Happy Accidents As 'Hallucinations'

 

I am still of the opinion that too many gimmicky tools make creative activities seem empty. When the tool is designed to make one thing, it puts you on a creative hamster wheel. (The software preset is the electronic version of this, where the sound has only one use.) But when the tools are there to solve specific problems, then they become more useful. Better yet is to design the tool to solve the problem, then discard it. Metaphors are another example of a this kind of temporary heuristic. It's the lowest tech thing one can do with most payoff.

"We used to varispeed the tape machines for tape echo. The original ADT [Automatic Double Tracking] we did was developed as a result. It was Ken Townshend who came up with a way of taking the signal off the sync head and then delaying it through other varispeeded recorders, so the gap between the two could be adjusted If you got it slightly out, you got phasing. But if you got it out to about 25 to 30 msec, it became a form of ADT. If you took it way out to about 80 msec, you got an Elvis Presley "Heartbreak Hotel" kind of sound. All those variations were on a knob on a tape machine. It was better because it was so unstable: Someone had to monitor it all the time to make sure the tape speed was correct, which is why it was so good. Now, if you press a button, once it's there, even if it's scanned a little bit, it's still a little bit mechanical. John Lennon rang me up from New York while he was doing vocals with ADT on Double Fantasy, and he said, "It doesn't sound as good as we used to get!" I said, "You're right, John, it doesn't!" (George Martin interview in Musician, February 1999)

3/13/2016 

 *** 

[3/13/2025: One of the things I don't like about AI is that it doesn't have that same kind of charm of using an instrument or effect in a way that it wasn't designed for, and you can get interesting results. I've been playing around with taking existing lyrics and seeing what it can do with them, and this is a variation on the idea of using a tool in different ways. Otherwise if you look at AI as a tool, it really doesn't have the capability of being used in alternate ways. Everything is generated by presets.]

[3/13/2026: The Happy Accidents in AI are "hallucinations"--the side effect of pattern-finding in the data, and the embeddings, which might include made up words] 

George Martin 2/1999: "If I'd had today's teclmology [available for the Pepper sessions], I would have loved it. The techniques we used were just a way to create interesting sounds. We had no synthesizers or computers, so we made up our own sounds. The only synthesizer we had in those days was a Mellotron. We actually had a Moog Series III by-the time Abbey Road came along, but that was pretty primitive too.A lot of the signal processing you we1:e doing in those days consisted of tape varispeed, which is a lost art today."

[More]