THE LISTENING SERVICE
A I: it’s not artificial, and it’s not intelligent. That’s a paraphrase of the computer scientist and composer Jaron Lanier’s take on AI as a work-replacing, culture-consuming and composer-destroying technology.
Yet how can Lanier be right? Because AI’s virtual tentacles are already grasping into the real musical world: if we can generate deepfake Drake and artificially resurrect John Lennon, what are the possibilities for classical cultures? Algorithmically induced Bach? Virtually composed Smyth? Network-synthesised Brahms?
In fact, the technology to do all that is already out there, and not only to replace composers, but to replace us listeners. Seriously. It’s not only that AI programs can create their own music, they can also ‘listen’ to their own tracks on streaming services, creating as many plays as possible to generate income for the companies who design the software. In this self-referential digital hellscape, technology listens to technology. Our mortal ears are materially and physically redundant. ‘Don’t panic!’, as Douglas Adams used to say. No: start panicking. Now. And even then it’s too late.
So what does Jaron Lanier mean? Zooming out from musical dystopia, his point is that when we mythologise AI as the agent of our imminent musical and cultural destruction, we’re giving it a power that the technology doesn’t really have. Every AI program that promises to compose an instant soundtrack based on your mood, emotional state or productivity goals is doing so on the backs of millennia of human-made music that their programs analyse. They perform gigabyte-surfing feats
