AI Versus Me

Artificial Intelligence is somewhere in practically every media, entertainment, and conversation today.  I went on record, a long time ago, saying that “I’m not worried about AI, but LI [Low Intelligence] is gonna kill us all” and I still believe that.  That said, so far, AI’s “contribution” to anything more sophisticated than a Google search algorithm has been dismal-to-dangerously stupid (LI, even). 

When it comes to music, though, especially popular music the bar is so low that I suspect AI will be quite successful at creating pleasant background noises.  Yes, that’s where the bar is set for most of pop music.  While I am no longer involved in any part of the professional audio industry, I still get the industry rags: mostly Mix Magazine and Tape Op Magazine with a few other freebies showing up intermittently.  If nothing else, those magazines tip me off on what is supposedly new and cool, while they flail helplessly at their primary purpose, selling me new equipment and software.  I have too much of both already. For the most part, most of the new music discussed in the industry magazines leaves me sub-zero cold.  For that matter, that is true for most old pop music.  I’m a firm believer in 1950’s SF author Ted Sturgeon’s rule, “90% of everything is crap” and I still think Ted was an optimist.

For example, this month’s Mix Magazine does a several page, detailed description of the creation of Lily Allen’s new record, “West End Girl.”  (If you’re interested, you can read the article by following this link.)  According to the article, a lot of creativity and work went into the recording, but it sounds suspiciously repetitious and the production is not unlike, or superior to, work I’ve heard from dozens of regional pop artists done in their home studios.  [You can decide for yourself without investment listening to this YouTube link.]  The song, “Ruminating,” is a good example and is about the most AI-sounding thing I have ever heard.  If it shows up in the soundtrack of “Matrix 101: Doing Everything the Same Way All Over Again” I want it noted that I said it first here. 

On the AI end, Producer/YouTube dude Rick Beato, who absolutely hates AI, in a show about an AI artist, Sienna Rose, does a pretty good job of showing how little space there is between an AI “artist” and some human, but very similar and equally derivative, pop artists.   That wasn’t his intention, but it was a pretty solid side-effect.  The problem with Rick’s argument is that there is a long history of pop music that is soul-less, repetitive, imitative, and boring and much of the worst of that ilk have been hits.  Not only is the music blah, but pop music listeners are not in any way discerning. 

There are many areas of “art,” industry, science, medicine, law enforcement and legal system administration, transportation, and clerical tasks that AI will very likely do as well or better than human competition.  Since the 1980s, when I first heard about autonomous cars, I’ve argued that it wouldn’t take more than a Zilog Z80 processor with 64kb of memory and a 5Meg hard drive to outmaneuver 99% of American drivers. 

In general, and on average, humans suck at complex tasks requiring actual multitasking and computers excel at those same kinds of chores.  Our “justice” system is plagued with issues as blatant as judges issuing harsher penalties before lunch, than after, to the obvious fact that rich people have a totally different set of legal rules than the rest of us.  Doctors are overwhelmed with information and responsibilities and, as their numbers shrink (Thanks to Reagan’s idiot tax changes.) and workload increases and their patient data flow exponentially increases, AI will be moving from providing assistance to making decisions.  Electrical, mechanical, and civil engineering decisions and designs are becoming more AI-driven every year.  Everyone from self-publishing authors to book publishers are resorting to AI-generated artwork due to speed, flexibility, and necessity.  (Watch for my next essay.)  Currently AI is used for 5–10% of movie CG generation and that will increase exponentially in the next few years.  Pop music just isn’t anywhere near as complicated or, usually, creative an enterprise as any of those tasks. 

However, nobody (almost nobody, anyway) is likely to want to pay money to attend an AI concert and we’ve already suffered through disco and we’re not likely to go back there soon.  Musicians, live and locally, are not likely to be inconvenienced by AI music and that might not mean much change for 99% of music “artists.” 

Technology Is Gonna Do What?

The telephone has been around almost 150 years, since 1870. By 1879, telephone service subscribers began to be identified by their phone numbers, not by their names and by 1918 a million telephones were in service just in the USA. In 1962, Telestar, the first communications satellite was launched. In 1973, the beginning of the end of telephone communications arrived when Martin Cooper developed the first handheld mobile telephone. The first analog cell phone system went into service in Japan in 1979. In the 1990’s, cell phones began the switch to digital and there are hundreds of millions of people now frustrated by the awful sound of low-fidelity (at best an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression) digital cell phone conversations and miscommunication created by lousy digital connections.

In fact, according to an Atlantic Magazine article "Don't Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone" a whole generation, Millennials, have been diagnosed with a “kind of telephoniphobia” regarding voice telephone communications. Now that half of Americans under 35 use cell phones exclusively, “the intrinsic unreliability of the cellular network has become internalized as a property of telephony.” It isn’t. It’s a property of fuckin’ cell phones and I absolutely hate the damn things. I hate getting calls from people on their cell phones. I hate calling people who I know will answer my call on their cell phone. Between the distortion, the Auto-Tune-like Mr. Roboto voices, and the forced long pauses while we try to determine if there is still a usable connection (on their side) I just assume that at least 3/4 of the things that were said were misunderstood or not heard at all.

I have stopped listening to audio fidelity complaints from people who tolerate cell phones. This is not an anti-digital rant. I love digital data storage and have been perfectly happy with digital audio for music since the early 1980’s. However, the fact that cell phone users don’t even insist on full duplex communications capability from their crap-stick phone providers is evidence enough to me that they are not serious audiophiles of any sort. If you don’t know the difference between half and full duplex, I particularly like this comment and response for an answer: “GSM operates in duplex (separate frequencies for transmit and receive), the mobile station does not transmit and receive at the same time. That's called half-duplex. It's done to save bandwidth and battery power, and to make cell phone conversations more difficult.” While I’m sure the real reason cell phone providers don’t deliver full duplex is because it would be technically slightly more demanding and marginally more expensive, I’m entertained by the assumption that “it's done to . . . make cell phone conversations more difficult.” No matter why it’s done, it sure as hell makes conversations more difficult, less convenient, less entertaining, less personal, and less pleasant.

This afternoon, I tried to have a conversation with my brother who lives in Phoenix and this statement from that Atlantic Magazine article on why people hate phone calls rang true, “On the infrastructural level, mobile phones operate on cellular networks, which route calls between between transceivers distributed across a service area. These networks are wireless, obviously, which means that signal strength, traffic, and interference can make calls difficult or impossible. Together, these factors have made phone calls synonymous with unreliability. Failures to connect, weak signals that staccato sentences into bursts of signal and silence, and the frequency of dropped calls all help us find excuses not to initiate or accept a phone call.”

It’s not just “weak signals” that are the problem. Grossly misnamed “communications companies” have jammed so much data into so little bandwidth that signal strength is just one of many factors that creates an incoherent telephone call. My brother, for example, said he had “five bars” of signal strength, but our conversation was mostly a collection of Mr. Roboto vocoder noises, weird electronic bird song tweeting and screeches, and long pauses where neither of us were able to get anything across the satellite signal path. After a bit, we gave up and went back to email to carry on our “conversation.”  A few moments later, my daughter called. We both have “land line” phone systems; hers is provided by her telephone company and mine is through the internet and an Ooma Telo system. We had a pleasant 1/2 hour conversation; with each of us laughing at the other’s jokes and stories made even more personal by being able to hear the laughter while we continued the stories. No weird noises, no Auto-Tuned Kayne West sound effects, no forced pauses waiting for the phone system to reboot itself and reconnect us; just a normal telephone conversation. The kind we used to have every time we picked up a telephone that was wired to the fuckin’ wall; 75 years ago.

The fact that the quality of telephone data transmission is lousy allows cell phone manufacturers to dumb-down the whole signal path. The microphones, the “speaker,” and the analog electronics connecting those transducers to the crappy data transmission system are all degraded. Why connected a decent micro-condenser microphone to an 8bit/8kHz sample rate, 200-3.2kHz bandwidth, 64kbs data compression system? It doesn’t make sense to waste a decent transducer on a crappy ADC system. Likewise, at the receiving end why connect a half-decent speaker to a low-fidelity DAC? So, they don’t. You clearly don’t notice or care. Some of you low-life weirdoes even listen to music on your phone, out of that godawful speaker!

Cell phones have rendered over-the-wire conversations pointless and painful. They are helping us all grow apart. “Can you hear me now?” is not a question of coverage and hasn’t been for at least a decade. Now, it’s a question of did you understand that simple question through the hash of garbled transmission, Star Bores sound effects, and cut-out segments of the phrase? I’ve said this before, “I can, in a few moments, tell if a caller is on a cellphone because the quality is miserable. Always. My guess is if you can tolerate that level of distortion in a voice conversation you aren’t that discerning in any aspect of audio. So, while I’m not surprised that music is being listened to on actual speakers by an audience of 12%-and-shrinking I’m also not impressed by your musical tastes. Your opinion of audio quality is just going to make me laugh, so don’t waste either of our time.” It’s still true, but now I also don’t think you care much about communicating with your fellow human beings.

This Is Revenge?

On the way out of my local library last week, I spotted The Revenge of Analog by David Sax on the “new books” shelves. The sub-title is “Real Things and Why They Matter,” which is oddly confusing. I guess I had no idea that real things had ceased to matter or that analog was particularly “real.” Design Magazine did a brief review of this book a while back and I was entertained by the gushing over vinyl records, as I usually am. Revenge spends the first chapter raving about how and why vinyl records have made a big comeback. I think Sax has the how down pat, but is a little fuzzy on the why.

Jack White, the big proponent of vinyl who has yet to make a record that doesn’t sound like shit, has a quote in Revenge that seems to sum up his philosophy, “With vinyl, you’re down on your knees. You’re at the mercy of the needle. You watch the record spoin and it’s like you’re sitting around a campfire. It’s hypnotic.” I have not problem imagining X-geners and Millenials wanting to be down “on their knees” to mediocre technology, but “romance” and messing with cleaning records and putting up with manufacturing defects and high prices don’t seem compatible to me. White, like his idol Neil Young, claims “the actual sound of analogue is ten times better than that of digital.” If that were true, Young would have made a second decent record and White would have made at least one.

If you read Revenge, don’t expect technical competence. Statements like, “Digital music takes an analog sound wave and translates it into 1’s and 0’s, inevitably sacrificing chunks of information, and sound, in the process. Usually, digital files are compressed to a smaller size to make them easier to download and stream, and their volume levels are jacked up to compensate. But none of that really matters to the vast majority of music listneers, who aren’t really that concerned about sound quality.” You might think Sax would have passed something this stupid by someone who knows something about audio engineering, but you’d be wrong.

The book does make one solid point in the chapter on vinyl, though. In explaining why “digital data” is at fault for devaluing popular music,:the ease at which decent recordings can be made with digital technology put the lie to the idea that artists are a rare commodity. With 8 billion people on the planet, it’s pretty hard to imagine that world wouldn’t produce twenty to fifty million musical geniuses. With access to professional quality recording equipment available to most of those few hundred million musicians, the result is a flood of brilliant, original popular music (and hundreds of millions of dramatically lessor talents) and a swamped buying public.

Sax’s take on the studio recording process is even more open-mouthed baffled and impressed. He is so enamored with the past that he didn’t even bother to ask if analog tape and vinyl have any sonic drawbacks. Likewise, when he finally discovers live music, he writes, “a great live band is a bolt of lightning, and an iPod is a lightning bug.” Imagine what he would think if he were to attend an orchestra concert?

The 2nd chapter is titled “The Revenge of Paper.” You’d think it would be about books and magazines, but it’s about a fashion accessory called the “Moleskine notebook.” There is a chapter for “The Revenge of Print,” but since I’m reading this book on my Android tablet it may not carry the appropriate clout, at least in my case.

ARTICLE: Who Would That Inconvenience?

[Clearly, in 2004 I was in a prolific self-publishing mode. I didn’t even try to find a home for some of these articles, as strongly as I felt then or now about their relevance.]

You can't read an entertainment or computer magazine without running into an article or ad about how much "damage" is being done to the nation's creativity by "intellectual rights theft."  The game manufacturers are, apparently, going broke because so many people are "stealing" game software.  The music industry execs are all living in cardboard boxes in New York and LA's back alleys because nobody is buying music, we're all stealing it through MP3s online.  And those poor, poor software designers are working nights at SuperAmerica to support their creativity because everyone is bootlegging software.  Billy Gates has sold his mansions and lives in a Seattle commune with 35 other desperate, but dedicated-to-their-art, Microsoft employees.  Congress and the international community needs to "do something" to protect these poor, starving, and productive folks before these vital industries are starved into non-existence.

Or not. 

I think not.  For instance, the music industry thinks nothing of "giving away" it's product on the radio.  Radio stations "give" us more of the music industry's product than most of us want to hear.  Sure, they're selling ads and using the music as a loss-leader to attract listeners, but they have worked overtime to own the broadcast business so that they have easy access to free distribution of their god-awful products.  How that is different than the distribution of these same products through websites is too indistinct for my sensitivities.  I'll admit that I'm not particularly sensitive to the needs of overstuffed executives and their desperate desire to own everything from natural resources to original thought.  But I do believe that if you give away your product in one venue, you've given up the right to be able to protect it in another.  The Supreme Court thought the same way when they prevented record companies from limiting the use of cassette recorders, 30 years ago. 

But my real reason for writing this article is to address the pitiful condition of software companies.  In our industry, bootlegged software is as common as guitar picks.  At the tech school where I sometimes teach, I hear about the use of "illegal" versions of every program from ProTools to Sonar to Logic to $50 plug-ins and $10 sampled loop CDs.  Everything you might ever want to own is available, for free, in a bootleg version.  Acquaintances who aren't even involved in the music business have copies of programs that I couldn't justify buying if I didn't need to eat regularly. 

Software manufacturers estimate that they've "lost" somewhere between two hundred million to a billion-zillion dollars due to software bootlegging.  According to their estimates, everyone on the planet would have purchased their products if they hadn't had access to illegal versions.  Some of us would, surely, have bought those products several times if legal channels were the only way we could obtain software.  Software companies have moved from vaporware to vapor markets.  Their hallucinations of wealth and power have infected the magazines with whom they advertise, too.

I beg to disagree.  In fact, I'd bet that the opposite of their argument is true.  I'd argue that if bootleg "test" software wasn't available, most of us wouldn't bother with computers at all.  The computer industry has made that a fact by its inability to build reliable, quality products.  The business tells us that bootleg software is unreliable and to obtain reliability we should pay for the software and pay again for the minimal "customer support" provided by the manufacturers.  Experiences tells us that the words "unreliable" and "software" are inseparable.  It doesn't matter if you pay for software or if you steal it, it's going to be unstable, undependable, buggy, and a constant irritant.  And you're going to have to pay, over and over again, for future versions that "fix" a few problems and create a lot more. 

That's a great business, if you can find it.  Build a crappy, unreliable product and follow that up by charging your customers extra for "supporting" your mistakes.  That is the next step beyond planned obsolescence, assuming that your customers don't revolt.

Basing a home studio around bootleg software is a risky business, because putting any faith in software is an act of unfounded faith.  The products are, simply, buggy as a Tijuana hotel bed.  Software crashes, we reboot, software crashes again, this time rebooting for us, and we pay more money in the foolish hope that, this time, the code will be more reliable.  The more features we get, the less reliable the software becomes.  It's an endless, unproductive closed-loop.  Many users are honestly "test driving" software by using hacked versions.  On the rare occasion that a piece of software is actually useful, many users turn from test drivers to legitimate owners.  I see it happen with students all the time. 

Occasionally, a company screws up and releases a version of software that crashes less often than its competition.  When that happens, many users end their search for improvement and get back to doing productive work.  A few months ago, I read a business computer article about a large number of businesses who are still using Microsoft's Windows for Workgroups, version 3.11, and the associated version of Office, because it did the job that needed doing.  Those of us who migrated to Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, and XP often think that the few functioning features we've gained haven't repaid the investment in retraining, debugging, and the reliability problems we've suffered in transition. 

What would happen if every computer user decided to quit chasing the holy grail of the newest, coolest version of software and found something that worked reasonable well and stuck with it?  There are a fair number of analog studios out there who have gone back (or stayed) to 20 year old technology and spend their time tweaking reliable and functional technology and making music.  Computer recordists could do the same thing.  Quality work was done on almost every version of almost every program.  We could have all quit looking for something new at any time in the last decade or two. 

Of course, that would break the software company income chain.  If every software company in the industry went broke and vanished tomorrow, who would that inconvenience?  If we all were forced to use the products we're using today for the next fifty years, would we stop recording music?  If today's software glitches and crashes became a constant, known, and never-ending irritant, would that make a lick of difference to people currently using that software?  You know it wouldn't.

If the state of the art never moved an inch from its current status, we'd still be doing what we're doing today.  We'd be recording music, burning CDs, cutting vinyl, posting MP3s to websites, and looking for the next cool music.  The profits or losses of software companies means nothing to the flow of music.  We have the tools we need and a hell of a lot of tools that nobody needs.  Software companies have their problems and we have ours and the two have nothing to do with each other.