Photo via Anton Diaz CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

 

It happened by accident to me. I came across one YouTube of him — I don’t remember which one — and then fell into another, and then into another. Now if I don’t stop myself, I’ll find myself falling into one Jacob-shaped hole after another, and then two hours later I remember what I was going to be doing. I even went to his Boston concert a couple of months ago, the first live concert I’d been to since Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975 in Toronto. (JC’s bond with his audience in the exact opposite of Dylan’s.)

 

Anyway, here’s the Intro Playlist:

 

This is an excellent one hour BBC documentary that I think gives a good overall view of why and how he’s special. It also will give you a sense of his genius-level multi-instrumentality, which the two songs below don’t highlight … although his guitar work in the next one is quietly astounding. (Hint: Always pay attention to his chord-work/harmonizing.)

 

Little Blue is a beautiful song from his new album. There’s an official video with him on multiple instruments (and Brandi Carlile!), but this version of him singing it with only his guitar and a small chorus I think is more affecting. By the way, the singers are simply fans who responded to his open invitation, not professionals. Also, in this version he turns them into a chorus by using hand gestures; that part is unrehearsed. (Leading his audiences in this way has become a signature part of his live concerts.)

 

Then there’s what I think is his magnum opus (so far): A version of a Bridge over Troubled Water. I’m not crazy about the original, but JC’s version of it I find exhilarating and moving. It’s purely vocal, with JC singing all the background parts. His 2-hour walkthrough of how he created it on his Mac makes you aware of the hundreds of  tiny decisions that went into it. And here’s a live version of it, with John Legend and Tori Kelly, that’s also astounding. JC is on a keyboard, called the harmonizer, he invented with Ben Bloomberg, an MIT Media Lab grad student, that turns what he’s singing into whatever keys he’s pressing. Also Tori’s runs were all written by JC, even though they sound like improvisations.

 

I hope you will long fall into your own Jacob shaped holes. And this is coming from someone who generally isn’t moved by music. (Some exceptions apply.)

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I met Brad Turcotte, who goes by the professional name Brad Sucks, back in the Age of the Blogosphere. He was, and is, an indie musician who embodies the spirit of the open Web. He’s also an awesome song writer, singer, producer, and one man band.

Weirdly, we have been friends since way back when – Why weirdly? Take a look at the photo – although we’ve only met in person twice, including today. Brad was in town, so we had a long beer and a longer conversation. What a pleasure. And, frankly, a privilege.

You should listen to his music because it’s good. You should support him at Patreon because that’s one of the services that actually helps artists. We should all be working to enable creative people like Brad to flourish; he’s what the Web was made for.

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At the PAIR symposium, Rebecca Fiebrink of Goldsmiths University of London asks how machines can create new things.

She works with sensors. ML can allow us to build new interactions from examples of human action and computer response. E.g., recognize my closed fist and use it to play some notes. Add more gestures. This is a conventional suprvised training framework. But suppose you want to build a new gesture recognizer?

The first problem is the data set: there isn’t an obvious one to use. Also, would a 99% recognition rate be great or not so much? It depends on what was happening. IF it goes wrong, you modify the training examples.

She gives a live demo — the Wekinator — using a very low-res camera (10×10 pixels maybe) image of her face to control a drum machine. It learns to play stuff based on whether she is leaning to the left or right, and immediately learns to change if she holds up her hand. She then complicates it, starting from scratch again, training it to play based on her hand position. Very impressive.

Ten years ago Rebecca began with the thought that ML can help unlock the interactive potential of sensors. She plays an early piece by Anne Hege using Playstation golf controllers to make music:

Others make music with instruments that don’t look normal. E.g., Laetitia Sonami uses springs as instruments.

She gives other examples. E.g., a facial expression to meme system.

Beyond building new things, what are the consequences, she asks?

First, faster creation means more prototyping and wider exploration, she says.

Second, ML opens up new creative roles for humans. For example, Sonami says, playing an instrument now can be a bit wild, like riding a bull.

Third, ML lets more people be creators and use their own data.

Rebecca teaches a free MOC on Kadenze
: Machine learning for artists and musicians.

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At the PAIR Symposium, Doug Eck, a research scientist at Google Magenta, begins by playing a video:

Douglas Eck – Transforming Technology into Art from Future Of StoryTelling on Vimeo.

Magenta is part of Google Brain that explores creativity.
By the way:

He talks about three ideas Magenta has come to for “building a new kind of artist.”

1. Get the right type of data. It’s important to get artists to share and work with them, he says.

Magenta has been trying to get neural networks to compose music. They’ve learned that rather than trying to model musical scores, it’s better to model performances captured as MIDI. They have tens of thousands of performances. From this they were able to build a model that tries to predict the piano roll view of the music. At any moment, should the AI stay at the same time, stacking up notes into chords, or move forward? What are the next notes? Etc. They are not yet capturing much of the “geometry” of, say, Chopin: the piano-roll-ish vision of the score. (He plays music created by ML trained on scores and one trained on performances. The score-based on is clipped. The other is far more fluid and expressive.)

He talks about training ML to draw based on human drawings. He thinks running human artists’ work through ML could point out interesting facets of them.

He points to the playfulness in the drawings created by ML from simple human drawings. ML trained on pig drawings interpreted a drawing of a truck as pig-like.

2. Interfaces that work. Guitar pedals are the perfect interface: they’re indestructible, clear, etc. We should do that for AI musical interfaces, but the sw is so complex technically. He points to the NSyth sound maker and AI duet from Google Creative Lab. (He also touts deeplearn.js.)

3. Learning from users. Can we use feedback from users to improve these systems?

He ends by pointing to the blog, datasets, discussion list, and code at g.co/magenta.

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Tiny Tim would have been 84 today.

He was my mother’s younger cousin…an innocent, gentle, and very genuine soul.

The song is by Bill Dorsey about whom little is known. But what is known, the Internet has unearthed.

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I find the weird sounds that opera singers make — singing — to be creepy, but even I find Bach’s St. John Passion moving. Of course, it helps not to be able to understand the words since it places the blame for the whole Messiah-killing nastiness on the shoulders of a Jewish mob and Jewish law.

There’s a wonderful episode of Christopher Lydon’s Radio Open Source that explores this question from scholarly and musical points of view, always sympathetically, and with transcendently beautiful passages from the work itself.

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A few days ago, when Apple pushed the latest from U2 into everyone’s iTunes library, you could hear the Internet pause as it suddenly realized that Apple is its parents’ age.

Now in the ad-promotion succubus occupying the body of what used to be Time Magazine, you can see U2 desperate to do exactly the wrong thing: insisting that it wasn’t a gift at all. You can learn more about this in the hilariously titled cover article of Time: “The veteran rock band faces the future.” This a future in which tracks we don’t like are bundled with tracks we do (the return of the CD format) and people who share with their fans are ruining it for U2, boohoo.

Or, as Bono recently said, “We were paid” for the Apple downloads, adding, “I don’t believe in free music. Music is a sacrament.” And as everyone knows, sacraments need to be purchased at a fair market value, the results of which Bono, as a deeply spiritual artist, secures in sacred off-shore accounts.

In my head I hear Bono, enraged by the increasingly bad publicity, composing a message that he posts without first running it through his phalanx of PR folks:

Dear fans:

You have recently received a copy of our latest album, Songs of Innocence, in your iTunes library. U2 understands you may be confused or even upset by this. So, let me clarify once and for all the most important point about this — if I may humbly say so — eternal masterpiece. It was not our intention to cause you stress or to wonder if you have the musical sensitivity to full grasp (if I may, humbly say) the greatness of our work. But most important, it is essential above all that you understand that it was not our intention to give you a gift. No freaking way.

We understand your mistake. You are, after all, just fans, and you don’t play in the Jetstream world of global music. As I said to my dear friend Nelson Mandela (friend is too weak a word; I was his mentor) shortly before he passed, music is a sacrament, just like tickets to movies, especially ones with major stars working for scale, or like the bill at a restaurant where you and any two of the Clintons (Chelsea, you are a star! Give yourself that!) are plotting goodness.

To tell you the truth, I’m disappointed in you. No, worse. I’m hurt. Personally hurt. How dare you think this was a gift! After all these years, is that all U2 is worth to you? Nothing? Our music has all the value of a CrackerJacks trinket or a lower-end Rolex in an awards show gift bag? Do you not understand that Apple paid us for every copy they distributed? We were paid for it, sheeple! Massive numbers of dollars were transferred into our bank accounts! More dollars than you could count, you whiny little “Ooh look at me I’m sharing” wankers! We’re U2 dammit! We don’t need you! You need us! MONEY IS LOVE! EXTRA-ORDINARY LOVE!!!!!!

Have a beautiful day.

Meanwhile, as always, Amanda Palmer expresses the open-hearted truth about this issue. It almost makes me regret making fun of Bono. Almost.

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This video was over at the NY Times Crossword blog (where I discovered that I’d missed the really clever part of the theme):

I know I’m old, children, but keep in mind that that’s a minor Beatles song. And yet there is so much right about it. More or less perfect. And not nearly the best of what they gave us.

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For $3 at a library book sale I picked up a copy of Releasing an Independent Record, revised 4th edition, by Gary Hustwit, published in 1994 by Rockpress Publishing Co. The short review is: Times have changed.

Gary’s advice is that if you want to get your music out, don’t go to one of the existing labels. Start your own. In 1993, that was pretty radical even though it required you to emulate the major labels’ processes, albeit starting from scratch and with no budget. So,the bulk of Gary’s manual is a directory of the services you’ll need to hire. He assumes you’ve already got a tape of your music. So, now you need to find a tape duplication house. You also need to get the paperwork done to set up your label’s bank account, and don’t forget the rubber stamp: “Depending on what formats you release, you’ll need a ton of different sized envelopes, and stamping the return address is easier than having them printed or writing it by hand.”

There are also handy, multi-page lists of the press to contact and the local radio stations (remember them?) to flog your songs to. And booking agents and promoters. And record labels so you can “See if your label name is already taken.” Oh, and you might want to check “if they’re interested in licensing your record.”

A quick google reveals that Gary is now a director of documentaries. I saw and liked Helvetica, and Objectified is on my Netflix list.

On the last page, there’s an ad for Rockpress’ other four books. My favorite is Hell on Wheels, by Greg Jacobs:

A compilation of tour stories from 40 bands, including ALL, aMINIATURE, Babes in Toyland, Big Drill Car, Buck Pets, Buffalo Tom, Butthole Surfers, Cadillac Tramps, Chune, Circle Jerks, Coffin Break, The Cult, Descendents, Doughboys, The Dwarves, Ethyl Meatplow, fIREHOSE, The Germs, God Machine, Kill Sybil, King Missile, L7, Luscious Jackson, Mary’s Danish, Melvins, Minutemen, Naked Raygun, Overwhelming Colorfast, Popdefect, Rockets from the Crypt, Screaming Sirens, Skin Yard, Superchunk, Supersuckers, Surgery, UK Subs, and X.

I recognize a couple —it’s not my demographic, people — but that list’s got a bit of Key and Peele about it, don’t you think?

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I know it’s the day after the day after Christmas, but I’m still going to give you a gift. A gift of Schiff.

I heard Andras Schiff on the radio a couple of days ago and it reminded me how much I’ve enjoyed his discussions of Beethoven’s piano sonatas before he’s performed them. He plays with passion but has an analytic understanding of the compositions. And, no, I’m not sure why I used “but” as the conjunction in that sentence.

Anyway, you can download the lectures here, thanks to The Guardian. (Thank you, The Guardian!)

Schiff said on the radio the other day that as he gets older, his understanding increases but his technical ability decreases. It makes me hope that we get some software that lets a master like him manipulate musical notation to produce a digital version of the performance that he would have liked to be able to give. Or will it turn out that there are so many variables for how you strike a note and string them together that such software is like wishing that Meryl Streep could instruct a digitizal avatar to act as well as she does?

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