As almost always happens, popular pop music is the first mass test for technological innovations. This time it’s AI, the artificial intelligence that has invaded musical productions. Sometimes it has done so in a clear way, for example in Italy last year there was Gerry Scotti’s Christmas album produced with the massive and obvious use of artificial intelligence. But much more often, and much more subtly, producers and alleged musicians use it. It is undoubtedly a revolution. And, like all revolutions, it creates fear or at least dismay. It happened at the beginning of the eighteenth century with the piano which revolutionized composition and performance. Then in the 1950s, when the tube amplifier helped create the rules of rock. Without the tube amplifier there would have been no Woodstock or Deep Purple’s Made in Japan, so to speak, nor the guitar solo of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to heaven or the brilliant digressions of David Bowie from Mars. Ditto the «sequencer» of the Eighties, who went in the opposite direction but allowed the birth of one, two, three generations of musicians who are still very popular today.
Now it’s the AI’s turn, which however has a decidedly different and musically disheartening characteristic. It does not put itself at the service of human creativity, but tries to replace it. It’s a race to the bottom. Take Suno for example, a platform that can create songs of all genres, styles, modes and lengths simply based on two lines of lyrics. It’s the juke box of banality. In a phase in which, to be visible on the market, individual creativity is forced to homogenize (all the songs in the charts sound the same), what is better than relying on an app? Think about it. In the 1960s, to record, so to speak, the song If Telephoning you needed an orchestra, an interpreter, various authors, arrangers, etc., etc. Today, technically, a “music producer” and perhaps a beat maker are enough, all fed by algorithms that in the meantime are literally learning from the past to try to create something new for the future. «But what joy is there in having a machine create music? I think making music is one of life’s miracles. It falls from the sky, it is given to you, it has no explanations! And it is not possible to schematize it», says Taketo Gohara, a talented producer and sound engineer of, among others, Negramaro, Capossela, Van De Sfroos and Elisa. His are not extreme hypotheses. Even if no one (or few) admits it, the temptation is strong for everyone, even for great authors, producers, record companies and performers. Therefore, as Andrea Bocelli rightly observed, “there is no need to be afraid of the invention itself, but of the man who uses it”.
At the moment usage is a jungle and perhaps one day we will arrive at labels like on yoghurts: “It contains 20% of played music and 80% of algorithms”. But the individual, the talent, in short the man, will always make the difference. At least as long as there are men listening to music.
