AI Generated Music You hear a lot about music being created by Artificial Intelligence these days. I recently read an article about how they were going to have an AI finish Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony. For those who don’t know, he published nine symphonies and there are apparently notes for a tenth. You have to wonder if people are really serious. I mean it’s not like we don’t have enough artificial intelligence as it is. I suppose artificially generated pop music is the music business’ big dream. They can finally eliminate the middleman, the artist who is just always getting between them and their product. Let’s face it; the artist is just such a liability to the music business what with all the neurosis, drugs and demanding to be paid all the time. They’ve gone from signing new bands to creating acts, so they may as well go the next step and eliminate the artist. But let’s take a closer look here. What’s the difference between artificial intelligence and ...

The Ivory Tower Syndrome I once attended a lecture by the late, great Ray Bradbury, who knew he was addressing an audience of young writers. What he had to say was essentially that, if you wanted to be a writer, you just read and read and eventually it would start to come back out. I somehow understood what he meant at that time, which was this; many people have the idea that if you want to write music, for example, you would go and shut yourself off in some ‘ivory tower,’ hoping that you could come up with a bolt out of the blue.  By shutting yourself up in an ivory tower and not listening to other music you would be able to create something absolutely new and would not be in danger of copying someone else’s work either directly or by accident. Now shutting themselves in an ivory tower is not what the great composers of the past did. Even Beethoven had his influences and they are quite obviously traceable and evident throughout the different periods of his co...

Life As Art You often hear the phrase ‘life imitating art,’ although it could just as easily be ‘art imitating life.’ If you Google the definition of ‘art,’ you get; “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” You get the idea, concepts of creation and of aesthetics; creating something of beauty. But why would art exist at all? It seems to presuppose a better aesthetic to be had, a more ideal scene than what we might be involved in. It might point the way out of what we have generally been brought to accept as ‘reality.’ This is supposing a particular purpose to art that is beyond escapism and temporal entertainment and what a concept this is! But what might art be pointing a way to? What could be better than the best of all possible worlds we find ourselves in now? Surely others have made attempts at how ...