Brian Eno has spent decades pushing the boundaries of music and technology, but when it comes to artificial intelligence, his biggest concern isn’t the tech — it’s who controls it.
Eno does strike me as the kind of person who could use AI effectively as a tool for making music. I don’t think he’s team “just generate music with a single prompt and dump it onto YouTube” (AI has ruined study lo fi channels) - the stuff at the end about distortion is what he’s interested in experimenting with.
There is a possibility for something interesting and cool there (I think about how Chuck Pearson’s eccojams is just like short loops of random songs repeated in different ways, but it’s an absolutely revolutionary album) even if in effect all that’s going to happen is music execs thinking they can replace songwriters and musicians with “hey siri, generate a pop song with a catchy chorus” while talentless hacks inundate YouTube and bandcamp with shit.
Yeah, Eno actually has made a variety of albums and art installations using generative simple AI for musical decisions, although I don’t think he does any advanced programming himself. That’s why it’s really odd to see comments in an article that imply he is really uninformed about AI…he was pioneering generative music 20-30 years ago.
I’ve come to realize that there is a huge amount of misinformation about AI these days, and the issue is compounded by there being lots of clumsy, bad early AI works in various art fields, web journalism etc. I’m trying to cut back on discussing AI for these reasons, although as an AI enthusiast, it’s hard to keep quiet about it sometimes.
I could see him using neural networks to generate and intentionally pick and loop short bits with weird anomalies or glitchy sounds. Thats the route I’d like AI in music to go, so maybe that’s what I’m reading in, but it fits Eno’s vibe and philosophy.
AI as a tool not to replace other forms of music, but doing things like training it on contrasting music genres or self made bits or otherwise creatively breaking and reconstructing the artwork.
John Cage was all about ‘stochastic’ music - composing based on what he divined from the I Ching. There are people who have been kicking around ideas like this for longer than the AI bubble has been around - the big problem will be digging out the good stuff when the people typing “generate a three hour vapor wave playlist” can upload ten videos a day…
Sure. I worked in the game industry and sometimes AI can mean ‘pick a random number if X occurs’ or something equally simple, so I’m just used to the term used a few different ways.
Eno does strike me as the kind of person who could use AI effectively as a tool for making music. I don’t think he’s team “just generate music with a single prompt and dump it onto YouTube” (AI has ruined study lo fi channels) - the stuff at the end about distortion is what he’s interested in experimenting with.
There is a possibility for something interesting and cool there (I think about how Chuck Pearson’s eccojams is just like short loops of random songs repeated in different ways, but it’s an absolutely revolutionary album) even if in effect all that’s going to happen is music execs thinking they can replace songwriters and musicians with “hey siri, generate a pop song with a catchy chorus” while talentless hacks inundate YouTube and bandcamp with shit.
Yeah, Eno actually has made a variety of albums and art installations using generative simple AI for musical decisions, although I don’t think he does any advanced programming himself. That’s why it’s really odd to see comments in an article that imply he is really uninformed about AI…he was pioneering generative music 20-30 years ago.
I’ve come to realize that there is a huge amount of misinformation about AI these days, and the issue is compounded by there being lots of clumsy, bad early AI works in various art fields, web journalism etc. I’m trying to cut back on discussing AI for these reasons, although as an AI enthusiast, it’s hard to keep quiet about it sometimes.
Eno is more a traditional algorist than “AI” (by which people generally mean neural networks)
I could see him using neural networks to generate and intentionally pick and loop short bits with weird anomalies or glitchy sounds. Thats the route I’d like AI in music to go, so maybe that’s what I’m reading in, but it fits Eno’s vibe and philosophy.
AI as a tool not to replace other forms of music, but doing things like training it on contrasting music genres or self made bits or otherwise creatively breaking and reconstructing the artwork.
John Cage was all about ‘stochastic’ music - composing based on what he divined from the I Ching. There are people who have been kicking around ideas like this for longer than the AI bubble has been around - the big problem will be digging out the good stuff when the people typing “generate a three hour vapor wave playlist” can upload ten videos a day…
Sure. I worked in the game industry and sometimes AI can mean ‘pick a random number if X occurs’ or something equally simple, so I’m just used to the term used a few different ways.
Totally fair