Example of Brian Eno using ITunes as a digital music zettelkasten. He's got 2,800 pieces of unreleased music which he plays on random shuffle for serendipity, memory, and potential creativity. The experience seems to be a musical one which parallels Luhmann's ideas of serendipity and discovery with the ghost in the machine or the conversation partner he describes in his zettelkasten practice.

Example of Brian Eno using combinatorial creativity using cards to generate music.

This sounds similar to a process used by Austin Kleon which I've noted before.

ways to link this to oral traditions in music and memory?!?

Sound manipulator, what a great title for a business card.

https://www.usgo.org/news/2016/11/aga-president-andy-okuns-father-milton-t-okun-music-producer-for-john-denver-peter-paul-and-mary-dies/

Andy Okun's father

https://austinkleon.com/2018/03/04/card-games/

I'm reminded of early French use of playing cards for note taking here...

A game by Austin Kleon for making jam sessions less boring using cards.

Inspired by Oblique Strategies and The Creative Tarot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cv7epY75Wa0

Maths, Logic, Computer Science, Chess, Music, and Dance

A similar observation could be made about mathematics, logic, and computer science. Sadly, public education in the states seems to lose sight that the formalisms in these domains are merely the tools of the trade and not the trade itself (ie, developing an understanding of the fundamental/foundational notions, their relationships, their instantiations, and cultivating how one can develop capacity to "move" in that space).

Similarly, it's as if we encourage children that they need to merely memorize all the movements of chess pieces to appreciate the depth of the game.

Or saying "Here, just memorize these disconnected contortions of the hand upon these strings along this piece of wood. Once you have that down, you've experienced all that guitar, (nay, music itself!) has to offer."

Or "Yes, once, you internalize the words for these moves and recite them verbatim, you will have experienced all the depth and wonder that dance and movement have to offer."

However, none of these examples are given so as to dismiss or ignore the necessity of (at least some level of) formalistic fluency within each of these domains of experience. Rather, their purpose is to highlight the parallels in other domains that may seem (at first) so disconnected from one's own experience, so far from one's fundamental way of feeling the world, that the only plausible reasons one can make to explain why people would waste their time engaging in such acts are 1. folly: they merely do not yet know their activities are absurd, but surely enough time will disabuse them of their foolish ways. 2. madness: they cannot ever know the absurdity of their acts, for "the absurd" and "the astute" are but two names for one and the same thing in their world of chaos. 3. apathy: they in fact do see the absurdity in their continuing of activities which give them no sense of meaning, yet their indifference insurmountably impedes them from changing their course of action. For how could one resist the path of least resistance, a road born of habit, when one must expend energy to do so but that energy can only come from one who cares?

Or at least, these 3 reasons can surely seem like that's all there possibly could be to warrant someone continuing music, chess, dance, maths, logic, computer science, or any apparently alien craft. However, if one takes time to speak to someone who earnestly pursues such "alien crafts", then one may start to perceive intimations of something beyond their current impressions

The contorted clutching of the strings now seems... coordinated. The pensive placement of the pawns now appears... purposeful. The frantic flailing of one's feet now feels... freeing. The movements of one's mind now feels... marvelous.

So the very activity that once seemed so clearly absurd, becomes cognition and shapes perspectives beyond words

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno

Brian Eno's experiments in generative music mirror some of the ideas of generative and experimental fiction which had been in the zeitgeist and developing for a while.

Certainly the fictional ideas were influential to the zeitgeist here, but the technology for doing these sorts of things in the musical realm lagged the ability to do them in the word realm.

We're just starting to see some of these sorts of experimental things in the film space and with artificial intelligence they're becoming much easier to do in all of these media spaces.

In some of the film spaces, they exist, but may tend to be short in nature, in part given the technology and processing power required.

see also: Deepfake TikTok of Keanu Reeves which I've recently run across (algorithmically) on Instagram: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/unreal-keanu-reeves-ai-deepfake/

Had anyone been working on generative art? Marcel Duchamp, et al? Some children's toys can mechanically create generative art which can be subtly modified by the children using axes of color, form, etc. Etch-a-sketch, kaleidoscopes, doodling robots (eg: https://www.amazon.com/4M-Doodling-Robot-Packaging-Vary/dp/B002EWWW9O).

In Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon, Malcolm Gladwell comments on the prodigious memories of both Paul Simon with respect to sounds and Lebron James with respect to basketball game play.

Where these sorts of situational memories built and exercised over time or were they natural gifts? Or perhaps natural gifts that were also finely tuned over time?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Cage

https://social.ayjay.org/2022/09/30/collections-on-microblog.html