December 14ths
12/14/1996
(From the article in Telegraph Magazine, A Star Comes Back To Earth):
“Bowie wants to play me some of the tracks from his forthcoming album, Earthling - a title that plays none too subtly to Bowie’s new persona as an ordinary, affable, if somewhat arty, bloke. In the studio an engineer cranks out the songs at full volume...they sound like the strongest he has recorded in years: densely textured - “industrial rock”, says Bowie - yet rich with the sort of commercial hooks that have been absent from his more recent work. Bowie was always clever at appropriating musical styles and stamping them with his own signature— - the “white boy” soul music of Young Americans; the ambient electronic atmospheres of Low.”
[6/2024: Earthling was one of favorite Bowie records—a reinvention using drum-and-bass, as well as being atmospheric with effected guitar].
12/14/2000
Interesting show on NPR on electronic literature. They talked about “preference clouds” and “taste communities”, collaboration between typesetters and writers, authors being involved in layout, whereas they weren’t before.
[6/2024: Once e-book software was introduced ~2010, authors were also doing the layouts].
12/14/2003
Saddam Hussein captured. Once a great manipulator, he still has control.
12/14/2004
Google has announced that it will be digitizing all the books at major libraries and allowing full-text searches on the Internet. It’s a “liberation of information”, as democratized knowledge.
12/14/2008
“Professor Yuval Shavitt, of Tel Aviv University’s School of Electrical Engineering, is melding math and sociology to describe mass behavior on the Internet. He is the principal investigator of DIMES, a project that hopes to map the structure and topology of the Internet, begun four years ago. And for the past year, he has used data-mining tools to collect and interpret massive amounts of data from file-sharing networks. By applying a decades-old sociological theory that describes the spread of information in social networks to the online world, he has been able to develop a predictive algorithm that identifies musicians who will ascend from local popularity to national stardom.”
[6/2024: In many ways, the Obama administration put wind in the sails of this].
12/14/2016
On Text-To-Music:
Clunky and robotic TTS runs parallel to early drum machines and sequencers that applied various algorithms to make them more “human”, and they can now add breath sounds and stammering to do this. There are interesting possibilities in terms of “effects” that can be added, such as prosody, that can run the range from tone inflection right up to rap!
Robotic voices are always annoying, but robotic music will always have artistic value. (You don’t always want to necessarily remove the machine from music.) What is more interesting is the feedback loop of dictated text and the synthesized version of it.
[6/2024: I’m still using TTS, which has gotten exponentially better than in 2016, and will continue to become more human-sounding if we follow the Kurzweil theory, and might also have the capability for singing. At first it will be crude, then improve over 20 years].