On "The Uncanny Muse"

 

It's interesting that in the early days of mechanical instruments like the orchestrelle and pianola in the early part of the 20th century, people were buying them because they wanted to vicariously play with “feeling, but if you look at it from the aspect of what is actually happening cognitively when you play music and play it with “feeling”, is different from a machine activating mirror neurons. This is happening today with people generating music with AI: sometimes it generates emotional-sounding music, but you weren't “instrumental” in that emotion--you're just feeling that emotion. (“With no artist in sight, an unexpected art emerged with unforeseen effects.”) When you're actually playing music, it is, in fact, mechanical--even for people who’ve been playing for a long time. Feeling is mostly a fleeting illusion, at least as it relates to playing music. The lasting impact of music on emotions is that if there's some kind of encoding involved--which can occur from the coupling of an experience in a place while listening to music--and the experience of looking at images along with the music, such that when you re-listen to the music or look at the images again it reactivates that experience as a form of nostalgia–”bringing you back”. And typically those kinds of emotions are more powerful than the ones you'd experience when you are playing music. So these feelings that we have for music are the result of mechanical processes, primarily recordings. Many times we’re moved just as intensely by things that work as a beautiful machine, like an expensive sports car. If that’s thrilling in itself, isn’t that a satisfying emotion as well? And if you’re really into cars, you’re not looking for anything else emotionally, and will probably find art and music less interesting in evoking it. 

In a Lester Bangs interview with Brian Eno, he said that what people call unemotional simply doesn't have one single overriding emotion to it, and the things he likes best are the ones that are ambiguous on the emotional level. I feel this as well when I'm working with random elements in some kind of AI context, and produces a result that causes some kind of an emotion, but it's not a standard generic emotion that crowds of people would react to. It's an emotion that I'm personally feeling is unique.