Week in Review: April 8-14, 2024

Closeup image of the side of a metal snare drum showing the pattern of the patina along with two lugs and the air vent centered in black and white

Each week, I first summarize my adventures in making music. Lately, I have been composing tracks for the Disquiet Junto, the Naviar Records Haiku Music Challenge and, this year for the first time, Weekly Beats. I also have other projects and collaborations I will share occasionally.

I also bring together the perspective I shared in posts on social media (currently Mastodon) about the music industry in the section: Music + Tech + Law. These thoughts are intended to come from me as a consumer of, and participant in, the entertainment business. However, I cannot completely separate the thoughts I generate from the part of my brain I use for my day job as a lawyer experienced in technology contracts and intellectual property.*


My Music


I had a lot of fun last week chopping up random samples and I decided to do the same for this Weekly Beats track. I went into my Splice library and selected different keys in the search filter to see if I had at least a handful of samples in one key that I could work with. I liked what I had under E minor and dragged four loops into Ableton on four different tracks each with a Simpler device in slice mode. I also found kick, snare, hi hat and percussion sounds to create the beat on four additional tracks. I really liked the new single from Caribou called "Honey" that came out last week and the dance beat with the ghost notes on the snare in that track was my inspiration. After I built out the track more, I felt like I had too many sounds and the mix was just too cluttered, so I opted to make a second part and that is where the A-B-A-B song structure came from. I spent more time in Session View this week than I usually do and only went to arrange the track on the timeline Saturday night. I am not sure if that helped or hurt me, but it was an interesting experiment.

 


Music + Tech + Law


I feel like in recent years technology around samples has been focused on finding the right sound for a particular circumstance among the glut of sample packs and libraries out there. I have used the new search features in Ableton and have tried similar functionality in Splice, but I still struggle with finding the sound I’m looking for when I need it. Perhaps instead of locating a specific  sample or sound, it is just more efficient to have a new one made from scratch on demand. Here is an article about one such example of a text-to-audio sample generator.


I'm not surprised that humans outperform machines in translating emotion through music. My first reaction to this press release was to assume that use cases for AI generated music are simply limited to circumstances where emotional impact is less important, and my mind went to music for commercials. But looking closer at it, I see the study is by a “sonic branding” agency specializing in commercial music. Which leads me to ask, what use case is left for AI-generated music?


The editor/founder of Tape Op Magazine is clearly upset about Apple using the trademark of his recording studio within Logic Pro. In this post, he describes how one of the virtual “drummers” specializes in indie rock and has beat presets with titles that hint at the Pacific Northwest. I take his point that Apple notably does not use “Abbey Road” as a preset for the "Britpop" drummer, but I do see references to other famous names. For example, the "Sawmill Sound" preset must refer to Sawmills Studios.


I shared this open letter from the Artists Rights Alliance that garnered some significant attention in the news. The gist of it is: If someone develops a technology that could not exist but for your music and my music (and everyone else’s music), and the output from that technology directly competes with all of our music, then the developer should get permission to use our music, pay us a fair amount of compensation or both.


*My opinions are not my employer’s and this material does not create an attorney-client relationship, is not intended to convey legal or ethics advice, and does not guarantee the same or similar results in all cases.

John Wright

John Wright is an independent music artist. A rock drummer and electronic music producer, his solo project is inspired by the driving beats of Detroit-area dance music clubs with organic textures honoring his rock band roots.

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