Generative music and Paco is born

Notes for the week of February 2, 2026

• Last week I mentioned I had begun playing around with generative music. Well, this week I released my debut album. 😉 Then I followed it up with two more. You can find my music on Spotify, Apple Music, and all the other streaming services.
  • This is not AI-generated music, though it is created algorithmically. Basically I’ve developed a script that will create pseudorandom albums within parameters set by me. All the tracks have the same sound and vibe, but they are all pseudorandomly different.
    • This is something you could do before AI just with Python scripts, which is why I call it pre-AI slop. 🙃
  • I initially developed it with an engine that generated Lynchian dark ambient music. I now have developed a second engine that will produce a ritualistic tribal ambient. (I’ll release an album using that engine soon.) I plan to write many more engines and then randomly choose between them for album releases.
  • Submitting the albums to the streaming services was surprisingly straightforward, and thought it took a week to get the first one approved, now I can seemingly add a new one each day.

• After considering installing my own instance of OpenClaw, I decided against it given the cost and security concerns. Instead, I decided to build my on OpenClaw-inspired personal assistant. I call him Paco and it’s working very well.
  • Basically I connected a Telegram bot with an instance of Claude Code running on a Mac mini at home. It’s whitelisted so that I’m the only one who can talk to it.
  • I also created a couple Claude skills that lets Paco read and write to my notes in Bear and tasks in Things (it’s not as straightforward as using things like Obsidian and Todoist, but aesthetics matter to me).
  • I also created an email account for Paco and made a whitelist of who it can send/receive emails to/from.
  • Finally, there are a bunch of helper scripts that run via cron for different functions, and it has a ‘heartbeat’ script that runs every 20 minutes with prompts for Claude to be proactive on several fronts. That means that every 20 minutes Paco will ask himself if there’s anything he needs to tell me or do for me.
  • From my end, the experience is that once in a while Paco will message me to nag me about a task I haven’t finished and on which he knows I want him to follow up. I can also ask him questions about anything and he’ll use not just his general knowledge to answer, but also my notes and tasks, as well as persistent short-term and long-term memory.
  • An aha! moment came when KO asked me in passing, ‘Hey can you send me the flight info for the Austin trip when you get a chance?’ Normally I would go into my notes, find the appropriate note, copy the info, and paste it in a message to KO. This time I just opened Telegram and spoke a message: ‘Paco, can you send the flight details for the Austin trip to KO?’ One minute later she had a courteous email from Paco relaying the info on my behalf. 🤯
  • I’ve just added automatic package tracking and I plan to add SMS support soon so he can send and receive texts in addition to email.
• Went to Penny’s second-grade play. She played the part of Balu in The Jungle Book—and she did it in front of an audience of almost 400. I’m very proud of her, and I’m also so impressed with her school. Each year every student has a speaking part in their class play, which they put on in front of the whole school plus parents and guests. I can’t remember the first time I had to get up to speak in front of 400 people, but it wasn’t in second grade.

• Shoveled out my car, which was trapped in six inches of frozen snow-ice. At one point I got it stuck in such a way that it would have blocked KO’s car, too. Luckily I didn’t leave us carless.
• Bees won away at Newcastle, which we hadn’t done since 1934!

Thank you for reading. You can view past weeknotes on my site.