Doing this writing thing daily is not easy, after all I’ve already missed 3 days in my first week. I can always work up to being consistent about it. I feel like I’ve got to have something profound to say or why bother, but that’s not the point, is it? I’m writing daily as a practice and you’re my audience coming along for the ride. Playing guitar daily seems to be much easier for me, partly because I’ve done it for so long but also because if just feels good. But if I think back it wasn’t always easy to do and i had to work up to it. Now it’s like a meditation, when I pick up the instrument hours can go by and I don’t notice.
Yesterday I recorded another conversation with Scott Morgan (Loscil) for what I hope will soon become a podcast. We spoke about Artificial Intelligence in music and rather than have any kind of comprehensive study of the topic we discussed our viewpoints. If anything, we seem to both be interested in where it will go and will work on collecting some good examples of AI in the context of music creation. I spoke about my experience of taking an online course called Machine Learning for Musicians and Artists by Rebecca Fiebrink of Goldsmiths, as well as building and using the Nsynth by Google’s Magenta team. I highly recommend both but the Nsynth is a little more involved and requires some serious soldering.
At one point in the conversation I found myself not clearly communicating how the Nsynth actually uses machine learning. To me that’s a clear indication that I will have to take some time to better understand it. Their website does a good job of explaining it in layman’s terms but I think I’d like to take a deeper look.
Also, I’ve begun to work on a new project that builds off some of the work I did in Mirror.fm, a music project with Tom Anselmi. The website has been seriously neglected for years but it was cool when we first built it in 2003. It used Flash, remember that, to randomly create and layer a video and audio playlist into a new full screen experience. I’m going to try to build a new HTML version of that using my own video and music. stay tuned…
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