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- Music and audio that is generated wholly or in substantial part by AI is not permitted on Bandcamp.
- Any use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles is strictly prohibited in accordance with our existing policies prohibiting impersonation and intellectual property infringement.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Thoughts on the Day of the Baptism of Dietrich Wilhelm Rüdiger Bethge,” May 1944:
We thought we could make our way in life with reason and justice, and when both failed, we felt that we were at the end of our tether. We have constantly exaggerated the importance of reason and justice in the course of history. You, who are growing up in a world war which ninety per cent of mankind did not want, but for which they have to risk losing their goods and their lives, are learning from childhood that the world is controlled by forces against which reason can do nothing; and so you will be able to cope with those forces more successfully. In our lives the ‘enemy’ did not really exist. You know that you have enemies and friends, and you know what they can mean in your life. You are learning very early in life ways (which we did not know) of fighting an enemy, and also the value of unreserved trust in a friend. ‘Has not man a hard service upon earth?’ (Job 7.1). ‘Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle; my rock and my fortress, my stronghold and my deliverer, my shield and he in whom I take refuge’ (Ps. 144.1f). ‘There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother’ (Prov. 18.24).
GOD standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.
How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.
Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.
Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.
Julian Lage’s new album Scenes from Above is FAB. Maybe his best record yet — adding John Medeski to his trio was a genius move. ♫
I joked last week that it would make more sense if we found out that the team behind redesigning the UI for MacOS 26 Tahoe was hired by Meta not a month ago, but an entire year ago, and secretly sabotaged their work to make the Mac look clownish and amateur. More and more I’m wondering if the joke’s on us and it actually happened that way. It’s like MacOS, once the crown jewel of computer human interface design, has been vandalized.
Listening to Joni Mitchell’s 1974 album Miles of Aisles on the remastered vinyl released by Acoustic Sounds. A wonderful record, and performed by Joni and her band at a level of musicianship that’s pretty much unimaginable today. ♫
It was late, the end of an exhausting term at a public university in the Midwest. I logged into our learning-management system (LMS) to answer a routine student email. The gradebook — rows and columns I had populated myself — should have been familiar. But one number was wrong.
A student who had failed my course after submitting a final exam composed almost entirely of AI-generated text now showed as having passed. The F I had entered, following my syllabus and the university’s academic integrity policy, had become a D. […]
Once I understood what had happened to my grades, I did what professors are supposed to do. I raised the matter internally. I tried to work through existing channels. I invoked the language of policy, accreditation, and Title IV compliance. I was told, politely, that the system was working as intended.
Wow.
On the topic of my previous post, here’s Thomas Mann, from Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918):
I do not think that it is the essence and duty of the writer to join “with great fanfare” the main direction the culture is taking at the moment. I do not think and cannot from my very nature think that it is natural and necessary for the writer to support a development in a completely positive way by direct, credulous-enthusiastic advocacy — as a solid knight of the times, without scruple and doubt, with straightforward intentions and an unbroken determination and spirit for it, his god. On the contrary, authorship itself has always seemed to me to be a witness to and an expression of ambivalence, of here and there, of yes and no, of two souls in one breast, of an annoying richness in inner conflicts, antitheses, and contradictions.
Robert Alter, from the Preface to his translation of the Hebrew Bible:
Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audiences guessing about motives and connections, and, above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution. In polar contrast, the impulse of the philologist is — here a barbarous term nicely catches the tenor of the activity — “to disambiguate” the terms of the text. The general result when applied to translation is to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible. These unfortunate consequences are all the more pronounced when the philologist, however acutely trained in that discipline, has an underdeveloped sense of literary diction, rhythm, and the uses of figurative language; and that, alas, is often the case in an era in which literary culture is not widely disseminated even among the technically educated. […]
Modern translators, in their zeal to uncover the meanings of the biblical text for the instruction of a modern readership, frequently lose sight of how the text intimates its meanings — the distinctive, artfully deployed features of ancient Hebrew prose and poetry that are the instruments for the articulation of all meaning, message, insight, and vision.
Sometimes I feel that our entire media environment is about disambiguating the intrinsically ambiguous. When Eliot’s bird said “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” it could have substituted “ambiguity” for “reality.”
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Emily Carr, Among the Trees, 1936, oil on canvas. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery
Woodrow Hartzog & Jessica M. Silbey:
AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our crucial civic institutions. The affordances of AI systems have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other. These systems are anathema to the kind of evolution, transparency, cooperation, and accountability that give vital institutions their purpose and sustainability. In short, current AI systems are a death sentence for civic institutions, and we should treat them as such.
Our guidelines for generative AI in music and audio are as follows:
Resistance is not futile; it is necessary. Some people understand that.
From an essay in Persuasion: “So here is our suggestion: Professors should actually teach the scholarly controversies on the issues that most divide them, and they should advertise their success at opening their classrooms to dissenting perspectives.” For academic humanists of my generation, what’s odd and funny and slightly disorienting is how many of the debates we’re having today simply repeat the ones we had in the late 80s and early 90s. For example: Gerald Graff’s essay “Teach the Conflicts” appeared in 1990, and was expanded into a very smart book that was widely discussed at the time. But the authors of the Persuasion essay appear not to know that history.
It’s no mystery why professional musicians are having so much trouble making a living through our primary work. Recorded music is dominated by streaming - on its most recent report, the RIAA calculates that streaming accounts for 84% of all recorded music revenue. And streaming is directing all its revenue to 12% of tracks.
Speaking as someone from that rarified 12%, the actual numbers we receive are absurd in any case — Spotify’s average payout to record labels is $0.003 per stream, gross. That fraction is then divided up, with artists receiving anything from 15% of it ($0.00045) to a maximum of 50% ($0.0015). Or, if they are fortunate enough to own their own masters — as my bands do, and Taylor Swift does — we get the whole ball of wax, 1/3 of a penny per stream to share among all those who contribute to the music. That’s $3,000 per 1,000,000 streams. Good luck.
Robin Sloan on chatbots as “manic technology”:
I’m starting to think language models are a fundamentally manic technology, in part because they operate exclusively through logorrhea, the “yeah, yeah, YEAH!” of the all-nighter. […]
The “best” setting for a brain (and/or an economy) isn’t necessarily straight down the middle. A dip into the realm of mania can be useful, some times revelatory. I don’t know if many creative projects would ever get started if our brains didn’t some times relax the standards by which they light up.
Yet for a human mind and a human heart, one really good project is more nourishing than ten cruddy ones; that was true a hundred years ago, and it’s true today. The AI coding companions will never ever say: “Hey … whatever happened to that other thing you were working on?”
I suppose you still need friends for that, people who know you, who know when you’re talking too fast, and the gleam in your eye has taken on a hard edge.
Telling someone to love literature because reading is good for society is like telling someone to believe in God because religion is good for society. It’s a utilitarian argument for what should be a personal passion.
It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice. This would be a more effective way to attract young people, and it also happens to be true. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn’t get people to stop buying and reading dangerous books. Now that books are considered virtuous and edifying, moralists can’t persuade anyone to pick one up.
The Last Days of the Southern Drawl:
Recent studies suggest I’m part of a trend: Young people are losing their southern accents. By the end of my life, there may be no one left who speaks like my father outside the hollers and the one-horse towns.
I’m part of the trend too: I certainly have a Southern accent, but it’s not as pronounced as it was when I was younger, and I profoundly regret that.
On the plus side, though, a Southern friend of mine sent me this: Redneck Shakespeare. A thing of great beauty.
Exotic Botany… (1804), by James Edward Smith
Sidney Lumet, from Making Movies:
The sound editor on Murder on the Orient Express hired the “world’s greatest authority” on train sounds. He brought me the authentic sounds of not only the Orient Express but the Flying Scotsman, the Twentieth Century Limited, every train that had ever achieved any reputation. He worked for six weeks on train sounds only. His greatest moment occurred when, at the beginning of the picture, the train left the station at Istanbul. We had the steam, the bell, the wheels, and he even included an almost inaudible click when the train’s headlight went on. He swore that all the effects were authentic. When we got to the mix (the point at which we put all the sound tracks together), he was bursting with anticipation. For the first time, I heard what an incredible job he’d done. But I had also heard Richard Rodney Bennett’s magnificent music score for the same scene. I knew one would have to go. They couldn’t work together. I turned to Simon. He knew. I said, “Simon, it’s a great job. But, finally, we’ve heard a train leave the station. We’ve never heard a train leave the station in three-quarter time.” He walked out, and we never saw him again.
I feel great sorrow for this man.
Whether or not one enjoys listening to the music of George Crumb, his scores are fabulous fun to read. ♫