No Reservations

I want to make some really good stuff. I guess I could make everything for free, but a wise man once said "if you can save the world, do it at a profit."

Let's face it, most audio engineers think of their tools as black boxes and have no interest in the code, math, or physics implications of their software. There is a certain knowledge threshold that separates an amateur from a professional in the realm of mixing, which is most quickly reached by quickly iterating by mixing constantly. After a certain amount of iterations, they're pretty much set for a career in mixing or recording and their "sound" can be reached quite efficiently.

Audio engineers are primarily artists, since after that threshold of knowledge (and therefore competency) is reached, we are productized and sold our services based on our "sound" which is a product of knowledge and taste. Gaining this skillset is quite simple since after learning the fundamentals of a solid mixing system like Dan Worrall's BEDA (Balance, Equalization, Dynamics, Ambience) the engineer has only to iterate to propagate. Unlike an artist whos knowledge is infinitely emergent (i.e. good music can be made in infinite ways, a good mix is more objective with more limitations, more on that later), the engineer's knowledge is relegated to the concepts of frequency and dynamics control over different toolsets. It's tricky to pinpoint what makes a song "good" but it's easier to point out what makes a mix sound good.

An LLM and a FiLM-enabled neural network walk into a bar…

Generally speaking, this direction of technology is of the wrong kind in regards to approaching AGI. It will not be a problem of compute but a philosophical breakthrough instead, that understands the origins of creativity which is needed to solve the black box "problem" of universal computation. How is universal computation a black box phenomenon? Epistemologically speaking…

The direction I wish to head towards is one of much greater importance and moral value to humanity. It is to solve for objective beauty by finding sources of creativity's origins. But since creativity cannot be defined without creating an understand of it, an abstraction like a math formula would only limit the definition of such an emergent and infinite phenomenon. This is the creative's paradox. How can artists be creative on-demand? Will our understanding of creativity allow us to reach its origins at-will? Feynman said "What I cannot create, I do not understand." My career will be that of illuminating symmetries from the sciences to create useful tools. (Symmetries from science, applied.)

2.17

Sometimes my mind gets overwhelmed when it thinks about the many tasks I have ahead of me. It requires an artist's devotion to complete even just one of the plethora of tasks I've assigned it. I propose that instead of magnifying and demagnifying the assignments, that the mind simply digs tunnels. By digging in one continuous direction, the mind is not distracted, and when it needs to come up for sun, it can do so naturally and not forcefully.