What would music have been like in the 1960s, say 1967, the Summer of Love, if music AI existed then? 1967-1969 was the pinnacle of spirituality in pop music, with the Finale the lunar landing. But it wasn't spiritual at all. It was something more precise: the US winning the moon race. The "spirituality" of the moment is more of a desire than a reality of what it was really about and yet lingers to this day.
AI is in some ways a desire for a Moon or Mars landing, and we read mystical things into it. But with the current AI, there's no spirituality in it at all--it's leaving the humans out of the loop. It's a form of self-deprecation--perhaps self-loathing. We've become so misanthropic that the music has to be equally deprecating, even to the level where machines have the ideas, and we're merely steering them. It now seems that having original ideas or even the desire to create something from an original idea is quaint and sentimental. There is a more compelling allure in artificial intelligence in that we're going to have a machine make our content for us and therefore there is no need for us to be intimately involved. We want things to be hands-off because we have gotten used to the precautions: It's safer to "glove and mask" in many things we do. Having ideas and manually shaping them is just this old thing that previous generations did: We don't necessarily have to be involved in idea creation. It is perhaps something that we want to avoid, to be post-modernist or do things with a feigned diffidence. So if ideas emanate from algorithms rather than from someone playing a guitar and singing a melody, we would never have had a David Bowie for example.
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There's the old saw that "just because you can doesn't mean you should". Yesterday I was assessing what I'm going to do with the InSum series in future editions. The thing about e-books is that you can continue with them indefinitely, but should we? Should there be limits on content? Now that we can generate content with AI ad nauseam the sky's the limit. But we can't consume that much information without some kind of framework. That's one of the ideas behind serializing the diaries into months and days. It's easy to create within that structure.
When I create new content it's usually through YouTube video transcripts that I use as raw material for the diaries. (This piece of writing is from a video transcript). You can generate a lot of text from voice and I think a lot of people are doing that these days. [Eventually, content gets "sequeled" and "prequeled" out. Serial thinking makes the sky the limit, and that's a good limit, instead of the universe being the limit. The creative arts need new Industries because Industries will always go through their life cycle and they will end, but what doesn't end is the desire to be industrious and create an Industry that can scale. The music industry is something that scaled up hugely. The art world scaled up and still exists as a multi-billion industry. But that hasn't been the case with the music industry but I think there's something that could replace it in which young people would have prospects for content creation that would be broader in scope--you're not boxing yourself into one medium. I certainly never have. It's worked to some degree on the internet and social media but it has to be more contractual. Content producers who have YouTube channels can vary the type of content they make. Sometimes it will be a video series, sometimes an album of music, a screenplay for a series, and so on.
On Dynaxiom 2777: "Visual art is like music with different durations depending on how long you look at it." Most art is looked at for under 30 seconds but can be as long as a lifetime if you look at it daily." For example, if you're at a museum and standing in front of a painting, you look at it for a couple of seconds, look at the caption card, look back at the painting--all in about 15-20 seconds. It's interesting to correlate that with music: when you stood in front of a painting sound would play using hypersonic speakers placed directly above the painting. Hypersonic speakers are very directional such that when you stand under them you hear sound and then when you step out of the zone you no longer hear sound. When we look at a painting we're "looking" at music. It's a synesthetic experience even if you're not a synesthete. If you correlate those two things, both paintings and visual art can have a duration. But art only has a duration for as long as you're looking at it. Music has fixed durations when you’re listening to it--three minutes or five minutes– but it also has a lingering duration in your head because you can hear music not in its entirety, but parts of it. Take for example Pink Floyd's Shine On You Crazy Diamond which is about 6-8 minutes. Everyone can hear that in their head: they might hear the intro guitar motif, they might hear some of the verses and choruses, or just the chorus but not the piece in its entirety. Perhaps some people can in their heads from start to finish, but it won't be accurate and they won't be able to prove that they listened to it. When we listen to music together we understand time consensually. The other thing that's interesting about art is the duration it takes to create it. Some art can take perhaps a day some take months some takes take years. When you look at the painting you can sort of say, "Well that took a long time". But you're only standing in front of it for 15 seconds and you're only "hearing" that painting for 15 seconds. But like an earworm, you can remember what the painting looked like, but like Shine On You Crazy Diamond, you can’t play it in your head from start to finish. Perhaps you can remember the painting if you read about it in an article and you remember being at the Museum looking it, or standing next to it. Similarly, in music, people can talk about it which makes the music play in your head. So there's an interesting correlation between the duration of music and the duration of art. 11/30/2022 Excerpt from the November diary, Some November |
AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
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