Category Archives: Music

AI & Music

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In a recent episode of a TV detective show, an AI tech dude tries to outsmart an old school musicologist by re-creating the missing part of a vintage blues recording. The professor is asked to identify which is the “real” track, compared to the AI versions. The blues expert guesses correctly within a few beats – much to the frustration of the coder.

“How did you figure it out so quickly?”

“Easy – it’s not just what the AI added, but more importantly what it left out.”

The failure of AI to fully replicate the original song (by omitting a recording error that the AI has “corrected”) is another example showing how AI lacks the human touch, does not yet have intuition, and struggles to exercise informed judgement. Choices may often be a matter of taste, but innate human creativity cannot yet be replicated.

Soon, though, AI tools will displace a lot of work currently done by composers, lyricists, musicians, producers, arrangers and recording engineers. Already, digital audio workstation (DAW) software easily enables anyone with a computer or mobile device to create, record, sample and mix their own music, without needing to read a note of music and without having to strum a chord. Not only that, the software can emulate the acoustic properties of site-specific locations, and correct out-of-tune and out-of-time recordings. So anyone can pretend they are recording at Abbey Road.

I recently blogged about how AI is presenting fresh challenges (as well as opportunities) for the music industry. Expect to see “new” recordings released by (or attributed to) dead pop stars, especially if their back catalogue is out of copyright. This is about more than exhuming preexisting recordings, and enhancing them with today’s technology; this is deriving new content from a set of algorithms, trained on vast back catalogues, directed by specific prompts (“bass line in the style of Jon Entwistle”), and maybe given some core principles of musical composition.

And it’s the AI training that has prompted the major record companies to sue two AI software companies, a state of affairs which industry commentator, Rob Abelow says was inevitable, because:

“It’s been clear that Suno & Udio have trained on copyrighted material with no plan to license or compensate”.

But on the other hand, streaming and automated music are not new. Sound designer and artist Tero Parviainen recently quoted Curtis Roads’ “The Computer Music Tutorial” (2023):

“A new industry has emerged around artificial intelligence (AI) services for creating generic popular music, including Flow Machines, IBM Watson Beat, Google Magenta’s NSynth Super, OpenAI’s Jukebox, Jukedeck, Melodrive, Spotify’s Creator Technology Research Lab, and Amper Music. This is the latest incarnation of a trend that started in the 1920s called Muzak, to provide licensed background music in elevators, business and dental offices, hotels, shopping malls, supermarkets, and restaurants”

And even before the arrival of Muzak in the 1920s, the world’s first streaming service was launched in the late 1890s, using the world’s first synthesizer – the Teleharmonium. (Thanks to Mark Brend’s “The Sound of Tomorrow”, I learned that Mark Twain was the first subscriber.)

For music purists and snobs (among whom I would probably count myself), all this talk about the impact of AI on music raises questions of aesthetics as well as ethics. But I’m reminded of some comments made by Pink Floyd about 50 years ago, when asked about their use of synthesizers, during the making of “Live at Pompeii”. In short, they argue that such machines still need human input, and as long as the musicians are controlling the equipment (and not the other way around), then what’s the problem? It’s not like they are cheating, disguising what they are doing, or compensating for a lack of ability – and the technology doesn’t make them better musicians, it just allows them to do different things:

“It’s like saying, ‘Give a man a Les Paul guitar, and he becomes Eric Clapton… It’s not true.'”

(Well, not yet, but I’m sure AI is working on it…)

Next week: Some final thoughts on AI

AI and the Human Factor

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Earlier this month, I went to the Melbourne premiere of “Eno”, a documentary by Gary Hustwit, which is described as the world’s first generative feature film. Each time the film is shown, the choice and sequencing of scenes is different – no two versions are ever the same. Some content may never be screened at all.

I’ll leave readers to explore the director’s rationale for this approach (and the implications for film-making, cinema and streaming). But during a Q&A following the screening, Hustwit was at pains to explain that this is NOT a film generated by AI. He was also guarded and refrained from revealing too much about the proprietary software and hardware system he co-developed to compile and present the film.

However, the director did want to stress that he didn’t simply tell an AI bot to scour the internet, scrape any content by, about or featuring Brian Eno, and then assemble it into a compilation of clips. This documentary is presented according to a series of rules-based algorithms, and is a content-led venture curated by its creator. Yes, he had to review hours and hours of archive footage from which to draw key themes, but he also had to shoot new interview footage of Eno, that would help to frame the context and support the narrative, while avoiding a banal biopic or series of talking heads. The result is a skillful balance between linear story telling, intriguing juxtaposition, traditional interviews, critical analysis, and deep exploration of the subject. The point is, for all its powerful capabilities, AI could not have created this film. It needed to start with human elements: innate curiosity on the part of the director; intelligent and empathetic interaction between film maker and subject; and expert judgement in editing the content – as a well as an element of risk-taking in allowing the algorithm to make the final choices when it comes to each screened version.

That the subject of this documentary is Eno should not be surprising, either. He has a reputation for being a modern polymath, interested in science and technology as well as art. His use of Oblique Strategies in his creative work, his fascination with systems, his development of generative music, and his adoption of technology all point to someone who resists categorisation, and for whom work is play (and vice versa). In fact, imagination and play are the two key activities that define what it is to be human, as Eno explored in an essay for the BBC a few years ago. Again, AI does not yet have the power of imagination (and probably has no sense of play).

Sure, AI can conjure up all sorts of text, images, video, sound, music and other outputs. But in truth, it can only regurgitate what it has been trained on, even when extrapolating from data with which it has been supplied, and the human prompts it is given. This process of creation is more akin to plagiarism – taking source materials created by other people, blending and configuring them into some sort of “new” artefact, and passing the results off as the AI’s own work.

Plagiarism is neither new, nor is it exclusive to AI, of course. In fact, it’s a very natural human response to our environment: we all copy and transform images and sounds around us, as a form of tribute, hommage, mimicry, creative engagement, pastiche, parody, satire, criticism, acknowledgement or denouncement. Leaving aside issues of attribution, permitted use, fair comment, IP rights, (mis)appropriation and deep fakes, some would argue that it is inevitable (and even a duty) for artists and creatives to “steal” ideas from their sources of inspiration. Notably, Robert Shore in his book about “originality”. The music industry is especially adept at all forms of “copying” – sampling, interpolation, remixes, mash-ups, cover versions – something that AI has been capable of for many years. See for example this (limited) app from Google released a few years ago. Whether the results could be regarded as the works of J.S.Bach or the creation of Google’s algorithm trained on Bach’s music would be a question for Bach scholars, musicologists, IP lawyers and software analysts.

Finally, for the last word on AI and the human condition, I refer you to the closing scene from John Carpenter’s cult SciFi film, “Dark Star”, where an “intelligent” bomb outsmarts its human interlocutor. Enjoy!

Next week: AI hallucinations and the law

 

 

The Law of Diminishing Returns….

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After blogging about false economies last week, a similar topic came to mind – the law of diminishing returns. This is the principle that suggests the longer you keep doing the same thing, the less benefit you derive from it.

I know from personal experience that continuing to work at something for any length of time can lead to a decline in results – fatigue sets in, I’m more prone to making mistakes, and I end up spending more time double-checking and correcting my work. So, in way, it’s another false economy – spending more hours on a task (the input) does not justify the amount of effort, or guarantee the quality of the end results (the output). Part of it is down to efficiencies, but it’s also to do with losing focus, being distracted, or being so intent on the “doing” and not the “achieving”.

Politicians, writers, musicians, artists, athletes are all susceptible to the law of diminishing returns. Doggedly repeating the same old slogans in pursuit of the same old policies (or trying to hold on to power for its own sake) lead political parties into stagnation and electoral dead ends. Successful athletes who don’t know when to hang up their boots rarely get to choose the timing of their retirement. Creatives who keep recording the “same” album, writing the “same” novel, making the “same” film, or painting the “same” picture come across as stale, formulaic, tired, boring and bereft of ideas – it’s clear that they have nothing new to say, so why should we keep paying attention?

Next week: Whose side is AI on?

 

 

Perfect Days – and the Analogue Life

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Last week I watched “Perfect Days”, Wim Wenders’ lyrical film about a gentle soul who diligently goes about his daily labour accompanied by a soundtrack of classic songs. Most of the featured music is 50-60 years old, and all of it heard via cassette tapes – no radio stations or internet streaming services were harmed in the making of this film!

Not only does our hero cling to cassettes, we never see him use the internet, e-mail or a smart phone. We don’t even know how he accesses his money – presumably he gets a weekly wage packet containing cash, so no need to visit an ATM or pay with a credit card. To cap it all, he doesn’t own a TV, and his hobbies include reading second hand paperback books, taking photos with a 35mm film camera, and cultivating plants from cuttings he finds in the course of his daily routine.

We don’t really need to know his backstory, although we get the occasional glimpse. What we are presented with is someone who is living an outwardly simple life, almost exclusively analogue, and with very little technology involved. (In fact, the public toilets he cleans for a living are far more hi-tech than anything in his personal world.) I suspect for many people, our empathy for the character’s disposition may easily become envy at how stripped down and uncluttered a life he leads. The fact that he doesn’t appear to have any family or other obligations (and doesn’t have to spend hours in pointless team meetings or on endless Zoom call) no doubt help facilitate this state of being – yet we suspect there is a lot going on in the inside.

But it is certainly a parable in favour of all things analogue.

In fact, as I write this I am listening to a recent album by Tarotplane on a cassette player. He is one of many contemporary musicians who choose to release their work in this format, and along with the recent vinyl revival, they are helping to keep analogue alive. It’s a trend we can see in events like Record Store Day (and it’s younger sibling, Cassette Store Day), books by Damon Krukowski and Robert Hassan, and symbolic vinyl moments in recent film and TV shows such as “Leave the World Behind” and “Ripley”. In the former, the absence of internet and streaming brings a turntable into play; in the latter, a clutch of 7″ records (in picture sleeves!) are among the few possessions the eponymous hero chooses to take with him. Elsewhere, Lomography continues to find new fans of film photography, and on a recent visit to Hong Kong, I was surprised at the huge display of Polaroid cameras and film at Log-On department store.

Not all this fascination with analogue is about nostalgia, fashion, or fadism (or even fetishism). In some quarters, people are becoming concerned that their favourite films, TV programmes, music and video games may disappear from hosting services and streaming platforms, or their cloud storage may get wiped. So they are keeping analogue versions and hard copies as a back-up.

Finally, and picking up a thread from “Perfect Days” itself, I’m not entirely convinced that a 1975 Patti Smith cassette is worth $100, but I do own an original copy of a very rare cassette that has sold for as much as $180… probably because it has never been reissued, is not available to stream or download, and is a great example of early, DIY electronic music made on basic synths in the early 1980s. You couldn’t imagine an mp3 ever commanding that sort of price, unless it was in the form of an NFT, of course.

Next week: False Economies – if it’s cheap, there must be a reason!