March 25ths

 

3/25/1997
 
I did a count of all the pieces I’ve written since approximately 1983, when I bought my first keyboard and 4-track, and I now have almost 300 songs and other compositions on about 150 cassettes, much of it jazz and experimental music.
 
I like guitar players who approach the instrument from lots of different angles, where you don’t have to always play it as if it were only a guitar. (Andy Summers, Robert Fripp come immediately to mind)—the “painting” approach, where you use different “brush” techniques.

3/25/1998

Black-out poetry

About a Girl 

He couldn’t get
The right mood
She explained
That it was about a girl

Waiting for her lover
In a motel room
She explained 
That it was about a girl

3/25/2021
 
Musicians seem to like things that are really technical. I’m still surprised to see so many people getting into music theory and they want the real complex things with chord changes that are like mathematical formulas. But they’re not mathematical formulas–they’re simple ideas. I think it has to do with the look of the chord symbol or music notation in general in that it looks technical, but there’s no other way of doing it that wouldn’t be any easier. There are many ways to notate music but it’s going to have some degree of technicality to it. Is the reason that we are interested in music just because of the way it looks on the page? It’s just a side effect: that’s not the music. This relates to NFTs: it’s simply a blockchain transaction. It’s not art in itself.

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[3/25/2025: The interesting thing about working with AI now is that it’s very technical under the hood, and at least at this point we don’t really understand how it works, and still has a magical quality to it. This is unlike other times in our technological history, such as the beginning of the internet when people had to learn HTML if they wanted a website. They would have to learn Flash if they wanted to do animations. They would have to learn Final Cut if they wanted to make videos. Now that’s all been democratized and very easy to use with the new tools freely available. So we’re not interested in technology as we were 25 years ago. In 2000, people would have advanced skills in HTML, now nobody needs to learn it. You can generate just about anything these days. Ultimately, I think it’s probably bad for human evolution because we will just become more stupid, but perhaps smarter in other ways. The skills that humans have aren’t always the same and they evolve as well.]

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The more this interest in algorithmic music goes on the more people are going to use it. I think it will become legitimate. I just saw a question on Quora: How would you write an algorithmically-determined chord progression from an algorithmically-determined melody. That’s kind of interesting because you’d have to think about what the rules are. It wouldn’t be difficult and might be interesting to see what it comes up with. If there was something in software that did that as a roll of the dice I may use it. Usually what happens when I’ve used anything that has to do with some kind of an algorithm like generated lyrics I’d always have to tweak it–you just can’t use it out of the box because a lot of it doesn’t make any sense. It gives you a starting point but I can’t see that as an end.