TMBWOD Audiobook, Proto-Viral Philosopher

So many options for things I may do, and anything is really possible. Creating new things feels different than working on old things, but then working on old things often means creating new things for them! The small video talking about The Myth Of Sisyphus is fine, and perhaps it's a good idea to make a promotional video of sorts for each album, and each book, and each painting, and each game; but again, there is the question of workload vs. value. Everything is ultimately valuable, and anything justifiable if rationalised.

I've sold a couple of audiobooks, after recording two in January, and, as with having sheet music for all of my albums, having audio versions of all of my books seems like a good idea, so today I've charged into recording an audiobook for The Many Beautiful Worlds of Death. Recorded 3 of the 14 chapters today, though the first chapter is (I'm sure you know) a short song, so there are really 13 chapters.

I've been postings paintings and links to existing works almost daily on social media this year and my Philosopher painting has had an explosion in views overnight and on BlueSky today, a first such result for me which, on its own has been an inspiration and source of some happiness.

Deborah's holiday and the Olympics have both been a distraction in the past week, contributing to a lack of focus. Hopefully this focus on TMBWOD (and perhaps even afterwards, another book, perhaps Deep Dark Light, perhaps another) will acts as a stabilising force.

Wuthering Heights, Einstein

Many slow days, at the end of the sheet music project and searching for new directions. Watched the new 'Wuthering Heights' film with Deborah on Tuesday and rather liked it, though the overtly artistic moments seemed consciously arty rather than genuine somehow, so much borrowed from Lynch, and many painting references; Vermeer, Ingres, Millet, even Francis Bacon. Excessive borrowing is not influence it's struggling for identity, someone without a creative soul desperately trying to appear artistic.

I have many possibilities for direction. I've considered everything from a new album, to more sheet music, to more audiobooks, or painting plans, or even revising my old game Bool.

Today I've toyed with a music sequence for a song called 'Einstein' but, working on the music led to a melody which didn't fit good words. I wrote some better words but these have bent the melody in strange ways. Stll unsure if I should work on it at all. Too split. Too many choices.

Ironverb II

A slow day. I had hoped to do some work on promoting my music but did not even begin.

I did, instead, develop a new reverb for Prometheus, Ironverb II. The original Ironverb is a tinny plate-type reverb, with a band-pass filter and limited settings (not even bandwidth for the filter). For Ironverb II I've added an internal delay to the reverb tail, plus left/right (and front/back/up/down - Prometheus is natively 6-channel) controls over the delay gain and diffusion. Diffusion affects the hardness of the reflection, so it's useful for creating new surface-spatial types. I added a 'Preverb' parameter, which is the amount of reverb tail that isn't in the delay. When zero, this makes it only a delayed reverb, creating an odd effect. All of these settings are useful for creating lots of variety. The Dry (original sound) can be turned down if required too.

Doing this revealed a small bug in Prometheus, so that's now updated to v3.83.

This feels like a distraction. I must target something new. Life is short.

Digitisation Devaluation and Targeted Advertising

I thought about shadow libraries, archives of books shared without heed to licencing or remunerating authors or publishers, and I was struck with the idea that the reason that much of the world has lived in poverty and economic stagnation since 2009 is not the real-estate 'global financial crisis' of that time, but due to the rise of the internet. Over time, everything digital has become increasingly devalued and increasingly worthless. This applies particularly to text-based factual information. Encyclopedias were once expensive, rare, treasured, even bought as investments. Now these are nearly worthless, as is so much journalistic content. News media and quality journalism has been all but destroyed by free news found online.

The things of value are those things not digitised, or not yet digitised, but it seems that the trend for digitisation will continue, and with it the devaluation of that content. I wonder if the total amount of value online is constant? It would be interesting to know the ratios of valuable digital information (some digital items are, of course, sold) vs. cheap or free digital information. Of course, much data is also lost over time, also something of a tragedy.

The value of digital items is mostly lost by piracy or free acquisition in legal ways. There are, of course many digital items intended to be low value from the outset, such as automatically created content.

That which retains value is that which is not yet digital, or that, like paintings and sculpture, which cannot be digitised fully. AI perhaps represents a start of the digitisation of personality.

Of course, our personalities are sold as commodities by social media to construct an advertising profile, this is the business model of these giants, so they consider this information valuable. I remain unsure whether it is. I'm sceptical about targeted advertising, it seems to me something of a scam. Social media companies make money by charging others to advertise, not by selling anything of value. Those advertisers have little choice but accept the if the 'personalised advertising' theory whether it actually works or not. Before social media, ads were not personalised, yet advertising was a thriving business, and the concentrated attention of people on social media would, I posit, still drive a lot of commerce without any targeting.

MOPO Sheet Music

Completed and filed the sheet music for Music Of Poetic Objects. Each album refines the standards and look of the music, so even when this mammoth, planned multi-year plan is complete, there will be a huge amount of work to publishing it somehow - yet I've now completed 37 albums of complete sheet music, with 14 albums remaining.

Since it's re-recording, I'd not listed The End And The Beginning on Bandcamp, the old version was there, so I've prepared that today. A full day of seemingly little progress. So it goes. Onwards we march.

Music Of Poetic Objects Scores, Kate Bush, and Introspection

A few solid days working on the scores for Music Of Poetic Objects. Spending more time on some than others. The ones for The Love Reliquary began as solo piano works, but I've added the full string arrangements to the pretty second tune (The Lost Princess), and today did some scores for the Swift Triptych, which are strange in the sequence and don't really translate into or render themselves well as 'real-world' instruments. In these circumstances I wonder what the utility of scores are; but I've notated most of the important parts, while removing parts like white noise, background flames etc. I suppose a paper version is better than no record at all.

Attended a dinner and murder mystery play night last night with Deborah, a generous Christmas gift to us both. The food was excellent, though I can't eat beyond 6pm as my digestion is so slow. I wasn't interested in playing the game, solving the mystery play which took part all around is, but I enjoyed observing it all. If reading a 'whodunnit' we don't have to try and solve it, and such fictions are designed to be illogical, unrealistic, and to subvert or make fools of the reader anyway. Deborah looked beautiful, like a Mucha subject. The star of the evening for me was the venue, the stunning interiors of old Crewe Hall. It's probably the best looking historical building I've visited, more beautiful even than Chester Cathedral.

Reading about Kafka, some consider his personality schizoid. I share many, not all, of these traits; certainly so when I programmed alone until my mid-30s. This has been playing on my mind recently, but personality is, I think, too complicated to label or categorise. Everyone is unique, and can be understood only on an emotional level, like art. Rationality needs time and time to calculate, becoming more accurate over time. Emotions understand instantly, like waves in the frequency domain vs in the time domain. Like atoms as particles or waves. Rationality and emotions have this duality. Perhaps our perceptions of time have a similar relationship.

I ate late, so had indigestion and stomach agonies. I got up at 2 or 3am, and watched television while standing (in such discomfort, even sitting is too unpleasant). By chance, the BBC showed two hour-long programmes about Kate Bush, one a documentary, and a second programme of her television appearances. Both hugely inspiring (I copied her dance moves!). What a great artist she is, or was, and great beauty she is, or was. I was struck with many sadnessess, but why? Perhaps envy, and sad at my eternal obscurity and feelings that everything I do is ignored or pointless, that I and my actions are worthless; when I feel that I can create and have created some good music, paintings, books. Again I recalled the schizoid traits of these feelings of obscurity, reminding me that my perceptions may not reflect reality. My training as a small child was that the things I do are unimportant. Now I know, on an intellectual level, the importance of all things.

I'm driven and eternally busy; productive and setting higher and higher standards without being paralysed by perfectionism. These are good traits. I feel inspired, that I'm working better than ever, that my 5-year old music explorations, perhaps now at an end, can be completed, and that I can create many new artworks in music, in painting, in writing, and in every area. I wish I had ten clones so that I could do all of these things. Perhaps all of my creations will always be ignored by the world, but perhaps everyone thinks that. I've to have a 'success', yet some things I've made (and make) are more successful than others. A breakthrough may occur. Some things I've made have been good, I judge them so at least, even if all things seem to be equally disregarded. It I had a 'hit' artwork, a hit song, a hit painting, its popularity would certainly annoy me relative to the many other good things I've made, and I expect that all artists feel this.

Have spent today working on the last bits of Music Of Poetic Objects scores, including some alternative piano versions. Perhaps a week is a long time to spend on such things, but as with all art or science, its impossible to know if this time was wasted or well spent. Perhaps this week's work will be my 'Leaf by Niggle'.

One other job was the hefty admin work concerning the release of The Myth Of Sisyphus, now due for release on 10th April. I've compiled, uploaded, and filed new videos for each track. As usual, I'll do no promotion for any of it. Is this a schizoid trait? It's true that I don't revel in, or even like, showing off my wares; but I do, sometimes try to promote them - I can still love my creations even if I don't love telling others about them - and TMOS is an album I'm proud of. I think the lack of such promotion feels like time stolen from the creation of new and more exciting works, and a dire lack of resources and/or reward makes promoting no better than not promoting. At one time I paid to advertise Flatspace. After a year, I decided to stop and sales continued at the same rate for at least a year - the money was wasted, that promotion useless. I've yet to try any form of promotion that has been worth doing. Perhaps most artists do love sharing their work, do love performing, do love telling others about their work; and that this is their reward. The hugely critical responses I've experienced in the past have burned my emotional fingers in this regard, such that the opportunity instantly feels risky, fearful and prone to pain and disaster; thus promoting my works always has this barrier to overcome.

An introspective roll along this section of road. Time to rest, and complete the scores. A new week to fill dawns. Analysis is useful because it can create revelations. To the gods of art I thank and pray. Let us roll our rock on this dark road. Onwards, onwards we push.

Music Admin, More MOPO Scores

A slower day. Started with the regular Windows updates, then admin work on 'Sisyphus', adding the album to my website, then a long-planned hour or so updating the public Cornutopia Music Catalogue document. In the afternoon, tedious time working on the recent scores, and scoring out 'For Deborah', which actually sounds better in the MuseScore preview than in my poor recording.

Bedtime Stories, Wild Horses Scores

A full day scoring the 'Bedtime Stories' and 'Wild Horses' scores. The latter has 12 instruments and is perhaps my biggest orchestral score to date. Most of the work with the other pieces involved painstakingly transcribing the piano notes, but not so in 'Wild Horses' as the notes are sequenced already. The work is the adjustment of the various virtual instruments into real ones. My 4 string layers (including bass) are split into 5 here, and the splits were somewhat awkward at times. All instruments fitted, except for a few notes of the horns which were too high (I could have used trumpets or a trombone, or another type of horn perhaps).

Absolutely lots of work for this long piece. Again, I'll not score it completely, or perfectly (do I yet have that skill?). I've added several dynamics, string markings, clues, but not everything (no tempi yet), perhaps 50% of a 'finished' score. Enough should be there for a conductor to work it out even now, I can always add more later.

I'm also changing my brackets, which, until today were (incorrectly) big blocks of everything, but will now divide by instrument sections, which I think is correct. I find them a big confusing as we are all supposed to be playing together; why would anyone be doing their own thing in such a group effort as an ensemble performance? Everything is about learning, evolving. I wrote my first scores, my first transcriptions of my recorded music, in 2022, a mere 4 years ago. As of today I've completed over 450. There's still a lot to learn, a lot to proof. I think I've scored more than half of the music I've recorded and released.

Today's music will take longer to score as it was to compose originally, which is an amazing thought.

Parts of 'The Rat Rock' is left to do, but most of the first key six tunes are now complete, though, of course, that proofing and adding the other touches is a huge job too.