This week, I spent a few hours listening to Dadabot’s Pho Queue stream.

I read the little prose they left in the stream description. And I found myself wanting to go back to it several times. Something about the screams of “FA KYUU” sounds morphing into saxophones, being garbled, sometimes screamed, sometimes sung, the transitions that were talked about in the prose felt nice to listen to. sometimes it felt like it was coming up with genuine new ideas, for itself at least, that it didn’t generate before.

Then I started thinking of the level of art discourse we have in the modern world, especially visual arts, and ideas from Cage. And the nature of the music industry.

Jackson Pollock and his CIA funded splashes of paint are only worthwhile to people who actually like them. The AI generated saxophone warblings, the screeches that come out of it, the choppy, syncopated drum beats give me feelings. It is art to me.

There is a person behind the scenes, that curated the algorithm to bring out music in a certain way. Pho Queue doesn’t sound the same as a “bach faucet” , because of the human creativity and curation that went into the way the music is generated.

Brian Eno and John Cage made music with procedural generation features before the current wave of generative AIs. It’s an established perspective to have on music. Some performances use radios being tuned to frequencies just to add a new source of sound.

How is this stuff any different?

On the other side of the coin, does music made by humans inherently mean anything? The crap churned out by pop musicians that are flying around with private jets, composed by commitee with the end goal of generating another product for someone else to buy, is there any expression or emotion in there? What does the zillionth love song made by a billionaire have to offer that hasn’t been expressed a zillion times before?

There’s some more to be written , like if I make music myself that relies heavily on timbre, or effects that I bought, who’s really doing the expression, and how? If the musical theory of what I’m playing is simple, and contributes less to the aesthetic feelings of the music I’m making than my guitar’s timbre, the way I set up my effects pedals; is the expression I’m doing actually more in how I turned the knobs on my pedals to get an aesthetic than the actual notes I play? So then am I expressing something, or are the people who designed and manufactured my equipment?

But then we get into this :

I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.

The talk about AI is stupid. It’s a tool.

The talk about the IMPLICATIONS of AI, and who uses it to automate what, at the cost of who, is the actual argument to be had.

If some metal band that can barely scrape together enough money to tour uses AI to generate an album cover, it shouldn’t be taken as a horrifying act of taking money out of an artist’s mouth. If BMG fires everyone they have on the art dept to only use AI art, that’s something to be concerned about.