The AI revolution is here, but how will it affect the musical world?
Opinion
Every few months I get a message from an excited reporter at the newspaper where I pretend to work. Scientists in Japan (it’s usually Japan or California) have used a computer to complete Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony! Or the machine has written a new Mozart concerto, or some more waltzes for Swan Lake. Would I see if I can tell the difference between this and the real thing?
I always say yes, because I find the experience strangely heartening. The gap between what human genius can achieve and what computers can fake, even when programmed by people who are themselves geniuses in their field, is – at least in this specific area – still vast. If fed with enough music, it’s true, computers can now ape the rules of composition and historical styles. But great composers break rules and revolutionise style. That’s their job. More vital still, they use their skills at manipulating aural phenomena somehow to convey emotions from their brains to ours. Machines, by definition, don’t do emotion.
Of course, machines already hugely help the musical process. They can eliminate much of the drudgery of notating, recording and disseminating compositions, search for obvious errors, auto-tune singers with dodgy intonation and much else. What they don’t have, however, is the uniquely human capacity to reflect life and death, love and loss, entirely in soundwaves.
Or perhaps I should write ‘not yet’, because what’s become obvious in recent months is the huge leaps that artificial-intelligence scientists have made with their ‘large language models’ – programs drawing on databases comprising billions of words and images. And, as a result, how astonishingly adept such universally available tools as ChatGPT have become at faking, well, anything you want really – pictures, videos, essays, business letters, even poetry.
I have no idea whether the warnings of concerned scientists about the impact of these chatbots on humanity – warnings that range from massive job losses and the increasingly dangerous spreading of fake news to the subjugation of our entire species – are credible or not. Pondering such things is well above my pay grade. But I do have a few thoughts about the impact on our artform.
First, it’s entirely likely that AI will change musical life considerably. For instance, low-grade compositional tasks – I’m thinking of those dreary soundtracks churned out for video games, or the sort of club music based on a driving drumbeat and a few synthesised squiggles – are already well
