• AI In Music Resources. • A remarkable essay on how to do great work. “When in doubt, optimize for interestingness.” Continue reading

• An article about AI and the music industry. “Human civilization is not just built on U2, Harry Potter, and Picasso but also on experimental artists, Grimms’ fairy tales, and the Amen break. There are longtime calls for legislators to impose a compulsory license on music sampling, just as fashion designers have proposed similar schemes… Continue reading

• An article about optical blur (which has me thinking about blurring in music). “There are still artists for whom the purity of optical blur—a tiny depth of field with a single detail picked out, or total lack of focus across the composition—says something important about the limits of perception, or usefully frustrates a viewer’s… Continue reading

• Essential reading on A.I. by Jaron Lanier. “The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but it can be thought of as illuminating previously… Continue reading

• An interview with Peter Doig. “Paintings have taken a lot of time to resolve, but I would keep them rather than abandon them—because I would think the elements were worth pursuing.” “I don’t really like the term ‘magical realism.’ You know, the spaces that exist within the painting are really spaces that have to… Continue reading

• An interview with Terry Riley. “Beginnings and endings aren’t that important, because you’re just tuning in to a sound current. Music is the involvement of the human spirit with sound. If you know what you’re doing in the arts, then you’re doing it wrong. That’s a pretty good maxim. I think before Indian classical… Continue reading

• A story about interacting with ChatGPT (which also speaks to creativity). “On a conceptual level, these large language models–these prediction machines–they deal with a certain amount of uncertainty. When you do down one of these ‘hallucinatory chains’–if you ask the model something that it hallucinates an answer to and you keep going, you keep… Continue reading

• An essay about how to get new ideas. “The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange, or missing, or broken?” • An article about monks and attention. “We inherited the monkish obsession with attention, and even inherited their moral judgments about the capacity, or failure, to concentrate. But most… Continue reading

• An article on interconnected production. “The approach that several people work on a project is essential for me. In terms of authorship, there isn’t a singular ‘great creator’ but many people who play around with it.” • An essay on creative algorithms. “I felt violated. The way I draw is the complex culmination of… Continue reading

• A documentary about the A World Without Ice exhibit. (Thanks to R. Hartenberger for the link.) “When you watch ice melt, it doesn’t really make a lot of sound on its own. So I froze some ice and put a drum underneath that and it sounded good.” “In this piece there is a certain… Continue reading