What would music have been like in the 1960s, say 1967, the Summer of Love, if music AI existed then? 1967-1969 was the pinnacle of spirituality in pop music, with the Finale the lunar landing. But it wasn't spiritual at all. It was something more precise: the US winning the moon race. The "spirituality" of the moment is more of a desire than a reality of what it was really about and yet lingers to this day.
AI is in some ways a desire for a Moon or Mars landing, and we read mystical things into it. But with the current AI, there's no spirituality in it at all--it's leaving the humans out of the loop. It's a form of self-deprecation--perhaps self-loathing. We've become so misanthropic that the music has to be equally deprecating, even to the level where machines have the ideas, and we're merely steering them. It now seems that having original ideas or even the desire to create something from an original idea is quaint and sentimental. There is a more compelling allure in artificial intelligence in that we're going to have a machine make our content for us and therefore there is no need for us to be intimately involved. We want things to be hands-off because we have gotten used to the precautions: It's safer to "glove and mask" in many things we do. Having ideas and manually shaping them is just this old thing that previous generations did: We don't necessarily have to be involved in idea creation. It is perhaps something that we want to avoid, to be post-modernist or do things with a feigned diffidence. So if ideas emanate from algorithms rather than from someone playing a guitar and singing a melody, we would never have had a David Bowie for example.
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AuthorLee Barry, Musician/Content Producer Archives
May 2024
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