alt Hacker NewsLast weekend a group of friends and I sat by the lake. One had a guitar, and we were all singing off-key to old classics and dancing to salsa and reggaeton. We were doing it together, and it was great. Much more fun than listening alone or caring about the authenticity of the music or not. It was the participation, not the product, that was the key.
Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption. Everybody got their own headphones, channels, and separate cultural bubbles. Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
By the lake we tried to get people up and dancing, and one of the girls led a reggaeton/zumba/salsa session. I had one woman come up and ask for advice on where to go to get dance lessons. But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
The most amazing thing was a little 10-year-old girl who just sat herself down in our group of adults. She was so happy to see people singing and dancing. We chatted to her for a while, and then it turned out she could play guitar, so we gave her one and she jammed along. Her mother was observing from a distance and was happy to see her daughter connecting and participating with strangers.
I don't think the issue is between AI and authentic music. This argument about authenticity in music is ages old. It's more about the imbalance in participation between producer and consumer. If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
Still, I'll always be more impressed watching someone play their trained fingers over a piano or guitar. There is more magic in that than prompting an AI. But if the music is just a backing track to some other participatory activity like dancing, then the equation is different again. I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
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You know its not that much work to learn a couple of open chords on the guitar and be able to play some songs and participate. And its so so rewarding to play a song, even one you aren't really excited about, and to sing and accompany yourself even if its a song that's like 2-3 chords (like "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones). Just because its YOU making the music and the sounds, its immediately your interpretation and has your soul in it. It becomes so meaningful to you to people around you.
You don't have to say I wont be a rockstar, therefore let me use some AI to make a song, and in doing so give up on the joys of touching and making sounds with an instrument, a very old human thing we've been doing all over the world, having someone show you a song, or look up a youtube video and learning it from some random stranger.
Even better, being in love with a song and finally being able to play it yourself!
Maybe AI could've sufficed for Paul McCartney's interest in music, and provided a creative outlet. But we wouldn't have had something as great and as human as the legacy of the Beatles.
> But most people sat there watching, clearly wanting to take part but scared. People have learned that creativity and participation are not welcome.
In my experience, a decent proportion of people have always been nervous about joining in. I'd wager that for many of the onlookers it isn't driven by a creativity/participation thing, it's just a (pretty normal) fear of embarrassing themselves. Scroll back 30 years and I would undoubtedly be one of those awkward teenagers wanting to join in but scared to do so out of fear of embarrassing myself.
That said...There probably is a reasonable argument to be made that in the modern world the potential for everything you do to be filmed and shared with others amplifies those fear more than ever.
Trying to “level the playing field” is antithetical to what art is. Art is about self-expression and communication.
If we viewed art as some sort of competition or race, then someone using neural–network-based generative tools could avoid losing the race; however, everybody would be participating in some sport A and the person using ML participates in a completely different sport B. Everyone is running, but one person is riding a scooter.
However, art is not a finite zero-sum game[0]. Despite what formal music education for kids sometimes tries to make it look like, it’s not a competition, there is no global ranking and scoring system for your skill. Many people have an intuitive understanding of that; try going to a live jam to see people participating regardless of their hypothetical skill level.
[0] As further reading on this topic more generally, I recommend Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
I’m really in the middle of what I should think about Gen AI, and to be honest, it disturbs me.
I’ve been playing guitar since I was very young. I have good skills, I can play hard songs, and I compose a lot on guitar, drums, and bass. I love the process of creating, but I’ve always hated using complicated applications just to get a clean recording or mess around with adding MIDI tracks.
Because of that, I recently tried a famous AI solution. I shared one of my really raw songs and used the AI to add violins and other instruments that I don't know how to play. The final song was, to be completely honest, really amazing.
But in the end, I didn’t feel like it was mine. I had this strong feeling of being an impostor. At the same time, it put me in this great energy, it opened up my head, made me really creative, and gave me a ton of new ideas of things to play on my guitar.
So like you said, there is this weird balance. As a musician, it feels strange to outsource the creation, but as a tool for energy and participation, it completely unlocked my creativity.
AI is the latest brick in the wall separating human beings from one another.
Your argument is like "people have been killing each other for centuries so when you think about it hydrogen bombs are not the problem"
>> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
This is one of the worst parts of any concert, performance -- having a sea of phones in front of you recording. In a dark theatre, it is impossible to watch the actual performance when you have a screen on super-bright in front of you recording it. Also, some people literally record on ipads!
All these are reasons i've not opted to do "concert in my living room" via YouTube and a big screen tv. Not the same, but a lot less silliness around me.
That sounds fantastic but it's essentially a different subject.
You seem to be dismissing any music that you don't have some pretty close participation in. Did it all start to go downhill with the invention of the gramaphone? Listening to Ella Fitzgerald or Vera Lynn or Elvis or Frank Sinatra was irrelevant for those that weren't actively jamming along with them?
I'm being facetious, I know you don't really mean that. My point is, listening (on your own, with no musical skill) to good quality music made by a real human is a valid activity. That's under threat, and the fact that making your own music with your friends isn't (or at least is less so) shouldn't detract from that.
On the other hand it allows teleportation. When I'm vibing in an Infected Mushroom concert with a few hundred people I can feel as if I'm on a beach stroll listening on my headphones, just the other people can actually hear what I hear and being neurally activated the same way I do.
When I'm on a beach stroll listening to Infected in my headphones I can imagine many people at the beach would be dancing with me if they shared my reality. It's just that reality became much more fragmented. It has some drawbacks but I like to see the good parts in it.
A hundred years ago, in order to feel that spiritual feeling of listening to such music, you had to be in proximity to the artists, which was really limiting. I'm grateful that I don't have to be physically near Infected Mushroom to feel the way their music makes me feel. It feels like time travel. Instead of moving yourself in time, you move the sound waves, summon them from alternate universes, right into your ears. This process is as magical as the whole experience.
> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.
I think closer to truth is: Participation became production.
More people are doing more things (including with instruments) but often times in a digital setting, sometimes more isolated and sometimes much more public (think: Twitch streams where chat is part of the whole social experience in a way that was never true for TV or other live events of that scale). More participatory online and more individualized as consumption, while some older forms of face-to-face amateur participation have become less socially normal or less visible.
This says not so much about music or culture really; it seems fairly aligned with where our lives and how we connect have moved more broadly.
I was in a park today, and I watched a man play a saxaphone. Other people had stopped to listen to him play.
It occurred to me that we appreciate this kind of public performance, but we get annoyed if someone plays their boombox too loud in public.
I tend to agree with you about participation, but I feel like there is a note unsung here.
> Something went wrong with music and culture in recent times. Participation became consumption.
There's probably more original music being created now than any time in history. Constant promotion of AI music is why you think it's not the case.
> Concerts became about filming a DJ twiddling a USB controller.
If you think being a DJ is more consumption than shouting cover songs near a lake, maybe you should try learn be a good DJ
> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
If you are a musician you know there're absolute geniuses who have ZERO formal music skills completely self taught. Some are world famous names we all know. That was never the problem.
> I honestly couldn't tell — or maybe care — if many of the Bachata songs played at parties are fully or partially AI-generated. I suspect a lot are. But most of the reason I'm there is not to fetishize the authenticity of music, but to hang out with friends and dance and have a good time.
You contradict yourself. If music really doesn't matter then why AI? The crippling fear of supporting a real human musician somewhere?
Authenticity (as Gidon Kremer once said), above all, is what is genuinely felt, and the inner world of a dedicated listener who has built up a relationship with their music over a lifetime is full of genuine feeling. It _is_ participation, not mere consumption. Even if the act of listening is a private one. Art forms need properly attentive audiences.
I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.
Q: What about the people doing interesting things with AI in their music? Some people are doing interesting things so isn’t it worth giving those ones a chance?
A: sorry maybe they are but unfortunately i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement so count me out?
Q: But AI is just another way for people to express themselves
A: sorry that may or may not be the case but either way i’m part of the fuck off ai music movement?
I loved reading this, thanks for sharing your take
Imo where I am from, asking people not used to dance to dance in public was always tall order.
And when you look at broader culture, people dancing seem to welcome only small or bigger mockery, unless they dance really well.
I think many people do see value though in the knowledge that a human took the time to create a creative work though. Its the same sort of difference you see between music made by someone who makes music because they like making music, and corporate music. The latter was historically kept in check though by the amount of talent necessary to get taken seriously to make anything.
People can do whatever they want, but they shouldn't expect an audience.
To be honest, this comment reads to me like LLM output.
You have a history of comments that were clearly written by a human, with character, but this comment stands out to me as an outlier. It has that semi-neutral, slightly pontificating tone of an LLM that just feels off in a way that's difficult to articulate.
I truly mean no offense. There's clearly a human behind this account.
> If AI music allows someone with less formal musical skills to feel like they are joining in and making something, then maybe it has its value.
An emphatic no. What we need to do is to stop comparing every hobby performance, whether it's music or dancing, with the top 10 artists in their field. We need people to learn, and try, and feel safe to be visible and thus vulnerable in group situations without fear of being mocked on social media for eternity. To achieve this, we need to stop filming people, and we need a societal norm that treats a violation of this ban on par with spitting someone in the face. We need to celebrate amateurs that simply try to improve their raw, honest skills.
What we don't need to do is to give everybody a Fisher Price toy with a "make it sound awesome" button. We need human connections.