In music, human creativity has been combined with mechanical assistance for a long time. So why shouldn’t AI works also be worthy of an award?
No hit without autotune, but even in folk and classical music there is hardly anything without equalizing and reverb Photo: imago
Breaking News: Handmade music isn’t handmade at all! It is actually generated by the membranes in the loudspeaker box. The membranes are in turn triggered by current surges sent out by an amplifier or a playback device. These machines do it because a medium – file, sound carrier – gave them the command to do so.
The way to the hands is still long. He finally leads us into a studio where sounds are created and fixed. If they are generated via musical instruments, we are almost at the hands. But in between there is another important step: the sound generated by hands on the instrument is fed into the mixing console via microphones or direct pickup systems, where it is often subjected to considerable violence.
The characteristics of the frequency response, the pitches and the spatiality are sometimes changed so drastically that the handmade sound would not be recognized in the mirror. But hands are overrated anyway: They don’t invent music, that’s what any brain well secured in a skull bone does. If it determines hands to vicarious agents – okay. But it can also be different.
I describe this actually well-known process to explain my shaking of my head at the defensive attitude towards supposed AI-generated music. Some even believe that AIs are aliens who have suddenly come from somewhere and now want to take over the shop. It’s us who not only called them, but – because they didn’t come right away – soldered them together in the garage ourselves. Now everything is supposed to be bad?
As we have seen above, there is no purity (also) in music. Human creativity is combined with machine assistance. No hit without autotune, but also in folk and classical music there is hardly anything without editing, equalizing and reverb. There is no such thing as purely human music for AI aliens to ruin (or worse, claim the copyright for).
Still, the Recording Academy, the US agency that awards the Grammys annually, rushed to assert that AI singing and composition were not award-worthy. It’s only when a human creator is “in the driver’s seat,” Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. told the magazine Rolling Stone, a work can be awarded. That means: If a human performer sings an AI composition, this performance can be awarded, but not the composition. Even if it’s a killer song.
dumb, right? And unfair. But above all: against the audience. Because despite all the passionate commitments to Manufactum-style handmade music from old vines expressed by a wide variety of voices: In truth, hardly anyone wants to hear it. Being human is nice, but too limited and error-prone.
If you start correcting the mistakes afterwards and prettify instrumental sounds you’ve heard a thousand times, you quickly end up with machine tools that don’t make mistakes in the first place and offer a zillion tonal possibilities. That makes work a lot more fun! And the audience? Loves it! Because inhuman perfection is the ideal that many people aspire to anyway, in art as well as in their own everyday performances, right down to appearance.
Putting aside that AIs are trained on the same pool of discoverable music recordings that every human creator draws inspiration from, isn’t it also about progress? Wouldn’t it be super exciting to train AIs on completely incompatible combinations (just as an example)? Couldn’t they tear down a whole series of invisible barriers and give us a few crucial kicks that put us back on the path forward?
But maybe the Recording Academy is just afraid of the acceptance speech, in which a C-3PO stalks onto the stage and, in a voice that cracks with emotion, thanks the wires, semiconductors, watts and volts that made his award-winning performance possible.
2023-07-05 08:35:31
#Artificial #intelligence #music #composes
