LSTM trained on Bach and Mozart MIDIs spits out endless wonky pseudo-baroque toccatas, passing briefly through a drunken mashup of Paul Hindemith and Scott Joplin on a broken player piano. We are nowhere close to the glory of CPU Bach.
https://youtu.be/SacogDL_4JU
Friday, June 23, 2017
Thursday, June 8, 2017
WSJ reports that hip-hop worship of Mammon has gone global
WSJ reports that hip-hop worship of Mammon has gone global
Even a decade ago, rappers nodded only a handful of times to any currency other than the dollar. In 2007, the euro appeared in just one rap song in the database of Rap Genius, a crowdsourced website that annotates rap lyrics. The Japanese yen appeared twice, and the peso a half-dozen times.
But as hip-hop music has become more global, rappers are internationalizing their lyrics, too, and references to foreign currencies are multiplying.
Peso appeared in 40 rap songs last year, Rap Genius said, while yen was mentioned in 10 and euro in seven. The Indian rupee, Russian ruble and British pound are also popping up in hip-hop lyrics with increasing frequency._
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-low-has-the-dollar-sunk-even-some-rappers-prefer-euros-1496935600
Even a decade ago, rappers nodded only a handful of times to any currency other than the dollar. In 2007, the euro appeared in just one rap song in the database of Rap Genius, a crowdsourced website that annotates rap lyrics. The Japanese yen appeared twice, and the peso a half-dozen times.
But as hip-hop music has become more global, rappers are internationalizing their lyrics, too, and references to foreign currencies are multiplying.
Peso appeared in 40 rap songs last year, Rap Genius said, while yen was mentioned in 10 and euro in seven. The Indian rupee, Russian ruble and British pound are also popping up in hip-hop lyrics with increasing frequency._
__
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-low-has-the-dollar-sunk-even-some-rappers-prefer-euros-1496935600
Tuesday, June 6, 2017
Bob Dylan's Nobel lecture seems as incoherent and ambiguous as ever:
Bob Dylan's Nobel lecture seems as incoherent and ambiguous as ever:
“Moby-Dick,” as he describes it, gave Mr. Dylan the tool of intertwining character voices and the theme of rebirth through a narrator. “Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave,” he writes. But Ishmael survives the shipwreck, “in the sea floating on a coffin.” The theme “works its way into more than a few of my songs,” he wrote, but gave no examples. (That sound you hear is a dozen dissertations being started.)
“All Quiet on the Western Front” — which is also admired by President Trump — portrays the hell of war, and the role of an artist to document it and give the world a reason to survive. Finally, Mr. Dylan turns to “The Odyssey,” with its themes of wandering, adventure and danger, and of returning home to a changed place.
What does it all mean? Mr. Dylan dodges answering directly. But he argues that songs both are and are not literature, the work of novels and plays and epic poems. “Songs are unlike literature,” he wrote. “They’re meant to be sung, not read.” And he asks people to encounter his lyrics the way they were intended to be heard, “in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”
But, he added, the granddaddy of Western literature was a singer and a lyric writer, too. “I return once again to Homer,” he wrote, “who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-lecture-literature.html?module=WatchingPortal®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=15&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-lecture-literature.html&eventName=Watching-article-click&_r=0
“Moby-Dick,” as he describes it, gave Mr. Dylan the tool of intertwining character voices and the theme of rebirth through a narrator. “Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave,” he writes. But Ishmael survives the shipwreck, “in the sea floating on a coffin.” The theme “works its way into more than a few of my songs,” he wrote, but gave no examples. (That sound you hear is a dozen dissertations being started.)
“All Quiet on the Western Front” — which is also admired by President Trump — portrays the hell of war, and the role of an artist to document it and give the world a reason to survive. Finally, Mr. Dylan turns to “The Odyssey,” with its themes of wandering, adventure and danger, and of returning home to a changed place.
What does it all mean? Mr. Dylan dodges answering directly. But he argues that songs both are and are not literature, the work of novels and plays and epic poems. “Songs are unlike literature,” he wrote. “They’re meant to be sung, not read.” And he asks people to encounter his lyrics the way they were intended to be heard, “in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”
But, he added, the granddaddy of Western literature was a singer and a lyric writer, too. “I return once again to Homer,” he wrote, “who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-lecture-literature.html?module=WatchingPortal®ion=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=15&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-lecture-literature.html&eventName=Watching-article-click&_r=0
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