NVDT RANDOM – The Gobbledygook Series

AI and Music – You Did It To Yourselves

This could be a huge boring AI discussion. Or a boring take on the current state of Pop. My plan is skip the parts readers don’t read. Redundancy and speculation.

Assuming one part we can skip is explaining that fake music is among us, I’ll start with a (brief) overview of what’s going on in the music industry.

Most “deep dive” essays on AI and music (or most anything) harp on the gray area involving copyright infringement and the “ownership” factor in pop songs. Which is a fallacious argument/discussion on its face regardless of who has sued who over “that’s my song.” If AI is truly drawing from the data well, how is that different from the samplers and loopers and pop song sweat shops that have given us the same predictable pablum for 143 years?

The old way to write a song, as I will post as fiction in a few days, involved people. Experimenting, arguing, fighting are part of the collaborative songwriting process. As with most creative collaborations. Songs written in a vacuum, or by a single person, the singer/songwriter or simply songwriter still have to see the light of day. Which brings the voice in the wilderness into the world of producers, engineers, A&R reps, record company suits…All that fucking hassle.

These days, an eight-year-old in their bedroom can record an album that used to cost thousands to millions of dollars. There is still the old way, as bemoaned by Sammy Hagar who said, after spending half a million dollars being an old schooler, “What’s the point of spending half a million dollars to make a record that nobody’s going to buy?”

Because records are singles these days, bro. Tracked in charts that didn’t exist in the “old days.” Club charts, dance charts, six thousand sub genres of electronica charts, country, pop, kiddie pop, K-pop, J-pop, Latino. Even Metal and LGBTQ+ gets pulled out into their own charts. If you lay out all the sub-genres of popular music, it looks like a diagrammed sentence from hell, (think Dickens or Poe).

All those people trying to make a buck, all the peripheral vampires looking for their share.

Fuck that hassle and creative angst.

Why?

The music buying and listening public doesn’t give a shit.

Really?

Yeah. Earlier I mentioned 143 years. Thomas Edison made music a passive experience in 1877. And a commercial income stream for content producers. No, it didn’t start with YouTube. Recordings meant an artist could get paid many times over for one performance. Listeners didn’t need to make any investment in experiencing music other than a trip to the record store. They “didn’t need to get involved.” In pursuit of the hit record, the musician/music industry killed itself. Long before AI.

How?

By producing popular pablum for the masses. Sure, touring and live performance to support record sales is still with us. But it’s not new. Women used to scream and faint at Fritz Kreisler concerts long before there were the Four Lads and Ed Sullivan or twelve-year-olds in tears at Debbie Gibson and later Taylor Swift concerts. And they go out after, buy the records the next day and scream and faint and dance in private female only parlor and bedroom parties. Guys do the same thing with testosterone laden crotch rock. But as you’ll see, they’re all the same. Only the grunge factor changes.

The musicians, now armed with a product that didn’t require ticket sales alone to make a buck, adopted a motto of “Give the people what they want.” And over the decades what they want is a beat with a physiologically agreeable BPM and a lyrical something, not too deep, possibly benign, even ignorable, on top. Preferably contained in a melody that can easily be whistled or hummed. How many “catchy” pop songs do you actually know all the lyrics to? Yeah, me too.

All AI is doing is following the rules of the game. When AI wins a showdown between itself, a real songwriter and a classic tune, the reason is down to the fact that the audience has been programmed as much as the music. If not more.

Is a pop song, a singer’s style or voice really proprietary? I remember Eddie Van Halen going off on his manager because he heard a song on the radio and blew up because “That’s Alex’s snare!” Was it? Ed had great ears, so probably. Could he prove it? Probably not. Was Alex’s recorded snare digitally watermarked? Doubtful. Especially back in the 80s.

More on (moron?) that. I take my granddaughter to volleyball practice twice a week, at least a half hour commute each way. I give her free rein to plug in her phone as long as she splits the screen with her Waze so I know where the speed traps are. And I have to tell you I really like the lyrical output of the young female “artists.” But they all sound pretty much alike, stylistically. They’ve all adopted a stripped down Taylor Swift-ish (the old lady of tweeny rock at 34) who adopted the hip hop lyric delivery ethic of occasionally changing pitch at some point in the nursery rhyme “poetry.” And minimal? On occasion, they take the sparse drum machine and something dancing around it plus vocals to a breathy, empty extreme. And sample in complete phrases from often unlikely sources for kids (Bacharach, Gershwin). And many of them openly admit to it.

Is it morally right that machines can go to the same well as humans and produce the same thing, only possibly more in the sellable pocket for the audience? Not my question to answer. I think everyone should learn to play a musical instrument if only to be aware of what’s happening in a piece of music. Which might lead them to demand better of the industry’s output.

Moron (again) the state of pop, composition, and how the industry has shot itself in the foot in a future episode. For now, I leave you with two (three, skip the first two if you want Rick Beato’s rant on the suits) videos. Video 1 – Six country songs that are the same country song. Video 2 – The four chords of more songs you recall but don’t know all the lyrics to than is possible.

It seems there are only a few “hit” songs and “songwriters” simply shove new lyrics between the clefs. Because 143 years ago Thomas Edison made it possible to play it once and get paid forever. Until the computer learned to do it just as well, or better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuGt-ZG39cU