Music AI: So? (Cont.)
When I use alternate tunings I use it as a tool (sometimes toy) in a similar fashion: to generate possibilities not available in standard tuning. But one thing I realized is that the tool can sometimes become the crutch or the thing to aimlessly noodle around with. When the tool has to coexist with other things not reliant on tools the reliant one is the weakest part: It has to be plugged in, needs other peripherals, and has other dependencies. Music can exist with almost no dependencies—all we need are hands, feet, and the voice. But what civilization has ever ignored the idea of progress? You’d want to keep extending it with tools. Tools also make other tools possible, but we shouldn't confuse the tools with the things we're supposed to make with them. You don't want to spend all your time on the tools then never have time to invent and innovate. The trope is that progress always involves supplanting something, but usually winds up changing almost nothing.
Jordan Peterson: "If you want to improve something, rather than criticize and change what already exists, it’s easier, especially now, it’s easier just to build a parallel system and see if you can put something in that’s a competitor. The Khan people did that with the Khan Academy. And they ended up actually not supplanting the standard education system so much as augmenting it." [more...]
There is creativity and innovation in the making of tools, but like electronic effects (which is what AI is in many ways), won’t always result in art—even if artistic intent or behavior is present. And it always is--it is a fixture of all the arts. In the words of the late semiotician Morse Peckham, “The arts are deposits of human behavior.” AI can create music that mimics the baroque, but it has no understanding of why the baroque is the baroque and what procedures composers used based on ET and rules of harmony and counterpoint. The baroque was a "deposit" of human behavior at that particular juncture in history, not of machine behavior that is the result of contrived routines circa 2020. Ideally, you'd want to honor whatever those "deposits" were and not simply Mickey Mouse them.
Peckham touched on this in his mid-60s book Mans Rage For Chaos:
"The arts are related through their primary signs, but the fact is of no significance, because all the signs of art, natural and artificial, situational and non-situational, arbitrary and configurational, are to be found outside of the arts. There are in the arts because the arts are the deposits of human behavior, of which perhaps the central and certainly one of the most important elements of semiotic behavior. The semantic aspect of art fair varies not with the non-functional stylistic aspect but to meet non-artistic demands. Much of common discourse about art is concerned with a property known as form, but as this analysis has shown, much of that discourse is not about form but about configurations which served as primary signs." (Peckham, Morse. Man's Rage for Chaos. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. Print. p. 196)
For those that want to use automation as a shortcut to art, it is largely a gamble, or simply a game. That’s not insignificant as it uses randomness--an essential part of artistic behavior at the experimental stages. AI can be useful as a randomness generator, but you still need something to watch the flow of randomness and take interesting "snapshots" to locate the art. That’s what art is about: It points at things as possible instantiations of art. Photography is almost all about this and could be a useful metaphor across domains. If your memory is good you don't even need the "camera"--you take a mental note of what worked and what didn't, and you know intuitively what might look like art.
What is more interesting is to create algorithms without computers at all. For example, here is a series of one-bar rhythms that one could tell a computer to play or have a musician play them at random using predetermined horizontal and vertical consequences (i.e. melody and harmony). It is an interesting compositional procedure, as well as being fun to perform. The randomness of a human and the randomness of the computer would have no effect on the result. The difference is our experience while making it and while performing it.
If you engage yourself in the activity of music, that's what you should be doing. AI seems to say, "let's automate this and go do something else." Once you start automating everything, there is essentially nothing to do than to systematize consciousness.
A person that codes an algorithm can be creative but not in purely musical sense. It is not unlike creating complex formulas in an Excel spreadsheet. It's not art until it has ulterior intentions.
Source article: A philosopher argues that an AI can’t be an artist
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11/20/2024: The music generators I have been using aren't really tools per se because I can't incorporate anything into what I might be doing. They are interesting to me in the re-imagining what I've already done, but it's not impressing me to the point where I'm not interested in doing something manually. What does AI lead to, i.e. how would it make you want to investigate something further without its use? This would be like using a band saw on everything, but you'd wonder what else there was to use.]
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