authenticity

AI music may be telling us something about how music works for listeners – and we might want to change that

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I had to catch myself editing the last post – as I discussed my use of virtual instruments in place of the actual instruments and the new plausibility of thoroughly AI music, I was tempted to overuse the word “verisimilitude.” Is that really something essential to the art of music? I like the cranky not-quite-real sound of the Mellotron after all. If musical art should be imagination, music itself certainly doesn’t care if the instruments are real – though musicians might, from legitimate guild concerns. Then we moved to having the computer play the instrument, and that too asks about human-displacement – and now we have AI creating songs outright from very generalized prompts. If you’re a composer, a musician, or a listener, this raises questions.

Let’s start by being honest with ourselves as listeners in avid or casual modes: as we pass through life, music becomes a sort of sonic homeplace – a location where something sounds similar to what we’ve heard before, with just enough difference to stave off boredom, just enough new to add the spice of novelty. Some musical ears live in homogenous towns, others in more diverse ones, but we go to music for the effects we’ve learned to appreciate.

Current entirely-AI music exploits this: taking what we know of form and sounds, following its predictability in a way listeners have been known to appreciate, and serving our aural expectations back to us. When they do that, the robots are telling us something about ourselves. As I ended my last post, if we object to AI music, it may be from the romantic feelings we retain for human artists. We want fellow humans to make these sounds with and for us, and our response may rise to disgust when we are tricked. And here’s a problem: it’s getting harder to say you won’t be tricked.

If this is so, what hopes do we have? One: imperfection, at least of a kind. Let me interject here that I’m not talking about the imperfections of boredom, of which there are many. I’m talking about music that may be a bit more haphazard and unpolished. If machines can precision-target our musical comfort-center receptors, then let us distrust that response at least in part.

Commenting reader rmichaelroman has already guessed that might be part of it, mentioning the performance, rough in recording quality and musical finesse, from the LYL Band at an Alternative Prom in someone’s basement years ago.  Even stored on honest recordings – live music, particularly live music that is truly live, with unplanned-out moments, with instruments reveling in their specific bodies, breaths, and vibrations – offers vivid imperfection.

Or too: voices with less talent than intent. I try to not over-burden my listeners with self-made excuses for my singing voice – but for all its limitations, it remains the one I have handy to realize the songs. Would AI be able to duplicate those imperfections? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely to want to.

When music practices and equipment reached points of greater mastery in the 20th century, reaction in the form of purposely avoiding those felicities arose. Midcentury pop music was opposed by the rising Folk revival and by early Rock’n’Roll. Then later, perfected Rock recording technology and improved musicianship found themselves met with Punk and Hip-Hop premised on the idea that a minimum of tech or muso-chops can still make an effective statement. By the way, I believe those technical hierarchies produced worthwhile music, but those that dispensed with them did so too.*

And when I wrote about voices with more intent than talent: for all the romantic imprecision of assigning internal motivation from a separated artistic product, what we believe we understand about why a piece of music was produced has importance. AI-music, however good it is at mimicking the technology and sound of music we like, presently offers only the weakest and least admirable answers to the question of why it was called into existence. To make some money? To make inoffensive sonic décor? To sell drinks to dancers? To show it can be done, as if that “verisimilitude” was the most significant thing about art? Some music I have liked was made for such mundane reasons, but in the future we may find intent more necessary to weigh.

I’ll leave with one more brief metaphor as AI-music reaches a level of musicological competence: we may have come to something analogous to painting’s role as photography entered the realm of visual representation. AI music in artistic hands may eventually seek out flagrantly subjective use of the technology – and music made by humans holding physical objects in real time will increasingly began to value qualities beyond sounding customary and “correct.”

If my energy holds out, there’s at least one more post in this AI series before I return to our regular combinations of literary poetry with original music, this one will address in more detail some of those music things I call “guild concerns.” If you miss the usual Parlando Project fare, there are over 800 examples of that here, so feel free to look around.


I wouldn’t want to call this performance imperfect, but there’s a human unexpectedness to it that satisfies me

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*The 1950’s-early ‘60s folk music revival had elements that I found closely mimicked by the Punk/Indie movement of following years: the DIY convictions, the gumption to form or transform venues and record labels, the opportunities for out-of-the mainstream ideas and sounds to sneak in between the more polished and “professional” acts. Similarly, Hip Hop followed the folk process: use what instruments were at hand, assertion before sounding “correct,” recombining shared culture materials (floating verses and borrowed tunes for the banjo brigades; turntables, cheap drum machines, and samples for Hip-Hop, contemporary social comment for either). Musicologist Ethan Hein said in a BlueSky post that helped spur me to write this series, “You can get across the essential elements of hip-hop and house with buckets (Hein here is referring to overturned buckets used as drums –FH)  and voices. Computers and sound systems are nice to have but inessential. Long after Spotify is gone, people rapping over beats will still be with us.”

When You Are Old

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

A few months back I presented a series of poems about old age that turned out to be written by young poets. Here’s another one written by the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats when he was in his 20s.

“When You Are Old”  is generally considered to be written about Yeats’ love for Maud Gonne, who like Yeats was active in Irish cultural nationalism and their country’s struggle for political independence. Yeats’ largely unrequited love for Gonne has a long and complicated story, the kind I’d often delve into here—but not today. This widely assumed context for “When You Are Old”  makes plain the poem’s historical, denotative meaning. One could paraphrase it like this: “You think I’m just another lovelorn suitor asking for your hand, and possibly other leading bodily parts, now—but someday you’re going to be old, and you’ll realize that the others around you were just after you ‘cause you’re a major hottie who seems to have it going on cultural-politically. I’m not like that. I’m your soul mate, who respects that you’re busy with this, and loves you even though you’re out searching for other things. That’s OK. Just know that someday, like when you’re old, you’re going to miss me. You’ll probably want to google William Butler Yeats some night and see if I’m still alive and what I’m up to….”

Yeats-Gonne

Yeats and Gonne. Yeats may be taking the bow-tie thing a bit too far. Rather than the musical style (or that paraphrase) I used today, I might have gone with this bare-faced expression of the same angst. You’re gonna miss me baby!

 

Did I just loose a bunch of readers* with this base summary of a beautiful poem that is sincerely loved by so many people? Don’t understand me too quickly, I’ll get back to what I think when I encounter this poem before I finish.

Indeed, this poem is especially well loved by older people and by a great many women.** If there’s a greatest hits of love poems in English, this poem is there. And I don’t think they’re wrong or missing some unavoidable explication of the poem’s context. I can’t say Yeats’ intent when he wrote it as a young man, or when he published it still being both of those things; but I doubt it was simply to dis an ex that wasn’t exactly an ex. And those that love the poem Yeats made are experiencing it in other contexts close to their own hearts and lives.

I’m close to Yeats’ age when he died, though still younger than Gonne who lived to be 86. The future mood predicted in this poem written by a twenty-something doesn’t ring false to me. I don’t dwell in the past, but it comes to visit me from time to time, and I’ll think of old lovers and not-to-be lovers absent and missing in time and place. For older people, some of those people remembered are dead, and so their present times and places are further obscured by the crowded stars. We often expect our poets today to write of their experience, but it turns out that we aren’t necessarily going to trade Yeats’ skill with a beautiful line for an authentic memoir-poem by an age-group peer.

One could trash this poem on gender role/sexual politics counts. Fine if you do—art is argument to a large part—but I doubt the women who love this poem do so all because they have self-worth issues. And after all, the poem doesn’t predict crushing regret at not bedding W. B. Yeats, or a reader’s personal equivalent. It only asks for a quantity of “a little sadly,” which doesn’t hurt anybody. Patriarchy aside, I suspect every letter in every acronym can accumulate such thoughts over a life-time. And throw out love, sex, and success, and we still cherish memories of any connection where someone saw and bowed to the pilgrim soul inside us. The youth in us seeks it, the old in us remembers it. Even 20-somethings.

So where does this pilgrim soul stand on “When You Are Old?”   That want for connection it speaks of and the word music it’s sung in captures me entirely. It’s good not to trust poetry and poets entirely, but to give oneself over to this song is worthwhile.

I’m sure this poem has been set to music often, but that didn’t stop me. I used an interesting acoustic guitar tuning that someone said had been used by Mary Chapin Carpenter: C G D G B C for this, and then added another of my simple-is-all-I-can-do piano parts. That’s one of the joys of music: sometimes it doesn’t have to be complicated to please us. The player gadget is below to hear my performance. Here’s the text of Yeats’ poem if you’d like to read along. We’ll be back soon with more of our April celebration of National Poetry Month. Spread the word if you can.

 

 

*I’m hopeful I didn’t, if only because listener/readers here should already know that I’m going to mix things up. If you think today’s music is what I’ll do next time, you should hear the #NPM2020 piece I’ve been working on—and you probably will be able to in the next few days.

**Here’s a 10 minute video where someone old and someone woman both declare their love for this poem.