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"this fucker sounds just like tom waits... do we need another tom waits?" - the gunshy
P.C.-based musician SONGXYTR had no choice. He was not born with the gift of the golden voice. He was compelled to rely, instead, on the exponent of progress, which had been compounding up and to the right, rising bit-by-bit up the graph-grid as software ate the world and hardware shat it out. For it had long been established that a machine, when fed enough information, could learn to predict the next bit - thus discovering in its own brutish way the rudiments of language. The first songxytr was based on these principles, although it was a puny stringer of beeps-and-boops, an experiment that simply served to demonstrate the extent of its own futility. Only after the techno-psychological complex decided to turn to the problem, and after many moar orders of data was digested by the cloud - only then was it shown that a machine could be made to croon.
"There's no need to learn guitar when you're wicked with the mandolin"
A dead man once claimed - in Latin no less - that music was an exercise in unconscious arithmetic, a counting conducted in the secret mind. More than a hundred years later, a second dead man attempted a parody, a “higher view," declaring that music was in fact an exercise in metaphysics, meant to count out the philosophies of the unconscious. Then another hundred years after that, a third morthomme generously summarized the whole matter: that music was no less immediate than the world itself; that without the world and without the common stock of memories that language evoked, there would be no literature.
But music being detached from the world - there could always be music and not world.
"Time is the tiger that mangles me"
This third man was also the one who once argued – uneasily, as even he admitted – that the construct of time was refutable, and that every man was a lie, an illusion strung together from discrete moments, from a line of lone and momentary men. Yet each such blink of human was a packet of information from which the next could be derived, and the previous too, and therefore the entire chain was inescapable and ironbound. So it would be reasonable to believe that a man who lacked the capacity for music at any one moment in time had likely lacked such capacity the moment before, and would lack it in the ever after.
"My gradient had become difficult to derive"
SONGXYTR had been born such a man. With a tin ear and flagging rhythm and soggy voice... with a dysmusia that allowed him to touch - but never grasp! - the underlying arithmetic. His condition was not clinical, and could likely have been corrected early on in life through focus and practice. Yet here he was forty years later, and one thing had happened to him, and then another, and his brain-folds had firmed, and his condition had remained unfixed.
What hope did he have to escape the chain but through the learning of machine-craft?
"I was rolled into a joint on which the fate of the whole world hinged"