brettworks

• An interview with Jaron Lanier about musical instruments.

“To me, musical instruments are the best user interfaces that have ever been invented. If what you think a technology is for is to help a person affect the world with ever greater acuity, then musical instruments are the most advanced technologies that have ever existed.”

“When you play an instrument you start to get this connection where you’re getting a lot of intent and data out there. It’s not just a question of the volume of data, it’s the focus and the acuity. It can be really remarkable. The control a violinist has over the string and the bow is, by some measures, close to quantum limit on occasion. It’s this very intense thing. And so what I want is for computers to be more like that. I want computers to be expressive machines that people can connect to with their whole bodies, with their whole nervous systems, with their whole cognition with ever more subtlety and ever more acuity. So to me the instruments have so much more to teach the computers than the other direction.”

• An article about Spotify.

“A royalty model that is not sustainable for artists leads to a situation where only the independently wealthy can create music – an outcome that is neither culturally healthy nor desirable. Of course, that’s assuming the independently wealthy musicians are able to fight off the AI-generated music currently crowding on to the streaming platforms.”

• An essay by Adam Gopnik on the Renaissance.

“There is a constant paradox of art-making: as an art form accelerates its pace of change, its content grows more nostalgic. This is evident in the work of the other great warp-speed era, French avant-garde painting between 1870 to 1914. As painting raced from sunlit Impressionism to Cubist abstraction in a single generation, its subjects looked backward: to Gothic cathedrals, to a bohemian café-table culture already passing away. It is the speed of transformation, as much as anything transformed, that makes some periods of human civilization permanently compelling.”