Music, Industry, and Artificial Intelligence

It has been a while since I have succumbed to the temptation to editorialize, since I believe that the primary function of writing about music is to inform rather than deluge with opinions. However, this morning, as I was going through my feeds from The Guardian, I encountered an article filed by Raphael Boyd this morning entitled “‘We have to adapt or die’: Daniel Bedingfield says AI is music’s future.” By way of disclaimer, I should note that I had no idea who Bedingfield was, let alone that he had earned a Grammy nomination in 2001 for the song “Gotta Get Thru This,” which was as unfamiliar to me as Bedingfield himself.

I suppose the sentence that really got (in the immortal words of Bullwinkle Moose) “my dandruff up” was the following:

Bedingfield said anyone should be able to make music and that a lack of ability should not get in the way of someone being able to create art, or profit from it.

Since I tend to believe that one (good?) quote deserves another, I feel the best way to reply is with the words of W. G. Gilbert, taken from the libretto for The Gondoliers:

In short, whoever you may be,
To this conclusion you’ll agree,
When every one is somebodee,
Then no one’s anybody!

I have to wonder whether or not the word “skill” is in Bedingfield’s working vocabulary. Here is another example of his “thoughts” about making music:

I could sing really well when I was six; I feel that my voice was as good at nine as it is now. I would have loved the chance to have made an album back then, without having to spend decades learning to play the instruments. That was the hard part, the brutal part.

The history of music is filled with biographies that involve rising to the challenges of “the hard part.” Mind you, there are many that have succeeded but have been forgotten due to twists of fate. Nevertheless, some of them shifted from making music to teaching about it, giving rise to a new generation of pupils, some of whom were fortunate enough to succeed.

The fact is that skill is an elusive quality, whether it involves learning to perform an instrument or composing music for that instrument to play. It is not the “vitamin pill” that Anna Russell conjured up for her “How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera” routine. During my student days, I encountered a Zen proverb that as never left my attention:

Hard work succeeds … naturally!

I take this as advice to let nature take its course, rather than to try to circumvent it through “shortcut technology.” These days I am pretty sure that this is a “minority opinion.” Nevertheless, I prefer the lesson of Adam Smith, whose The Money Game was another source of wisdom in my student days:

The crowd always loses because the crowd is always wrong.

It was during my junior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that I first encountered Professor Marvin Minsky and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In response to some ideas that Minsky gave me, I developed what amounted to a programming language for polyphony. Exploring the expressiveness of that language led to my doctoral dissertation. It has been very hard for me to come to terms with the fact that what is now called “AI” is a remote, if not trivial, shadow of the research that took place under Minsky’s supervision. Sadly, that triviality has attracted far more attention than Minsky ever did; and Bedingfield is just one of many now rallying behind a practice that is more artificial than intelligent!