Portending the Post-real Era

#1

so…kind of wanted to have a serious discussion of what could potentially either become an incredibly beautiful or incredibly tragic trajectory in music history. we are witness to it in its earliest phases right now.

have we officially entered the post-real era of music? are you excited, scared, indifferent? what do you think are the implications? a slow erosion of our emotional connection to music? a milestone in our evolution? please share your thoughts.

discovered this in my Bandcamp feed last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. obviously the PC Music crew primed us for something like this years ago and people like Holly and @mat have rolled out their AI compositions earlier this year but, still, I couldn’t help but to listen with a kind of knot in my stomach and a conflicted heart. does an unreal persona falsify the sentiment of a song? were our sentiments false all along?

#2

I’m going to reply to this on an abstract level as I haven’t really listened to anything of this nature (bar that Actress not Actress album)…

I feel I’ve been through different mindsets regarding auterism of whatever kind, notions of authenticity and what have you… But I always bristle at the kind of bs you see people say about how Beyoncé or Kanye songs took 25 people to write or whatever.

That said I guess I do like the human aspect of it, that someone or some people were behind it all, and I find it slightly unnerving thinking about this being entirely outsourced. I’m also an old man who doesn’t understand how the above artist works, ie where does the voice come from etc.

tl;dr

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#3

in the case of Miquela, I’m not entirely positive on the provenance of the voice itself and am totally making an assumption that the voice is not in fact real, although it still sounds very real. the reason why this is such an interesting topic is that, since pitch correction software has become an industry standard, pop music has had one foot in this “unreal” dimension for some time now.

#4

Yeah that makes sense!

#5

This just popped up in my feed and it’s an intriguing area for discussion.

I’ve been thinking about this recently.

a) If it’s music for dancing and clubs then I think AI could easily take over - not because dance music is easy to make necessarily but there is vast amounts of music out there which rhythmically could be disasembled and reassembled with right algorithms (no pun intended) - which is largely what the least talented DJ can do.

b) If it’s chart/sales focused (eg Beyoncé) then I can understand why it might 25 people to “craft” it - it’s a product first and music second (you can thank big record labels for that!) I think you can include pitch correction stuff in this point too - The Spice girls couldn’t sing for shit (and probably still can’t) but they were right for the market at the time and a lot of very clever people worked on them to make them a “product”.

c) Will we get AI to create music which is itself already “post-music”? - here I’m thinking maybe Low, Sonic Youth who I think are/were kind of meta rock bands in that their noise is about what rock music actually is.

d) electronic music is another fish - it’s viral by nature and also led by the technology available. At the moment we have a resurgence of analog equipment being made (possibly more than was in its hayday or perhaps THIS is its hayday!) and at the same time there seems to be a move away from using computers - the DAWless massive…

#6

i keep having flashes of those pod farms in the matrix when i read about what Holly Herndon is doing and now this thread. there’ll be a time when human input will be sought after in music again and it’ll harvested en masse through evolutionary-neuron-memory-suck-straws and input directly into Ableton 2000. our collective screams will be granulated with the thickest hall-reverb tail which will last for all eternity while lightning strikes off in the distance