onfocus

Generative.fm was at the top of the link charts this week. It's a site that offers endless computer generated ambient music. The crisp design pairs well with the sounds and it's fun to explore. It's also disquieting in light of some other articles I read this week:

A brief history of why artists are no longer making a living making music is a concise history of popular music by Ian Tamblyn. He argues that simultaneous advances in technology and labor rights helped fuel a golden age of music craft that has ended.

Another article I ran across about the end of music as we knew it from September, 2018: No more heroes: how music stopped meaning everything. This one describes the end of music as a countercultural force and describes the current age as musical wallpaper. (ouch.)

And just to put too fine a point on all of these, we had Mother Jones with: What Will Happen When Machines Write Songs Just as Well as Your Favorite Musician? It's an oddly unsettling discussion of using machine learning to aid or directly compose music. It argues that music could be affected by AI like photography has been by Instagram. The idea of musicians being replaced by musicgram influencers is bleak.

On a positive note I discovered some fantastic new (to me) music this week by King Buffalo. Check out Morning Song. It was not composed or played by computers. It is similar to music I love from the height of the golden age of recorded music but what are you going to do?

If you haven't been following the college admissions fraud cases you have a lot of catching up to do. It's a rich mine of awfulness that you can dive into if you want to feel even worse about wealth, finance, education, the youths, the parents, and so on. I don't recommend it. I do work for a large land grant university with a mission to educate the public—which is not the type of institution people are conspiring on crimes to enter. However, there is a tangential connection that is annoying: one of the fraudsters used a picture of an Oregon State building on their Twitter profile. Our local paper covered it: Weatherford photo used in admissions scam. Apparently they picked a random college-esque photo and Weatherford fits that bill perfectly. I take pictures of Weatherford all the time as I walk by because it's so darn photogenic. So instead of going down the evil rabbit hole of awfulness that this story is churning, I'm looking at historic images of Weatherford Hall. It's an iconic college campus building that even scammers appreciate.