䷈ On Music

P.S. Few links and thoughts about AI and music. Ezra Klein and Brian Eno had a good conversation.

What a gardener does is put some seeds in the soil and then watch how they develop. “Oh, these ones over here are doing better than those ones over there. So next year I’ll plant them differently.”

Eno seems to share Feynman’s dream.

I had gotten sick of hearing this word “genius” being used all the time because it never seemed to me like it was just one person who was doing everything. So I came up with this word “scenius,” which is “scene” with an “ius” on the end. That seemed, to me, to much better understand the ecology of systems like that. And I think that’s what it is. It’s an ecosystem. And we still don’t understand ecosystems. It’s still not intuitive to most of us to understand how a thing like an ecosystem works — how there are lots and lots of nodes and they’re collected in very complicated ways and if you move one of the nodes to a different place, everything else in the system has to shift.

And a quote for my sister.

I have an architect friend called Rem Koolhaas. He’s a Dutch architect, and he uses this phrase, “the premature sheen.” In his architectural practice, when they first got computers and computers were first good enough to do proper renderings of things, he said everything looked amazing at first.

You could construct a building in half an hour on the computer, and you’d have this amazing-looking thing, but, he said, “It didn’t help us make good buildings. It helped us make things that looked like they might be good buildings.”

I went to visit him one day when they were working on a big new complex for some place in Texas, and they were using matchboxes and pens and packets of tissues. It was completely analog, and there was no sense at all that this had any relationship to what the final product would be, in terms of how it looked.

Jordan Rudess demoed some live AI music generation to Rick Beato, not quite jam worthy, but it’s a research project. One thing he said suck with me.

As somebody who’s really into AI and really into technology, I love it for what it is. I’ll use it for education, for entertainment, all those amazing things, but I will always respect and understand that there’s a story in another human being, and that’s really valuable to me. …

But if you’re going to see a concert, like the people who are coming out to see Dream Theater tonight, they’re coming to see the human beings because there is a story there, right?

So I think that story aspect is so, so important to our experience, and that’s why AI is never going to replace the human being. Because the AI doesn’t have a story like a person does. It might have its own story, but it doesn’t have a story like a person does.

Kind of like a person, the one here in the room with me. I don’t have the slightest idea how to teach Sili music. They don’t have the right senses for it.

Next, Adam Neely as a jazz player sees a strong distiction between recorded music and performed music.

What generative AI does is not music.

Probably should have quoted him at the beginning and saved myself a lot of trouble.

Neely has a new video on AI music. Haven’t watched it yet. I trust Adam to be insightful. It’s probably about economics or at least the questionable motivations of companies making AI music imitation tools.

Do you guys ever use AutoPlay in Spotify or Apple Music? I’m always trying to turn off those sorts of features. Usually, a full albumn or symphony or mixtape or playlist is the minimum unit of recorded music that I want, that or every variation of “Hey, Ho, the wind and the rain.” Or there was time I listened to everything Apple music had from Joe Hisaishi, about 40 albums. By the end, I felt properly prepared to hear “The Boy and the Heron” when it was released. Whatever it is, I want it curated, and I don’t feel the algorithms are really into that, not in the way I like.

Lastly, you know I’m going to mention Jacob Collier. Google hired him to try MusicFX DJ. Google’s press says, “MusicFX DJ lets anyone steer a continuous flow of music.” Sigh. They should say a continuous flow of sound. Here you can see Jacob sample from it with mixed success. There probably is a really good tool lurking nearby, something where you walk through a latent sound space picking up bits and remixing them into new vistas as you go. Calling it music though, I worry.

Conrad Godfrey made a “AI-generated sitcom starring jacob collier and adam neely” with a special guest. See friends, Conrad understands. The video is silly, sincere, keeps all the rough edges. Comic impersonation isn’t trying to replace a person. Thank you Doctor Simsearle.

Jacob gave a masterclass in Sydney last year. AI naturally came up.

My personal intuition with anything tech, and this has been since I was really small, has been: embrace it, mess around with it, try and break it, and then it will show you itself.

So like I got a little Casio keyboard when I was five with 100 rhythms and 200 sounds, and I would go through all that stuff. I loved it. I didn’t take it that seriously. I didn’t think it was a real drum kit, but I knew that I could learn some stuff from it. So I would wiggle around and try and do my best.

As I grew up and got older, more and more high-resolution tools have existed. Logic, for example. And I built instruments like the Harmonizer, which is one such thing as this.

AI is kind of a different family of beings. It’s a huge brain, an order of magic besides these other things. So I spent quite a lot of time trying to bully it into being interesting, because by nature AI must be mediocre since it’s trained into oblivion to obey every command. And obviously no creative source is ever fully obedient.

We could train it differently.

So to me it reinforces the necessity for human perspective, human toolkit, and human enunciation of request. The human is the questioner in the equation rather than the answerer. …

The better your question, the more thorough your question, the more complete your answer will be. And questions have always been more interesting than answers. In some ways the job of an artist is to pose really good questions, not to give really good answers. But I think we’re in a time where we need to ask bigger questions, more high resolution questions, and more challenging questions. And there are so many ways to ask these questions. We can ask them outright, but we can also imply them with our language. We can bury them within our decisions and our choices and in our freedom, in our wiggledom, you could say.

Wiggledom. That’s the kind of intentionality we need.

People have limits and that’s why we’ll need them forever. Because if we’re talking about relating to people, then people need limited people. We need people with edges and weird waggly imperfections to believe in. And I just don’t think music’s about competence. I think it’s about other things.

Music not about competence? Easy for you to say while I think of musician friends who fight so hard for it.

I used to sit in a chair like you’re sitting in and watch my mom stand here when I was two or three. She would be like this and she’d be going, and the musicians would go. I thought, it’s literally like casting a spell. How are you doing this? What’s going on? …

The thing I learned—the ultimate nugget, I would say—is that as a teacher, as a performer, as a parent, you are only as powerful as you make other people feel. That’s it. If you can give people the feeling that they matter and that they’re a part of the thing you’re building, then they’ll remember that feeling forever. …

I never thought I’d be a conductor when I was small. I didn’t think, I’m going to grow up and conduct orchestras. But I accidentally became one from the stage when I started to realize how much power there was in people singing together. A lot of the principles I draw on are those foundational lessons. I call them lessons, but they were looser than that. They were lessons around permission. If I give you permission to go, and I’m not afraid of that, I’m not afraid of your freedom—it’s a different leadership model than we’re used to. The idea of giving you the autonomy and the authority to go and take it wherever you want, but I’m able to hold you in a place together that feels important.

Very good. Very good indeed. Should we do a quick song to finish?

Listen to the song. See and hear them demonstrate that kind of permission.