Tag Archives: Laufey

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.

Is Music Translatable?

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Media theorist Marshall McLuhan reminded us that one medium is not easily translated into another.

Almost to the day that I finished a 600-page biography of composer John Williams, a friend sent me a copy of an article by the critic Jacques Barzun affirming the idea that music is not easily reducible to meaningful discussion.  The issue is whether the stipulative qualities of ordinary language can add much to what musicians have “said” in the non-stipulative patterns of organized sound that are so attractive. Any discussion here is a thought experiment; It probes the nature of our love affair for sounds that–strictly speaking–do not “mean” any one thing.

Tim Greiving’s new book, A Composer’s Life: John Williams, is an exhaustive review of the hundreds of scores the composer produced, starting with episodic television in the 60s and carrying through to the serialized epics of Star Wars (1977), Harry Potter (2002), Jurassic Park (1993), and many other Steven Spielberg epics. Who can forget the feeling of being lifted by the climax of E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982), when soaring score matched a soaring Henry on a bike taking the alien back to the mother ship? In its way it was grand opera, with audiences sharing the thrill of an injustice being set right. Williams sought the same impact in scores for films like Schindler’s List (1983) and Jaws (1975).

Greiving is effective in connecting the dots of Williams life, and is especially interesting in suggesting the commercial and logistical arrangements necessary to bring an orchestral score to the screen. I’m less certain the book’s detailed discussions of various motifs or specific chord progressions adds much to the pleasure that happens when we experience them. That observation gets us back to the question at hand. Greiving’s otherwise excellent study does begin to drag in extended discussions less memorable films in mostly forgotten films.

Of course we learn something from the mostly Italian expressions passed on by the composer in a score. It means something that Williams wrote a significant amount of music with the manuscript notation of “Religioso,” especially in his big memorial set pieces like Saving Private Ryan’s Hymn to the Fallen (1998). But, in the end, notations of expression or naming the unique tonal moves of a piece may hardly matter to anyone except the musicians and avid appreciators. The key question is whether there is more to say in ordinary language. Does insight or wonder stop with the music itself, leaving our discussions as unsubstantial afterthoughts?

An easy answer is that words about musical form can enhance what we are hearing. Libraries of words about music can be vast and maybe compelling and revealing. That is surely what Leonared Bernstein thought in his famous 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard. If there ever was a valiant effort to marry musical sounds with their meanings, these six lectures are it.  It is no surprise that Bernstein leans heavily on what may be the slight cheat of using generative linquistics to bring its music to life. It suggests that music is just another “language:” a common but perhaps limiting metaphor that needs a harder look.

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Barzun notes that some musical authorities believe that “anything you say about music, other than technical, will be silly or irrelevant.”  Media theorist Marshall McLuhan similarly reminded us, one medium is not easily translated into another. The problem is when we begin to think of various forms of exchange as simple “carriers” of meaning. The metaphor suggests that content and the vehicle that carries it are distinct and easily separated. This is often how we think about language. But while It may help to learn about classical music’s Sonata form or the A-A-B-A structure of a lot of pop music, full appreciation hardly depends on knowing these patterns. And we are not going to get far by falling back onto the overworked and false dualism that music is a form of feeling separate from rationality. But speaking phenomenologically, these effects involve the whole individual.  Music marries the two.

In this regard, Barzan hints of an insight that he dismisses too soon. In passing, he reminds us that some people have what is called “synesthesia,” or the perception of a particular color tied to a note or sound. Indeed, spin out this idea to its more general application and we have real translation that converts or compliments music as experience. Most of us have sense-experiences that we tie to particular songs or scores we know well.  Barzan is surely right to note that “Whatever the cause, the tie between inarticulate sounds and bodily states [that we can verbalize] is a fact of experience.”  This is clearly written on the faces of pop singer Laufey’s stageside audiences as as with listeners of the “affirmation of life” last movement of Gustav Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Surely it is natural to use favored images or experiences as touchstones for our enthusiasms.

And a final caveat. Since experience is processed mostly using the reservoir of a person’s available language, it may well be that we lack the kind of descriptive terminology that would do more justice to an attempt at rich translation. Might a sophisticated discussion of any work needs a better terminology than is usually available to a person who thinks and speaks in mostly one idiom? This is in addition to the reminder that turning music’s open-ended form into any stipulative language is bound to have limitations.