Lala
(Pictures of the TV)
Posts
On AI In Classical (Non-Pop) Music
I started experimenting with AI on some of my orchestral pieces. At first, it's interesting, but it's never what I want, and it's always the same clichés–the John Williams-style scoring. It's always the case with AI-generated music that it's an approximation of what you might want. Sometimes it suffices, but it will never be the one that you originally thought of. With the Curios, I only want a piece of music that's a minute or less in duration, and AI extends it. It can extrapolate what you've already written and can suggest ideas, but you need to get into the weeds and do it yourself. I played a number of these for a friend, and he immediately liked them. I can see why because it's a complete work, and when you play mine against it, it pales in comparison. With the 250-series pieces, I’m scoring things only for brass ensembles, and AI is making a complete orchestral arrangement out of them. That's not what I want. I know that you could probably ...
September 16ths
9/16/2001 While listening to music on the radio, you get these very interesting coincidences, or “collisions of context”. You’d be listening to a report about an Islamic holy war, change the dial to a rock station and hear Lennon’s “Instant Karma”, followed by Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down”—I’ll stand my ground. (Prediction: song lyrics will become more important. Songwriters will also have to censor their own work.) [9/16/2025: Lyrics are now hugely important in AI generation because their musicality will drive the overall musicality. They also anonymize the voice in the sense that a marionette is singing them]. 9/16/2004 One of the wonders of digitized information is that you can endlessly edit it. It is possible to scan the original documents typed on a typewriter, convert it to text, edit the text, then make another original. These could be merely proxies of the vir...
August 16ths
8/16/1968 Studio Two, 14 takes on While My Guitar Gently Weeps. 8/16/1997 20th anniversary of Elvis’ death. 8/16/2022 There was a photo that was floating around on social media showing Paul McCartney with a capo on the Rick. I can see that he would use it if he wasn’t familiar with certain keys. A bass guitar is a guitar after all, and why not use it?
July 16ths
January 16ths 7/16/1997 Interesting interview with Pete Townshend on XRT. I like the idea that music is storytelling, much like what the African Griots do. He said that he thought jazz was the highest musical form. 7/16/2004 Millennium Park finally open. 7/16/2006 “Uncanny Valley” was a term coined by Mashiro Mori to describe the emotional response of humans to robots. He theorized that as a robot became more human-like, the emotional response of humans became increasingly empathetic, until a boundary point where they looked more “zombified” (the perceptual boundary of real and fake). [7/16/2025: I’ve noticed that when I listen to TTS voices, especially in Google NotebookLM, I find myself “entraining” to its logic–thinking along the same lines. This also relates to whether AI music can have soul. I have been emotionally moved by some of the mus...
1116
11/16/2004 Went to Cultural Center. There was a guy playing delta blues on a dobro. (God I love that sound—I want a dobro. I wandered through the galleries. Interesting: Installation based on a journal, with newspaper clippings, diary entries, video. AI-Generated Track 11/16/2024
March 16ths
Antipode: September 16ths 3/16/1999 Interesting that when the phonograph was first invented it was designed only to preserve performances, not replicate them. We’ve come full circle: Now we’re back to preserving via sampling technology. 3/16/2005 Internet Demolition 3/16/2024 AI is a good way to rapid-prototype music if you have an assembled cryptic lyric. Crossing a Range was made of lines abstracted from diary entries made on March 16ths. The meaning is hazy when you first start working with them but possible meanings begin to emerge. The theme seems to be Sisyphean: you could travel the world, crossing mountain ranges, arriving back home and perhaps feeling nothing had changed in some ways. It’s also Pinkphloydian: “Running over the same old ground, have we found the same old fears...” The music is extremely saccharine but works in an interesting way. “She” chokes up a bit on the word “change”—a nice happy accident. Throu...
February 16ths
2/16/1998 A statement that sounds good, but needs to be proven: “As long as the rhythmic structure supports it, music can be built in many layers, but only to the point where the music disintegrates, and the many parts have nothing in common.” (A good example of complexity is African music where each player and rhythm dovetails with every other player.) Excerpt Library (Music I) : "Discuss the 'rhythmic mesh' of African music" Excerpt Library (Art Philosophy and Aesthetics) : "Discuss the effect density has on the coherence of an artwork" 2/16/2004 Idea: rearrange cover songs and turn choruses into versus, or vice versa, or otherwise rearrange sections. [2/16/2025: AI-generated music does this automatically and is either annoying or really interesting]. 2/16/2021 Typically, what happens when pieces start bottom-up is that I never use the bass part that I originally conceived. Once you start tracking a song and layering other instruments in the presenc...
January 16ths
1/16/1999 Lyric line: No one ever woke up one day and said, “I'm glad I'm a star.” Sent demo of Miles From Mars to 482 records. AI-generated versions with cherry-picked words as lyrics: 1/16/2003 The Raelians have claimed they’ve cloned a human being. (Like Chuck Barris claims he was an FBI Hitman). [More] 1/16/2005 Terrorism is like a cell phone number: It’s not connected to one physical place. It can be anywhere. 1/16/2006 On cell phone cinema: it will give us tolerance for shorter, exformed movies that we can watch privately, and spend some contemplative time with, like a snapshot in your wallet, like a short story or aphorisms that inspire us. [1/16/2025: This seems to be a perennial wish: recently, the ReelShort app has been in development. It still has yet to be used in a serious way by filmmakers, except perhaps as a conceptual idea. The metaphor I’v...
December 16ths
12/16/1998 US bombs Baghdad. Never underestimate a troubled president. Do we really need to do this now? New chat room: “Reality Check”. This is the antithesis of usual chat rooms where everyone has similar interests and viewpoints. It’s where everyone decides to have a “friendly” war but on all kinds of topics. [12/16/2024: Perhaps the first iteration of social media. It still exists.] 12/16/2001 If America was attacked at the time the Bill of Rights was drafted we would never have had the rights we’ve enjoyed for the past 225 years. 12/16/2010 The title is always the last layer of color—Robert Rauschenberg 12/11/2016 Book: The Righteous Mind . Its primary theme is that there is an inherent cultural cohesion across human history, bound by simple rules. I resonated with this as a musician, as I know that certain "spiritual" dimensions ca...
October 16ths
10/16/1937 Grete de Francesco of Milan sends a 12-page handwritten letter to the “esteemed Mr. Thomas Mann,” along with a copy of her recently published book Die Macht des Charlatans (The Power of the Charlatan). Though unknown to the world-famous author, de Francesco insisted that Mann was the “intellectual patron saint” behind her own work: “This book would never have been written,” she explained, “were it not for the wake-up call” provided in 1930 by his novella Mario and the Magician.” [ Power of the Charlatan ] 10/16/2000 [A diagram re: what was essentially an algorithm. I wasn’t thinking about AI back then, but it’s essentially an idea for shuffling sounds in real-time, a few years before “shuffle play” entered the lexicon]. 10/16/2003 Interesting: Boxer Gene Tunney was an intellectual and ev...
