Music

At the beginning of the year, I bought a uke and started to learn how to play it. I just completed the 30-day Uke Challenge by Bernadette Teaches Music and it was really good. She’s got a nice teaching style and goes through things at a good pace - not too fast, not too slow. Highly recommended. It’s interesting learning how to play an instrument as an adult. I took a few years of piano lessons as a child but don’t remember anything.

I usually try to learn a new thing every year. Last year, it was rowing. This year, it’s ukulele. I know I’m a couple of years late to the trend as learning an instrument was very de rigeur during the pandemic, but it looks fun and I have some nice memories of my Dad playing ukulele. I ordered an inexpensive Kala Concert Ukulele and it looks nice. I don’t really know how to play it yet, but I’m going to do a 30-day uke challenge and then see if I can take some inperson classes later in the year.

I went to my first large concert since the onset of covid-19 last week. The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie were great. The show was at Merriweather Post Pavilion. I grew up nearby and it has changed dramatically in the past 30 years. It’s much more modern than the rustic bandstand in the woods that it used to be and is still a great place to see live music.

AI is all over the news these days. It’s even inspired a pretty awesome stock market rally. I’ve been doing some exploration of what is out there and one of the more interesting things I ran across was MusicGen. It does what’s on the tin: generates music using a Language Model (LM). It’s interesting even if the music isn’t great, it does fit with the description used to generate it. I haven’t played around with it yet, but I plan to see if I can generate some cool theme songs for my dogs.

Transmission by Joy Division just came on in my music mix. It’s a great song and sounds fresh (at least to me). I’ve been listening that that band (and others like them for more than 40 years. Since I was a teenager with bad haircuts and questionable taste in clothing. Really weird to think how much has changed but how art can persist. I’m sure some of that is just nostalgia for a mispent youth.