Last week, Paul McCartney’s mention of John Lennon’s last song sent fans giddy in anticipation of its release. A cassette recorded in the late Beatles member’s New York flat has been cleaned up by artificial intelligence (AI) and is set to debut this year, more than four decades after his murder. imagine that. While AI is expected to affect almost every field, we should not forget what it can do in the world of chords and keys, tones and ear-worms, music and harmony. Recently, voice synthesis by AI has been causing a lot of surprises. All it takes is a singer’s voice sample for the software to compose and render songs into. This type of vocal cloning has raised concerns of intellectual property theft, even as singers are exploring pay-per-use opportunities. Who deserves credit for the AI-assisted or generated output is another question. How can an AI-rich market share its rewards equitably so that artists keep their art and audiences are satisfied? Or what if AI is poised to grab onto the core of this business? It’s not just graphic equalizers, the entire music industry has been put in flux by technology.
It was a sign of time when the Grammy Awards recently revised its rulebook for next year’s competition, including clauses specifying any AI use in song creation. The move was also a high-profile nod to AI’s ability to mislead human judges about prize-worthy talent. Music has always used digital and other instruments to improve the results human composers are credited with, but AI music-making marks a sharp departure for its own human-like agency. A perfect creation can be created by AI and we will not be able to create it. Of course, this would all be artificial. After all, AI music tools are trained on vast datasets of tone, format, genre, lyrics, mood, voice, etc., and what they deliver is taken from what is already in digital format. In other words, all AI can do is provide us with souped-up remixes. Nevertheless, as long as they can express feelings and describe what humans do, they can be considered authentic for the most part. And therein lies the rub. Will the global audience market prove to be smart enough? Or will musicians find their roles automated by machines for the sake of cost and time efficiency?
It depends on whether creativity as a human faculty is overestimated or underestimated by music listeners. It is not easy to predict how the market will develop, but we can expect human ingenuity to rise to the challenge. Although a computer can be made to churn out emotion, it can create rhythms and beats that seem soul-soothing from analysis of past response data, but no such real heart exists, from where it originates. This should give real artists an edge over digital seekers. Learning also has its limits; Even the ultimate learning machine cannot learn the emotions of a uniquely lived life in all its subtle nuances. The words, melodies, and sounds that affect us usually come from somewhere deep down, whether it’s the pain of unrequited love, the pain of persecution, or the grief of losing a loved one. Human beings are imperfectly perfect, and it must flow into art in order to qualify as art. A genuine song or musical composition is a form of poetry, broadly defined as the soul revealed to us. And the kind of self-display that can win hearts is best left to humans. Lennon was right about not being the world’s only dreamer. And this is another point in favor of real music.
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Updated: June 22, 2023, 11:24 PM IST