On Spirituality (In Music)

AI-analyses are good for writers who like to hear their thoughts read back to them, especially with my Dynaxioms, which can be cryptic in retrospect, and I get to revisit them to see if I still agree with them.

Here are my postscripts: 

0035: ‘Reason’ meaning Apollonian.

0149: Music provides a good look into how the brain can rewire. In music, it only happens while engaged with it as a listener or a player. But the best performances from an improvisatory standpoint are when you’re alternating listening with playing. It’s the biggest challenge because difficulty in performance will force you to not listen.

0208: We may get to the point where we have so much invested in the idea of activism that it becomes a sunk cost without any ultimate payoff: We just do it reflexively. I believe in activism as an expression of democracy, but it needs a new approach to fit changing worldviews.

0464: I recall going to many jazz performances where it felt like the stage was elevating, particularly a performance by Phil Cohran in Chicago, also various African bands, even Turkish ensembles.

 0750: Each new technology makes new messages possible, including spirituality and the New Age movement. If it wasn’t for social media, people like Marianne Williamson wouldn’t have run for president.

0931: We think that we need a spiritual path that we stay on for life, and music can be that path. It’s whatever takes you out of left-hemisphere reactions or an overactive right amygdala.

1012. As I’ve been using AI to create music, people are reflexively dismissing it, often vehemently. This typically happens with new technologies because it challenges the notion of the purity of art forms. For example, jazz purists will rail against it, but ironically, jazz has roots in science, particularly physics. It’s also ironic that the purest of all, classical music, has typically been open to applications of new technology. 

1261: I see using AI in music as a “department” of creative activities, a term I borrowed from Marcel Duchamp. AI music is in some ways a Readymade made from readymades (individual stems in the data sets)

1404: We can extend our Umvelt with technology, but technology has its own Umvelt, and you’d need to extend those technologies as well. An example is the JWST. It’s not seeing everything either.

1724: There’s always something we’re not collectively thinking about because we assume we had moved on from something, but some people haven’t, or they’ve been “born again” in some way, and you won’t be aware of it because it’s not on the surface.