#155 AI Music is Not Music - Adam Neely

35:06Alex O'Connor:And that's something that the world is better off having. And there have got to be, and this is me doing the sort of Suno plug here now, there have got to be thousands, if not millions of people who have that within them that we won't get to hear except for tools like Suno. Yeah. I mean, I'll just go back to the digital audio workstations. There's so many free digital audio workstations that can and have been used for the past 10 to 15 years where people can do that very, very easily. And I will say with Splice, this is going to be my plug for Splice. Anytime you mention a tool, it's like, oh, this is the plug for this particular tool.

35:44Splice is a loop library that you can find anything. I mean, it's the professional loop library and it's very, very, very extensive with the kinds of really cool sounds you can get. And I use Splice all the time. It's the standard. I'll say this. Yeah, I agree that like, first of all, with hip hop, there's a huge amount of human intentionality to sample selection and record diving and, you know, chopping it up on a drum machine. Some of the greatest, honestly, I think musical achievements in recorded musical history come from people like Jay Dilla, who really kind of expanded the rhythmic vocabulary of what was even possible because of layering different kinds of time fields and samples in these really interesting ways that could have only been done by sampling other people's music and arranging them in this beautiful collage.

36:34And it's his impact on terms of musicianship, like live musicianship has been huge over the past 10 to 15 years. And then in terms of like rappers and the lyricism, the wordplay, the rhythmic delivery, like that to me is is just deeply musical on just such a such a deep level. It's so inspiring. Their craft is so inspiring. What they can do is awesome. um the selection of a beat and then the pairing of the wrapping with the beat you know you could say that that's like a wine and cheese pairing or something very like you know that's a taste thing um but there's something beautiful in that um part of why i don't find the same kind of inspiration in suno is because of the slot machine aspect of it meaning you don't really it's like you keep kind of like going back and like seeing if you can get something good seeing if you can get a banger singing if you can get a banger and the idea of like craft being um repeatable is an important one meaning like when you are doing something doing a skill have a skill you want to know the outcome of that skill you want to know uh like if i do this this happens that is what a craft is and the more that you develop it the more you kind of know what the end result of your skill is and that's essential.

37:59Like, um, the, my partner is a platonic scholar and she says that, uh, Plato says that, you know, you want a doctor to know whether or not they are going to kill you or cure you through their actions. You, a skilled doctor is necessary for that result. And so, you know, I think about that, like, oh yeah, like I want to, that result of my actions to be, predictable. I want that to happen because that's inspiring for myself and other people and essentially like very important in many, many ways. And so for hip hop, you know, there's sampling and chopping up samples. You like, that's a very, you know, the end result of it.

38:42There's a craft and a skill there that I think is, that is, that I look up to. But I hear what you're saying. I do hear what you're saying in terms of taking these tools and then inspiring other people to rap and to write lyrics and to sing and use these tools to bring something out of them. I can see that very honestly being a very useful tool. And I don't want to make people feel like that I am completely against this or completely against the ideas here. I just think that this is maybe the wrong way of going about doing it.

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39:52Alex O'Connor:keep it going because it's like this is great well i just i i feel like i spend so much time abstractly thinking about like ai and and my my job is something which could be quite severely threatened by ai like a sort of great ai interviewer who asks the best most interesting questions you know um i can i can see that sort of fear but it's nice talking somebody who sort of lives in an industry where this is a much more direct and obvious threat at least in the terms of technologies that are being developed i i haven't seen any um ai interview tools yet um but they're yeah they're probably they're just not very good yeah yeah i you're someone who you don't just sort of it's not just that your job is in music and that you're some like exec at a at a music industry you know company or whatnot like presumably you also love making music like there's something about the musical process which you enjoy that you feel is meaningful and without which you feel like your life wouldn't be what it was and so like i'm just imagining to myself like suppose that you just like you just lost your ability to do it like i don't know you lost your arms and your legs and you were sort of bedridden you could no longer play an instrument um suppose you also maybe just like lost the ability to communicate in anything other than binary code or you sort of had a stroke and couldn't speak english anymore basically like you still had this desire to get ideas and musicality out of your system but you can't play an instrument and you can't have meaningful discussions with other people the only way that you could do it would be to sort of feed your ideas into a computerized machine that would produce some music where you could go that is at least somewhat the result of my you know musical ideation would in that circumstance you just go like no like i'm just not going to do that because the reason i asked this kind of ridiculous thought experiment is because i would imagine that you being completely disabled in that way like physically and communicatively it's probably a bit like what it feels like to be someone right now who doesn't have any musical ability they can't play an instrument they they yeah sure you could like learn the guitar but it's going to take 10 years before you could even play a bar chord you know you know what i mean and like you can't even communicate with other people because you you kind of don't have the vocabulary like even if you just wanted to go and work with the producer you know you you don't know what eq is or reverb you don't know what terms like automation mean you don't know how auto shune works or when it would be useful maybe even if it exists in the first place and so like i don't know if you were in it that's why i sort of have to imagine you in this ridiculous sort of circumstance to be like, would you just say, I can no longer do music?

42:41Alex O'Connor:Or would you be like, actually, no, I love the process so much that if this is the only way I can get my ideas out into the world, I'm willing to do it. So there's two things. If it's me specifically, if me, Adam Neely, was bedridden and unable to interact with the world and only had computer technology with which to write my music, I would probably use Sibelius or Digital Audio Workstation or some kind of other means of writing honestly a text a text document would do it for me because i've trained myself to be able to hear music in my head and be able to to work out ideas that way and you know there's ways of notating music and expressing that um through audiation which is the musical idea or the musical term of um audio audio imagery audio visualization basically and so like most musicians train themselves through many years of practice to audiate very, very clearly.

43:40And so because of that, I feel like for me particularly, I would use other tools because Suno, quite frankly, doesn't do a great job of matching that ideation. But for somebody who is not me and for who doesn't have those tools, I can see it. And I honestly, in the video that I made, I suggested that that was a possible means for people who, for whatever reason, they are not able to engage with music in any other possible way, maybe, because there's this deep, deep desire in essentially all of us to make music and connect with other people through music. There's some theories about how human musicality developed through evolutionary means.

44:26I talk about this a little bit. Stephen Mithin has this great book called Singing Neanderthals, which suggests that before language developed the way that we use it now through like grammar and semantic meaning, musical cues, sung musical cues, rhythm and timbre and pitch were very, very important means of communicating emotional states between early humans or human precursors. And essentially we sung as a means of creating bonds between us in early social bands. And so there's a very, very deep need to do that, to communicate emotional states with other people through music. And we are profoundly alienated from that as a culture and as a society, at least in the West, because we didn't grow up singing.

45:14We didn't grow up making music usually. I mean, we may make music in schools. God bless the public school teachers. And for anybody who, and church, and if you're in church, honestly, to me, that's the strongest argument for organized religion is the amount of music that's made in organized religion. I grew up going to church and that was the thing that I took from it is I learned a little bit about singing. I learned a little bit about music making in church. And so there's something very, very deep in there, but most of us are not in that. Most of us just never had that. And so there's this really, really deep thing in the back of our brains, in the back of our bodies saying that we need to be making music.

45:55We need to do this. But for many, many reasons, we are alienated from that music making. Recorded music gives us a little taste. We get a little taste of experiencing music and singing along the different songs, of being very close to other people because of shared musical tastes and shared experiences with recorded music. But we don't have much experience making the music. And I think that's why Suno is so popular is because at least it gives that, it scratches that itch and it gives an easy entry point for many, many people. That said, I think that there are many other entry points that are potentially better, that potentially can connect us a lot deeper.

46:40Like honestly, singing with other people is probably the big one, even if it's just like shouting a football chant or something like that, that goes way deeper. You know, I was at like a Mexican restaurant the other day and there was karaoke happening on in the background and just in the other room. And it was like, you know, crazy people were singing and screaming. It was great. I remember thinking, this is the most profoundly human thing, and it's something that brings people together in the way that singing in church or singing in sporting events or just singing in general does, that people are cut off from if they're using AI to have that same experience because they're making music, but ultimately there's not that connection with another person.

47:26so to answer your question yes i think that's okay but i would prefer if we don't get to that

47:32Alex O'Connor:point where we need it yeah i want to talk about another concern you raised in your video which was about this development of narcissistic music oh yeah i mean you talk about how yeah it's all very well and good uh taking other people's materials and reusing them like a like a sampler does but at least in that case people know who their influences are you know they point to particular people who they grew up listening to who they were trying to emulate but i think it was on the like the r slash suno subreddit or something somebody asked like yeah who are your greatest um like ai musical influences and everyone's just like no like oh i don't know what you mean like i don't really have any um and also when when asked for people's like favorite ai musicians they were like oh who are your favorite like people to listen to it was just comment after comment of people saying like well myself you know like i like my own music isn't that the point that's that's why we have a tool like suno because now we can create the music that we want to hear and i think people see it as a kind of you know in the way that like spotify does your spotify weekly and it sort of handpicks music that it thinks you will like because you know ideally music is is the music that you discover is going to be the music that you particularly really really like and if you can just like create music from the ground up with with that kind of selectivity it's like really cool so now yeah like my favorite musician is me because I can produce the music that I want to make.

49:14Alex O'Connor:And isn't that like the point of music to create the kind of stuff you want to hear in the world? Isn't that the whole point? I would say no. We have been led to that point through exactly what you were saying, the Spotify algorithmic Discover Weekly or whatever that is, where we're being fed music that is uniquely curated to our tastes. But what's interesting, the pattern that's developed over the past 10 years, is people have stopped really looking at the bands. People don't follow bands. People don't trust a band or an artist for that. They trust Spotify for that. And so because of that, Spotify generates these playlists, but you stop having any kind of personal relationship to the band, understanding who the musicians are, who might make the music, the artist, who's the singer, all that.

50:03It's instead essentially alienating consumers from the people who make the music. And so Suno and commercial generative AI is essentially the next evolution of it, of this, because, you know, at a certain point, you just don't need that person who makes the music for you. You can be the person who makes the music for you. And that creates a little bit more of a sensation of ownership over your listening patterns. And there's this tendency towards creating your own experience, your own cultural experience through AI. And the people who are making these AI songs, they really love the songs to the point where they're not listening to any other AI music, because why would you listen to any other AI music?

50:49You could just curate your own AI music. But what's worrying is they stop listening to music that other people make, like classic recordings, classic pieces of music that everybody knows and loves, because they are so involved in their own creations is the term that people end up using. I'm a bit worried about that because music is a culture. Music is the cultural touchstone by which we can interact with other people and find some kind of meaning with other people. This is what culture does. It's a means of expressing yourself through a larger identity. And so the thing I always say is like if you're in a discussion with another person about like a tv show or something or a movie or a song um and the the discussion is happening among other people about a tv show that you haven't seen like people are talking about breaking bad or severance or whatever it's profoundly alienating because you haven't seen the show and they're making references to the show and they're excited about something that happened in the show and you don't care and you kind of maybe vaguely want to join them, but like at a certain point you're like, eh, whatever, I'm not part of this.

52:07There's something very like, oh, I'm not part of it. It feels so weird and wrong and off when your friends, people who you were close to just a second ago, are now having a shared body or shared discussion about something that's different. When culture is so personalized, essentially every discussion about culture becomes the equivalent of people talking about severance without you having seen severance. And that is the direction if you have this kind of very fragmented culture. Now, we were already kind of headed that direction because we don't have pop stars in the same way that we do. People's individual musical tastes are so fragmented anyway.

52:47But at least you can find a culture and group of people that get excited about a piece of music and get excited about this stuff in the same way. But the danger, I think, is that people having hyper-personalized music will lead to total cultural isolation, which is a bad thing, in my opinion.

53:09Alex O'Connor:That is, of course, assuming that live music isn't a thing, by which I don't just mean like live performance like going to see a band i mean things like going to a nightclub and they start playing a particular song and you know all the girlies run back from the bathroom because it's you know their favorite tune is on that kind of thing that is something that ai can't replicate except in so far as people do listen to other people's ai music because you all need to sort of have the familiar sort of touchstones and i feel like if you're going to put on music at a house party if there are just two people in a room if you're like with your partner and you know you're having a romantic dinner and you're going to put some music on in the background like that there is this role that music plays importantly for people which goes much beyond the sort of uh sort of inner listening and to me i guess i do see like i don't want to give you the impression that i don't see the the problems that you're raising i just want to see how far they go um And I'm sort of representing a more mild view on AI here, although I am actually on your side about this.

54:17Alex O'Connor:I think this is extremely terrifying and horrifying and all the like. But I think, you know, I feel as though I've kind of got two different musical discographies in terms of what I listen to. there's the kind of thing i listen to when i'm like on a walk with my headphones in and it's the kind of thing that i would play if i had some like friends over and that it's like it's not the same music because those are two different kinds of experiences when i'm like headphones in on a train you know i want to sort of absorb myself into a particular world you know it's the classic looking out of the window and imagining that you're in a music video kind of thing it's all it's almost it's this extremely personal thing you know you almost imagine yourself like in the song or something.

54:56Alex O'Connor:Whereas when you're playing music for other people, it's like, hey, listen to this thing that we're participating in together isn't this cool. And I feel like as far as AI music is kind of narcissistic, is about what I like, is about just me. I feel like to some degree, that might be how people are already kind of engaging with music on the private level. And that would only be a massive problem if there wasn't this other context in which music is much more just necessarily shared you know what i mean yeah i mean um the musicologist christopher small has this great term i love using it called musicking where uh it tries to move music away from a product or something that is an object and more into an activity and this is kind of where the musical academic field is starting to really think about music as a select like activities that you do and your relationship to other people with sound and the space that you're in so what you were doing on the train with the earphones and just like having that cinematic experience which is so fun it's like one of my favorite things to do put on some like dexter gordon ballads and then ride the subway in New York is like, oh, it's awesome.

56:12Highly recommended. But like that particular experience is a fundamentally different experience, different musicking of music than so many other things. You're talking about like, you know, the DJ at the bar and the girlies come in to dance and all that. You putting on music at a party with the friends. Those are different ways that we engage in musicking different kinds of music. And the AI thing is essentially the equivalent of just the headphones in and then that's what music is and to me it's like oh like that's one thing that's cool but if you've i'm sure if you've used suno and you have shared your ai music with your friends and family chances are they're not that interested and i i don't mean i don't mean that like in a pejorative sense that's the experience that i've heard from the vast majority of people they're not particularly interested because that music was designed very specifically for you to listen to in your headphones.

57:10And that's the only musicking that that was designed for. But the shared social experience of like, check out this music, this music from this band, or like, you know, the DJ is doing some crazy mashup of all these different styles that requires some kind of shared, I guess, contract, social contract between everybody that these are the pieces of music that we're going to do this thing to. um and you know there might be some musical elements that cause you to dance or want to dance or do stuff usually it's it's like uh usually it's some kind of reference or some ridiculous thing and that's uh very important i mean i was in a wedding band for uh for six or seven years and you know we're playing we're playing all the hits we're playing like abba but we're also playing i don't know we're playing pink i guess i don't know why i'm saying abba and pink, but journey, don't stop believing.

58:01All these pop songs from a very different styles, and everybody knew all the songs, all the lyrics, all the time. And at a wedding, which is, you know, there's always music at a wedding. And that human experience of everybody going on the dance floor and sharing these specific pieces of cultural knowledge is just such a deeply human thing. this is why the narcissistic listening pattern is a it's just it's a bit terrifying for me that this is now the thing that um is becoming the standard or at least a lot of people are doing yeah but i

58:40Alex O'Connor:you know i when i heard you talking about this in the video like this fear that people said like you know my favorite music is my own music um i thought to myself like in any other context I would think this is the mark of a true artist I mean people like to sound humble so they don't say they don't like to big up their own music but I can you imagine like a painter who like you ask them about you know what what they thought their art was an expression of like what it meant to them and they were like oh I think it's I think it's a load of crap no I I don't really care for this um I don't think it's very good but people you know people seem to love it so I keep painting it you'd be like well that doesn't make you a very good artist that makes you kind of commercial whereas the artist who says you know when somebody says oh like are you excited that people are really enjoying your art and they're sharing with each other and they're buying prints to put in their living room and he goes i i don't care about any of that like i mean you know good for them fine but that's not why i do this because i felt like this was missing from the world i didn't see anyone else making this and so i produced this because i felt like it needed to exist that's like yeah there's the artist you know in other words i feel like the most artistic kind of creators are quite like inward looking and if we didn't have this allergy to you know sounding a bit prideful you know a lot of artists could honestly say yeah my favorite music is my music that's that's why i make it is because i i enjoy the process and i enjoy what what results and so i just kind of wanted to question this suspicion you had of people saying i love my own music like if you were to go and ask a bunch of like kids who had just undergone like a two-year music course right and you interviewed them before the course started and they said my favorite artist is katie perry and sabrina carpenter and at the end of this music course where they learn how to play guitar and piano you ask these kids what's your favorite music and they went you know what it's it's the music that i make you know it's the stuff you'd be like yeah awesome dude that's so great man like good for you you'd feel good right and so i don't know i just wanted to like when i heard in your video you're talking about this problem of people everyone saying my music is my favorite music i kind of thought i get why that feels wrong but are we sure like is that not the mark of a great artist so i got a lot of pushback on that one and i i agree i actually do agree with what you just said um my own relationship so there's actually quite a lot of uh detail in this in my response I'm saying like for my own music, like I like it, but it's not my favorite.

1:01:15There's a difference between my compositions and then my recordings. And this is one of those interesting things that we need to separate sometimes when talking about music, the composition versus the recording, which is actually what the copyright industry does anyway. I love my compositions. My compositions are awesome. They're honestly my favorite music. I like what I write and I like to play what I write. It's honestly why I do it. I love writing stuff and then playing it. It's awesome. Recordings to me are like a kind of a capture of the composition, but sometimes an imperfect capture of the truer platonic ideal of the composition or whatever.

1:02:00But I can hear the things which are like, ah, it's not quite right, you know, all that stuff. But for the most part, I love the stuff that I write. And for people who don't perform their compositions and the recording is kind of like what the best reflection of the composition, sometimes they make that correlation like recording and composition are the same, especially in styles of music like electronic dance music or any kind of electronic style where they really are the same. and they you know when I made these statements about like you know people who are become self obsessed about their own music they didn't quite understand that so I want to I want to say this that I love my music and I think it's awesome that people love their own music and I think that's beautiful and you kind of have to have that sort of self-assuredness that what you're doing is necessary for the world like you said Thank you.

1:02:51And the thing that makes it like, wait, what is stopping listening to other music? Because I like, I mean, I listen to my own music, sure, but I certainly listen to, you know, I don't know, Stevie Wonder or Victor Wooten is, of course, like the the the bass player that like really inspired me. I listen to all these other musicians. I check them out all the time. Like part of part of what makes it so exciting to be a musician is to listen to other people's music, because then when you get ideas for your own stuff, but then you can also be like inspired by their greatness. I was talking earlier about the craft.

1:03:31There's something very inspiring about greatness, whatever that might mean. And looking towards other people for greatness is one of the things that I do all the time so that I can try and be as great as I possibly can be. And I feel like if you stop looking outward, then and everything becomes very like self-referential, there's no room for growth. and for people who are artists we constantly want to try or for anybody honestly not for artists but just for humans we constantly want to be growing and becoming the best best and better versions of ourselves in order to do that we have to both look inward and outward um and so thank you for pushing back on that because i i wanted to clarify that i i love my own music and i think everybody should it's just that there's another step there you kind of have to love other people's music too um you think everybody should love your music everybody should love mine yeah but um but but but seriously like i i think that that the ability to love other people's music um is very or is is very honestly i think you need to do that yeah and you know even like somebody might be listening

1:04:44Alex O'Connor:and say i don't need to do that like you know there's no rule of the universe that says i need to listen to other people's music and i kind of want to say yeah fair enough but i would i would slightly maybe rephrase what you say in that in like making the context clear we're talking about what counts as art and music and i think we could just say look i mean if you are not listening to other people creating like things through a particular process then fine you can do that you don't have to go and listen to music but then you're just not doing anything with any musicality right the context of the conversation is like what counts as musicality what counts as art and it's almost like it feels like you want to say that although these ai systems can produce sound waves which bring sort of pleasant feelings that are rhythmic and melodic they kind of don't count as as music or as as art i don't know how you define what music is i know that's a bit of a sticky question but perhaps a more important question would less be what counts as music and more what counts as like musicality or art or artistic music because we could just start to sort of pull those things apart and say that what we're really talking about here is not music per se but rather like artistry and it's artistry you need to listen to other people you need to it's a definitionally human thing like yeah sure you can have ai music and you don't have to listen to anything but ai music but you're not listening to anything involving artistry in the truest sense yeah i mean i i agree like i would say i mean in my some of my more controversial statements i've said that ai music is not music which i think is not necessarily true yeah sure you could define it as music um musicality to me is more defined by interactions with other people um and your ability to communicate an emotional state from yourself to another person which like i was saying earlier is a fundamentally human thing.

1:06:41There's evolutionary basis towards that. And your ability to communicate an emotional state from person to person is your artistry. Great artists are able to communicate great things and communicate it very effectively from person to person and maybe to many different people at the same time. So to me, that's artistry and that's musicality. Um, I, you know, I was thinking about like definitions of music. Um, and the music is one of those things that it bumps up against language very frequently, meaning like I use the language analogy all the time because, uh, the more you think about music as a language, a means of communicating from person to person, uh, the more it makes sense, even though it's not a language, it's not, it's certainly not the universal language, which is something that people sometimes say.

1:07:34But it is very language-like, and it's a useful way of understanding how music functions, how we learn music. Our relationship to music is to think of it as a language. And I think of, you know, with that regard, it's like listening to your own AI music is like just having conversations with ChatGPT all day. Sure, you can do that. Fine. What's going on? Like, and then what? You know, I'm not saying that listening to your own AI music will lead to some form of AI psychosis, which is what happens sometimes when people have conversations with ChatGPT all day. But it's certainly not healthy and it's certainly not human and it's certainly not musical, in my opinion.

1:08:19Alex O'Connor:So where does this go? I mean, here we are, like, you know, scared businessmen at the year sort of 2000, really worried about this internet thing and how it's going to change everything. But like, isn't there a kind of inevitability to the development of AI music tools? And at the same time, perhaps an inevitability of an increasing reluctance of people to engage with them. I can kind of imagine a future in which, in the same way that you have to put age ratings on music, or you have to label food when it contains certain allergens, that there'll be some requirement to label AI-generated music, and there'll be this whole organic music industry similar to how you can go and buy organic eggs at the shop or whatever.

1:09:11Alex O'Connor:um like how do you feel about that are you like optimistic about it do you think that kind of thing will exist or do you think we will just end up in some kind of like ai music dystopia uh you know i'm i'm cautiously optimistic uh you know band camp has already banned ai generated music from uh from band camp um there is a huge pushback and it's it's interesting there's a youth pushback which typically you don't want to have youth pushback in your new musical movements. Typically, that's not how culture is disseminated because the people in Gen Alpha who are currently using that's so AI to mean something that's fake or bad are going to be people who are, you know, using musical and artistic tools for the next 30 to 40 years.

1:09:58And so their formative years are thinking of this technology as something fundamentally uncool. uh i don't think that that is good for the future of this technology as a cultural item now it will change things i just don't know how um but i think the adoption of it has been lopsidedly from much older generations than younger generations especially in music and art it it has been and i think for a couple reasons one of them one of them being like older generations um who have felt locked out of the musical process now find a very easy way in whereas younger generations who are maybe more technical savvy technically savvy or otherwise know of a lot of the other tools that are available to them have been using them up until this point so don't feel as locked out of the musical process or locked out of culture as older generations do older generations always feel locked out of culture that's what happens like i'm a millennial i'm starting to feel very locked out of culture, which is fine.

1:10:58And I understand that I'm not going to be with it and I'm certainly not with it right now. But AI as a means of grabbing something for yourself is, you know, very alluring there. I think human generated music, there's a premium on that for sure. And we're already seeing that and how advertisers think about using AI-generated art in ads. You know, like Coca-Cola is using AI all the time in their ads. They've really gone all in. But then other brands like Porsche make a big deal about how using AI or they're using like human artists for their ads. And so it's become like, you know, AI is for the masses.

1:11:43Humans are for the elite, basically, or it's the prestige version of it. So I imagine that happening more and more, like being human generated, being a sign of class almost, that there's a wonderful creator by the name of Magic, I believe. She has this video essay I saw, I think she's a DJ, called The Chronically Online Will Be the New Underclass, where people who are online and require the use of AI tools or like engaged in, you know, the AI slop that is going to be generated over and over again on the new internet, whether it being music or art or what have you, are going to be profoundly disadvantaged to people who are, who have the ability to touch grass essentially, who have the ability to log off.

1:12:36And I see that really being the case in, in music, meaning like the ability to go see a live musical performance or the ability to engage with live music. And I'm using live music kind of like you did where like a DJ performance, I'm considering live music in this regards, like being in a room with other people sharing a kind of musical experience is going to be seen as like the, like almost a class signifier because for many people, they're unable to join that kind of experience. And I find that maybe kind of part of the bad future that I'm talking about in my Suno video because, you know, live music and the experiencing of live music is kind of just, there was no class signifier beforehand.

1:13:25Like every social class across history made music in some regards, but now live music or being able to perform or being able to engage with that is going to, I think, become a lot more, a lot rarer or a lot, a lot seen as more premier, I guess. Um, that's, that's my fear. And I think where things are headed. Um, but I think the good thing is that, like I said, uh, the younger generation isn't on board and that's not normally a good thing. If you want to, if you want to like show how cool and awesome your product is. yeah that's true i think um kind of makes me think of like lab-grown diamonds or something

1:14:09Alex O'Connor:i've never been interested in in jewelry at all but as far as i understand we can now create like chemically identical diamonds in a lab such that they are like literally that like the same thing but people just people just want the one that was dug up from the ground by some you know poor slave child somewhere probably you know they want they want the real thing just because it's the real thing even if the produced alternative is like chemically identical and i can kind of imagine a world in which ai music gets so good that it can it can just make you weep buckets it's so beautiful it's like almost like more perfectly beautiful than than anything a human has made but people want the real thing not just because it's better but because it's human and the same reason for the same reason they want to play real people at chess rather than chess computers i mean you can you can play against chess computers which are designed not to like automatically beat you which is designed to like perfectly match your skill level which in theory is like the perfect opponent right like it's going to be more brilliant at not only knowing how to play chess but also knowing exactly the kind of game that you need to play to make you a better chess player awesome but you just want to play a human because there's something about that which for its own sake is worth having and surely people are going to feel the same way about music which is the most like human thing that the people can do it's like the most human thing uh that that i can i can basically imagine yeah for sure and the reason for that is because uh when you're doing music there's so much more than music in the doing of music uh you are trying to do you're trying to make a connection with people.

1:15:56You're trying to make a, trying to understand another human being. That's a very fundamental thing. Like I keep saying, it's trying to understand emotional states so that you can feel closer. You can feel like you're in community with another person. And if the second that you know that something is AI, that part of the brain like shuts off, meaning like, yeah, it sounds good, but like, I'm not learning anything like deep in here. Even if you don't understand why you're shutting off, but deep in the back here, your brain shuts down. It's like, oh, I'm not learning anything. I'm not making any kind of connection here.

1:16:31I'm not able to find any real connection because there's nothing at the other end. and yeah the humanity of it all is something i think really fundamental now you point about like making something per like perfect or beautiful i don't know about that maybe like and the reason why i'm saying i don't know about it is because our individual reactions to music are so personalized that you know what might might make you cry or whatever well might i might feel like uh that's not really it. I don't know. I don't get it. I don't understand it. And then that kind of interaction where you're crying, you're like, oh my God, this is the most beautiful thing, and another person doesn't understand it, is alienating.

1:17:15And I think that will push a lot of people away from the AI music to try and find something that both people can find at least some value in, even if it didn't have such the emotional reaction in one person. I'm a huge fan of Nina Simone, for example, like one of the there's some some recordings that I cannot help but have an emotional reaction to every time I hear them. And Nina Simone's Don't Cry in Bed is one of them. And it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. But if I was to play that recording for one of my Sungazer bandmates, they might not have that same reaction because they don't know Nina Simone's story.

1:17:51They don't know the whole history behind the song, etc. And so I probably won't do that. I probably won't have that kind of interaction with those bandmates until we kind of come to some discussion or like we learn a little bit more together about the story and the history and the backstory and all of that. And with AI, you can't like what is what is there to learn about the song? What is there to learn about the history of the song? It might make you cry because the lyrics are so beautiful, but who is the person doing it and why did they write it? and to me that's ultimately why i find value in recorded music because of that kind of connection

1:18:29Alex O'Connor:yeah i always talk about this example from the famous art uh like art critic or so i never know how to pronounce his name i think it's john berger but it might be john berger um and he wrote a book called ways of seeing and made a really popular tv show titled the same yeah um And one of the things in the book that really jumped out at me was when he sort of showed a painting, he puts a painting, he says, just take a look at this and see what you think, right? And you look at it and it's a picture of some birds and you're like, okay, it's pretty cool, you know, whatever. And then you turn the page and it shows you the same image.

1:19:04Alex O'Connor:But now it says, it's labeled, it says, this is the last painting that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself. and he's sort of asking how that changes your interaction with with the painting and this happens in the art world all the time like you see people interacting with like i don't know i went to see um i was in i was in vienna like yesterday and i saw the kiss this this famous painting oh yeah yeah and it's like you know cool and you sort of go into this museum and it's in this room with other paintings by the same artist and i've got to say it's not really my kind of kind of art like i'm not i'm not really that interested in it and had i not known that this was a super famous painting i probably wouldn't even look twice at it right i would have looked at all the stuff on the wall that wouldn't have jumped out at me but because i knew that that was the famous one i was like i stood for a little bit longer and i was like yeah maybe i should i should give this some more sort of attention in other words like the context in which we view a piece of art is like a part of the art itself it always is whether we like it or not it changes our experience of the art it changes how much we enjoy it um because even if the art say say there are two pieces of art that are equally as good if one of them you like were expecting to be really cool even though it's as good as this other one it will be more underwhelming than the other one because you had no expectations on the other one so in a weird way you'd kind of prefer the second one in terms of how like whelmed you were and that that context never gets detached from the art And so to think that like music, which is always a process of storytelling to some degree, there's always some reason why a song exists, even if the song itself isn't telling a story, even if there's just a story about how, oh, this person like accidentally pressed this button on the machine or how there's that Gorillaz song where the guy just pressed the preset on the piano or whatever.

1:20:54Alex O'Connor:and that becomes kind of part of the story of the song um the story of ai music is always exactly the same which is something typed in a prompt and it spat it out and so yeah maybe the the isolated music on its own is one day going to be just as good as anything else but as you say when people do music they're doing much more than just the music itself otherwise it wouldn't be an art form It would just be a bunch of vibrations in the air, which are tickling your eardrums, which is great, but that's not the same thing as art. Yeah. Well, I said I love the painting The Kiss because I had like in my parents' house growing up, we had a we had a poster of The Kiss.

1:21:33And so I remember seeing it every day. I don't know anything about the painting. I remember seeing it, but I think I really liked it. And it's part of my story and the way that music is a part of so many people's stories. Like I remember just growing up listening to like the Beatles. My father was really into the Beatles. Maybe you can drive my car for whatever reason. When I was five years old, I screamed that at the top of my lungs. And so that's a part of my story. It's like a really big part of my growing up and my relationship to my family. My mother is a musician and she and her family are musicians.

1:22:08And so because of that, like I have a relationship to all the pieces of music that, you know, I had to learn when I was like playing piano, Clementi and I don't know, like all these composers who wrote these like little piano pieces. There's a long part of my life is defined by these pieces of music and my relationships to them and the world around me. And that is vitally important. Now, I can see how pieces of AI music could be important to people. One of the big things that Suno loves to tout is funny meme songs among friends. You do something really stupid and going out, and then you make a little song and text it to each other.

1:22:56That could be part of your story, this funny meme song that then is stuck in your head, and then you share it among your friends. And in a way, I think that that's okay. I think that that ends up being a means of connecting people together. The only way that you have to connect to a relative who maybe is in hospice care, for example, and this is very important that you're able to, before they pass, to be able to reference something in your life that you have shared together, and now you can create a piece of music very easily and give it to them and share and have that moment. That is something that I think is valuable too.

1:23:35It's these stories, these little individual moments in time that make music so valuable and art so valuable and culture so valuable because it becomes part of yourself in a very real way. The memory, the stuff that's burned in the back of your brain. And I think as long as it continues to be that, and as long as we cultivate that in ourselves and our society, I think there is a good future for us. So not to be all doom and gloom, I think there is a good future, just knowing that that story is very, very important in how we shape ourselves and the world around us.

1:24:10Alex O'Connor:Is there a redemptive story here for technology like Suno? I'm wondering if you were on the board of directors and you basically had this attitude of like, look, this technology is inevitable you know it's not it's not going to stop these people aren't just going to shut it off because some people kicked up a fuss about it um but they give you this option of some input they say but you know you're a musician and you know a lot about the music industry and we're just you know business people we don't really know like is there anything you would say to them like okay if you have to do it then fine but at least do it this way or change this is there anything that you could do aside from just getting rid of the technology that you think would improve it or make it more musical?

1:24:53Well, so I'll say a couple of different possible answers. The first one is a very interesting one from Timbaland, one of his responses. So Timbaland is a legendary producer who has worked a lot with Suno, creating AI compositions and all that. In an interview, he very interestingly suggested, you know, he's a big advocate for the technology, but he very interestingly suggested that um it shouldn't be for everyone you have to know your craft your musical craft before you can access these musical these tools like uh ai which is almost completely contrary to you know the stated mission of this it's like completely the opposite and i wish uh i wish more people made a big deal of that statement because to me that was like oh this is very interesting and it's not what is in the common narrative meaning like this is a specialty tool that only people who have passed a certain threshold of skill and craft and dedication to the culture and all this can access.

1:25:52So I know that's impossible, but maybe like, yeah, maybe like - Why would that be a good thing? Sorry?

1:26:00Alex O'Connor:Why would that be a good thing? It means that there's less slop in theory, meaning there's less stuff polluting the internet, less stuff which is low effort designed specifically to create money specifically as a grift meaning that if you have spent enough time dedicating towards making music and uh in yourself uh you then therefore can use these tools for other things i'm only half serious when i'm suggesting that like okay yeah whatever i just thought it was an interesting one um i also would push back and saying that I don't think it is inevitable. Nuclear energy seemed inevitable. It seemed like it was the future in the 1950s, but at the same time, it's here, but very tightly controlled because we recognize the danger that it has to the world and society.

1:26:53I think personally, not that I know that much about it, but I think safe nuclear energy is something that is worth considering the same way that safe AI is worth considering. But nuclear power is a profound dangerous thing and it's a profoundly powerful thing. And it wasn't inevitable in the ways that we thought it was. I think AI is very similar. Profoundly powerful, profoundly dangerous, profoundly potentially good, but we're going to need to be very, very, very careful with it moving forward. I think the first thing, if I was on the board of directors with Suno, is I would insist on spending some of their marketing budget on compensating the musicians that they essentially stole from.

1:27:34That's the number one thing. I don't think that's ever going to happen, but that is the big thing that I would insist upon. And the other thing is, is I would insist that the music, the tool is geared more towards music making and sharing music with other people. And when I say music making, I mean making musical decisions, like understanding where downbeats are, understanding where chords are, not even names of chords, just like where things are so that it becomes more of a musical education tool as the way in the same way that it becomes a creation tool. And that way, you know, that's maybe not the best business decision, but in terms of like influencing what I feel like is the best outcome in the world.

1:28:18If technology is there, I think music education is the way of channeling it in a way of, you know, teaching, teaching people like I generated this thing. This is the thing that I'm generating, but having a little bit more friction there because that friction is the thing that gives people ownership over it. So I don't know. It's a good question. I honestly would maybe shut the company down. And if I was going to be working with a generative AI company, I'd pick a different company. There are people who are doing great things with ethical models that I would maybe want to work with a little bit more.

1:29:01Alex O'Connor:Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, people often compare AI to other technologies, but this educational aspect is interesting. Like with MIDI, for example, you can open up GarageBand or something and you can create a MIDI track. And it will give you like a grid on your computer screen. and a little like piano running down the side and you can just paint in the music. And maybe you don't know what all the notes on the keyboard are, but you just sort of use this paintbrush tool to paint in a note and you listen to it. Does it sound right? If not, then you sort of can drag it up or drag it down and you're listening responsibly such that if you just were to sort of paint things on and listen to, does that sound kind of cool for like a year, you'd probably start to kind of get a feel for what kind of notes go together which notes sound happy and sad you might get an idea of how major chords and minor chords work and you might keep coming across different intervals and then it would be like really easy after doing that to intuitively get a grasp of the basics of music theory of like intervals how they work um you know what chord extensions are that kind of like melodies and time and time signatures and stuff just from like messing around in the way that a child could with oh this sounds kind of cool why does that sound kind of cool but you don't get any of that with generative ai um because i guess the technology up to now has well has not been generative the technology is a uh it's like it's like a technology of of tool it's a literal tool you know it's like a it's like a hammer which you have to grasp and hammer the nail in whereas this kind of technology is more like, you know, the movement of the hammer itself.

1:30:47Alex O'Connor:You don't even have to sort of get up out of your chair. And so there's no real involvement. You tell the hammer the nail, right? Yeah, exactly. It's like hammer the nail. And it's a different kind of experience. And again, I kind of want to say like, I think by the way, most people are on your side here. I don't think many people are going to be like, you know, like you're talking nonsense, get with the system. But I just want to be clear that for those people who do kind of think, yeah but I want to be able to tell the hammer how to hit the nail it's like fine but I think to be precise here again there's no rule of the universe that you can't or even shouldn't do that but maybe it's like you're not engaging in the thing you think you're engaging in you're not part of this tradition of music creation that Suno is trying to convince you that you are and you'd be better off downloading GarageBand and playing around with a with a MIDI keyboard yeah I mean the narrative that suno loves and everybody loves to tell themselves about uh about this is like this is just the next progression of technology people said the same thing about you know the drum machine people said the same thing about synthesizers people said the same thing about all these things uh you're clearly just luddites you clearly don't you know dar are just part of the past you don't know what you're talking about and i'm going to say yes um also every time those technologies came about um people created new crafts new skills in other words like there became a new body of work a new a new skill craft that was associated with these new tools i i really want to see and i want to want to see how people use uh generative tools in a way that is craft based meaning like what you said uh trial and error or like uh input input based meaning like you're doing an action and then you're receiving feedback and you're modulating your response based on that feedback which is how we learn and that's how things happen um i don't see that yet and it could happen but to me that is the fundamental thing that's different about previous technological revolutions in music is that that uh the shift from craft to taste the shift from being essentially a doer to a musical director or the person who is like ordering you know this is the classic thing like it's your door dash order like just because you can customize your door dash order or your you know your delivery order doesn't mean that you're know anything about cooking uh you're just creating the thing specifically to your taste and great for you that might be a delicious order but But saying that you're now, you know, Anthony Bourdain should come and interview you is ridiculous.

1:33:29And it's the same kind of idea is like there's such a divorce from the actual doing of the thing. I know that people in the comments will will have a variety of opinions. But the fact of the matter is.

1:33:48the war has almost been already won meaning and it's a it feels like it feels almost like a gloating kind of thing not even gloating but like i'm saying something that is too soon but popular opinion especially in the past year has shifted pretty radically and i know people i'm preaching to the choir very frequently when i'm saying a lot of these things and the people who haven't already been convinced are probably not going to be convinced by anything that i'm saying right now but that doesn't necessarily mean that i need to stop saying it i was at a um a conference recently about ai and music at uh indiana university in bloomington and i was amazed by uh the fact that the student body um was universally against ai like the student body at this AI and music conference universally.

1:34:40Every single one of them that I talked to was extremely skeptical for a variety of reasons. But I was amazed by how many people in the faculty were very, very pro-AI and very optimistic about it. And to me, that was a strange course of events when you're talking about how technology interacts with culture and generations and youth, where an older generation is enthusiastically adopting it, where a younger generation is not. And I don't know what that means in the future, but it certainly is unusual. And it's certainly a difference between previous technological revolutions like the electric guitar or what have you and what we have right now.

1:35:21Alex O'Connor:yeah i mean people booed bob dylan didn't they when he sort of whipped out the electric guitar at that folk festival um but i imagine it was probably the the older folk fans booing him rather than the the new sort of cutting edge kids on the block i mean i think that if there's a technology which older people think is really cool and exciting and younger people think is like really bad um what you basically got there is a is a really lame technology uh that's like you're talking about facebook you know you're talking about like facebook emojis and stuff uh it's just just lame man uh i don't know i kind of it's it's shrimp jesus it's yeah it's like it's the equivalent like it's the cultural cachet of shrimp jesus it's like what is like what is this guy's like um yeah and that's that's really been the case and i i don't see much course correction i mean there might be course correction we might see some really cool hip people doing interesting things that are radically, radically different, but I don't, I just don't see it.

1:36:21So please also, I do want to be open-minded. If there are people doing cool things with AI, commercial generative AI, please let me know and please leave it in the comments or what have you, because I want to know and I want to, I want to check it out because I always want to be open to learning. I always want to learn new things and new workflow, new workflows. But I haven't

1:36:43Alex O'Connor:seen it yet so yeah i mean i would not be surprised if there are just like developments and uses of the technology that we just aren't even like capable of imagining right now um i suppose the good news is that i would i would guess that most people share your suspicion and my suspicion that this is that this is not a good thing um but i think for that reason And while we should be worried about the effect that this will have on an industry and the job market and stuff like that, I'm not sure that we need to be too worried about the effect that it has on artistry. Because I think that for most people, the most important thing about artistry is that it's human and that if you remove that element, you're just now talking about something else, which probably will find usage in Coca-Cola commercials.

1:37:29Alex O'Connor:but is unlikely to be the source of somebody's, you know, wedding first dance or, you know, their song that they have with their romantic partner or whatever, because it just doesn't seem to fulfill that communal role in the same way, I think. I mean, I don't know, you know, I could be surprised, but I just don't see it. So there's an interesting, I'm going to call this the Rick Beato argument. Rick Beato, of course, is the great patriarch of music YouTube. And he has a reputation of being, you know, very old man, yells at clouds like kids these days with their pop music back in the day was better, which, of course, you know, it's very easy to argue against that kind of mindset.

1:38:22He isn't that, by the way, but that's his reputation. He made an argument maybe two or three years ago that I keep thinking about. And this is this is interesting. He said that the prevalence of auto tune and quantizing in the pop industry and how everything everybody ever hears is either auto tuned or quantized. um ends has prepared essentially the listening public for ai slop because essentially what people are doing are like hyper correcting all of the humanity out of musical recordings and have been doing it for decades and so because of that there is now the aesthetic uh equip we have been listening to the aesthetic equivalent of ai slop for generation like a generation now and uh you know, when he made this, I was like, oh, that's ridiculous.

1:39:17You know, like what? Yeah. Sure, Rick, fine, whatever. But I've been thinking about that a lot recently about how, you know, it's hard to tell if an AI generated pop song is being sung by a human or not, because it's affecting the same kind of auto-tune aesthetic that pop songs have been doing for quite a long time now. And we've been essentially listening to this stuff for a while. And we've been like as a so i said i was a wedding musician for a while um i remember very distinctly like i was playing a lot of top 40 pop songs that i thought were kind of garbage and i couldn't exactly say why they were garbage like i'm playing the songs like sometimes you know there might be an interesting chord progression it's fun it's high energy there is one song in particular uh i think it was justin timberlake's can't stop the feeling from the trolls to soundtrack i don't know why that was so popular it was just to me that i don't normally shit on other people's music but to me that song was just like it felt like ai garbage 10 years before ai garbage existed i played it night after night and it on paper it seemed like it should be a good song like it was a funky bass line some of the chord progressions were interesting but at the time it was like this is not this is something that was generated specifically to make money and and now we're in And the equivalent of that AI, basically that generation of pop music has now given us this new aesthetic of slop where it's the regression to the mean.

1:40:49And so I think about this Rick Beato argument a lot of like, we've been prepared by this. We've been prepped by this for a while now. The humanity has been sucked out. And I think the next generation, their job is to put it back in. So I imagine that there might be some aesthetic qualities in the music of the next generation that people really will connect with. And there's a French Canadian band named Angine du Poutrin, I believe. They're a microtonal band that has been going quite viral on the internet, where we're discussing right now the internet. and they're a microtonal band and are very weird and they have a weird aesthetic but it's so radically different from other pop music that people hear these days that they have this viral moment because it's something genuinely different it's something genuinely that has not been heard in the mainstream because because of many reasons and i think and that's like dress up are they like yeah they got this gimmick they have they polka dot things i'm sure you may have seen it you'll

1:41:54Alex O'Connor:they do that one where they sort of play the same riff over like uh it's like the same amount of notes but it switches from like a six eight beat to like a four four beat or something i saw some they do a lot of fun metric uh metric tricks um yeah yeah they're like i think i've seen these guys yeah it's they're fun i i like them a lot actually i haven't made a video about them um but there are plenty of music theory youtube videos that you can see about them i know david bennett has done one uh stephen weigel is a great microtonal like uh transcriber he's like written out all these these pieces and i think people are excited about it because it's something that is not in that hyper polished aesthetic it is a little weird it's a little raw it's a little rough um so maybe that is the what where we go um something more in that direction i think it'd be good to have a bit more imperfection i was watching a video the other day it was like um some compilation of like mistakes in music recordings i can't remember whose video it was oh yeah you know the classic stuff there's sort of like the the hey jude thing where you can hear one of them swearing and playing the wrong chord uh or like at the beginning of uh roxanne by the police where like someone like sits on the piano or something you know it's like cool something like that and i it hadn't really struck me but like all of these songs were like from the sort of 70s 80s maybe into the 90s and then this guy who made this video sort of said uh yeah and that's kind of it like we won't have any more of these now because uh everything just gets cleaned up and taken out and yeah we still have mistakes in the sense where someone's like oh yeah like i played this chord but it actually worked really well so we just decided to keep it i mean like the kind of stuff that's like baked into an imperfect recording and the beatles are the place to go for sort of the wellspring of that kind of stuff and that again becomes like part of the story you know um and it becomes sort of part of the part of the song and it makes it more interesting like i remember when i was when i was a kid and i first heard um strawberry fields forever i remember feeling like something really funny was going on when that chorus came in and suddenly everything sounded a bit sort of darker and more intense and i thought that for years and then i then i found out about the sort of the two different recordings that got meshed together and i felt so validated and there was something so kind of i don't know it really highlighted the fact that i was dealing with this thing that people had created and made decisions and they've got implications and stuff and yeah we just we just don't really get that even not and this is like the rick beato thing it's not just that we don't get that from ai music of course we don't but we're also kind of not getting it from like modern music at all because everything is so pristine in the studio maybe we need like a resurgence of of live music i mean it used to be that people would you know they would make a record which is supposed to be a record of a particular event which is a performance of a song you know they'd stick a microphone in a room and they would they would play it and they'd say all right there you go you can you can take this home and it was kind of almost like an advertisement for the band for the music and now it's almost like the live shows the performances are the advertisement for the recorded version and i don't know that that that's why we're also seeing like live performances become much less live it's like everything is supposed to be perfect the use of auto-tune the the highly um perfect like choreography it's it's like a like a stage show where you want everything to be like identical every single night when part of the charm that's kind of missing is perhaps the the rawness um so maybe we just need to encourage a culture of like live music and imperfection yeah may i interest you in some jazz because the entire point of jazz music is being in the moments and experiencing improvisation and reacting to things in the room and all of that.

1:45:48So this is my pitch for jazz. This is my pitch for the improvisational art of jazz music in small spaces because it genuinely is that. Now, it's obviously not for everybody and it sometimes is a very opaque genre, but it's also a very exciting genre of music specifically because it places so much emphasis on spontaneity and realness and uh and the environment and it's also typically best experienced in small venues um yeah you know part of the what you're talking about like the hyper process with the auto tune and the choreography and everything is usually for like these big stage shows and live venues which is a very different kind of musical experience than being in some basements with, you know, 30 people and listening to jazz or like a rock band or like some small group of people.

1:46:42And there's something very, very special about that. There's something so, so awesome about that. There's something so awesome about a bad sound system with a bunch of amps on the floor. And, you know, like, you know, you have to wear earplugs, protect your hearing. but like something about that kind of environment. That's so, so, so cool. And I think, you know, people, I think about this. So the pandemic, of course, was such an insane time for the world. And the thing that I think about the most is that that was the longest time in human history, by far, that live music didn't exist on the planet.

1:47:21um the spanish flu and uh the spanish flu of 1918 i think they uh i read some newspaper articles where they canceled concerts for like two weeks uh and then they immediately went back to playing just like with open air or something like that so you know even though millions of people died it was still people still were like rushing back to make music or listen to music because of the internet we can connect with each other and experience music over the internet in all these amazing ways. So we didn't have that like burning social need to experience music in the same way. But the second that people were able to experience it more safely after lockdown stopped, people rushed back and remember very vividly the first concert that I had in Nashville, Tennessee was one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had on music of the sheer joy, the sheer electricity in the air after people had not experienced this thing for more than a year, like a year and a half or whatever.

1:48:24It was awesome. And I think that, you know, AI will kind of clarify that even more. The more that you polish away the humanity, polish away the sweat and gunk away from it, the more people feel disconnected from it. And then the second that they can experience it, oh, baby, oh, is it a, is it, you know, you reconnect with your humanity in this really beautiful way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so jazz, by the way. Yeah, jazz.

1:48:57Alex O'Connor:The London music scene is very jazzy. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And I know lots of, I've got lots of friends who are exceptionally talented, like jazz musicians. and so i go to a lot of these these jazz jams and um it's it's it's kind it's almost depressing how good these musicians are you know um and they're just and it's like you know a few people there and as you say it's like it's like a small room and i gotta say like i i don't i'm not really into jazz man i i like some some jazz like sure why not as everybody does but it's not my genre let's put it that way but nonetheless i like keep going to these things just because they're so fun because like it's just like watching people do it's the same reason i'd watch like you know i don't really follow football but if i might watch a completion of like the 100 greatest goals in history or something because like i love watching people just be excellent at things that they're excellent at and yeah that that's like where it happens more than anything i've ever seen in music so i go to a lot of these um these jams but even though like it's not my favorite genre you know what i mean because of the humanity of it and and yeah like you're gonna sort of hyper emphasize the um inhumanity of like computerized automated music that will probably just increase the demand for for that kind of stuff you know yeah and uh i have great memories of uh troy bar i think is in hoxton uh yeah that's right yeah is is one of one of the places uh i've i've come through when i've been in london yeah it's it's awesome because it's uh it's a memory that you make with other people in a space and when you're physically in a space it's a different it's a it's not it's not the same thing as listening to you know a jazz recording on headphones it's just there's food there's you know drinks there's a conversation you know you're half listening and then you're you turn around and then you see somebody do something crazy like whoa and then you go back to the conversation and then somebody else comes in and sits in and then there's like there's it's it's a it's just what to me that's like the essence of what uh jazz culture is and it's very exciting to be part of it and like to be just experience it both as a musician and as a listener and as somebody who just does it because it's it's fun um it's cool and in these sort of like like ridiculous rooms it's just like some like white walled like bare room there are some beautiful beautiful jazz bars and famous ones you know that are beautiful and plush and lovely but like a lot of like i used to go to this one that was in there's one in brixton that was like above a cinema i think it was in a cinema the ritzy in in in brixton i think which was i don't know it was almost as if like these guys had just like found the most convenient sort of small venue that they could and it's just like i don't know there's something so charming about being in this like random space like you said there's like a bar there's some drinks and stuff and you're just watching these musicians play things that you didn't know were even possible it's like how like why like why is this person not like the the highest paid musician in the world right now you know what i mean um yeah and i will say that's something peculiar to that to that like vibe and genre and i will say this they're often very highly paid musicians who are going off and doing all these crazy pop tours and all that and then on the weekends when they're at home they're in a crappy bar like in new york that's the that's the thing like yeah the most amazing musicians you will ever see in playing to 10 people and that's that's the hang you know um Well, I grew up in the Washington, D.C.

1:52:37area and D.C. has like a really killing jazz scene. And I remember I played at a in the house band of a jam at an Eritrean restaurant with amazing East African food. And I just remember like that being the formative experience of like, yeah, music and food and community is the thing. Like this is everything I always wanted and I want to do this from now until the end of time. and um you know i i still do that i still am able to to jam and go whenever i'm on tour like one of the big things is like okay you play the gig and then afterwards you go find the jam you go find the the thing the real event which is the community thing the community hang where everybody goes and plays music and does whatever um yeah yeah and that's like the it's sort of the equivalent in

1:53:31Alex O'Connor:my world of that is that you go to the you go to the talk and or the debate or whatever and you pay your ticket and you sit down and you watch this hour and a half long event and then the event finishes and everyone goes to the pub and then you you keep talking yeah that's when the real yeah and that's why people go because i mean there's a there's a really interesting question to ask like why do people listen to live music rather than a recording oh because like you know it's more like it's louder and and yeah okay fair enough why do people go to a live debate or talk that's being filmed i mean it's not i'm not like more inspired by like the bassy reverberations of the person's voice is like why why bother going because when you're there firstly you focus better you're like more in the zone you're paying more attention and that surely happens with music too but also like you're talking to people you talk to the person next to you go to the pub afterwards it's like a communal thing and that's like part of the whole experience um yeah the talk isn't just about the talk and the music isn't just about the music it's about the experience and the creative process and once you realize that those two things when it comes to anything to do with art are kind of inseparable context and product um then when you have something which removes the context and leaves just the product you are left with something which is necessarily you know only half art and i think that is where ai essentially takes us but then you know we say all this as though i don't want to i want to be careful not to sound like someone who doesn't understand how clever ai is you know like the sort of the chess players from the the 90s being like yes but a chess a chess computer could never could never do a creative move they don't understand the artistry of chess they don't understand the the beauty of a of a queen sacrifice in the right and And it's like, actually, five years later, they're better at doing it than you are.

1:55:21Alex O'Connor:But with this, I feel like we're on pretty safe ground in saying that it's not something that can suffer the same usurpation. Yeah, I mean, with chess, I keep going back to chess, because it's so interesting. because chess is a game and the point of a game, usually a competitive game, is to test your skills against another person's skills. But most people who are athletes or, you know, people who play games, I guess, I guess a chess player is an athlete. That's a debate that I don't care to have. But, you know, they'll say that, you know, yeah, you're testing your skill against another person but really you're testing your skill you're testing your own self like it's all about self-improvement and you do that by which of this exchange between another person and yourself and you don't really learn that much um i mean you can learn from a playing against a a bot and you can certainly improve yourself by testing your skill against a bot but people don't find the excitement in that there's no spectacle in that in the same way there might have been at one time, you know, like at one time, but now it's so clearly that the bots are so much better than humans that it's like it stops being interesting because now there isn't that kind of friction and there isn't the story that can be told.

1:56:41I don't know if that's a great analogy with music because the, you know, you're not really challenging, like, how are you going up against the AI? The AI is not adversarial necessarily because that's not how music works. We don't have adversarial relationships with other people. And I say adversarial in a positive sense, because the adversary is the thing that makes us grow. And this is where greatness comes from. And, you know, I find chess so fascinating because the same kinds of pattern matching and the same kinds of skill and dedication and focus, I can find parallels in my own thinking and my own music making.

1:57:18um but yeah it's it's it's one of those things where i don't i keep going back to it because it seems like it should i should learn more from how the chess world has reacted but i don't quite think it's the same same exact thing with music and art and i don't think it ever will be well

1:57:37Alex O'Connor:adam neely um i will put the relevant links in the description uh to your channel which i usually say you know i think our channels are roughly the same size and usually when that's the case it feels a bit pointless because people have almost certainly heard of you but i i wonder i'm hoping that there are people who who maybe don't know about you and what you do on youtube i think your videos are really cool um they are super accessible and sort of bring a kind of interest to music that is beyond just the the listening of it which i think is really important and cool so appreciate your content thank you for taking the time and yeah the video that we've been most relevantly discussing is your most recent one and its actual title is suno ai music and the bad future so i'll make sure that's linked in the description as well but yeah thanks for your time man thank you so much man for having me i'm very excited to uh to see how this comes out and yeah i'm a huge fan of your channel too and i've learned a lot so really it means a lot that uh you would invite me here sweet