The Tangent College
This week I’d like to talk about something a little different which I’ve entitled “Things That Nobody Is Really Interested in – but should be”. It’s about art and music; the death of rock ‘n roll and rock bands; AI, the bleak future of music, and trans-humanism.
I would ask you to listen to a wonderful song that I wrote called “Magical Paradise”. Follow the link and listen, really listen, put down your phone, close your eyes and really listen without distraction. Don’t just listen to the lyrics; but listen to the piano, listen to the flute, listen to the strings, listen to the interesting chord structure and how it all blends together and make sense as an arrangement from beginning to end. Every note, and every beat, every chord voicing, every lyric, and every instrument, was agonized over to produce this completed work. Every instrument was actually played by me without quantization or auto tuning.
AI, or computer-generated music, could never, ever, ever produce such a thing for one simple reason, because “Magical Paradise” was a musical piece that never existed in any form prior to its creation. If the computer databases had access to Magical Paradise, with all its billions of parameters, it could reproduce it and copy it but it could never create it from scratch in the first place. This is the fundamental and most important distinction between computer-generated music, versus human generated music.
All the computer can do is copy, rearrange, and plagiarize pre-existing material. It must already be in its database. It cannot produce its own database from nothing. Anything that seems to be new is simply a re-assembling of things that already existed. Only God, and only humans made in the image of God can bring into being something that never existed previously. God is The Creator, and we were endowed with this creative ability.
We created the computer, but the computer merely mimics its creator.
The same is true for AI. We humans created a computerized mirror so we could look at ourselves and worship ourselves. I realized a while back that the female’s obsession with selfies is essentially a way to look in the mirror and check out how they look. They use it in the same way as one uses a mirror.
But let us get back to the music, that which nobody is really interested in, but I believe you would enjoy this video which gives insights into the death of music. Yes in fact, you can tell Neil Young that rock ‘n roll has died – hey hey my my, and Rick Beato is going to tell you why in this video “The Real Reason Why Music Is Getting Worse”. It’s true people; face it; pop music, pop country, dance pop, worship pop, hip pop, all are really really really bad. And now we have AI coming along mimicking and plagiarizing this really really bad crap. Even if it is not generated by AI, it still sounds computer made because it is. Because the people who make this crap, just to be popular, are becoming trans-human with the inability to create anything new or original but instead merely rehash everything that’s already been written prior. (Is not this exactly what AI is doing?) Every worship song sounds exactly the same because that’s what the worship song market demands and creativity is threatening and taboo.
Nobody would be able to tell the difference between an AI song and those written by music industry songwriters because they are both doing the same thing. Contemporary Christian worship songs would be the very easiest songs for AI to generate, with pop country following closely behind. You just need to get the affected southern cowboy accent right.
A great take away quote from this video is a message that Rick received from a subscriber to his channel. It reads, “I wrote a song that I think can be a hit. I used AI to hear it because I know nothing about making music. If you are interested in hearing what AI did, I can send it to you.” This reminded me of the people who have come to me throughout my life asking me to write music for their “song” for which they only have lyrics (which are usually weak at best). Now with AI, they can just have the computer generate their “song”, which will sound like everyone else’s song but it is also something that nobody really cares about. But is it their song? “Who needs music and art, and humans? We’ve got AI now, and it looks like all of us, combined and better, all the time.” It’s the ultimate collectivism.
Deezer (A streaming platform like Spotify) announced recently that 18 percent of its streams are AI (which means computer-generated – remember there is no such thing as AI – having an identity).
The second great quote from this video appears around 7:43 and he reads, “Creative AI tools can be seen as sophisticated plagiarism software, as they do not produce genuinely original content but rather emulate and modify existing works by artists, subtly enough to circumvent copyright laws.” This is so incredibly accurate and well stated and he laughs because this true explanation was generated by Chat GPT.
But as he states in chapter 2 of this video right around 12 minutes, the problem is really the consumer, “because you vote with your attention”. But he also encourages, in the same way that I encourage you to listen to “Magical Paradise” at the beginning of this email, try to sit down and just listen.. Play just a few songs…. Don’t look at your “Thought Deletion Device”, because it empties your mind out… Just listen to the music, let it flow over you…. And try to experience music like we use to so many decades ago.
It is a valuable video to watch and consider. It just may change your life along with listening to Magical Paradise.
Perhaps I will get into this deeper in further emails. If you want to dive super deep into what has happened to the music industry, rock ‘n roll in particular, then I would also throw out these two highly inciteful videos by Rick Beato:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_DjmtR0Xls – Why Are Bands Mysteriously Disappearing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibMd_Jx9daw – Ted Gioia on AI’s Threat To Music