The Cathedral of Maybe

Digital tape machines and an exercise in listening

To live in New York as an outsider is an exercise in solitude in the world’s least solitary city.

But it helps to have access to a cohort of creative coders and noise nerds as I did when I attended the ITP 2025 Camp at NYU.
What I found there was not mastery but permission.
To begin with, the joys of becoming a learner again and discovering a creative language like p5.js
You start with something modest - a simple polka-dot animation, a self-drawing doodle... You learn how randomness behaves, how repetition accumulates meaning. And then, suddenly, you’re studying a tape loop machine written by a fellow cohort and ITP graduate Willem Yarbrough, heavily inspired by Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
The logic is deceptively simple: loops of varying lengths, gently falling out of sync, creating accidental harmonies. It’s the practice of listening.
Toward the end of the camp, I gave a short presentation on making music with AI using Suno. The agenda was not to evangelize or dissuade but to examine. What does AI music look like right now—June 2025? What can it do? What can’t it do? Who benefits? Who disappears?
No wrong answers.
Only more questions—layered like loops slightly out of phase.