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.
I loved this piece. Sometimes it feels like we focus a lot on how well or poorly new tech performs a musical task…and not enough on what we lose by not doing those processes ourselves. It’s tough to perceive the thing that is not happening.
(Also, “Woncha Come on Home” is one of my favorite lifetime songs!)
"All you need is three chords and the truth. I think."
Not to toot my own horn, but my substack is all about how you don't even need three chords to get started; plenty of songs get by with two. Some get by with one. And, of course, there's a whole genre dedicated to noise. I agree with you and Ira: AI has no taste.
I've been really cavalier about image generation using AI. I see it as a great prototyping tool, and I use it to create elements for my collages. I don't think of myself as a visual artist though, so I find it sort of abstractly threatening--that's all. On the other hand, playing with Suno makes me feel ill, as a person who has spent decades committed to their craft. It's not that the songs are good, it's totally the ease (as you point out). It's also the fact that nothing it creates could exist without decades of material composed by humans. It's hard to imagine anything other than an even more destructive and extractive future for the creative industries using something like Suno.
For most of history, advances in music technology allowed musicians to create new music that they could not achieve before - new sounds, effects, tempos, pitches, ranges, volumes, etc. Thinking of technology broadly, consider the invention of the piano, saxophone, microphone, guitar pickup, etc. Think of all the different new technologies (at that time) that enabled a song like Superstition by Stevie Wonder - the electric clavinet, the Moog synthesizer (for the bass line), 16-track recording (Stevie recorded 8 different clav tracks), and effects (reverb, delay, etc.). Recently (past 20-25 years), it seems like technological advances pertain to making music easier and/or cheaper. You don't have to sing well because auto tune will fix it (and other technologies will take care of any harmonization needed). You don't need rhythm because quantization will fix it. You don't need to play the right notes because any and every note can be deleted or changed in the DAW. This is why there are 100,000 new songs uploaded every day. It's easy and cheap. Sampling technology is the most recent "music innovation" that I can think of that resulted in significant new types of music.
Really interesting. I've read that Ira Glass quote before, and it makes me wonder if fewer people will put in the time/effort to "get good" - to train their skills to the level of their taste - with this technology proliferating.
From the listening angle - I think that human (and "human") music will always be the biggest winners.
But from the creating angle - fewer artists will probably put in the effort, and so the few biggest winners will take larger pieces of the pie.
I was just listening to that Joan Armatrading album! It's so so good. The song I am stuck on is "Willow." I can't get enough of it. From the exquisite vocals to the toms, it's just perfect.
Thank your for the perspective in this piece. I can't imagine AI ever developing the "taste" of someone like Joan. And if it does, it will have gotten it from...someone like Joan. I guess we'll see.
Signed,
-Guy who used to have a "Kill Drum Machines" sticker on his guitar case while he secretly obsessed over OMD
Thanks for writing that - I’m sure we’re heading for an umbrella badge like b-corps (https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/) where creators and labels associate themselves with a pledge of accountability, transparency and moral behaviour … and probably a human to human element built in - the public can then buy with knowledge and investment
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.
I loved this piece. Sometimes it feels like we focus a lot on how well or poorly new tech performs a musical task…and not enough on what we lose by not doing those processes ourselves. It’s tough to perceive the thing that is not happening.
(Also, “Woncha Come on Home” is one of my favorite lifetime songs!)
"All you need is three chords and the truth. I think."
Not to toot my own horn, but my substack is all about how you don't even need three chords to get started; plenty of songs get by with two. Some get by with one. And, of course, there's a whole genre dedicated to noise. I agree with you and Ira: AI has no taste.
I've been really cavalier about image generation using AI. I see it as a great prototyping tool, and I use it to create elements for my collages. I don't think of myself as a visual artist though, so I find it sort of abstractly threatening--that's all. On the other hand, playing with Suno makes me feel ill, as a person who has spent decades committed to their craft. It's not that the songs are good, it's totally the ease (as you point out). It's also the fact that nothing it creates could exist without decades of material composed by humans. It's hard to imagine anything other than an even more destructive and extractive future for the creative industries using something like Suno.
For most of history, advances in music technology allowed musicians to create new music that they could not achieve before - new sounds, effects, tempos, pitches, ranges, volumes, etc. Thinking of technology broadly, consider the invention of the piano, saxophone, microphone, guitar pickup, etc. Think of all the different new technologies (at that time) that enabled a song like Superstition by Stevie Wonder - the electric clavinet, the Moog synthesizer (for the bass line), 16-track recording (Stevie recorded 8 different clav tracks), and effects (reverb, delay, etc.). Recently (past 20-25 years), it seems like technological advances pertain to making music easier and/or cheaper. You don't have to sing well because auto tune will fix it (and other technologies will take care of any harmonization needed). You don't need rhythm because quantization will fix it. You don't need to play the right notes because any and every note can be deleted or changed in the DAW. This is why there are 100,000 new songs uploaded every day. It's easy and cheap. Sampling technology is the most recent "music innovation" that I can think of that resulted in significant new types of music.
Really interesting. I've read that Ira Glass quote before, and it makes me wonder if fewer people will put in the time/effort to "get good" - to train their skills to the level of their taste - with this technology proliferating.
From the listening angle - I think that human (and "human") music will always be the biggest winners.
But from the creating angle - fewer artists will probably put in the effort, and so the few biggest winners will take larger pieces of the pie.
I was just listening to that Joan Armatrading album! It's so so good. The song I am stuck on is "Willow." I can't get enough of it. From the exquisite vocals to the toms, it's just perfect.
Thank your for the perspective in this piece. I can't imagine AI ever developing the "taste" of someone like Joan. And if it does, it will have gotten it from...someone like Joan. I guess we'll see.
Signed,
-Guy who used to have a "Kill Drum Machines" sticker on his guitar case while he secretly obsessed over OMD
Thanks for writing that - I’m sure we’re heading for an umbrella badge like b-corps (https://www.bcorporation.net/en-us/) where creators and labels associate themselves with a pledge of accountability, transparency and moral behaviour … and probably a human to human element built in - the public can then buy with knowledge and investment
"All you need is three chords and the truth. I think."
That may be true, but "human discernment" as you put it is still the key element.
Otherwise, K-Pop would be an international hit. Oh, wait....