Music Machine

Reading this article from AAAS, it suddenly occurs to me that the common argument about machines vs. humans in music is flawed. As I note in my last post about Liza Lim’s “How Forests Think,” we naturally hear the sounds of the forests as music – it is a human response. We turn the sound into music because we’re musical creatures that come from the forest. That small insight, applied here, provides the key to understanding our future role with technology and the arts.

Music isn’t necessarily in the making – deciding which notes and rhythms go together – but in the human response to organized sound, the enjoyment and participation of in the making and listening. That makes AI seriously less threatening. Will machines make music equal to that of humans in creativity, complexity, even spiritual depth? Sure! Will it matter? Nope.

Because, after all, what’s the point?

We ultimately will be able to teach computers how to respond to music like we do. And they will be capable of making music on par with a human composer or performer. But the musical experience itself is human and the need for humans to make music and to appreciate the music that is made, will never, ever go away. Machines are just us – an extension of us and an extension of that musical impulse.

This idea actually extends a slim hope for the economics of music – a weakly floating board to cling to amid the shipwreck of the music industry. As far back as Marshall McLuhan, students of culture have noted that it is only when an object’s use becomes obsolete that we, as a culture, begin to fully appreciate it. The value of paintings and appreciation for the skill of the illustrator increased with the advent of the photograph. Tape and LPs became highly prized when that had been eclipsed by CDs and digital downloads and streaming. We are seeing a rather sudden appreciation of the physical, printed book, separate from the books we read online (the scores of George Crumb and the rise of the graphic novel are just two examples that spring to mind). Once its usefulness is eclipsed, the human achievement of the old medium becomes the thing itself, a source of admiration and appreciation.

That’s where we’re headed with the use of live performing musicians for entertainment. Already it has become a kind of status symbol – only the poor wedding will have no live music. Musicians now can make a living as cover bands, some focusing on famous old acts like Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, but some just cranking out the tunes at parties, human juke boxes – whether imitating artists or rendering them in a more personal style, doesn’t matter, so long as they’re not recordings but flesh and blood, communicating the rhythm.

It is common, too, to see live performance transcriptions of works never designed for live performance, like Frank Zappa’s “G-Spot Tornado” at the 1990s Yellow Shark concerts, or the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” by Alarm Will Sound, or the endless MIDI scores composed for video games performed by orchestras. The subtext there is clear: music is better with living human beings making the sound.

Not better because humans do it better; simply better because human.

It will be no surprise when a future sophisticated robot (like Data in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”) can play Paganini perfectly. But because it’s no surprise, it will also be less valuable than a human achieving the same goal. A player piano can execute rhythms and counterpoints impossible for a human to play. The only reason to care is because a human dreamed up those impossible compositions.

Music is part of our evolution into the creatures we are now and technology is part of that. But the connection between our music and our biology is deep, and it exists now with or without technological aid, offering us immediate union with one another and with the world. We will carry that forward, come what may.

Let’s admit that the Turing Test is merely a landmark on the horizon, and that there will come a day when we literally can’t tell the difference between humans and machines, or the part of us that is human and the part that is machine – no matter how well we know the hybrid. That day is a long way off, but when it comes, the confusion will be best expressed in a song.

--C.
August 15, 2017
theandofone.blospot.com

Music and Human Identity

I just listened to this radio broadcast via a link on the KUT website.

The recording is a fascinating article on the success of a guitar class in a juvenile correctional facility. Music, it seems, has the power to heighten an individual's sense of self-control and self-worth. One of the interviewees even says, playing the guitar allows these kids to discover something about who they are.

This fits in with the findings the students in my class, Music and the Natural World, keep stumbling onto: music acts as bonding agent and, in helping define us within a group, also reinforces and strengthens our identity as individuals. This appears to be a trait of humanity, not just classical music, not just our culture, not just the Western world.

I just touched on this same subject in a column I wrote yesterday for the Asbury Park Press, appearing this Sunday. By way of acknowledging Christmas, Hannukah and the New Years holidays, I point out this role of music in expressing the spiritual and physical bonds we share as humans.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Dream, Dream, Dream

Note: This is a post written June 1, that, for some reason, I didn't publish. Just found it among my notes.

Falling asleep, I have some great dreams. Things become associated with other things, qualities from one item of my life become part another, forming monstrous complexes of identities.

Yesterday's involved the hollow sound of octaves in an atonal texture. They stick out like a sore thumb--like parallels in tonal 4-part harmony. The same effect. Without proper planning in a free atonal environment, nasty octaves invariably appear, like ants at a picnic.

And there they were, in my dream, octaves everywhere. Each pair of octaves were also the wheels of race cars and comparative rates in dollar amounts for some service which I don't now recall. Difficult, all these, trying to move one pitch of each octave to get a more pleasing interval while not creating another octave, not wrecking the speeding car and still getting the best deal for my money. Very complicated.

In all seriousness, though, this psychological experience is where the origin of musical expression is located for me: the in-between world where borders become blurry, where meanings bleed into one another. As a college student, I would often fall asleep listening to music (usually Josquin) and as I nodded off, I would be aware that the music had become blended into speech patterns and characters stored somewhere in my head, an expression of the internal drama of relationships--the incredibly minute details that we pick up from one another and amass into our understanding of one another. I would hear the music--see the music, experience the music--as a rendering of real human interaction, including dialog and physical activity. My two greatest preoccupations of those days--music and social relationships--would become the same thing.

--C.
www.theandofone.blogspot.com
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Music's Power

Music says something about our connection to Creation in a way that language can't--beyond the morality, politics, opposites that define the terms of language. Music reveals our connection to every thing, everywhere. The appearance of language, scientists tell us, is at least coincident with music in human evolution and most likely music even predates language. And in nearly every extant primitive human society, music serves some powerful magical or religious function. Music is the ultimate church.

--C.