Barbie Doll
AI-generated based on a 2011 song conceived in an open G Minor tuning. All minor chords. Score:
Posts
Curio No. 65
This perhaps sounds a bit too Beethoven but the extended versions will mask it. The seed is from a diary entry in January that had a staccato feel. My process at the moment is to sample phrases from texts and reduce them to riffs as an "A" idea then extrapolate them--both as an instrumental and with different lyrics. There could be an AI version titled "Docking Station", but the phrase could also be swapped out with other lyrics and have nothing to do with that theme. This could easily be for full orchestra, but the other parts would essentially be doublings. What this is is starting with an orchestral arrangement then building a song around it. I have others that have been extended out and they have turned into prog instrumentals, and could have vocals over the top of them.
Put In a Good Word
The sound of words is always an issue in songs because they can be awkward for singers. For some listeners, some words are fingernails on a blackboard. For AI "singers," they might never be able to pronounce them, or they hallucinate them, which can sometimes be interesting, or they will put emphasis on the wrong syllables, like "geometry", which AI would pronounce as "GE-om-e-try" with a southern lilt, or ge-om-e-TRY, instead of ge-OM-e-try. "Quaternity" was also a word it could not pronounce, perhaps because there are no word patterns (embeddings) that start with "quat". It's usually "quo" or "quar" or "quin". In some cases, the sound of the word itself doesn't matter, particularly in protest songs--like Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis . The city could be any city, like "Park Forest," and it doesn't matter how musical it is. "Chicago" is famous for its word, an ...
0125
*** AI-generated tracks with the same strophic lyric schema. What I want is to have AI work from a MIDI file and match syllables with rhymes.
0124
A rhythmic riff derived from 1/24/1998, as an intro and outro, coming and going. 0124 (Coming and Going) by meta4s
January 13ths
Antipode: July 13ths 1/13/1998 The cloning idea is out of the bottle and it won’t be long before all the wrong people abuse the technology. [In 2002 the Raelians claimed they had cloned a human. A central tenet of Raelianism is the pursuit of biological immortality through human cloning. A company associated with the movement, Clonaid, gained worldwide notoriety by claiming to have produced a clone.] [More] Reading Edward Hall’s The Dance of Life. He made an interesting observation of Hopi culture with respect to time and rituals. Ritual was much more important than any finished product–sort of like playing music but never writing or recording it. Apparently, the Hopi had a hard time finishing projects because they weren’t driven to bring closure to all their activities, as do Westerners. [1/13/2025: Most primitive cultures don’t see art as a product. They can be objects of course, but they’re not decorations]. Excerpt ...
January 11ths
1/11/1999 Idea: an album of very short songs, 30 seconds or less, “stamp” songs. 1/11/2000 The great thing about films is that they don’t need text in order to convey information, tell stories, or evoke emotion. Text can be added as an embedded layer between image and sound. [1/11/2026: This is what I’m doing with the Curios , which are “microfilms”] 1/11/2003 Bill Russo died at 74. Great obituary in paper. Bill got my musical thinking where it is now. 1/11/2005 The term “music composition” and “composer” are constantly changing, but the process is always essentially the same: making art that unfolds over time. 1/11/2007 Idea: Band that forms and collaborates online, writes all the material, then finally meets in person and rehearses for one show. Band name: Blind Date–or for my band on Second Life. [1/11/2026: What would be interesting to...
On Instrument/Art Collecting
Picasso, Guitar (1924). On wants versus needs in terms of musical instruments: It's been several years since I've bought a new instrument. I don't focus on that anymore, yet I see a lot of bassists collecting them–some with hundreds. It must consume your entire day–shopping around for them online, having them delivered, reviewing them on YouTube, and so on. Instruments can make a difference in production, but they don’t make a difference in composition most of the time. Instruments are different and unique and can create unique ideas, but once you take the idea and separate it from the instrument, it obviates the instrument. So you buy an 8-string or 12-string: They have a unique sound but once you start to track up a song and compose the song itself, and reduce it to chords and melody–something that you could play on a guitar or a piano, that bass doesn't mean anything. You could use a stock Fender Precision if you're just playing a simple supporting bass part,...
Ambient Drones
I was just reading an article on Roland’s 50th Anniversary piano that they created and its 4 speakers are mounted on drones. I’m really interested in that as I’ve always been interested in immersive sound. You could take that back to Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia , a chromatograph that was just a light bulb that shined through a rotating disc that had paintings on it. He custom-made them for people. Music also always wants to extend itself through the instruments in similarly eccentric ways. It’s important that we do that, but it’s never going to catch on, as quad sound never did. There’s too much hardware involved, and it’s just a novelty. People play with it a couple of times and then it just becomes a toy. What we want to do is just keep music where it is and use sound as the main material. But I do like the idea of putting speakers on drones, and it would be interesting to place them in very large spaces that have very high ceilings, where the sounds are more in the distance ...
Curio No. 5
1/21/2025 “What a beautiful name,” he said, pronouncing the phrase with a stress on its last syllable: A-mer-i-CA. The rhythmic seed: Curio No. 5 by meta4s
