What If Music AI Existed In 1966?

 

Every week on Monday, I get the results of my Google Alert on music AI. The articles are basically all championing its bright future--a kind of green-washing. 

What would music have been like in the 1960s, say 1967, the Summer of Love, if music AI existed then? 

 

1967-1969 was the pinnacle of spirituality in pop music, with the Finale the lunar landing. But it wasn't spiritual at all. It was something more prosaic: the US winning the Space Race. The "spirituality" of the moment was more of a desire than a reality of what it was really about, and yet lingers to this day.

AI is in some ways a desire for a Moon or Mars-landing, and we read mystical things into it. But with the current AI there's very little spirituality--it's leaving the humans out of the loop. It's a form of self-deprecation--perhaps self-loathing. We've become so misanthropic that the music has to be equally deprecating, even to the level where machines are having the ideas, and we're merely steering them.

Working with AI in music, at least to me, seems to suggest that having original ideas--or even the desire to create something from an original idea is quaint and sentimental. There is a more compelling allure in artificial intelligence in that we're going to have a machine make our content for us and therefore there is no need for us to be intimately involved. Perhaps we prefer things to be hands-off because we have gotten used to the pandemic precautions: It's safer to "glove and mask" in many things we do. Having ideas and manually shaping them is just this old thing that previous generations did: We don't necessarily have to be involved in idea creation and is perhaps something that we want to avoid, so as to be postmodernist or to do things with a feigned diffidence.

So if ideas emanate from algorithms rather than from someone playing a guitar and singing a melody, we would never have had a David Bowie for example.