October 20ths

10/20/1914

Wittgenstein longs for David {Hume] and wants to write, but is depressed.

10/20/1998

I go through periods where I can never remember my dreams, only fragments, last night something involving Percy Jones, who appeared as a short stocky fellow with a cocky attitude. 

Interesting interview on NPR with the heart surgeon, Dr. Oz who operated on guitarist Johnny Copland. I found it impressive that he gets deeply involved with the care of his patients, even down to the music that’s played for the patient in the operating room. He said that the music should be a “healing” music, but not necessarily New Age.

[10/20/2024: In Daniel Levitin’s recent book I Heard There Was A Secret Chord, he posits how AI would be used to select music based on various contexts, and will be a part of meds: “When you're sick or recovering from injury, music will be similarly selected, just for you, in the hospital and the clinic, and your caregivers will send you home with it and in your continued recovery. From hospital and clinic to home, music-as-medicine will be scientifically chosen. the right music, whatever that turns out to be, can remind us of who we were, who we are, and who we want to be, it puts us in an intimate and private conversation with the angels of our better nature, and it opens up worlds of new possibility.” ( p. 270)

10/20/2003

What will save digital media from being downloaded is superlative quality, archived with high bit-depth. Hi-def that makes huge files, too hard to download. Once people expect high-quality, it will obviate pirating cheap inferior copies, because part of the experience is lost. (It also begs the question: why hoard copies of everything anyway?)

[10/20/2024: I think most people are becoming anti-object. This is one of the reasons I prefer making music over paintings because they don’t produce objects. Not that I don’t love them, or love the process, but the paintings accumulate and you have to store them– whereas music is hidden until it is played, and could perhaps have a score, which can now be played online].

10/20/2019 

I am still thinking about composing music with algorithms because that’s what’s supposed to be new in music. In some cases, I’ve already written music the old-school way and wanted to do a version made with algorithms. I can’t even find an iota of motivation to do this because there’s no soul there.

Don’t try too hard to be the future.

[10/20/2024: What I want for the Songday System is a custom LLM that will take a day’s entries and map them over a rhythm–for example, using the rhythm of the Alan Watts quote. This means finding all the words that properly map over the syllabic structure. After that’s done then I can tweak it. This is how I want to use AI. If AI doesn’t produce anything usable, then you’re back to manual creativity]. 

 

From Rampage to Improve the World

10/20/2024, Sunday

June-like day, clear, almost 80 degrees

Open House Chicago--attended only 2 sites: Astor Club (Old Maxim's) and former Hemingway apartment. Passed by the Fischer Building (1209 N State), which I love. I wish it was on the list every year.