Tag Archives: Paul Simon

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.

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Lunch Anyone?

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I’m always interested in the response of my friends to a simple question. If they could conjure up anybody from the past or present, who would they like to have a leisurely lunch with? 

Sometimes we could use some new conversation-starters.  In my circle the usual topics run all the way from A to B, from the cool and wet summer, to the latest norm-violating behavior of our President. There are also some local issues that are good for a few minutes of hand-wringing, including plans to build an unwanted pipeline through our valley, or the always-good-for-a-comment angst about our state’s high property taxes.

But sometimes it’s worth taking a leap into the unknown, or even the frankly impossible. I’m always interested in an acquaintance’s response to a simple question:  if they could conjure up a meeting with anybody, who would they like to join for a leisurely lunch? A meal can not only satisfy an appetite, but ruminations with a good conversationalist can stay with us a long time.

All of us come into contact with remarkable people, friends or strangers with wonderful stories to tell or experiences that extend well beyond our own. It is usually just an intellectual exercise to imagine what it might be like to spend time over lunch with a famous person. But people we already know can be just as interesting. Think of the conversations with familiar companions that bubble up in Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981) or Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013).

To be sure, it sometimes works out that someone with intimate knowledge of a notable achiever may come away from a meeting chastened. More than a few writers have admitted that their living or deceased subjects remained interesting, but not necessarily as candidates for a fantasized social outing.  Biographer Nell Painter remembers working on a study of the famous slave preacher, Sojourner Truth.  But several years ago Painter told a C-Span interviewer that her “closeness to me receded” as she worked her way deeper into Sojourner’s life.  She respected her subject to the end, but finally doubted they would connect in a conversation. Sometimes a little distance keeps the great and good on a pedestal where we want them.

In a recent dinner with friends the question drew various responses.  Singer-songwriter Paul Simon came  up as  a good lunch companion.  He  has been a stream-of-consciousness poet for several generations.  And some of those enigmatic lyrics in Graceland: what do they mean?  Another liked the idea of sharing a meal with Jesus, and  it’s hard to quarrel with that choice.  But the guest of honor would probably make me a nervous eater. Did I order to much? Should I have shared it? Why didn’t I suppress the joke about turning my water into wine? Another mentioned Barack Obama.  He’s articulate and sometimes funny.  And his off-the-record perspective in this political moment would be fascinating  to hear.  Would he make us feel better about where the nation is headed?

Another person suggested the African-American blues musician, Daryl Davis. Davis seems to have a knack for drawing in listeners, including KKK members.  He told an NPR interviewer that in some cases he was the first black American these white men had spoken to socially. One measure of his success is that he has a pile of KKK robes that his newly sensitized friends have sent him after they renounced their membership in the Klan. Think of what he might teach us about the subtleties of face to face conciliation.

American culture exists most vividly when we focus on agents of insight or change.

My choice tends to change by the week.  But right now I’d love to have lunch with the arranger, musician and producer, Quincy Jones. He is in his 80’s, with a career that spans playing trumpet in several great 50’s bands, to arranging and conducting some of the best performances caught on record: everything from Sinatra at the Sands, (1966) to Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982). He’s a walking history of American music: big-band Jazz, R&B, Pop and Funk. In interviews and a growing list of tributes (including 26 Grammys) Jones is unfailingly generous and interesting. Can a person still be hungry when sitting next to a national treasure?

There’s a useful point to this exercise. It’s a reminder that American culture exists most vividly when we focus on agents of insight or change. They may be famous or obscure.  But more than we think are close by,  their lives are testimony to the value of pluralizing our world beyond the shallow celebrities that sometimes narrow rather than broaden our horizons.

Since the fantasy lunch with the fantasy check is on me, who would you choose?