What does the artist do in the age of algorithms?

In 2021, technology the task of creating art remains a matter of debate and discovery. Since the rise of NFTs to multiply techno-artists to produce visual expressions that use generative networks of opposition, for smartphone applications write new music, creators and technologists are constantly experimenting with how art is produced, consumed and how they make money.

BT, Grammy nominee Composer of 2010 These hopeful machines, has emerged as a world leader in the intersection of technology and music. Beyond producers and writing such as David Bowie, Death Cab for Cutie, Madonna, and the Roots and composing scores Fast and furious, Smallville, and many other shows and films, has contributed as a pioneer in production techniques, intermittent editing and granular synthesis. Last spring, it was released by BT GENESIS.JSON, A piece of software with 24-hour music and visual art. It includes 15,000 individually sequenced audio and video clips created from scratch, with different rhythmic images, recorded recordings of cigarettes and crickets, a live orchestra, drum machines and many other sounds that are constantly played. And he lives in a chain of blocks. In my opinion, it is the first composition of its kind.

It might be like an idea GENESIS.JSON be the future of original music, where composers use AI and blockchain to create completely new art forms? What does the artist do in the age of algorithms? I spoke to BT to find out more.

What are your main interests in the interface of artificial intelligence and music?

I’m really fascinated with this idea of ​​what an artist is. Speaking my common language (music) is a very small variable. We have 12 notes. There is a collection of rhythms that we usually use. There’s a kind of vernacular of tools, tones, and timbres, but when you start adding it, it becomes a very deep set of data.

On its cover, “What’s unique and unique about an artist?” And that’s what I’ve been curious about all my adult life. Seeing the research going on in artificial intelligence, I immediately thought that music is the fruit of hanging.

Today, we can take the sum of the production of artists and take their artistic work and quantify the whole thing in a training set, in a massive training set of multivariates. And we don’t even name the variables. RNN (repeating neural networks) and CNN (convolutional neural networks) named automatically.

So you’re referring to a set of music that can be used to “train” an artificial intelligence algorithm, and then it can create original music that resembles the music you were trained in. If we reduce the genius of artists like Coltrane or Mozart to a training set and recreate their sound, how will musicians and music lovers respond?

I think the closer you get, the more this idea of ​​the valley becomes. Some would say that things like music are sacred and related to very basic levels of our humanity. It is not difficult to engage in a spiritual conversation about what music is like as a language, what it means, how powerful it is, and how it transcends culture, race, and time. So a traditional musician might say, “That’s not possible. There are so many nuances and feelings, and your life experience, and these kinds of things that go into the music output.”

And my part goes like an engineer. Look at what Google has done. MIDI is a simple type of motor generation where all Bach’s works have been taken and can be spit out [Bach-like] fugak. Bach wrote many escapes, which is a great example. He is also the father of modern harmony. Musicologists listen to some of them on Google Magenta escapes and cannot be distinguished from Bach’s original works. Again, this makes us question what the artist is.

I’m both happy and I’m terribly terrified about this space we’re expanding. Maybe the less I want to ask is “We can, but should we?” and more “How do we do this responsibly, because it’s happening?”

Right now, there are companies that are using something like Spotify or YouTube to train their models with living, copyrighted, and protected works. But companies are allowed to take someone’s job and train models right now. Should we do that? Or should we talk to artists about them first? I think we need to put in place protective mechanisms for visual artists, programmers, musicians.