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Resonant Thoughts: Sebastian Mallaby’s “The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence” (2026)
“The result confirmed the central contention in Gödel, Escher, Bach. Human intuition was not so magical after all. A machine could reproduce it with the trick of mapping one thing onto another” (147). “AI experts had long recognized that tasks that humans perform instantly and unthinkingly, such as recognizing an image, are hard to program,… Continue reading
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Database: William Orbit On Unquantized Rhythms, Playing Stuff By Hand, The Curve
“You can make something very unlistenable by quantizing it too much. I play a lot of stuff by hand and don’t quantize it, and very often it sounds better that way. Unquantized rhythms work better when used next to quantized rhythms and vice versa.” “Basically, you have two hands, so you’ve got ahold of two… Continue reading
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Arrows of Attention: Twelve Musical Notes
What you’re doing is important:maybe to you, maybe to others, maybe today, or one day. Music’s claim on our attention comes from its sense of urgency. The economic worth of a piece of music is a wildly inaccurate measure of its aesthetic value. Art is a gift, so what do you want to make knowing… Continue reading
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Listening Connections: Knowing Music
Listening recently to three tracks by three different artists, I noticed they share a sense of knowing in their lyrics. The voices in these songs wink at us, aware that the songs’ confessions are enacting the sentiments they describe. In “Camera,” Charli xcx explains her skepticism about being a pop star: “Do I want to… Continue reading
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Shaker
Tensioned—inside repetition’s slipstreamsubdividing, accenting, flowingmaking rhythm palpable hand holding shakera gesture of 16th notessemiquavers stretching into years timeline is panoramahear the other soundstheir parts come and gopoints of departure and arrival they hold long tonesbut percussion dances staccatoaround the clickin headphones hear discrepancies always slightly ahead or behindthe metronome is perfectme I’m uneven still distilling… Continue reading
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Accumulations (Curating The Week Over Time)
(1 year ago) (2 years ago) (3 years ago) (4 years ago) (5 years ago) (6 years ago) (7 years ago) (8 years ago) (9 years ago) (10 years ago) (More accumulations here.) Continue reading
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