CyberGene

RPReplay_Final1709838456.mov

I’ve started seeing some animated album art on Apple Music streaming, sometimes even for vintage albums and wondered whether it’s made by Apple in-house artists or the labels are slowly adopting 21st century capabilities.

When I was choosing an instrument to learn as a kid, a wise old man told me to pick the piano (especially classical piano, preferably playing Schumann) and pretend I’m in a relationship. That would make girls want me so much.

Reminds me of my first (and last) encounter with the MODX a few years ago. Great sounds. Inhumane logic.

Mid to late Romantics are my favorite too. To me it’s like the golden period of art when every element was important and artists took pride in creating art that had the seemingly impossible quality of being both technically and artistically advanced, yet accessible and humanistically beautiful. Anything before or after was kind of excessive in one way or another, going way too much in satisfying either audiences mainly, or the author, or rioting the past/present art, the historic events…

Let’s stop diminishing chords and augment them instead!

That’s very interesting, thanks. Seems it might be genetic after all. With so many things to get wrong in all these genes (I am myself color blind, for instance. And my daughter has one FMF variant, out of minimum two required to be diagnosed with full FMF, but still leads to a condition called PFAPA which is luckily only a childhood thing), it’s wonder we’re all still kind of alive and in mostly working condition 😀 Apparently biological gender is also something that might be dependent on multitude of genes and things can go wrong on so many levels, not just one. We should indeed be more tolerant towards people, towards all of us. And hopefully gene therapy can improve our lives.

I’m not familiar with that matter and we are already walking on eggshells. But I think some people are unfortunate to be born with something that makes them feel they are of the opposite sex to their biological one. As I said, I know one such guy and AFAIK he felt like that his entire life, it was not a sudden change of moods. Which makes me think it’s rather a condition that might be reversible.

If someone feels uncomfortable in their biological sex, I’m OK with them asking for a surgical change, new name, pronouns, whatever. I know a very intelligent and talented musician who went through that. However, I really hope medicine will advance enough to be able to fix the root cause for these people, so they won’t have to go through what seems like a pretty brute force solution of hormonal therapy and risky surgery. Maybe there’s something small that determines whether we feel right about our biological gender and scientists haven’t yet discovered it. But until then I really feel for these people 😕

I think it was @konaboy who had the idea of having a big hardware knob (encoder) connected to your computer and then use it to control software synths by turning it when hovering the cursor over the various on-screen controls. I think it’s a great idea, not sure why nobody has implemented it yet.

I have such a huge respect for Wendy Carlos that I will call her any way she likes. Even if you don’t agree with transgender transitions, you can think of that name as an artistic pseudonym and you can call her by that name out of respect for her artistry. On the other hand, what a sick person would report you for using the name she used on the album before her gender transition. You might not have known that she changed gender 🤦🏻‍♂️ We live in a funny world 😞

Learned something new, thanks 👍🏻

Indeed, I’ve always found it confusing that there is classical period in… well, classical music 😀 Some musicologists in Bulgaria tried to instead use the term academic music but understandably it caused additional polemics, arguments and disagreements and I haven’t heard it used outside a small circle of people here.

Well, actually that’s how AI is programmed in a more general sense: the generative logic is allowed to produce almost random stuff at first and the results are judged and scored. Through that learning process and with enough iterations, the AI self-adapts until it starts to produce desirable results. That’s why you sometimes hear the term Machine Learning used interchangeably with AI. Actually ML is a particular implementation of AI where the machine “learns” how to solve a particular task through an automated learning process. It’s an oversimplification but roughly it’s the same. And is how we all learn to do things, through mistakes and feedback from our senses or, in the case of art, through the subjective weights the others give to our attempts.

The only edible food in the UK is the imported cuisine: curry, kebab, Chinese, French, Italian, Fish and Chips (Spanish jews introduced it there). The local stuff is something I only imagine being forced to eat when tortured 🤦🏻‍♂️

That’s true, however it has a caveat too, for me at least. With those synths that support loading presets, it becomes a bit disorienting to not see the actual knob positions. I really hated that aspect of my Novation Peak and more recently the Sequential Take 5 which is why I sold them both. I much prefer my Hydrasynth with its LED ring encoders and multiple OLED screens next to them to show values and names. But I love my Behringer Model D the most (forget about the B, I know your opinion, imagine I speak about a Moog 😀) where there are no presets, what you see is what you get! That’s my most fun synth to use, all pots always at the correct value. Vintage analog soft synths at least have this advantage of showing you all these knobs/sliders/switches reflecting the actual values.

Schumann is not my cup of tea either. If it’s keyboard/piano music I love Scriabin most, there’s a lot of jazz-like harmony there, of course Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy. It’s also symphonic/orchestral music that I adore, especially the Russian composers: Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff. I also love Bruckner, Mahler, Sibelius, baroque composers… Well, anyway, as I said classical is my thing ❤️

Classical music is more of a European thing 😀 I really can’t say if it’s nature vs nurture but classical is what I feel like my natural habitat. I appreciate almost any music on earth, even the most repetitive EDM, cheesy pop or brutal death-metal, however classical is like going home ❤️

I had a brief photography period around 2008-2013 which started with regular DSLR-s and gradually went through so many things that I ended up with medium format B&W films that I developed myself 🤣 Anyway, something interesting from the latter is I experimented with Rodinal stand development and it’s a pretty interesting technique where you use a very low concentration of developer with no agitation. This means that the chemistry will get exhausted more around dark elements (which are translucent on film). Leaving it for longer than the usual time then means that naturally the dark areas won’t get too dark. Or, ultimately it would be almost like a local contrast, e.g. HDR that is a side effect of the process. You can simulate that process with an effect in a digital workflow on a digital source image but what I actually deduced from the whole this thing was that with film photography there’s this unpredictability that can lead to interesting results without any deliberate attempt. I’m not defending film photography or vintage analog synth mania since I abandoned both of them. But I kind of understand the fascination with the chaotic nature of analog synths and images 🙂

I’ve read somewhere that we subconsciously enjoy imperfect (approximate) representations of something we know, because it makes our brain fill in what’s missing. Examples are: black and white photography, since the brain has to imagine color. Or, 24 fps cinema since the brain has to interpolate movement from what’s rather insufficient frame rate (compare the dreamy cinematic look of films versus the ultra smooth high fps of a modern broadcast that actually looks too boring and dull). I guess the same applies to analog synths that are never perfect waveforms and periods. Our brain needs to interpolate that to the ideal one. Or maybe my analogy is wrong, never mind 😀

And to clarify, I don’t think AI is there yet to create any listenable jazz. But it can certainly do soon, taking in mind how much AI is becoming a reality. And provided there’s interest in programming it to play jazz at all. I’m not an atheist. However, I’m not religious either and I don’t buy the idea of how art and creativity is something coming from some metaphysical space, divine, etc. It’s all a product of great minds that happened to be optimized for that particular field and be at the highest possible peak level on a world scale. Can this be recreated through machinery? Most probably. Can we humans create that machinery/models? Not sure. Or maybe not soon.

See, a car is faster than you can run. But we still run. Occasionally 😉 Fear of technology has been a thing since the Industrial Revolution. We’re still here and kicking. As someone else said above, there’s no money in jazz, so AI is moving on to more lucrative genres anyway 😀

Everything can be turned into an algorithm 😀 Spontaneous behavior is either random or triggered by stimuli. Both are features that are available to computers. Being able to react to other musician playing at the same time is what? Paranormal activity? 😉 What’s preventing the computer from listening to the band in realtime and reacting the same way as a human?

Self-driving car AI is a special case which involves safety and regulations and is thus severely limited in its scope of action. BTW, I can assure you, current self-driving AI will most probably drive better than most people, and will result in much less casualties, despite occasional weirdness. So, it’s not a divine driver but is nevertheless a great driver that is better than 99% of the drivers 😀