Can AI really replace human musicians and composers?
It is the best of times! It is the worst of times! Charles Dickens didn’t do headlines, but if he did, the current debates about AI (Artificial Intelligence) in our lives and culture would be made for him. It’s algorithmically impossible to find a view in the media that isn’t either ‘AI is gonna save us all!’ or, conversely, ‘AI is our event horizon as a species – you have been warned!’.
In music, the AI news seems very gloomy, as bot-made playlist-manufacture takes over the digital charts and musicians’ catalogues are harvested and data-mined, all so that we can give whichever AI service you favour a prompt such as: ‘make me a medium-paced Baroque sarabande to accompany my trip to the supermarket’. If you’re a human recording artist or composer trying to make your way and compete with the technology, you’re off to a losing start before you’ve begun.
Musicians taking a stand against AI theft
Yet it doesn’t have to be like this. At least, not according to Ed Newton-Rex, who created the not-quite-silent album Is This What We Want?, in which musicians from James MacMillan to Kate Bush supported the album’s manifesto, ‘The British Government must not legalise music theft to benefit AI companies’, and lent the sound of silent studios and music venues to show the impact of an insufficiently legislated future on musicians’ lives. If AI companies keep harvesting their albums without consent or compensation, musical culture dies – that’s the dramatic point the campaign makes.
But Newton-Rex says there is still time to save AI’s business models from visiting this wholesale destruction on musical culture, if lawmakers across the world get a grip of what’s happening and don’t allow a Wild West of creative landgrabs to continue. Here’s hoping.
Can AI be useful for musicians?
And there are two other avenues for hopefulness. The first is that AI’s usefulness to music and musicians will work best when – as has always happened throughout the relationship between music technology and human beings, from bone flutes 40,000 years ago to digital samplers last century – the relationship allows us to realise sounds and ideas that couldn’t have been created before. AI’s true potential isn’t in making crappy simulacra of what’s already out there to anaesthetise you aurally on your commute, but to allow human composers to make something definitively new.
Music is about human emotion...
The second, and most important, is that the AI-contradicting fact of all musical cultures – and those we call ‘classical’ in particular – is the experiential connection between all of us as listeners, performers and composers. That means producing sounds with our voices and instruments that only humans can do, having emotional and intellectual reactions to the music we make and dreaming of musical futures that have meaning because of their significance for the entirety of who we are, from our cells to our souls. Don’t believe the hype. AI is just a technology: all hail the human future!
