The garden in the machine

Using music to explore human creativity amid the fears and hopes of a hi-tech civilisation.

Grow Up With Soul by Valencian street artist Xelon

Artificial intelligence has become a ubiquitous discussion recently, though the term seems somewhat misleading given the technology is neither particularly artificial nor demonstrably intelligent. It relies on processing gigantic swathes of human creativity and culture, reducing it to data, and then regurgitating it in a way that frames it as original, alien, and synthetic. The linguist Noam Chomsky has described it as ‘sophisticated hi-tech plagiarism’.

Despite the hype, it nevertheless feels like an inflexion point in our relationship with technology, as our culture becomes increasingly machine influenced. Given that music is so deeply embedded in technology it makes it an ideal tool for examining it. By exploring contrasting technical and aesthetic qualities in music composition, I intend to examine the fears, hopes, and emotional landscape of our hi-tech civilisation.

To achieve this I have set myself a challenge: to write one composition in a manner that is deeply embodied, and another that is highly disembodied. I have opted to explore our relationship with technology through the notion of embodiment rather than AI, partly because it avoids the temptation to anthropomorphise technology, and also because disembodiment represents a longer-term trend in our relationship with technology — one that has intensified since the Industrial Revolution.

How it will work

For the embodied piece I will compose for a handmade instrument, notating it by pencil onto paper before recording it onto physical tape at a local recording studio, using neither metronome nor editing. Every mistake, noise, and musical imperfection will be printed onto the tape and left unmodified: a heavy breath, a finger scraping the instrument, a misplayed note.

The disembodied composition will be written entirely in code, using no physical instruments or analogue inputs. The sounds will be calibrated by adjusting and fine-tuning the system, using only a laptop. I will use a generative method of composition (the precise definition of this I will explain during the project), rather than anything related to AI. In generative composition, one person can create and comprehend the entire system, whereas with AI people often interact with a closed system (or black box) of which one can only speculate about its contents.

On the disembodiment of music

A few years ago while recording a composition at a studio I complained to the engineer that the musician was breathing too loudly. He responded, “I’ll let you be the one to go in there and tell her to stop breathing”.

It is tempting to extract humanity from recordings in pursuit of a ‘perfect’ sound, not least of all as improvements in recording equipment and editing software allow us ever more control, and listeners become more accustomed to over-processed sounds. Brian Eno described this dilemma over a decade ago in the BBC documentary Another Green World.

The temptation of the technology is to smooth everything out. You know, you’re listening to the thing over and over and over, and there’s that one bar when the drums are a little bit shaky, and you think ‘oh well, I´ll just take another bar of drums and put them in there.’ And indeed, when you’re doing that the immediate effect is, oh that’s better, but of course, if you keep doing that what you gradually do is homogenise the whole song, until every bar sounds the same, until every rhythm guitar part is perfect, until in fact, there’s no evidence of human life at all in there.

The singer Nancy Wilson echoed a similar sentiment in an interview, describing what she saw as the inverse relationship between advances in recording studio technology and the skill of recording musicians.

I remember going in the studio with 36 musicians live. Downbeat at 8 o’clock. Doing four songs complete and finished, because we had an entire arrangement written. You had musicians who could come in a play it. When you could come in and not sing entire songs, and piece together a song, you no longer needed to be talented…

The ability to ‘piece together a song’ has shaped music to a degree that I think few listeners realise, dovetailing neatly with a coming culture of machine-composed music. After all, it is easier for disembodied robots to compose music for a culture that is in the process of becoming more robotic and disembodied.

A warning to this effect was issued by the anarcho-primitivist writer John Zerzan in 1997 when he delivered an influential talk about the potential for technology to lead to a dehumanised, cyborg-like culture.

… it seems to me, when you have the distance narrowing between humans and machines in the sense that if we are becoming more machine-like, it’s easier to see the machine as more human-like. I don’t want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think more and more people wonder, is this living or are we just going through the motions? What’s happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away? Well, that would take many other lectures, but it’s not so much the actual advance of the technology: If machines can be human, humans can be machines. The truly scary point is the narrowing of the distance between the two.

If this is starting to sound like a tirade against modern technology let me clarify, I intend these critiques to provoke the imagining of better and more humane technologies — it is not a vain attempt to turn back time. For example, there is nothing inherently bad about disembodiment, it can represent an opportunity.

Historically composers often took pride in their ability to write music without the aid of a piano — the musical computer of its day — opting to use just pen and paper instead. The whole image of Mozart is built on this idea. Had composers not created some distance between themselves and instrumentalists, their imaginations may have been more constrained by the inability to specialise to such a degree. About a decade ago I had the pleasure of hearing the witty and charming Norma Herrmann discuss her late husband’s music, the celebrated film composer Bernhard Herrmann, who in her own words was ‘completely hopeless’ at playing musical instruments, but who she said would read music scores in bed as though they were novels.

Removing ourselves from the physicality of music can allow us to experience music purely as sound, without the constraints or biases of the interaction of physical instruments. By using instruments that are non-physical and exist only as ideas, we can overcome certain physical, financial, or logistical barriers. Therefore, I will pursue disembodiment not in an attempt to replicate or replace people — which I consider banal, if not pointless — but to open doors that physicality keeps shut.

Music as cultural prophecy

Music allows us to temporarily inhabit and imagine new realities. This is what musicians find instinctively liberating and dictators instinctively threatening. In his original and thought-provoking book, Noise, the economist and composer Jacques Attali describes music as a prophetic force.

Music is prophecy. Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the rest of society because it explores, much faster than material reality can, the entire range of possibilities in a given code.

Perhaps this is an overstatement, but it is certainly true that it is far quicker to compose and test a new piece of music than to imagine and build a new society. After all, throughout all of history music has helped us navigate our constant voyage into the future.

Attali considers music as a way to make sense of society beyond purely technical methods.

Now we music learn to judge a society more by its sounds, by its art, and by its festivals, than by its statistics. By listening to noise, we can better understand where the folly of men and their calculations is leading us, and what hopes it is still possible to have.

Furthermore, he points out that our very perception of the world is shaped by our sonic culture.

Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world… It is thus necessary to imagine radically new theoretical forms, in order to speak to new realities.

‘To speak to new realities’ is an inspiring sentiment. The sense of fatalism and disempowerment that hangs over our age may in part be because we have lost our sense of the power of art, and therefore our ability to imagine other realities and potential futures. Technology can be used imaginatively, but it cannot make us imagine — that is the role of art.

As I embark on this project I will do what all composers do at every opportunity: to write the best possible music I can, embodied or disembodied. I will explain and document this process and any relevant technical or philosophical ideas, but I will not explain the music. Its emotions and aesthetics either speak for themselves, or not at all. That interpretation is entirely up to you