Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

The Record Industry Can See Itself in the A.I. Mirror

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The record industry (RIAA) officially opposes the use of copyrighted music for artificial intelligence, but industry practices are now firmly in the same business of reinvention.

You may have tried a quiz offered by several different social media sites inviting you to choose if a particular song is the work of A.I. or the real deal:  a recording with real musicians. So far my few attempts to sort out fake from authentic pop songs has been no better than chance. Do I really have a tin ear? Why was I so easily fooled? It’s not impossible. But something else is at work. For years, almost all pop music has been run through so many “tools” and alterations that it’s unrecognizable from its original forms. Overproduced tracks that have been around for years are nearly indistinguishable from A.I.-generated tracks.

One cue is to listen to the bass-heavy beat that drones along unaltered.  For a long time even “real” music has been using drum machines or “loop tracks” that lock onto a song and never change. Musicians don’t usually play that way. But synthesizers do, faking other instruments from digital samples that automatically repeat. And then another set of black boxes go to work on a singer who has a natural range that requires skillful adjustments at the top or bottom end of their musical range. No worries now about natural variations in a voice. Any less than perfect vocalizing can be tuned with pitch correction software. And we haven’t even talked about the extensive A.I.-like sampling used in hip-hop and other genres.

My point is that modern music has been so overproduced with studio effects that a singer’s natural performance has been obscured by endless “intelligent” circuits that have altered it. Modern producers and audio engineers can’t help themselves in their desire to make someone’s or some group’s natural sound even “better.” But that also makes them part of the problem. Pop music today is not simply a record of a single performance, but the result of labored audio construction that takes place in different places and at different times.

The twist  here is that while the record industry (RIAA) officially opposes the use of copyrighted music for artificial intelligence, it’s practices are firmly in the same business of electronic reinvention.

Where We Came From

All of this more or less started with Les Paul. His tape-delay overdubbing and “looping” were early applications applied to a particular pop standard, “How High the Moon” (1951). This novel recording gave his partner, the singer Mary Ford, a performance twin heard just a fraction of a second behind Mary’s first pass of the song. New and novel Ampex tape recorders adding tape-delay pleasantly thickened Ford’s voice and did the same for the new pick-ups that Les used on his guitars. To reproduce the track on television a few years later Paul proudly revealed these new recording tricks of multi-tracking and tape delay that would change the course of modern music. I can still recall being among the millions of Americans being mesmerized by the sound when I first heard it, in my case, coming from a jukebox in a café in Leadville Colorado.

Paul and Ford were an amazing and creative performers. But I’m afraid Paul paved the way for music to begin its long downward decline to being radically reshaped by circuits in a box: a harbinger of what A.I. does. No longer did recording engineers try to faithfully capture what was captured by a microphone. They soon became participants in augmenting the sounds of a performer with all kinds of electronic add-ons. This continued with Elvis Presley using various an effect called slap-back delay. And nearly every record producer started using the kind of added ambiance, especially reverberation, pioneered by Motown  and other labels. Today most pop singers also use Auto-Tune or pitch correction: producing real alterations of the natural variations common to even great singers. For some reminders of how straight “dry” recordings of performers sound like, listen to Frank Sinatra from the Capitol years in the 1960s, or, more recently, the pop-jazz singer, Laufey, who shuns most production add-ons. In the 1970s singer Karen Carpenter had an amazing voice and a broad range that was sometimes uselessly altered by unnecessary add-ons.

There are obviously many kinds of synthesizers that can add effects and sampled instruments on tracks: some “musical,” others uselessly intrusive. But the use of all mean that most pop recordings have been “enhanced” by layers of electronic devices that apply their own logics to a recording. The robotic line seems to be crossed when an engineer can preset an effect and simply allow it to alter the original acoustic sound.

In addition, all of the software and hardware needs to be duplicated on prerecorded tracks to be used when a group goes on the road. Audiences usually want to hear the studio experience rather than what the logistics of live performance would normally allow. For this reason concerts are often a mix of live and prerecorded segments, a sore point for some fans who notice the contributions of musicians who are not even on stage.

We can marvel at the electronics that can be patched in to alter recordings. Few engineers seem to be able to resist. My point is that those temptations make the complaints of the popular music industry about A.I. uncomfortably close to their standard operating practice.

A final example. There is something a bit sad about accounts of how the classic Paul Simon album Graceland was put together. There are some wonderful tracks on it that replicate the experience of a live performance. But as Ashley Kahn recounts in Days of Miracle and Wonder (2026), individual songs were not assembled in a studio in South Africa or on a stage in Zimbabwe in 1987, but a few years earlier in studios and mastering suites in New York, London, and Johannesburg.

What is High-Decibel Sound Doing To Us?

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Our sense of being adequately entertained has grown dependent on amplified sound.

During the recent World Cup games this summer in North America, spectators had many chances to see some amazing soccer in the frenzy leading up to the final championship game. But some of the games on television left me relieved that I was not in the loudest stands. Punishing sound levels were off the charts and easily sustained for several hours.

Our lives need to unfold in environments where ambient noise is significantly less than 100 decibels (dB), which is well under the sound energy of most sporting events and rock concerts. For those keeping track, apparently the loudest game was in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. That June 13 match between Scotland and Haiti at times registered an ear-damaging 125 dB. And that was not a record of recorded noise, which is still held by Kansas City’s Arrowhead Stadium at 142 dB! These sound levels amount to a severe attack on the tiny bones and hair cells that make up the middle and inner ear. The cost of such noise is usually permanent hearing loss, most of which cannot be repaired by the body over time. The visual equivelant would be staring into the sun.

Predictably, sports fans, musicians, and members of large crowds suffer from some hearing loss over their lives. Some may wear ear protection. Many do not.

It is sobering to note how hearing loss correlates with a person’s sense of isolation and social withdrawal. The challenge is to convince young concertgoers and earbud users that the other end of their life will be faced with missed opportunities to hear what was once so easily taken for granted.

Our sense of being adequately entertained has grown dependent on amplified sound. As every musician knows, even if performing in a small intimate space, a group will use microphones to augment their acoustic output. Somehow they have become badges of authenticity. As a former drummer, I can testify that there is usually no need to surround a standard jazz drum kit with a set of pickups hovering over cymbals and toms. Some famous clubs, like New York City’s legendary Blue Note are small enough to not need amplification. Recording is one thing. And arenas are obviously an exception. But in many venues playing live could easily be done without playing loud. Sadly, the drama of performance now brings the expectation that it will occur at greater sound levels north of 100 dB that voices and instruments alone may not produce; reasonable hearing levels be damned. In addition, a wall of amplified sound usually the sacrifices the natural harmonics of many musical sources. The next time you are near someone playing a good grand piano, listen and you will hear overtones that are often crushed by amplification.

What Have We Done to Our Sanity?

The writer and novelist Franz Kafka famously struggled to live within a noisy household in Prague while trying to write. He frequently complained that the noise of family and city life sabotaged his ability to focus. He exists in a long line of authors before and since who have sought out ways to cloister their hearing from the detritus of human activity. Gustav Mahler, Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf,  Roald Dahl, and Michael Pollan are only a few samples from a much longer list. Journalist Pollan wrote A Place of My Own (1997) about his experience building a writing shed behind his Connecticut home (above). The building and the book were his homages to the life of the mind that can be saved from the clutter and distractions of the modern world.

There is also a degree of cognitive energy that is forced into overdrive by too much racket. UCLA Health cites four common effects:

  • an increase in the release of stress hormones, increased risk of heart disease,
  • increases in rates of depression and anxiety, and
  • weakened cognitive functions. It is common to notice some elements of cognitive decline in older friends who are already wearing hearing aids.

Individuals vary greatly in their tolerance of noise.  We are all different. Since the 1990s some behavioral scientists have noticed a cluster of personality traits one has described with the unusually clear name, the Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). In general, these folks may make up the ten percent or more of the general population who can be overwhelmed and overstimulated by various forms of human activity, including sound. When first coming upon this idea in a recent article in the BBC Music Magazine, it made sense, and can include a grab bag of positive indicators. Many are similar to what I have previously described as “sound-centric” persons.

With regard to music, one common positive effect HSP includes an overwhelming swoon upon hearing a particular performance, as well as a capacity to hear “into” sounds that others may miss. We have all seen audience members melt away upon hearing a portion of a performance. For film and theater director Mike Nichols it could be enough to hear an actor perfectly capture the meaning of some pivotal lines in a script. I’ve seen teen singers fight back tears singing Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes” within a choir. It is also easy to find audience members with moist eyes from listening to a performance of John William’s “Hymn to the Fallen” or the Main Theme from the film Schindler’s List. My own experience includes a quickening heartbeat in anticipation of the final third of Saint-Saën’s Organ Symphony, or the first notes of the Third Movement in Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

As is so often the case, music gives and takes away. No one would want to lose the chances to experience wonderful musical highs. But those opportunities come with the proviso that we must still have enough hearing to appreciate these sonic miracles.