9/6/2026
Along Milwaukee
Posts
September 31sts
A song (sorta) about Millerism From the book The Conspiracists : "The Ballards said that Saint Germain wanted them to deliver his messages to the public. The I AM movement, which is currently making a big comeback, spawned other groups that borrowed its traditions to build their own new theologies. The most influential of these was Elizabeth Clare Prophet, a woman who ran a version of I AM in the 1960s through to the 1990s that was closely aligned with far-right politics and preached an impending apocalypse based in nuclear Armageddon." The world will end On September 31st Caught between The 29ths and the 1sts Read between the lines The lines in a verse Cosmic signs To be read in reverse A new age will begin Third dimension to the fifth You'll begin to feel The shift and the drift Living life force Not an off-planet man Mystical laws Not a guy with a plan The world will end On November 31st Caught between The 29ths and the 1sts Read between the lines The lines in a verse ...
9/24/2025 (On Lyrics and AI)
There was an interesting study that was done a few years ago on the complexity of lyrics. But there’s a difference between those who write scientific papers about lyrics and those who actually write and sing them, which has an interesting connection with AI-generation of songs where the “singers” are just LLMs shuffling patterns to match riffs. When I work on a lyric, I’m focusing on how the quality of words to be used musically, especially at the rhythmic level. How syllables are mapped over note values is crucial. I think lyrics should be as economical as possible, which is the issue with translations from English because you’re “deracinating” the natural speech rhythms. With the Esperanto lyrics, the music sounds fine on its own with the vocals just being another instrument. If you don’t understand the words, then it’s essentially an instrumental. Most people don't tune into lyrics. The music is most important on first hearing, but lyrics can soak in over time.
9/22/2024
Why am I so attracted to AI for generating material? I had been involved in generative music in the ‘90s creating music from seed structures, and I’m still interested in that, but sometimes I find myself wasting too much time going to websites, logging in, thinking of text prompts to generate music–when I can generate music from an idea or simply pick up a guitar or a bass and I’ll have an idea within seconds. Like this morning: There was a Bill Clinton quote in my diary on 9/22/2010: “They always like you better when you’re gone.” I heard a 12/8 minor blues in it. For the past 4 or 5 months I have been generating music from words and phrases that are in my diary and I jot them down in my Songday notebook. I wouldn’t necessarily want to generate music algorithmically as a first choice. It would be interesting to have my own large language model that would generate music based on the inputs that I give it, such as a rhythm or melody and see what happens. A lot of creativity is “Let’s tr...
911@25 Dark Days
[View Gallery] The first images are photos of the TV that I took as I was watching various commemorations and footage of the event. When I got downtown, I started taking pictures of buildings that serve as a snapshot memory. On 911, they had closed the office at about 10:30 and I started to walk around to take photos. I had gotten my first camera about a month before, and I wasn't completely familiar with it, so most of the photos were overexposed. Later on I inverted them, which is a look that I liked. So I thought that I would take overexposed pictures and then invert them in the same fashion.
On Improvisation
Improvisation is a form of spontaneous composition that uses predetermined structural elements, usually chords and scales. Jazz improvisation is understood as being free-form, but is controlled with rules. In Arabic music, there is Taqsim, guided by a different system of rules for improvisation—and similarly with Indian Raga. The eastern versions of improvisation have an additional cultural element that is more important than the West’s focus on improvisation for art’s sake. Interestingly, Taqsim may possibly have some connection with algorithms (simply a series of rules or instructions). The word algorithm is eponymous with Algoritmi, a Persian mathematician. The fact that jazz musicians can relate to physics (and vice versa) is perhaps not just coincidental! The curious thing about improvisation in anything is that there are always some rules or constraints that are not universal, e.g. a jazz player would be confused by the rules of Taqsi...
