{"id":574,"date":"2010-02-12T22:58:13","date_gmt":"2010-02-13T02:58:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=574"},"modified":"2010-02-12T22:59:18","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T02:59:18","slug":"paul-williams-writes-article-about-nothing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/?p=574","title":{"rendered":"Paul Williams writes article about nothing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Does music need “professional” musicians?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Paul Williams, the songwriter and current president of ASCAP, recently wrote this article<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s pretty short, but one thing is missing from it: a point.\u00a0 The only point I can see is that “piracy is bad.”\u00a0 Well, duh.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I’m going to go off on a little tangent here.\u00a0 I think at some point in the future (perhaps still hundreds of years away) people will no longer be able to make a living off of writing music.\u00a0 One reason is quite simple: computers will write music.\u00a0 People won’t need to.\u00a0 People will<\/em> continue to write music, though, because it’s fun.\u00a0 People being able to make a living off of writing music is, from what I can tell, a pretty recent phenomenon in the history of human existence.\u00a0 (As are the sorts of economies we have now, for that matter.)\u00a0 The creation of beautiful music doesn’t depend on people making a living off of it.\u00a0 The reason people defend and fight for being able to make a living off of it is because it’s a dream come true!<\/em> Being able to make a living off of doing something you love is just fantastic.\u00a0 (At least, I imagine; it still hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’m working on it!)<\/p>\n

So, I’ll whole-heartedly agree that piracy is bad, and I’ll defend protocols and systems that try to counter it (as long as they don’t get in the way of what us legitimate non-pirates want to do, which they do too often), but I won’t do this in defense of the music.\u00a0 The music will always exist.\u00a0 Piracy is bad for moral reasons, not monetary reasons.\u00a0 Well, it is<\/em> bad for monetary reasons, but I’m not against it just because I want more $$$$, like perhaps a number of other composers and publishers (and PROs?).<\/p>\n

My automatic music generator<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently, I’ve been continuing work on my computer program that will, if my daydreams come true, write music.\u00a0 OK, it’s still such a difficult task that I probably won’t live to see (or hear) it work, but it’s still a puzzling challenge that obsesses me sometimes.\u00a0 Anyway, I spent the day thinking about new algorithms to try out.\u00a0 To help me do this, I began writing a semi-fictional dialogue.\u00a0 In it, I appear as a character and I meet with William Wobbler, a character from my recently finished screenplay The Melody Box<\/em>.\u00a0 The two of us then contemplate how to create a computer program that can write music.\u00a0 It’s a lot of fun to write, and if I ever succeed at my goal of creating this program and if it makes me insanely rich (a dream that motivates me), then I will someday release it to the public so that everyone can learn how it was done, and how my thought process worked while creating it.\u00a0 Or if I die having failed (which is more likely), I can leave it for generations after me to perhaps have something to work with (though the possibility remains that it is and will forever be useless garbage, but, I don’t know, somebody out there might read it).<\/p>\n

I guess that’s it.\u00a0 I have to go back to work tomorrow.\u00a0 Snow got me an entire week off, but the vacation’s over now!\u00a0 (The week off did give me a torturous glimpse of what life might be like if I could ever make enough money writing or composing to work from home.\u00a0 I risk becoming a hermit then, but it’s still something I cannot stop myself from desiring.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Does music need “professional” musicians? Paul Williams, the songwriter and current president of ASCAP, recently wrote this article.\u00a0 It’s pretty short, but one thing is missing from it: a point.\u00a0 The only point I can see is that “piracy is bad.”\u00a0 Well, duh. Anyway, I’m going to go off on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[7,23,53],"tags":[100,190],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7gI4B-9g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=574"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":575,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574\/revisions\/575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wizardwalk.com\/newblather\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}