Should Making Music Be Hard?
New AI technology has shaken me to my core about what it means to make music.
Rolling Stone recently published an article about Suno AI, a startup that allows you to generate two-minute songs from a text prompts. This is the first piece of musical AI technology that has legitimately left me somewhere between astonished and scared. Below you can listen to “Kaleidoscope of Love”, the song I created using Suno just by entering the text “1960s style psychedelic rock about falling in love for the first time.”
Is this a good song? No. But I don’t think that matters. What matters is that it is a song. It has discernible sections and some understanding of the genre that I prompted it to create. I’ll probably talk about the legal and moral ethics of this technology in the future, but for now I want to talk about something else that popped into my mind while messing around with this technology: should music be this easy to make?
Before we dive into that topic, I want to remind you that this newsletter is available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack. Also, if you live in the New York City-area, my friend Ken and I will be playing a short acoustic show at Pet Shop in Jersey City tonight from 8:30 to 9:00 PM. Come by if you’re free. The music will surely be performed by humans.
I’m Only Human After All
Below is a video of me playing your basic rock n’ roll beat on the drums, albeit with a few flourishes.
Please don’t criticize my drumming. You’re looking at the extent of my skills. Regardless, I want to walk you through what’s going on here because it’s somewhat interesting if you’ve never drummed before.
Though this is a rudimentary beat, it requires four limbs. My right foot is hitting the kick drum on the first and third beats. My left foot is periodically opening and closing the hi hat while my right hand hammers away eight notes on that same cymbal pair. Amid all that, my left hand is hitting the snare drum on the second and fourth beats. Compare that process to me making much the same beat on my Korg Volca Beats drum machine.
Is there a difference between these two music-making processes? Watching these videos back, the first thing that strikes me is the endlessness of the beat-making process on the drum machine. Once you have the beat set up, it will play until the batteries die. The length of time I could play the same beat on an actual drum kit would be a function of my mental and physical stamina. Furthermore, even if I played that beat correctly for 500 straight measures on the real drum kit, there would be no assurance that I would do so the 501st time. Short of a malfunction, the drum machine will never have that issue.
After observing the eternity of the drum machine, the second thing that would jump out at me would be that creating this rhythm on the drum machine looks much easier than doing it on the drum set. And this would be true to some degree. Though it would take you some time to understand how the drum machine worked, once you got the basics down, you could quickly have the machine playing the standard rock beat. But it’s also worth pointing out that learning that same beat on the actual drums isn’t that hard.
After my girlfriend recorded the video of me drumming, she decided that she wanted to sit in. She’d never played drums before. In fact, I don’t think she’d played an instrument since middle school. Thus, it wasn’t a shock when her brain and limbs got all twisted up while attempting to play the standard rock beat. But less than ten minutes later, she was sort of doing it. No, she wasn’t Neil Peart, but I could imagine her holding down a steady groove after a few days.
Now, I won’t claim that beat-making on a drum machine is as difficult as doing it on the actual drums. If you were learning how to use a drum machine and play the drums at the same time, you would always be able to make beats on the drum machine that you couldn’t play on the drums as a beginner. Furthermore, you would also be able to program beats that were physically impossible to play on the drums. But this drum set-drum machine dichotomy raises some important questions.
Is making beats with a drum machine less valid because it is easier than making those same beats on a drum set?
Is music valid only if it involves some baseline level of struggle?
If you’ve read this newsletter for a while, you won’t be shocked that my answer to both of these questions is a resounding NO. Any standard used to define what makes music permissible or valid or real is almost always based on the whims of the person making the definition. There is no baseline level of struggle required to make great music. All you need is three chords and the truth. I think.
This Suno AI company has really shaken some of my musical beliefs. I’ve spent a long time convincing myself that nearly all musical endeavors are valid. Music is a healing force. We shouldn’t throw a fit if someone wants to make music in a way that doesn’t feel right to us. But, man, typing “boom bap hip-hop about drinking and partying” into a text box and getting back a song moments later doesn’t feel anything like making music. And that’s independent of if the song sucks or not.
As I was getting confused and depressed about all of this, I found some solace in this quote that I’d heard a few years ago from Ira Glass, the host of the syndicated radio show This American Life:
All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you … It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
Part of what Glass is getting at here is the idea of discernment, the idea that we can understand and judge a piece of art with training, the idea that our skill to discern will ultimately beget a skill to create. Whether you are creating music on a toddler’s play piano, a Steinway grand piano, or by entering “sick piano music” into Suno AI, you need to be able to discern whether a musical idea is good, whether it is powerful enough to move you, in order to make music. That skill is such a fundamentally human trait that it gives me faith in the future no matter the technology that abounds.
A New One
"Vampire Empire" by Adrianne Lenker
2024 - Lo-fi Folk
In Anthony Fantano’s recent review of Adrianne Lenker’s new album Bright Future, he describes the songwriter as “penning weary, rustic folksy tunes that sometimes have a country twist, sometimes have enchanting instrumental layers, sometimes deliver profound observations on life itself, or sometimes feature devastatingly sad lyrics that feel like an atomic bomb going off in your heart.” Those descriptors capture why am I intoxicated by “Vampire Empire”, the sixth track on Bright Future.
Originally released by her band Big Thief, Lenker’s solo version of “Vampire Empire” sounds like it was recorded in a rush, the singer-songwriter grabbing the first mic she could find to capture the lyrics as they streamed directly from her unconscious to her mouth. That rollicking rush is why Lenker is able to so powerfully capture the vicissitudes of a relationship on the brink.
An Old One
"Woncha Come On Home" by Joan Armatrading
1977 - Singer-Songwriter
Recently, my friend and I have been putting together a playlist of our favorite fingerstyle guitar songs. Last week, he added “Woncha Come On Home” by Joan Armatrading. I’d never heard of Armatrading before. After I clicked play, I wish I’d heard of her sooner. I’ve seldom heard longing, love, and confusion so wrapped up in a single song. Funny enough, if someone asked me to point to another song that captured that tornado of emotions, I’d probably point to the aforementioned Adrianne Lenker song, a song distinct from “Woncha Come On Home” but connected by a quavering energy.
Do you want to hear the music that I make? Come see my friend Ken and I play at Pet Shop in Jersey City, New Jersey tonight or listen to my music on Spotify.
Great piece. The sheer lack of the human element is certainly what makes AI-generated creativity so generic, so....well....blah. Whether that will eventually cause a crash in this trend is a great hope. Human discernment, as you so eloquently put it, is vital to creating a good art, I think it's also critical for it to connect with others.
AI doesn't make music. It makes "Muzak" at best, empty "sound product" at worst.
You know how, when kids, we mixed all the watercolors together to see what we got, and all we got was dull brown?
That's AI product. Brown.
It mushes so many things together in context-bereft collage that the resulting product is closer to nothing than something.