So right now we are sitting in a consideration of the life of Saint Augustine’s mother Monica. In case you were unaware, soon after Augustine’s conversation and baptism his mother dies. The entire episode is detailed in book 9 of his Confessions.
This has been a challenging album to work on. There is a lot of rich material and my methods and care around the album work has shifted a bit as well. I have a few song that for sure will be on the final album but others that are just not quite there.
One thing I began to do during this phase of album creation is to have my trusty A.I. robot companion produce some daily scholarly articles on Monica and Augustine’s reflections or her from the Confessions. I like to use the text to speech mechanism in the app to listen to these on occassion.
At some point this album will get released but really I am in no hurry and want to do right by it so I am sitting a bit longer in the material and doing a bit more producer input on this one giving myself some time to come up with more creative angles for songs.
One especially touching part of the story of Monica is the shared vision Augustine and his mother share immediately prior to her death. It is a fascinating moment in Augustine’s writing where he details a supernatural experience of the presence of God. We would all I think do well to pray for and seek such a blessing and even more with family member or a friend. In the case of Monica and Augustine it began with a conversation considering what God had in store for His people beyond this earthly life. Here is a taste!
Raising ourselves with a more ardent affection toward the Selfsame, we passed step by step through all bodily things and through the very heaven from which sun, moon, and stars shine upon the earth. We ascended still farther inwardly by thinking, speaking, and marveling at your works; and we came into our own minds and passed beyond them, so that we might touch the region of unfailing abundance, where you feed Israel forever upon the nourishment of truth, and where life is the Wisdom through whom all these things are made—things that have been and things that will be.
Wow! So there something to check out. 😀
. . .
At the same time I have been on a crazy coding agent kick.
In case you did not know, the A.I. tools have significantly improved over the past half a year both in accuracy and capability. I began to tinker with OpenAI’s Codex tool, another tool called OpenCode as well as Anthropic’s Claude Code. I also expanded into testing out Gemini functionality. Still primarily I use the kleenex of A.I. ChatGPT.
One significant area of help that has occurred by use of coding tools is the ability to really improve the site and data around my albums and songs. If you visit the site and explore you will see this. We now have lyrics for every song published on our site. VOX has been very hard at work. We added album and song pages and even meanings for the songs to help folks dig deeper into the songs and Augustine’s thought.
To add a little humor we added a little VOX001 ticker at the bottom of most pages. He shares a little dry Augustine humor. Some of it is funny. Some of it is a groan but still kinda funny lol.
One huge release on the site is the Study tool. It’s quickly becoming my favorite. It is basically an entire application built into the site that provides a library of public domain texts and translations. It even provides a little music player for study sessions and ability to play back some works in a synthetic text to speech voice that is pretty darn good if I don’t say so myself which I guess I just did.
I also was able to enlist some additional human help from one of my younger brothers who helped to enter some song pages and provided some helpful feedback on the site looking for bugs. Thank you Jonathan bro!
All this to say the new album is progressing and do please feel free to check out also all the new things on the site. These tools are so cool and can allow us so many new ways to learn and explore. I am very grateful. God is good.
Peace!
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