musicians

The “Guild Concerns,” and mine, and yours, around Artificial Intelligence

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I hope the hardy, but smaller, summer readership here has enjoyed this diversion from our usual literary poetry combined with original music subjects. It’s been somewhat difficult to write. Why?

When I run across comments or longer-form writing about artificial intelligence – given my interests, mostly from folks in artistic fields – the feelings and cold convictions I read come in hot. AI gives me a lot of feels too: frustrations, fears, disgusts, distrusts, worries, even amusements at its fails. Yet, earlier in this series I’ve honestly talked about AI features I’ve tried. I wonder if I’m alone in these mixed feelings – if I’m just a wishy-washy old guy who won’t say it plain. For my final installment let me focus on those concerns.*

I’ve referred to some of those “guild concerns” earlier in this series. Let me expand on that. Let’s say you are a professional, semi-professional , or aspiring visual artist, voice talent, translator, editor, writer, composer, musician. AI claims it’s achieved parity with your field’s trades. “No!”  you reply to any such suggestion, for you are informed of all the small things that a master in your field provides that AI, as yet, can’t. But along with that comes the fear that most customers and many consumers of your art may judge as inessential elements you’ve learned to provide and appreciate, that your professional value-add may be judged dispensable. Capital’s royal decision makers may not hear your objections, give them any bottom-line weight. There’s an unavoidable term for a resulting outcome: enshittifacation. Everything then may drop to just above the level that would drive commoners to revolution.

And there’s a tsunami of salt to be poured into artist’s wounds from the use of Large Language Models in current AI. LLMs digest realms of work by artists, almost entirely without compensation to them, and apply pattern and categorization processes to this hoard to make it into reusable parts that can be recombined into other work – work whose ownership has been severed from artists and transferred in part to oligarchical corporations. This injury isn’t speculative. It’s already occurred in titanic amounts to create current LLMs, and ex post facto attempts to get paid for this seizing of work or to prevent future accumulations of scraped up art are being resisted by the AI industry who is seeking government protection for this reuse.**

So, where organized as unions, workers in the arts have attempted to counter this, concerned both as keepers of artistic excellence and as counter-forces seeking to protect incomes for their members. Will this succeed? Who am I to predict, watching ignorant beach-sand techbro armies sweep across the darkling plains amid alarms. But I understand the anger/fear of the artists, endorse it.

But I, myself, am an odd case. Poetry has low capital needs, a loaf of bread, a jug of iced-tea, and a roof, and I’m good to go there – and the renumeration market for poetry is scant. I used to inconstantly chase after giving readings with a couple dozen attendees, or the small paper presses aspiring to three-digit sales. I still admire those things and support them, I just don’t see them as precious scraps to struggle over at this point in my life. With the Parlando Project I most often use other people’s poetry, using and promoting work from dead and/or public domain poets or small excerpts of words from the living. With this Project I can aim for my hundreds of readers or listeners for a piece – a tiny audience in Internet stats, but an appreciable reward by poetry standards. With my music production and distribution here (aided by affordable computer technology) I find that I’m part capitalist and part worker-in-song. And there’s a conflict there.

I’ve already confessed in the series that I sometimes use what is called AI to extend the long-standing feature of computer music arpeggiators, programs that suggest and play patterns of notes on command. Honestly, I don’t feel good about using these – there’s shame mixed in there with the approval I find with my producer’s hat on from the effective results they bring to the finished musical piece.*** It’s not just breast-beating when I confess it feels fraudulent to me to use some computer aided line or expression played with an accomplished verve. A human should do that, and I can’t do that, and yet that part of the ensemble is  there – I’ve allowed it, and its level of success to some listener could be assigned to me. The alternate path I left some time ago was organizing bands of musicians to realize the music I create. I may wonder about that untaken path, but then I consider how dissatisfied those musicians might be at my non-commercial aims, how frustrated or dismayed they would be with my musical naivete, how stressful and ill-fitting it would be for the composer-hat-me to wear the bandleader-hat as well. Yet, those struggles, despite unfitness on my part, may be the necessary dues to engage in musical work. Guild concerns might hand down a harsh judgement on what I’ve done: “If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that  –  you’re taking away jobs from skilled tradesmen.”

In this I support the guild with one side of my heart, and yet I could be charged with working against its union shop.

A musical piece from a pair of DVDs issued decades ago that my child and I treasured when we both were younger. I don’t have details about how this music was produced, with what technology, but this is so much better than the trite AI slop illustrations I could have chosen to use instead. The Animusic web site is defunct, and I don’t know how you could still purchase this.

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Full-fledged AI music? The examples I provided in my last post satisfied my curiosity in my quick attempts to see what the current state of the art can do. Even more so than with my frustrations with AI illustrations I discussed in the first part of this series, I’m not tempted to continue to use that level of AI music creation. I don’t have to test my ethics in this: AI generated songs can’t get close enough to what I want, what I intend to communicate. I like playing instruments, and despite my not uncommon artists ability to procrastinate on getting down to composition of new work, once I’m into the process, I find it absorbing. If what results isn’t always a perfect realization of intent, so to it is with AI, and typing a few words into a prompt has no visceral rewards.

As I wrap up this series today, I’ve honestly tried to report my contradictions. If I’ve done anything, it’s my hope that you, my widely curious readership, will use what I’ve written to spur your own considerations of the challenges AI brings to art. I’ve used music as the main example, but literature and many other arts – as well as work that isn’t viewed as artistic – have like dangers, allied concerns.

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*Let me mention that I also share environmental concerns with the energy usage to provide AI. While earlier in this series I wrote that we likely don’t really know what those energy needs are with precision – and our existing general use of ubiquitous computers both saves and costs energy in some balance that’s hard to calculate.

An another issue: brevity keeps me from delving today into the important risk of extended capitalist and or authoritarian control of expression by ceding tools of production to oligarchs.

And lastly, there is a great deal of techbro hype around AI. In some ways it’s encouraging and scary how well it works, and in others it’s risible and scary how badly it works. I don’t mind so much laughing at its limitations in the world of musical art – like the satire in the last post where it created outrageous protest songs that can still sound sonically plausible – but the thought of non-analog safeguards in life-and-death contexts is concerning. It’s already hard enough to hold capital to account for grievous errors and oversights. Giving another level of kings-X granted to the passive voice of “computer error” worries me.

**As I was finishing a draft of this on Saturday I read an egregious example of AI theft from a musical artist. Emily Portman (and others, it appears from the linked news story) had their artistic presence on leading music streaming sites invaded by someone greedy enough to try to steal the widow’s mite that independent artists receive.

***If I was to play advocate in my defense, I could say that the uses I make of these tools are not the same as typing in a few generally descriptive words and having AI generate an entire song (or painting, or story, or essay) such as the song examples I supplied in the last post. I work iteratively with the specifications and adjustments for the patterns – though so do many who work on elaborate prompts for generating entire songs – but I’ve supplied them with the harmonic structure by playing or composing the chords or melodic centers of the resulting pattern to be generated. Those substantive contributions I supply make a case for these uses being collaborative extensions of the human.

I’ve so long used drum machines – and entire accepted genres of music are built around the expectations that they will be used – that using computers to play drumbeats in patterns seems more allowable to my inner ethicist. If I dig deeper, and acknowledge that I know and appreciate the musicianship and sound of a good percussionist, this is inconsistent, but this is my honest emotional report.

Summarizing and speaking here in guild specifics: the composer in myself may feel justified, while the internalized musician’s guild inside my soul still feels shame at my stooping to this.

They’re Not the Grateful Dead

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Is it time to take a break from our sometimes intense presentations of poetry combined in some way with music? Well, here’s a little ditty about the lighter side of death, or rather the worship of dead rock stars.

My observation is that though there are still the occasional premature music casualties in the current environment, that the worship of “The Greats are Taken from Us Too Soon” variety is reduced among young people today. Perhaps that’s a healthy sign, or it could be secondary to the casualties not having the right mix of fame to burn brighter at the graveside. And in the past, the other half of this project’s concern, poetry, has not been immune to the praise of dead talent, particularly dead, young talent, either.

Sure, it can be a honorable thing to give respect to those who’ve gone, to carry their artistic flag further when they can’t, but there is another side, the romantic admiration for the risks and the access to excess that often precedes the early death of musicians, writers, and other artists. The first duty of an artist is to survive. Society is not generally on the artist’s side until they become successful commercially, and even when it grants them that success, it can withdraw it and their support quickly too. To add to that burden with one’s own self-medication and distractions seems like a compensation to that state, but it doesn’t always work that way.

Poet, songwriter, alternate voice, and frequent keyboard player here Dave Moore wrote a short poem about how an older person might view with a strange kind of envy the tentative fame and unbounded experiences that others in our musical/generational cohort enjoyed. Sex, drugs and Rock’n’Roll once seemed to be jobs on offer in the want ads in our youth, even if it turned out the positions were already filled and the items already sold. I adapted Dave’s words, added a verse of my own, and wrote music for my performance of “They’re Not the Grateful Dead”  some years back and thought you might enjoy it here. Oh, that “Grateful Dead” in the title? Translated folkie Jerry Garcia knew that this was a trad folk song trope where the dead magically and musically express some gratitude.

They're Not the Grateful Dead

Who’s who for any crate digger obsessives: Hopkins, Hendrix, Moon, Jaco, Saxon, and Thaxton are hereby linked.

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One thing I like about Dave’s lyric is that, outside of Jimi Hendrix he doesn’t pull in the big names, the Boomer rock’n’roll Shelleys and Byrons, the ones that are still featured faces in the rear-view mirrors looking at the music and times. Starting right off with Nicky Hopkins* is a bold move, but then Dave is  a keyboard player.

The song’s conclusion has a little fun with the sentimental “If there’s a rock’n’roll heaven, you know they’ve got a hell of a band” thing. Keats’ unheard music may be sweet, but it’s still hard to hear.

My performance of this has a few flubs, but it’s hard for me to get more recording in right now, so we’ll make do with this older recording as is. The player gadget is below for many of you, but if you don’t see it, this highlighted hyperlink will also play my performance of “They’re Not the Grateful Dead.”

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*Huh. Who? Those who didn’t ruin their eyesight fantasizing about debauched after-parties but by reading all the liner notes on every LP will know who Nicky Hopkins is.

The Most Popular Parlando Project Piece for Winter 2020

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

December seems so long ago doesn’t it? More so this spring in our current crisis. Back on the 10th of December I awoke, took my bike ride to breakfast in a pleasantly crowded café, where I read that it was Emily Dickinson’s birthday. While eating breakfast I decided I should try to make a Dickinson piece before the day was done.

This morning in March, I rode to that same café. Normally there are 20 or 30 folks there drinking coffee, eating breakfast, talking, reading or fiddling with notebooks or notebook computers during the morning on a weekday—more on weekends. Today they are to close their dining area for the duration at noon, and the two couples eating breakfast several empty tables apart (along with some not-present more) will need to do what I did and pickup takeout fare to keep this place a going concern.

Last morning to dine in at Turtle Bread

Cold but sunny morning, and taking their last chance for awhile to have breakfast together.

 

When Emily Dickinson was a child, her family grew up not in the grander family house her grandfather had built and lost due to debts and business ineptitude, but in another house across the road from a cemetery. Some biographers think this molded the young mind of our great poet, but then the literature of that time had a decidedly gothic tinge to it anyway. And that’s not the place she lived as the poet we know.

Her father worked assiduously to repair the family wealth and regained the homestead. Emily’s room is in the front of the house. Out to her left would be the garden and orchard that she became the master of with the illness and eventual death of her mother. Below her, the kitchen where she and the family’s immigrant Irish servant fixed the family meals and baked. That garden and orchard is now gone as the world of her family and town moved on from its former rural self-sufficiency. Also gone is the 11-acre Dickinson meadow that would have been more or less straight-on in view for Emily at her writing table on one of her December birthdays.*

The famously sequestered Dickinson of her later adult years would have been living our current Covid-19 life of “social distancing” and stay-at-home self-isolation. You might think her poetry would be more solipsistic for that, but she really was a mind forever voyaging. The winterscape she portrays in this short poem is quite likely that Dickinson meadow or her bare garden.

Though the creation of the music and recorded performance of it was rapid even by this project’s quick pace, I don’t think it suffers from that at all as I listen to it again today. The post I wrote about it in December was not one of the most liked or read this winter, but the audio piece was listened to more than any other one during the past three months,** and by enough to score the top spot anyway.

As I consider my sequestered music making today—something I can create even in these times, by myself, playing each part in turn—I feel for those other musicians whose art and the revenue to support it requires a live venue, a paying crowd coming through the door. Of course, cooks, wait staff, musicians—small businesspeople for the most part and only a portion of our world—are not the only ones who will suffer through the duration of our current crisis, but they were in my thoughts as I write this.

Is Dickinson’s poem lighthearted and playful or more gothic in mood? My current reading of Dickinson is that it’s both. She is amazed at the shapes and filigrees of the barren landscape, yes—but it is a place of stilled and departed artisans as she portrays it. She sees an absence, that resonate line: “Summer’s empty room.”

My performance of Emily Dickinson’s “Snow” also known as  “It sifts from leaden sieves” is available with the player gadget below.

 

 

*Here’s a highly detailed blog post about the vantage point of Emily’s room in the Dickinson homestead. It even goes so far to suggest that the irregularities of mid-19th century glass may have been the genesis of some of the impressionistic or even visionary imagery in Dickinson’s poetry.

**The second most listened to piece was #6 on the list “Do the Dead Know What Time It Is.”