Wouldn't It Be Nice?
Dream: I was in a small town with a woman in a white straw hat. We passed by a blues club. On the way home on the bus this song was playing: ( Find the Others ) Find The Others (11-2-2024) by meta4s
Posts
October 31sts
10/31/1978 On Kawara , from the 'Today" series. {What I'm doing essentially with the Songday series.] 10/31/1998 Bill Laswell: The only way to arrive at something different is now by combining things. [10/31/2024: In retrospect, the beginning of Remix at the leading edge of the internet]. 10/31/2004 In music, you can leave out a repeat of a melody and their brains will still hear it. (Phantom effect). You can also hear this phenomenon when you hear someone playing a solo with implied chord changes. 10/31/2005 Melissa Etheridge, recovering from breast cancer, was interviewed on TV. She was talking about the crossroads in her life. (If you present yourself with Crossroads, it doesn’t give you the option of a third choice, which can become a shell game, and you’ll have to always wonder about whether the other two were better options. With a crossroad, you only regret once). [ A ...
August 27ths
8/27/2019 AI, in general, hasn’t yet impacted the future of music, at least not in an aesthetic sense, but that could be a possibility, as could the blockchain, such as turning samples on and off. But that will essentially be the avant-garde, not pop music. The problem I have with new technologies is they just barely overlap with artistic expression as has been defined through history. We’ve already explored cybernetics and systems theory in the 20th century, so anything we do with blockchain or anything involving computers will be a variation on what’s already been explored. It may be interesting but that’s just speculation on what future generations will value. [8/27/2024: I think everything is ultimately a variation on what’s already been explored–by previous generations. It’s interesting that new fashion trends/memes always touch on early PCs, especially the color space. DOS computers used only 16 Windows colors. The new Decora maximal vibe/mem...
October 30ths
10/30/2021 Throughout the last 300-400 years, there’s been a compromise in music, and it will continue as musicians create both new instruments and sounds that will either be integral (as in an acoustic instrument) or are separated, as controllers or interfaces are. Guitars started to become controllers once amps and effects produced the sound. If you just heard people playing them acoustically, it doesn’t sound like much compositionally. It’s not composition per se. So using instruments as sound controllers is one of the compromises we make in music. #riff [10/30/2024: AI-generated music is another compromise because it makes music that is good enough and disincentivizes the exploration of it. We are no longer explorers of knowledge for its own sake, and over time, become inured to new ways of being. This is why we can’t fully understand ancient civilizations: even in their own time, they forgot how they used to do things, and consequently...
October 27ths
10/27/1998 Dream: In Kazakhstan. I was living with a family there and participated in a ritual where the oldest son was dressed in a brightly-colored feathered costume and cast off into the wilderness. Another fragment where I was preparing for an approaching storm, gathering all my valuables. 10/27/2000 Pop music now is sort of like using an idiot appliance, where everything is pre-programmed and pre-made. There’s no interest in learning theory. Why learn a blues scale, when you can just find a recording of one? Recordings are an attempt at a perfect performance, so we don’t have to worry about the anticlimax of a human being making mistakes. [10/27/2024: LLMs are now that idiot appliance. To some extent, synths started to become idiot appliances around this time. As regards learning music, if you look at Reddit or Quora, there is still an interest in learning theory. On YouTube there are perhaps too many unqualified people teaching it. Last night I watched Peter Frampton’s perfo...
10/22/1998@26
10/22/1998 Browsed at Marshall Fields and noticed that they now have puzzles based on the photomosaics book. Is such a great idea, but when they take the image of the Titanic and use [only] fish photographs, it misses the point. The point is to somehow make a commentary on the image itself. [10/22/2024: This happened recently when the Trump campaign used My Heart Will Go On, a song in the Titanic film. What images would we now use for that photomosaic? Generally, most musicians have vociferously objected to the use of their music at Trump rallies, which is indicative of “profane”uses of music on moral grounds. Of course, any music can be played at rallies in venues where performance royalties are collected, or is covered under fair use. It is conceivable that the Supreme Court would now rule that it was fair use under absolute presidential immunity. Imagine that…] West Nkosi, South African sax player died. He was the guy that invented Mbaqanga , which was a melange of different tribal...