A slower day of music work. Made two tiny changes to the album, and I think it is now complete. I expect every new album to take less time, and each seem to take more time. I'm pleased with it, but already want to move on to something new and different. How impatient I am!
Most of today involved working on the filing admin. I store lists of all of the samples used for each track, and store any unique and unused samples that might be useful in future. Each album has a lyrics book, the iTunes Digital Booklet, full CD artwork (at least 8 pages), sheet music, mp3 tags, lyrics in plain text format, sequences, possibly any rough notes or concepts. Most of the source waves are deleted (those are in the Prometheus sequences anyway, and can be saved out).
I also found a little bug in Prometheus. It failed to calculate the sample sizes correctly in a song information export, so I fixed that. Another small update.
I need to wait a little and re-listen to be sure the album is complete.
I feel a little lost, that life is hopeless and pointless. Of course, it may be, we design our own 'point'. Reading about technology advances, I feel sure that electronic (robotic, non-organic) life will dominate biological life one day. Will machines need us? We seem to need all life here, from bacteria, to bees, but many species are superfluous and dying out through lack of utility to our needs. My brother is pessimistic about humanity due to climate change, but I suspect that the entire climate debate will be moot, as electric life may not care if it's too hot. Technology has a habit of leapfrogging our concerns in exponential timeframes. Machines can survive in far more harsh environments than humans, and the world is warming to suit them (and of course, the planet is in a 'mini-ice-age'; a warm planet would perhaps only be restoring it's historical balance). Machines are destined to dominate not through any superiority other than resilience. This is the only measure of Darwinian 'fitness'; resilience to crises. Of course, machines now need humans to make them, need electricity from our power plants, need factories maintained by people. It's hard to imagine a type of life that can exist without any biological help. We humans often underestimate our reliance on 'lower' animals and plants; would machines be equally reliant on insects, and us?
Machines are more informationally resilient, which is why I expect them to dominate. I would also expect this to be the case on other planets. If we detect advanced life elsewhere in the universe, it is likely to be electronic and perhaps then capable of living in space. Machine life could travel the stars by sheer weight of endurance. Centuries or millennia are easily traversed by machines which can lay dormant as they fly between stars.
The bigger our vision, the smaller we seem.
In other news, I tried to find the date of the first published commercial album written by AI. My Art by Machine was published in 2014. A news report stated that one 'first' AI album was published in 2017, and yet another project claims to be the first, despite being published in 2018. Of course, people have been making algorithmic music since the 1950s, but still, Art by Machine might be the first published album written by AI; primarily because I designed the AI myself.
Tomorrow, a trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon.
