On Not Doing and Doing
Not Doing
I’m generally less motivated in the winter. It might be some sort of SAD-like thing, but there’s also simply more friction in mundane tasks. It’s not just a mental block; it’s physically more difficult to go out into the world during a cold Michigan winter. Combine this with the inherent busyness of the holiday season, and the pervasive awfulness of everything in the world right now, and you can see how creative energy can suffer. You’ve probably felt it yourself.
I made this site with the intentions of primarily sharing photos and music. Things that either Look or Sound interesting. Since I rely heavily on sampled sounds and field recordings for the music I like to make, going out into the world and exploring is basically step one in the process. Maybe next year I’ll make it a point to try to get out in spite of all of this. There are definitely a lot of interesting things to see and hear, despite the cold:
Doing
On the other hand, though, I’ve been learning to snowboard–something that is only doable in the winter. I think to some extent it is necessary–for the sake of my mental health–to adapt. Embrace the winter; go out and do the types of things that only exist because of it. We have season passes for some local hills, and we’ve been out many times already this season. It’s a little scary, but fun. Something very much outside of my comfort zone.
And in the meantime, while I wait for the weather to warm up, I’ve been working on a little command-line utility for slicing and manipulating audio samples. The original idea was to chop up long-form audio recordings and feed them into an app called Sononym (which I highly recommend). It uses machine learning techniques to classify samples into categories based on traditional instruments (kick, snare, lead, pluck, etc.). Then, I’d build sample packs based on this analysis. Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) discusses this technique in this Tone Glow interview. He used this exact workflow extensively in his 2011 album Replica, slicing audio from old corporate training videos and advertisements. If you haven’t heard the album, definitely give it a listen.
I think the next step for this app will be using machine learning to train custom, hyper-specific models on various audio sources and try to synthesize my own samples from my existing collection. I have no idea if this will work, but knowing me, if it spits out garbled trash sounds, I’ll make tracks with garbled trash sounds. This is what I may consider to be a non-awful creative use of AI. Training my own models on my own audio. Controlled inputs and outputs, custom parameters, and curated results. The outputs (being samples themselves) would then constitute a small part of an overall composition. I could (and might yet) write a whole post just on the hellscape of foundation model-driven slop ““““““““art”””””””” that’s all around us these days and how AI relates to real art, but for now I’ll just say that I do think that there’s some gray area, and bespoke machine learning architectures can have genuine merit as creative tools. Which brings me to:
Both Doing and Not Doing
The last major thing that’s affected me in the past few months is the inescapable rise of AI-driven software development. The development lifecycle now feels like a sort of mix between architectural software engineering and describing a cool idea you have to your nerd friends while you’re drunk. A sort of Doing while simultaneously Not Doing. As a career software engineer, this has caused me some level of existential dread. But I guess the results speak for themselves. It really seems like this is the future of development. Like with the winter weather, all we can do is embrace and adapt.
Well, anyway, I guess it just feels a little weird to go through all the work of setting up this site, only to immediately stop making music and taking photos for several months. But that’s fine. As designer Jessica Hische put it: “The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” And I seem to procrastinate by making weird and obscure command-line utilities, so I guess that checks out.