Musical Readymades

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 AI Music is causing daily cognitive dissonance because I'm not sure it's art writ large. If there were a visual equivalent, it would be a prefab collage with some overpainting created by the lyrics and the prompt script. The results are interesting, and you like them on your wall as decoration. I'm not sure how it could be recontextualized or appropriated because it would force the hacking of something admired for its decorative qualities. For it to be art, you'd have to channel Ai Weiwei in some way, like the dropping of Han Dynasty urns, but those urns would rather be cheap replicas. Some people actually like the urns and have sentimental value, even though they are inexpensive. Some AI music can gather those kinds of feelings if there is some kind of emotional connection with a loved one, or associated with a time or place. There are songs I generated that evoke places where I was when I was working on the lyrics. They are my "musical daydreams" that are permanently encoded with them. It won't matter whether it was generated with AI. It could even be something you don't particularly like (country music, for example), but has been annealed, softened or "warmed up". To the extent that you made a copy or replica of a generated piece and performed and recorded it with human emotions (flaws), it may or may not evoke the same daydreams. AI music is still too young to know whether that's the case. But it's typically the "decorative" quality of recordings that have the most power. A concert experience has the same power, but it's not the sonic qualities of the performance. It's the dreaminess of it all, and you look past the mechanics. After all, music sometimes requires a “mechanical license” before it can be recorded, which naturally implies that the whole recording process is a mechanized one, now further mechanized with AI.

If you want the finest musical experience, go to the symphony. If you want the purest art experience, go to a museum or gallery. The nice thing about mechanical reproduction is that you don't have to do that, whereas a century ago it was the only way. For the creation of music, you now don’t have to have any musical skills, but that’s been the case for 45 years now. Even before that, there were player pianos and other mechanized instruments. 


“Discuss the history of mechanized music” 

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