The Beat

Welcome to The Beat, Decential’s weekly breakdown of the music-web3 byway.

Like most things in web3, the music space moves at breakneck speeds, issuing regular bouts of hope, cringe and FOMO. That combination of qualities blur the essence of the movement – the enduring solutions to legacy industry problems and the people building them. Let’s focus on the essence; the rest, as Alex Ross wrote, is noise.

Nonmusical Fascism

In 2016, I interviewed the experimental composer Glenn Branca (who has since sadly passed away). We bar-hopped around Manhattan’s Lower East Side for several hours, chatting about his rivalry with Rhys Chatham, the time John Cage (kind of) called him a fascist, experimental theater and a wholly uninteresting – in his view – modern music landscape.

“Of course there are good people out there – there always have been. But 99 percent of it is not very interesting to me,” he told me. “In Europe, electronica is the music that people want to hear. And in all the clubs they have giant subwoofers under the stage, and these electronica musicians just make a gigantic noise that is nonmusical, as far as I’m concerned.”

When I pressed him on his use of “nonmusical,” he said: “I just don’t like this idea of people buying very sophisticated digital instruments that, in a sense, are pieces of music unto themselves. All you have to do is push a couple buttons and then hit the keyboard and you get this gorgeous sound coming out. To me, the real composer is the guy that made the instrument, not the guy that’s playing it.”

Today AI is forcing us to reimagine the authorial nature of music-making altogether. Forget pressing a button – now you can turn a text prompt into a song, rendered in your favorite singer’s voice.

Would Branca bequeath the engineers at OpenAI or Google – the “guys that made the instrument” – the title of composer? This tech wasn’t created with music in mind – at least not like the guitar or a pair of Pioneer decks were. John Cage famously said that “everything we do is music,” but in this case, to what extent are “we” really doing it?

Every new model marks the hitherto zenith of the creative floor. Today we’re at some midpoint on our journey, heading toward a reality where we can all rattle the subwoofers, so to speak. Has the creative floor risen so high that, when paired with an algorithm that rewards mass appeal, we risk hitting a cultural flatline? Where does all this leave the artist?

The Next George Lucas

In a recent Twitter thread, technologist and media thinker Mat Dryhurst commented on the cutting-edge AI tools that can ostensibly turn anyone into “George Lucas.” For George Lucas and his fellow filmmakers, suddenly the competition has 1,000,000X’ed. But before we devolve into fatalism and mourn the artist, remember that this isn’t the first time we’ve been bedeviled by the new. With every new technology comes a fresh framework for experimentation.

Through that lens, Dryhurst reminds us of our tendency to confuse the media for the art:

“The ‘now anyone can be George Lucas’ argument is only half true,” he wrote. “Now anyone can present as George Lucas, and the contemporary analogue will be wielding (or rejecting) these tools to do something different..like Lucas did.”

“Take experimental music,” he continued. “There were people experimenting on batshit ideas, records and modes of performance that were shocking and seductive, forced into reality by insistent artists. It is also possible now to make a drone record in an hour with a plugin. Media might sound the same. Not the same.”

By all accounts, Branca was one of the batshit guys. He composed singularly experimental symphonies, mostly for multiple guitars. Those have taken many different forms, but the most interesting pieces utilize guitars of his own making, namely “mallet guitars” – percussive instruments designed to be hit with drumsticks – and “harmonic guitars,” whose extra bridge allows microtones to ring through. 

His music combines the minimalist structures and rhythmic complexity of Steve Reich with Cage’s conceptual air. It shares both punk’s nihilism and the grandiose ingenuity of Mahler. Plus there’s just a lot of fucking noise.

And anyone can make noise! Plug an electric guitar into a sampling amp – which uses digital processors to emulate and replicate other amplified sounds – with a Big Muff pedal and suddenly everyone’s making some gnarly crunch. That’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also a classic example of “might sound the same, not the same.” 

Now plug in a hundred guitars and give some of them hammers and microtonal bridges that can tear a room apart. Talk about “forced into reality.” I saw an all-star cast of guitarists play Branca’s 8th, 10th and 12th symphonies in Manhattan’s Masonic Hall and it was akin to seeing god – a fulminating resonance that takes you to the edge and grants you a glimpse of the other side.

Like many before him, Branca used his instrument as a compositional baseline, and the implication here is that what Branca did for the electric guitar, the new pioneers will do with AI:

The notion that the experimenters will continue to experiment, regardless of the media, is a heartening one. With the elevated – though still superficial – layer of media, and an increasingly advanced set of AI-powered tools, what will our modern-day virtuoso sound like? And will they be human?

The Next Scene

A few weeks ago, The New Yorker profiled Universal Music Group boss Lucian Grainge – I mentioned it in a prior Beat in regard to UMG’s split with TikTok, but left alone the piece’s true focus: AI.

The article’s print version was titled “The Next Scene.” It offers a lens into Grainge’s gradual capitulation to artificial intelligence – and what that means for the music industry and beyond.

Near the end of the story, the piece’s author, John Seabrook, joins Grainge in visiting the site of YouTube’s Dream Track project – what the former labeled “an experimental venture” in AI. “A select group of a hundred YouTube creators would get to use the A.I.-generated voices and songwriting styles of nine well-known singer-songwriters,” he wrote. “Three of them from UMG – John Legend, Demi Lovato, and Troye Sivan – to create YouTube Shorts of up to thirty seconds.”

Grainge wanted to see how hit songs could be rendered in different languages via AI-generated versions of the artists’ voices. Seabrook notes that, when the artist Don Was interacted with Google’s AI model Lyria – which is trained on YouTube videos – his response was: “This is better than anything I could have done.” Welcome to the new creative floor.

Facing this new “instrument,” Seabrook asked Grainge if he could really trust Google, “since the company’s long-term interests may lie in giving its users the tools to close the gap between wannabes and real artists by making it possible for anyone to create a fully orchestrated song by typing in a prompt or even whistling a melody.”

“What are we going to do?” Grainge responded. When a Google-sized company is “making an investment in developing products and tools, my view is, as an industry, we need to be the hostess with the mostest.”

Coda

In 1838, Sir Charles Wheatstone invented the stereoscope, a device used to view pairs of slightly different two-dimensional images – typically photographs – that when viewed together create a perception of depth or three-dimensionality. 

Upon its arrival, David Brewster – inventor of the kaleidoscope – said: “There are few machines indeed, which rise higher above the operations of human skill. It will create in an hour, what a thousand artists could not invent in the course of a year; and while it works with such unexampled rapidity, it works also with a corresponding beauty and precision.”

This is our stereoscope moment, and I’ve got faith that artists will continue to be batshit. But we should also heed those long-term interests of the Googles (and UMGs) — and mind the gap “between wannabes and real artists,” lest the Glenn Brancas of the world go unseen, hidden by the algos of mass appeal.

Maybe you’re unconvinced, resolved that Branca types aren’t your cup of tea – and that’s ok. But remember: no Branca, no Sonic Youth (early iterations of his guitar ensemble included Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore). No Sonic Youth, no Nirvana. And so on and so forth.

“If all of those young artists hadn’t been excited about somebody doing an art rock band, I wouldn’t exist,” Branca told me.

So tell that wild kid down the road to plug in their instrument of choice – electric guitar, Sora, or something homemade – and go nuts. Create something that – in Dryhurst’s words – is “more ambitious than what a model can approximate.” Channel Branca when he said, “If I knew what the music was going to sound like before I wrote it, I wouldn’t bother.”

The most exciting future is one whose music we can barely imagine.

Now go outside and listen to music – it’s a beautiful day.

My name is MacEagon Voyce. For more music and less noise, consider subscribing to The Beat. And if you already do, consider sharing with a friend. Thanks for being here.