Yolanda Charles on Technology, the Internet and the Musician

[TheGreek]

 

Technology, the Internet and the Musician

A conflicted relationship and an invitation.

YOLANDA CHARLES

 

I love the internet. It’s a great big electronic library. I can find out “how to”, “what to”, “who to” and “when to”… even “why to” is there offering ideas and inspiration.

 

I’ve met people online who have now become friends. I’ve connected with a few people I admire greatly that I would’ve been unlikely to connect with otherwise. It’s pretty cool when I travel and meet some of those folks IRL (in real life). There are just so many advantages to having this method of communication. Many speak of the internet as an evil in society. I don’t agree but I’m not immune to the noise about AI and I have my own concerns.

 

Do I think it will impact the music business and the business of making music? Yes, I do. I know it already is. Music writing can be like painting by numbers for “composers” when writing some kind of stock material - usually for library use. Well, it seems like those jobs will all be done by AI eventually.

 

YouTube is offering a new service and included in that package is promised “thousands of royalty-free tracks" that are “copyright safe” to include in the construction of video creation for the platform.

 

I just love euphemisms, don’t you? Hmm… we know what “copyright safe” means. They want to make it as easy and cheap as possible so an endless supply of content can be created by us for their Ad-revenue profit model. I get it. It also sucks. Musicians will not be involved in providing that service.

 

But somehow the loss of connection IRL because of online activity, and music not being created directly by humans doesn’t worry me as much as it could. A lot of music being created today is just filler or background musak anyway - meaning nothing to nobody.

 

I hear music differently since being exposed to such a huge volume of musical tat. I took for granted the excellence of the music of my youth, but now I appreciate its magic; its superiority, and the craftsmanship of great songwriting. The beauty of a seasoned professional singer, who can emote lyrics so beautifully, is missing from the formulaic writing and affectedness of the vocal styles in popular music today - those weirdly robot-sounding voices that are so heavily processed and changed by plugins that they can be easily copied by AI. (Put “Drake AI voice” in the search and see what comes up!)

 

I value so many things differently because I have something to compare it with now. I appreciate quality over volume and the necessity to make intentional choices in every area of life.

 

What there is to appreciate is not any of the junk music, junk food, and junk plastic crap found in pound shops everywhere, giving the mountains of landfills and ocean garbage patches an endless supply to replenish their volume as they breakdown into micro-plastics that we all consume again and again, in an ironically weird and foul pattern of unintended recycling. It is the beauty of what we’ve done as a species that has enhanced our lives and what we are able to make with our artistry and inventiveness that is of value. The junk and the beauty currently go side by side.

 

To paraphrase the author & philosopher Charles Eisenstein “The problem isn’t being materialistic, it’s not having enough reverence for the material.” It’s true that we use and discard without a thought. We don’t value the effort made to get those things to us. We don’t see the lives in the formulation of the structures and respect the source of the raw materials that came from the earth; all that we use and discard so easily.

We know there’s something wrong with our connection to each other and our surroundings. We seek other ways to help us feel like it’s all worthwhile.

 

The ease of contact with strangers that technology has given us affects our human relationships. We hear a lot about the negative experiences and the friendlessness that the internet has fostered. But without making intentional choices, things happen to us and we don’t feel like our lives are under our own control. Effort has to be made to resist where you are being encouraged to spend your time if it doesn’t feel good to be there.

We can value what technology and the internet give, without fearing what it may take from us. It hasn’t touched what is important to be human. It never could. But it has confirmed what’s important to prioritise in far more detail and with more certainty than ever before.

 

AI - whatever it’ll become known as can mimic convincingly, but it is a mimic. We are the real thing. But do we as artists tap into what we can really do? Are we truly “going there”? To those places of human experiences and feelings, exploring the reality of human existence when we make our “Art”?

 

If we don’t open up whilst creating our Art and allow it to come through to the listener, we will be easily replaced. Interactions online are like a big old circus show with snake oil salesmen absolutely everywhere. We’re constantly exposed to adverts adopting a marketing approach that utilises ‘freak-show” tactics and all kinds of enticements to encourage us to spend time, money, and attention here, there and everywhere. With the growth of AI it will become even worse. You won’t know who you’re listening to even directly on a video call; the voice and face will match eventually becoming undetectable. So what will the AI be mimicking? It can reproduce fake - the mimic is easily mimicked. But can it truly do the myriad of different yous there are on any given day? The unmanaged, unguarded, the honest true character of all that we are? Because we are so highly individual and unpredictable, the way in which AI would mimic us would be the predictable thing in the end.

 

Artists who are worried about technology needn’t worry about AI, it’s a motivation; an inspiration. It shows us more about who we need to become and changes our path away from where our contribution to human history was headed - towards more and more meaninglessness, contributing to a great garbage patch of junk human actions, junk words, junk music, and junk occupations.

 

We can be almost grateful for this new incentive to drop the personas and become Real. When our actions have meaning then our lives also have meaning.

 

I’m perfectly happy to leave the mundane, repetitious, drab, predictable, and unimaginative to the programs whilst I do what only a human can do - Live life in full colour. And my music will reflect the same. No, it won’t sound like everything else and no it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But it will be unashamedly my character, taste, and that of my musician partners.

 

That’s a choice all musician artists may face, be real and authentic or an AI can replace you. Perhaps that’s not a terrible thing.

 

Edited September 28, 2023 by TheGreek

[BigRedX]

@TheGreek That looks interesting.

 

However could you please edit it to put spaces between paragraphs so it is easier to read? Or alternatively provide a link to the original source where I suspect it will have been presented in a more readable format. Thanks!

[BigRedX]

Thank you!