About This AI Thing

May 25, 2024

I need to say something about this whole AI thing everyone is talking about, especially with regards to music. I don't have time for an essay but there are a few things I need to get off my chest.

First, the whole tension between arts and technology is nothing new. Everything invented my humankind will be used for good and evil, anyway. The mechanisation of music compostion (rather than recording) started in the 1980s when drum machines and sequencers became a thing. I was fascinated for a while, spent many months programming drum beats and whatever (actually I made my first CD like that) and then, eventually, decided actually playing instruments is just more interesting and beautiful - my personal choice, for personal reasons. Others choose differently, that's fine, no judgement.

But the gradual mechanisation of creation of music has a timeline.

1980s : music sequencing (that is, using a computer to make computerised instruments play). In a way, an extension of the notation of music which we have had for hundreds of years. (There's lots to be said about that too, something that comes home to me when I play with musicians from other cultures where the oral tradition is the big thing.)

1990s to 2000s : sophisticated digital recording suites that allow editing of every tiny fragment of sound. That was a game changer, especially if you started out on analogue tape. Woo hoo! Let's micromanage our music! (Yes, that is sarcasm.)

2010s : computer programs to make bad singers sound good by fixing their tuning. This has become so pervasive that now top producers like Trevor Horn, working with quite skilled singers, don't dare NOT to do it. (He said it on a YouTube interview.) So everything sounds like a robot now.

(In fact, we are no longer even shocked by people miming on stage. How times, or actaully, expectations, have changed.)

2020s : computers actually "writing muisic. More accurately, sucking in stuff previously created by humans and regurgitating it in another form, because a computer just CANNOT write in the sense that I can. It has no innate creative ability. Creation is more than an algorithm. I have an inner certainty about that which is a result of writing music for many years. I don't care what the computer scientests think. They don't know what I know. (Maybe Roger Penrose is going to prove it one day.)

Anyway, when chess computers started beating grandmasters, people said the game was over. That didn't happen. Noone pays to watch two computers play eash other. It's a tool, which players use to get better and has actually enriched the game, eventually.

Or, another analogy : you're hungry, you can go to MacDonalds or you can eat decent food.

I think you can see where I'm going.

That's all I have time for right now. I have a concert to organise for tomorrow. I will record it and also livestream direct from my living room. It's gonna be great, a new adventure and something I dreamed of doing for a long, long time.

I like computer technology, it's a great tool. And I like music that is (proudly) made by humans.

(Postscript : there are other important other things to say about this, to do with the way music is distributed and rewarded, but that is for another day.)