Curating The Week
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Curating The Week: AI and Human Touch, AI and Writing, AI and Taste
• An essay on AI, music, and the demand for the human touch. “Echoing AI commentary today, some musicians viewed the player piano as not just replicating human playing, but exceeding it. The Russian composer Igor Stravinsky explained that he wrote pieces specifically for the machines because ‘there are tone combinations beyond my ten fingers,’… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: The Brand Age, Selling Out, Sync Music
• An essay on the brand age. “Branding isn’t merely orthogonal to good design, but opposed to it. Branding by definition has to be distinctive. But good design, like math or science, seeks the right answer, and right answers tend to converge.” “Branding is centrifugal; design is centripetal.” “One obvious lesson is to stay away… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Blogging, Music and Truth-Telling, Memory
• An interview with Cory Doctorrow. “When anything seems important to me, in any way, I write a blog post about it. There’s a lot of advantages to that. When I write for a public audience, I apply rigor necessarily that I wouldn’t apply to notes to myself. So that creates a kind of mnemonic… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Light, Musical Variations, DJing, Joep Beving
• An essay on light in the paintings of Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour. “When one looks at La Tour’s paintings, it is hard not to see signs of the devotional culture of his time: a Counter-Reformation Catholic world that valued stillness, interior reflection, and meditative attention, and that found spiritual meaning in restraint… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Consicousness, AI, Writing Rooms, Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force
• An interview with Michael Pollan. “Our consciousness is being polluted, and protecting ourselves against that at the same time we preserve the ability to act politically is a difficult balancing act. Consciousness is a very precious realm. It’s the realm of our privacy and our freedom to think. So I think we need some… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Tinkering And Marginal Gains In Sport, The Ephemerality Of Music Consumption
• An article about tinkering in sport. “‘Probably you’re going to see another change,” [Carlos Alcaraz] said. ‘I don’t know if next month or at the end of the year. I just make constant changes in every shot.’” “The sport’s most gifted player may also be its greatest tinkerer, as clips from his practices on… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: The Act Of Making, A Music Production Manifesto, Attention
“The act of making something is so good, so good.” • A manifesto on electronic music production. “Technology answers to technique. Every device and piece of gear has secrets that can be unveiled with the right technique.” “After more than thirty years of making music with computers, we still do not know the DAW and… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Artistic Toil, Aphoristic Intelligence, AI Slop, Reclaiming One’s Mind
• An essay on artistic toil. “…instances of just how willing the great artists are to undergo tedious, repetitive, finger-cramping work—toil—in the service of their craft. In some of these examples, such as the stonework of a cathedral, there was a higher purpose to justify the toil. But often it seems that the artists engaged… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI and Search, AI in Music, Perfectionism
• An essay on AI and search. “There is a road that must be crossed, by Google and also by the rest of us. On one side is a digital world with its largely familiar structure, fuelled by familiar kinds of advertising, in many of whose forms Google excels. To make liveable whatever lies on… Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI and Thinking, Sound Designing, AI and De-Skilling
• An essay about AI and thinking. “It can seem unnatural, even repulsive, to imagine that a computer program actually understands, actually thinks. We usually conceptualize thinking as something conscious, like a Joycean inner monologue or the flow of sense memories in a Proustian daydream. Or we might mean reasoning: working through a problem step by… Continue reading
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