Tag: tech
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Spotify is a Digital Landlord
Spotify, Apple Music, etc. are rent-seekers. A rent-seeker capitalizes on something freely available, that could have been freely given, and charges a premium for it. Spotify et al are digital music landlords over their vassals, big record companies, and the rest of us serfs, in this new age under an emergent system of oppression which…
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How I Use Obsidian to Pair Lyrics and Melodies
Obsidian is a note-taking app that I fell in love with a couple years ago for its ability to connect notes with wiki-style links. In my songwriting practice, I like to use the Dataview plugin for Obsidian to help me link lyrics to tunes and combine lyric fragments. I do this by way of tagging…
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AI Music Cannot Replace the Joy of Making Music
Mikey Shulman, CEO of AI music generation startup Suno, actually thinks people don’t enjoy making music anymore. “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now,” according to him. “It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece…
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Random MIDI Mutes and Semi-Generative Drums
I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of silence in music, and I dreamed up this technique, using a sequencer to more-or-less randomly mute a signal. The idea was to program a beat but then have the sequence be periodically interrupted by silence. I was partly inspired by this tai hirose track. Now you…