Curating The Week
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Curating The Week: Social Media, Attention, Note-Taking, The Simplification Of Music
• An essay on social media. “On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive. When network connections become activated for Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Devaluing Music, Vibes, The New Minimalism
“Perhaps Spotify understood the stakes—that when it removed real classical, jazz, and ambient artists from popular playlists and replaced them with low-budget stock muzak, it was steamrolling real music cultures, actual traditions within which artists were trying to make a living. Or perhaps the company was aware that this project to cheapen music contradicted so Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Writing, Clichés, Music Streaming
“AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.” “The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI Voice Bots, AI Writing, Brian Eno’s Production Approach, Skateboarding
• An article about interacting with AI conversation agents. “Other modern sciences have constrained themselves in accordance with an emerging code of ethics. There are weapons that physicists have sworn not to build, experiments biologists have agreed not to conduct. Nothing holds back computer scientists from developing talking machines that pretend to be humans.” • Continue reading
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Curating The Week: “Neoclassical” Piano Music, Autechre, Ganavya
“Neoclassical music doesn’t cut through the noise of our society, rather it is camouflaged within it. It is superficially calming and pleasing and gives only the illusion of escape from ‘these uncertain times’. But to my ears it has a numbing quality, the musical equivalent of living blue-pilled in the Matrix, of ordering Deliveroo or Continue reading
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Curating The Week: AI And Real Art, Stubbornness, Superblasts
• An essay by Ted Chiang about why AI-generated art isn’t real art. “Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Spotify, The Tyranny Of Ideas, The Music Of Breadmaking
“Music on the app is most easily consumed in a disorganized cascade; every song becomes audio ‘content’ separated from a musician’s larger body of work. In short, Spotify does not seem to care about your relationship to ‘your’ music anymore; for long-term users, this has felt like a slow-motion bait and switch.” “Ideas ride us Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Charles Taylor’s Interspace, Walking And Creativity, Method Creates Flavor
“The arts are not subsidiary places of secondary sensations but the primary place where we go to recall feelings of wholeness, of harmony not just with ‘Nature’—the craggy peaks the Romantics loved and the Italian lakes they lingered by—but with existence itself. Poetry and music do this by escaping the constraints of intellect, by going Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Music Criticism/Music Fandom, Manipulations Of Musical Patterns, Attention
• An article about the intersection of music criticism and music fandom. “The tepid music reviews often miss the fact that ‘music’ is something that Swift stopped selling long ago. Instead, she has spent two decades building the foundation of a fan universe, filled with complex, in-sequence narratives that have been contextualized through multiple perspectives Continue reading
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Curating The Week: Virtual Reality, A Musical AI, A Special Saxophone
“No one wants to die; everyone wants to fly everywhere in the universe. Young men, especially, get high on infinity; their version of tech culture is the most influential culture of our time. It is the only remaining cultural force that can defy market forces, technological limitations, and the law—at least for a while […] Continue reading
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