December 4ths
I’m going to start creating posts that are calendar “antipodes” which are 6 months apart: December posts in June, January posts in July and so on.
12/4/1998, Saturday
70 degrees. So warm today people are actually dining al fresco.
12/4/2008
[Post-financial collapse]:
It will be interesting to see how music will be reshaped by economic and/or social upheaval. During the Depression the movie industry saved the music industry to some degree. Regardless of a bailout of one medium for another I think we will have different uses of music, and musicians will be responding to those needs (whatever they are). While perceptions can be measured by imaging devices, the effects are only ephemeral and do not have an effect unless encoded into memory. For most people music is encoded to emotions, not extraneous data that the brain is picking up. (This is similar to the theory that video frame rates cause more anxiety.) That said, I think the application of cognitive science to music marketing can affect our musical preferences to some degree. Whenever you say to yourself, “I like this but I don’t know why”, it has something to do with how the brain has processed it. I’m not so sure that an awareness of fidelity affects the musical product in any profound way, but a study of psychoacoustics and music preferences might be revealing.
12/4/2010
First snow, 6 inches
The new era of ‘R&B’ is untethered from its roots, perhaps intentionally. Any artist who wants to part ways with the past shouldn’t even be associating itself with the genre unless making a parody of it (which is fine). Imitation with reverence for the art form is flattery, but imitation without reverence is a mockery.
***
Camera phones are charming and fun, but terrible from a tactile usability standpoint. They are clumsy to hold, as are most small point-and-shoots. If that’s a part of the ‘charm’ then that’s fine. But for more serious and rigorous shooting, you have to use a good SLR (film or digital) or medium and wide-format cameras. I liked the comment by A. about culling usable stills from video footage. An interesting idea on many levels. Rather than capturing moments you are sampling them.
12/4/2015
In music, working with synths makes it much easier to compose a piece of music because it shortens the time between inspiration and straight to the resultant production, without hiring orchestras for rehearsals and performances. Similarly in digital art, the artist can conceptualize and produce work within hours, and use all the new tools to market it. But this is the case in many industries now, where all the middle operations are being squeezed out by the Internet.
The “record deals” in the future will be much more independent, perhaps using AI, the blockchain, and mobile payments: You will represent yourself through your own algorithms. Algorithms as of now are in the black box of the “siren servers”, but it would be somewhat of a new zeitgeist to create your own algorithms, separate from the ones pushed at us from social media. (The Internet works better as a “pull” technology).
[6/2024: LLMs allow us to “pull” and curate as opposed to being limited to ranked Google search results, but it remains to be see whether there is any real difference in the final product or whether your research is solid].