Remembering Oliver Sacks

 

Oliver Sacks really spoke for music’s humanistic qualities. It may be the beginning of a period where we leave behind our most deeply evolved understanding of music, and merge more with computer hardware and software. That’s nothing to get excited about, but that is apparently where we are heading. (Think ISIS destruction of antiquities.) Formal music education is almost non-existent at the primary and secondary levels. Music is autodidactical in the sense that one can pick it up through osmosis by watching YouTube videos. (It has always been this way since piano rolls, but now there is no pedagogical system in place.)

Dr. Sacks was a part of the Silent Generation, one generation removed from the phenomenon of private listening with mobile audio players. He didn’t like them.

Music may be moving to something that is more sonic—more about the texture of the sound rather than its connection to music and language. This is where the “Mozart Effect” makes sense. Merely being subjected to sound, or being in some type of intentionally musical environment can make someone more intelligent.

7/25/2015

[7/25/2024: Music generated by AI removes the connection between music and language even though we are using language to drive the results. It is music based on questions and answers, which is interesting in itself as music as an “answer”. But music isn’t a “search result”. Given Sacks’ dislike of mobile audio,  I can’t imagine what his views of AI music would be.]

[7/25/2025: After a year of using generators, I must say I’m still fence-sitting. At the very least, it’s a new process of exploring musical logic as evinced from words, both the lyrics and the prompts. For younger musicians just getting started, I would imagine that AI music can be the radio or records that you play along with. But the training sets and the algorithms churn out very uninteresting chord progressions, something I extracted from playing along with records. AI music is also too anonymous: there are no players who could be your early heroes, like Geddy Lee was for me on the bass].