Technological Distancing

 From Francis Bacon's Aphorisms:

The unassisted hand, and the understanding left to itself, possess but little power. Effects are produced by the means of instruments and helps, which the understanding requires no less than the hand. And as instruments either promote or regulate the motion of the hand, so those that are applied to the mind prompt or protect the understanding.  

Someone had recently made a comment that music composition can be done simply by typing code as the equivalent of scoring at the piano on score paper (or with software). The main distinction is that writing an algorithm, say, based on pitch driving RGB values, then creating artworks based on that won't necessarily be very interesting or beautiful: There is no direct connection between data and aesthetics, as is between the muse and ourselves--and the time spent attempting to write an algorithm to make an aesthetic (or conceptual statement) is probably more than a composer sitting at the piano and composing into Sibelius, What they're really saying is, "I'm going to construct machine or a tool that I can use as an arm or extension that will enable me to play the notes on the piano from 6 feet away. 

This reminded me of Matisse's use of the 6-foot bamboo stick (in the image above). He is using the stick as a tool for making the brush proportional to the surface for purposes of scaling the work. But he's not doing it just because it's the new technology or that everyone else is doing it. I can understand copying or tracing as a form of homage or reverence to the artists that you admire. I have done this ever since I started playing music, and I do it in art as well. But ultimately it has to be done with the right intentions and be righteous to the artists you are copying, as well as inspiring you to experiment and perhaps be innovative and generative over many decades. We need tools and should continue to invent them, but like metaphors, they are the scaffold, not the work itself.

When I use alternate tunings I use them 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."

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 Man's 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."

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's more interesting is to create algorithms without computers at all. For example, here is a series of two-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 completely automate consciousness and untether it from its primary Sources from somewhere in the universe. 

A person that codes an algorithm can be creative but not in a purely musical sense. It is not unlike creating complex formulas in an Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is the tool--the 6-foot bamboo stick.

#SFD