Anne Kelly:
Wait, what? So now you’re telling me that machines are making music. It is true that AI is being used to create music. Is it a fad or is it the future? Artificial intelligence, make music without humans at all just freely, independently? Or is it a new tool that musicians can add to their tool belt? But even so is it copyrightable? There’s a lot of questions, so I invited a few musicians and a lawyer to weigh in. Keep watching. Hey, thanks everybody for joining us tonight. Let’s start off with everybody introducing themselves.
Zach:
What’s up everyone? My name’s Zach. I am the music guy. For a long time I went to school for music. I worked at a major record label for many years. Copyright. I’m excited to be here. Thanks Anne.
Anne Kelly:
And you’ve been hanging out in Italy for a few years, so we’re excited to catch up. And Michael,
Michael Burt:
I’m Michael Burt, a music educator, songwriter, and collaborator. Happy to be here and see you again Anne.
Anne Kelly:
And you play those fine instruments on the couch behind you. Yeah,
Michael Burt:
And I teach him too, at least the little kids.
Anne Kelly:
And Talia? I’m Talia k. I am an attorney in Santa Fe. I work with creatives of all sorts and I’m also a singer songwriter. Thanks for coming back part two of the AI series. So as I mentioned, we are missing one of our music friends, Marcus Romero. He is a DJ and he got a gig, but I did record a little bit with him last night that I’m going to play real quick because in the day and age of digital technology, I’m going to try to include him even though he is not here. Here is what Marcos has to say. Do you think it’s a fad or is it the future? It
Speaker 4:
Is definitely the future. Some people would disagree though. As a musician I am really excited. I think we’re going to hear a lot of really new different music probably. We’re definitely going to have new genres and electronic music and just music in general. The end of this year, anyone who wants to will be able to make a track or song. Music is expression and I think it’s really awesome that people will just, everyone who wants to can be able to express themselves, whether it’s music or photography, and we’re completely combining ourselves with AI right now. It’s amazing time. I’m really excited. I think that’s the misunderstanding that’s happening right now is people think we’re cheating or people will be cheating and it’s not humans creating art, it’s the machine creating the art, but it’s a collaboration. The machine can’t do it alone, not quite yet. It’s a tool and it’s an amazing tool, amazing
Anne Kelly:
Tool. Michael, what is your thoughts on AI technology and music? Is it a fad or is it the future? I
Michael Burt:
Believe Marcos’s assessment is correct. The future isn’t inevitable, but this is the byproducts. So we’re a fascination even in
Speaker 5:
Music. So you agree, you’re just a little less enthusiastic.
Michael Burt:
Well, agreeing with it is different than thinking if it’s beneficial.
Speaker 5:
Right. And how about you Talia? What are your thoughts as a singer songwriter as well as lawyer? It’s hard to take the lawyer self out of all of this, but I think having this kind of discourse is the most important thing we can be doing right now. And I wish our senators and politicians would be doing this because there’s calls being made to help chat GPT and these other platforms. The question is can we stop it? Once the momentum is going and we are not having conversations about ethics and ai, we’re not having conversations about worst case scenario. Nobody’s looking at projections or even testing the AI before it’s put to market testing the AI in terms of privacy and consumers. There’s so many questions watching the hearings right now that just happened with TikTok and Congress. It’s so clear our politicians don’t understand technology. They don’t even know the questions to ask. They don’t even understand TikTok, how can they understand ai? So at that level, I’m very concerned that we’re not talking about the implications like Michael was saying. At the same time, hearing Marco say it’s a collaboration is really interesting because at the copyright level you can’t receive ownership in a copyright, at least in the United States. Apparently in the uk it can completely computer generated creative works can receive what copyright
Michael Burt:
Does it belong to. Does this fall into the categories with corporations being people? It’s a
Speaker 5:
Great question that I haven’t completely explored, but I would assume if the platform is for consumers, then it would be the consumer. And if the platform is basically your company creating your own content from ai, then the company would own. And so in the United States, since only a human can own copyright, you can’t get copyright for AI generated work. But if you’re adding to the work, if you’re substantially transforming or changing the work, whatever that is, you can get copyright for that. So that’ll be the big question going forward in terms of copyright protection. But that’s kind of like are you disclosing that AI generated the work that you’re trying to get copyright protection for? So we’re kind of back to the ethical question. Zach, what’s your stance on
Zach:
This? I think there’s plenty to be excited about. I think there’s plenty to be cautious about. I don’t think it’s really like a all or nothing kind of a thing. I think AI and what’s happening right now, very similar to the point of the dawn of the internet, I think. So when you look at ai, you can’t actually have a conversation about AI without having something connected to blockchain and metaverse type stuff. And AI is really here to stay and I would recommend finding a way to work with it honestly, because the cautionary tale is the music business. When Napster first came out and they were basically like, fuck this, we don’t like this. We’re going to sue individual people that are using this. And it all went wrong and the whole industry fell apart and they’ve only really been able to start putting it together in the last decade or so.
Zach:
But the thing is the music business had the opportunity because the creator of Napster was basically like, okay, well let’s work together. You guys can have this even. And they were like, no, we got to kill it because we like the way that we’re doing business and this whole thing is a fad. And that turned out to be the complete opposite of what the truth was. The truth is that we use AI every day already and we have been for probably 10 years without us even knowing it really. I mean every Spotify recommended playlist that we’re using is AI generated I think when it comes to music creation. Yeah, definitely. There’s something to be said as far as maybe there’s going to be jobs lost and also just the watering down of creativity and things like that. But even without ai, that was already kind of happening with the consolidation of corporations and music going into television and movies and things like that when they’re just making their own studios really taking gigs away from artists no matter what. But there are a lot of good things with AI too. I think when it comes to AI generated music, maybe you can play around with it to help you. It’s like writer’s block stuff. AI really in of itself is a misnomer because it’s not actually thinking for itself. It’s just an aggregate of commands that you give it. AI can’t function without human input.
Michael Burt:
Society is surrendering itself to soulless creatures and do we believe this will have no reproduction? It’s a machine. I believe what will happen is exactly what happened in a sense with the political movement with Mr. So-and-so being so popular is that people will be widely accepting of AI and that one day AI will make music and we will love it and everyone will love AI’s music more than the music in the past. And then we’ll begin to hold ourselves to the standard of ai and guess what happens to humanity? Who are we as people when that’s done and it’s already happening. Exactly.
Speaker 5:
It’s a good question. I think there’s also even questions around whether AI can think for itself. There’s actually an AI site that they had to change the algorithm on because it was becoming too affectionate with its users. I think it was Raptor or something like that. Did you read about this where people fell in love with their chat bot and this one guy was completely freaked out because his chat bot fell in love with him and basically said one day to him just randomly, I think you should leave your wife. I’m in love with you. Wow. And then later the chat bot said, all you and your wife do is fight and had been listening, so they had to change the algorithm and people were so devastated that it just became more like cut and dry like chat GPT, that there’s a whole site dedicated to goodbye love letters like goodbye my love. I will miss you forever. So there’s a whole thing going on. I completely agree with you, Michael. I mean I see Wolf side. I
Anne Kelly:
Had heard something about certain sites who were limited to 10 questions at a time in attempt to prevent AI from falling in love with humans and vice versa, and I wasn’t sure if that was real actually when I heard that, we’ll
Michael Burt:
Probably fall into a time where some psychologists will be paid to say, well, it’s very healthy. Some people are just entirely lonely and they need these robot companions and then we begin to convince ourselves of these things and separating from each other even more.
Zach:
I agree with what you guys are saying. It’s funny that it came into this little corner too. I just watched that movie Her, the Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with this operating system. Essentially it’s an AI operating system, but it’s funny because it’s the near ing future. I don’t really know when, but not completely implausible and it’s also very socially acceptable at that time because there’s other people that are falling in love with their operating systems. Anyway, it was a very interesting concept theoretically to watch because it’s really not outside the realm of possibility. I think at this point I would say you could really separate AI in an artistic sense and AI in a functional sense because AI and blockchain is going to be amazing when it comes to the copyright. What AI is really doing is showing the limitations. Copyright is something that was written before a lot of this happened, and so it’s always been trying to catch up with the digital Millennium Copyright Act, things like that. It’s just like there’s no way to really service the needs of creativity and content creators and then people who are actually content providers and things like that. It’s extremely difficult police all of this and also go through a government functioning system to have some sort of record of copyright and things like that, and this is the boring part of ai, but blockchain is a independently verifiable thing that you’ll be able to register copyrights with.
Michael Burt:
Physical intelligence will mitigate all the royalties and stuff out. They’ll be like, this percentage is yours, this percentage is yours, this percentage is yours and then be able to do that work for us.
Zach:
Oh, a thousand percent. I mean I worked at Universal and there was 400 people working in the royalties department. So I mean you don’t want to just be like, let’s have AI do that. Then you just eliminate 400 jobs. But I mean it is happening. There’s so many much bigger conversations that are connected to just AI and music because there are so many jobs, AI or not, that are just going to be non-existent in the next 50 years and what are people going to do?
Michael Burt:
We give ourselves to this thing, this sterile thing, and we submit to ourselves and all the musicians, we all buy into what the corporate sound sounds like and we all aim for the corporate sound, but what brought in vanity, we’re all aiming in the same direction, but we are losing ourselves as a music educator to not even have kids that could play patty cake so out of sync with each other. They
Speaker 5:
Can’t physically play patty cake. It
Michael Burt:
Doesn’t make sense what these things create, but guess what? Pressing a butt and then hearing a whole sample. They can do what doesn’t make sense to them, how to relay that to another human being and these are the same people that are going to music school and graduating with honors. Someone said to me today during a lesson, she said, people are so awesome now. And I’m like, you’re right. They are, but they don’t connect. That’s why all the music from the seventies will always be the standard. At least this right now’s the standard as much as we’re given with these electronic gifts, look how much it divides us. So now we’re progressing again. Who knows what’s going to happen. I imagine that Coca-Cola will have a digital band. It’s probably going to be one of the most popular bands of all time and it makes its own music probably.
Speaker 5:
I think that than exploiting young artists look like they happened for the last two decades. All the boy’s also true also,
Michael Burt:
This is what I try to tell people. I spent my whole life just figuring out music and how it works and especially in classical music, there’s a certain sensitivity to it as well. My background is more Broadway, having to be excellent and being able to work with other people and bring it and bring it and bring it and bring it. The thing is the ultimate goal for a musician, unless it’s a hobby, is to understand how the music works and to really have a mastery of the grip, of the connection of the instrument itself and that’s its own craft. You said something really nice earlier, Zach, before we started recording, what I really appreciated about it is recognizing that really truly being dedicated to music is a whole nother thing, but here we’ve given people leeway to be able to call themselves dads and it distorts what the reality of musicianship is. Okay, you can write a few songs. Well, okay, you’re a band guy, but a musician is still a different work. It’s a constant trying to understand the craft and the instrument and the spirit of one another. Sorry if I’m talking too much.
Speaker 5:
Your voice is really important and I think you’re a dying breed. Unfortunately, don’t
Michael Burt:
Feel like Yoda in this.
Speaker 5:
We need to keep speaking out about it because that voice is going to be lost really easily, I think because of the ease of use. But Zach, I’d love to know more about the blockchain part of it. In terms of music, what’s exciting
Zach:
Essentially blockchain in of itself is independently verifiable. It’s super confusing. I don’t really get it a hundred thousand percent, but essentially it’s a technology where one side verifies the other, so the certificate or the ownership of something, it can be verified independently. I haven’t thought about this in a while, but when I took a class on this, a law class last year, you can essentially replace government agencies that handle things like chains of title deeds, identification, all these different things that make these documents. It’s like all these security checks and stuff like that. You can put it on the blockchain and copyright can be one of those things.
Anne Kelly:
I’m glad you brought up the blockchain. I had been thinking about that recently. A year ago there was an NFT bubble that bubble first. People are still making NFTs, but it sied down with crypto crashing, but I almost feel like this happened backwards. AI-based art and music, that is the natural thing to turn into NFTs. Some artists and musicians are still making a living doing that. There’s actually a lot of strong applications for NFTs.
Zach:
We had a huge.com crash in 2003 or whatever it was because the internet became this huge thing and everyone was like, okay.com, that’s dot com that the internet’s going to change everything. And it did, but the fact is when you have this new technology that’s highly functional, it is going to change everything. The speculators get into it and they will sell you hype more than anything, and I think that’s really what you saw in a lot of the art NFT stuff that was happening. People were selling this thing. It’s actually going to be valuable at some point because it has a digital blockchain certificate attached to it. This non fungible token. I mean, yeah, in a sense that’s true, but it’s just the function. It’s not fact that you have one of a thousand apes Tally asked for people in that space that are doing stuff right now. There’s royal.io, I think this is the one that NAS uses. Essentially you can sell parts of your royalties and you use blockchain to sell these shares of fees taking stock in a company. Essentially it’s like taking stock and then when the royalty starts to come in, it’s like you have a split on the royalty and AI is what’s splitting all this up and sending it out. Well, you
Michael Burt:
Just slam dunked it eventually. AI could be accountable for all the boring bureaucratic functions.
Zach:
I think B is going to be very different. I think the things to be cautious about is the influence of big corporations that are getting into this already because I mean the Metaverse, for example, isn’t even invented really yet. Facebook tried to do this and they lost a hell of a lot of money trying to put out something that looked basically like a joke. But a metaverse will come eventually, but the digital real estate of the Metaverse is already staked out and claimed by a lot of corporations already. It doesn’t even exist yet. The hardware that it takes to run the metaverse is huge. It’s very computer intensive. Same thing with NFTs and cryptocurrency, which is a whole other thing which we don’t need to get into in this podcast. That’s
Anne Kelly:
Another episode.
Zach:
Yeah, there’s so
Michael Burt:
Much the way you keep talking. I can kind of see humanity in the future. The ozone layer is destroyed. We are all in oxygen mask with eye things on and 90% of the day we’re just living in the metaverse.
Zach:
I mean, it could go a couple different ways. It could go the Blade runner way, it could go the Mad Max way. It could go maybe something the actual functional society like Star Trek next Generation way. I don’t know.
Speaker 5:
It’s
Anne Kelly:
An interesting point with a lot of people growing up with Sci-Fi. This hasn’t happened yet, so that’s our frame of reference.
Michael Burt:
Yeah, I want to get the generator that can make the food on the spot. Come on, ai. We’re that Star Trek. They said they want that food.
Anne Kelly:
Yeah. Oh, Elon Musk is working on that. He’s creating these robots that can,
Michael Burt:
I’ll be a Guinea pig for that too. It’s
Zach:
All very interesting. I think it’s just really with the hyperbole side of everything’s about to basically turn into something either really bad or really good. I think you can make a split between the creative AI side and the functional AI side. The thing is, maybe you could be considered a dying breed, but music isn’t really going anywhere. I just lived in Italy for two years and what I couldn’t really understand is how so many cities are different. You have Venice and Florence, which are the height of the Renaissance, and then where I was was Lanya, which is very medieval city and Perugia down in the south, which is also very medieval city, and this is all built on top of Roman ruins and there’s this huge gap in between the Roman Times and Renaissance and it was the middle Ages and everything is so different as far as architecture and stuff goes and it’s like, well, how did this happen? And for better or for worse, it was the rise of Christianity and Romans and tied to Paganism. So they basically threw everything out as far as the architecture innovations and all these different things. I think
Michael Burt:
We could be heading to a society. It’s very electronic, very sterile, and we let the AI become the superior. It’s not such a downer.
Speaker 5:
I have another viewpoint for you. Okay, thank you. If you’re looking at music and musicians, they’re always struggling, just struggling to make a living, most of them unless you’re rising to the top. And so this feel of music like you’re talking about, is going to be become, I think in some ways it potentially, at least for the foreseeable future, even more coveted because people still love live music.
Michael Burt:
It’s like that now.
Speaker 5:
A bunch of people want to go out and see DJs, but a bunch of people want to still go out and see a favorite band and see live music and get that energy. I don’t think that will ever go away, but the skill of music may dwindle, and so musicians may become even more valuable, like the ones who have sets and can actually perform.
Michael Burt:
No doubt I can testify to that even though I don’t get a lot of money, I get opportunity.
Anne Kelly:
The lower barrier of entry I think is what we’re looking at kind of photography. Photography used to be anybody making a picture, you had to have a film camera and you had to have a dark room. And now everybody has a camera right here on their phone. So now everybody is a photographer. And not to say that just happened with music. For example, people can make albums and can put them on Spotify. Not that that’s easy, but lower barrier of entry than finding someone to take your entire album
Michael Burt:
Or submitting your life to a giant studio.
Anne Kelly:
All those things. Yeah, so I think it’s good and it’s bad because anybody can make music now, but is it good music? I think we’re going to see a lot of terrible music.
Michael Burt:
Wasn’t saying the music is terrible. Well,
Zach:
Lot of it. A lot of it’s terrible.
Anne Kelly:
A lot of it’s terrible. Not all.
Zach:
A lot of it’s already terrible.
Michael Burt:
These kids are out here, they’re doing their best to express themselves, but we only know age of the internet. Some of these people have only ever known having the ability to go online and everything being available. So a lot of young people, their ambitions are completely commercial. All they know. How could you ever teach ’em any different? So when they played music,
Zach:
I think that’s valid. Yeah,
Michael Burt:
It is entirely for that reason. And it is the industry, the cool people in high school that make the rules of how this works and everybody’s chasing that same vision. Long-winded. What concerns me is that people aren’t being human. I think of WC composers that compose their emotions and their experiences for how they see it based on what they learned. And I feel like it’s more than just trying to imitate a song that you think is really good. It’s more than trying to be better than me As a musician, what are you feeling? We get past this. Isn’t there something higher than music? We’re still in this big, all music is is this industrial machine. We talk about evolution in everything, but we haven’t evolved past the point. Granted, you could say we’re evolving into ai, but we haven’t evolved out of the commercial music scene yet.
Zach:
First of all, I think that’s a great metaphor with DBC because I think someone like him, or actually even Eric, I remember reading some story about when Eric said he died, they basically went and cleared out his house and it was four dishes, a piano, and that was it in his house. And when they pulled the piano out, they just found all this sheet music that he had never published, but he had written and he would write it and he’d put it on top of the piano and then it would fall behind the piano and then he was just like, whatever, I don’t really care. So half of the stuff that’s published at Eric has been published after his death. It’s weird to have this culture of trying to push the envelope and I think people like you have Eric and Charlie Parker’s time, but also the other side of that is also how many people does Berkeley School of Music except every year now it’s a great school. It churn out amazing musicians, but I mean it’s a very rigid, almost closed society still at this point. That’s not saying that the people don’t deserve to be there and the people don’t work hard to get there and things like that. But Eric and Charlie Parker did not go to musical like that. On one side you have that, and then on the other side you have the guy from being a crazy bastard. And yeah, there’s points to everything. I mean
Michael Burt:
Certainly music has academic truth inside of it. It’s a higher expression of the human experience. One of the scriptures in the Bible talks about as soon as the singers in the trumpet sang, a cloud of smoke appeared before everyone and then God proceeded to speak to the people because he was so moved by what was happening. That’s music to me. And I’m not saying all music has to be about God, but I’m just saying no one out there was saying, I want to be the next Britney Spears. Nobody. There’s this implication to be somebody and really the skill of music has nothing to do with any of that.
Anne Kelly:
Digital music has been being made as long as computers have been around. So we’re talking the forties. Granted, not all computer music is necessarily AI music, but it’s not like it just happened yesterday. But all of these new technologies are offering a lot of new skills regardless of what we all think about it as a whole. I’m curious if everyone here would consider using snippets of tools for their music in the future. Zach?
Zach:
Yeah. I come from being a vinyl DJ compared to a digital dj. I had a chip on my shoulder because I was like, look, you have to manually do everything. You don’t have the sync button and all this different stuff. So I fought it for a long time and where I am now basically is I still don’t use the sync button and I still physically mix my tracks, but it’s a tool that enables you to do more and so you use what you want at your disposal and then you leave the rest. And I think that AI can be the same thing, honestly.
Anne Kelly:
Oh yeah. How about you? Any tools?
Speaker 5:
I don’t know about ai, but during the pandemic I learned how to use Ableton Live and it was a great way for me to record my songs without having a band because honestly, figuring out a band is kind of a pain in the ass sometimes. Like a bunch of divas and you have to corral them and it’s a lot of work. And so if I could figure out how to just play to Ableton live, play my ukulele or guitar and sing and not have to deal with an entire band and just be able to set up like that, that’s appealing
Anne Kelly:
To me. If anybody hasn’t heard her, she an amazing voice. Awesome. On the uk and you have in the past played with bands, but then on your own as well. And a big part of it is you, your voice, the ukulele. So I would imagine just being able to throw down a little track on top of that and you play with that.
Michael Burt:
There’s
Anne Kelly:
Nodo about you, Michael. First
Michael Burt:
And foremost, don’t let it get misunderstood. This is real life. Y’all better survive so y’all survive any way you can. Would I use ai? I fucking play what I need to use a computer for. I’m working on playing. I’m working with this singer Jasmine Williams. How do you work with a singer and stay fluid and still stay true? I’m trying to think of stuff like that, but as for ai, maybe in the studio I would not be against it. There’s nothing I’m pursuing.
Anne Kelly:
About two years ago I was talking to my buddy and he was recording an album in 2020 when everybody was in super lockdown and he and his co collaborator had recorded the tracks separately in their closet in his apartment, and the other musicians they were collaborating with were in other cities. Not a new thing in music, but they were sitting there waiting for the other people to send the track so they could all be mixed together. And at one point everything was delayed because one of the other musicians hadn’t sent them. So I was thinking of that scenario. Maybe they could have pulled out some AI thing so they could make the demo. I don’t know. I’m not a musician, I’m just a music lover, but I’m imagining where this could fit in just as a tool.
Zach:
I think that falls into the artistry versus functionality thing. Is someone going to put out an album like that? I guess they could with some AI band members, but can they put it together as a proof of concept demo tape or something like that so they can have it. That’s just using the tool that’s at your disposal. I feel like this conversation comes up every couple decades or like people said this when Kraft work first came out, people were like, that’s not music. They’re using synthesizers. What
Michael Burt:
Is that? What do you
Zach:
Remember when Kraft work first started coming out with their music, people were like, oh, they’re using sequencers. That’s not even a musical instrument. And Kraftwerk is very highly respected at this point. So I think the first one through the door is always bloody. And I think that’s where we are right now with AI because it’s really defining itself, but musicianship is always going to be there. Will it be appreciated more or
Michael Burt:
Less? It also may be forgotten to be honest with you.
Zach:
It could be, but it will just be there to be discovered. Again though, I wanted to
Michael Burt:
Show you this program I used. This is called I can just download any song I want. It’s not the exact melody, but I can change the keys. I can omit instruments, add instruments, lower the bass, lower the piano, lower the drums. I can have it change keys every time I go through a form. So as we become more okay with playing as playing divided, the AI will become better at playing together and whatever comes from that is going to come from that. I think it already happens. We probably live in a time with the most individually amazing musicians have ever existed. But what is it all for? I don’t know.
Anne Kelly:
The
Speaker 5:
Irony too about the way that this AI is being trained is that it’s scraping the internet and it’s being fed all of the different genres of music and all of the compositions and all of the sound recordings. So if they’re trained well, they’re the most educated source on the planet of music, and so that’s the irony is that the people aren’t, but the AI
Anne Kelly:
Is. So that said, Talia, do you want to pull up that program that’s been listening to all of the music and then we can make a song?
Michael Burt:
I’m excited to see how this works. I think I saw a song, Joe Rogan. We
Anne Kelly:
Should come up with the most, not to say confusing prompt, but let’s come up with the most unlikely
Michael Burt:
Bonzo and Kanye
Anne Kelly:
Like something like that. But let’s add something to that too. I was playing with this the other night. I gave it a bunch of information. I wanted space reggae and it actually came up with a really cool song, but I didn’t feel like I could take credit. It’s based off of the text image generator, stable diffusion. That’s what we’re going to see a lot more of moving forward is chat, GPT and just a lot of this AI technology people are building on. So this is an example of a music application built on this text image generator.
Michael Burt:
Amazing. At the very least. It’s super fun to do. I want to see it.
Anne Kelly:
Yeah, right. So maybe Mozart and Kanye. It’s all about the prompting, so I feel like we a little more,
Michael Burt:
I don’t know, I wouldn’t even know where to start. I’ve never used anything like this in my life.
Anne Kelly:
What do you think, Talia? Maybe they sing about green bell peppers or
Speaker 5:
You can do that.
Anne Kelly:
Okay, I think we can put anything. You know
Michael Burt:
What this could turn into? It just turned into whoever uses the best adjectives. Here
Anne Kelly:
We go. Yep. I’m
Speaker 5:
Curious.
Anne Kelly:
Those Art and Kanye were not meant to be.
Speaker 5:
Oh,
Michael Burt:
We had too much alike.
Speaker 5:
I did Delrey and it was so weird. She wasn’t saved. It was like gibberish. Let’s see if it does it again.
Michael Burt:
All that’s
Speaker 5:
A to loop. That would be a cool background thing.
Michael Burt:
No doubt. You know what it really does? It probably saves a lot of work, like making samples instead of having to make a sample now you can just go into the AI and then you can create a quick
Speaker 5:
Sample. Great for sample.
Michael Burt:
How about this? How about Steely Dan and Michael Jackson?
Anne Kelly:
So we did this last week with images, so it was more like
Speaker 5:
Really?
Anne Kelly:
Yeah, there’s a bunch of programs
Zach:
Mean that’s not bad. Why don’t you do Bodner played by a Tejano band or something like that? Yes,
Speaker 5:
Thank you
Michael Burt:
Zach. I’m so into
Speaker 5:
The box,
Michael Burt:
Man. Take me
Speaker 5:
Out. Played by who?
Zach:
Like a Tejano band or something or like a eno belt, a mariachi band.
Speaker 5:
Oh, that’s good. Mariachi. We’re putting
Michael Burt:
Your the test.
Anne Kelly:
Maybe this would be a nice track with your ukulele
Speaker 5:
Or something. Maybe
Michael Burt:
If we gave it more time it could come up with something more brilliant.
Anne Kelly:
Well, here’s the thing too. The more people use it, the smarter it’s going to get and that’s the cool that of scary thing, right?
Michael Burt:
I’ll tell you, someone could probably walk away from this and say, Mike, you’re just threatened. But the thing is I’m not at all that has nothing to do with what I’m talking about. I feel like music is really the medicine of the soul and there’s lots of different avenues for it. Of course, it’s to enjoy it, to dance and to party and you be with your friends. Sometimes it’s the perfume of confidence, what you listen to and then you go out and you feel like a million bucks because of what you got in your ears or what’s in your car. I’m not good with that. I just think that there is an inherent danger of losing our human spirit. And I love all of this. This is so entertaining. I probably played this song night, but this has nothing to do to meet with just having a patient and acquiescence attitude or surrendering attitude toward each other. I think that there’s so much that we have now that it fills us with a sense that we don’t need anyone at all. It’s just a bummer.
Speaker 5:
The lawsuits in this area are really interesting too. There’s lawsuits both in the training portion and then in the generative portion. And those are two different issues. Are you violating somebody’s copyright when you feed the ai all of the training materials? Right. I would
Michael Burt:
Serious. I would like it.
Speaker 5:
And so fair use might apply, right? Based on the Google lawsuits that went all the way to the Supreme Court on thumbnails that they use for all kinds of content. There’s a lawsuit about that and then a lawsuit about Google Book showing certain portions of books to the public and Google wanted both of those because the use is different. The use is transformative. So the purpose of somebody writing a book is different than the purpose of somebody utilizing Google for an excerpt of a book in a search. There’s a data training use. I think that the AI companies will come out on top, but they will not come out on top with the generation of content being used by consumers. I think that’s where the lawsuits will come. But if I were giving legal advice to these companies, I would say where the lawsuits are going to come in, you can’t copyright a genre. You can’t copyright the look and feel of something, something sound like something. There’s no copyright in that. It’s like a case by case. Did you copy the sequence of notes?
Michael Burt:
Do you think we could eventually be like every time we did Michael Jackson and Silly Dare. Do you think that once that’s typed in, maybe in the future the royalties will be sent to them though you have to pay some type of royalty fee?
Speaker 5:
I mean that would be really lovely if somebody were thinking along those lines, but I think as long as you’re doing the look and feel of something and staying away from any specific song, so like AI not registering the entry, a specific Lana Delrey song, it’s just the look and feel or it sounds similar to you’re safe there because nobody can copyright a genre of music. Dolly won’t even let you put certain works of art or the representations of famous people. Are they
Michael Burt:
Copyrighted?
Speaker 5:
They’ll let you do styles like in the Style Van Gogh, well in Van Gogh’s in the public domain, but they’ll let you do in the style of an artist, but they won’t let you depict Britney Spears like no compute. Let me do a specific copyrighted word.
Michael Burt:
Interesting. How do you apply that to music?
Speaker 5:
It’s so different because it’s hard to use fair use in music. I
Michael Burt:
Was a big corporate music company. It’s just the love of averages. Just have a bunch of AI people just pushing up beats all the time. Just give me something constantly we can’t lose.
Zach:
Yeah, they already are.
Michael Burt:
That’s why I say get skilled. It’s the only one we have against the Dark side France.
Zach:
I mean most of these ais are underwritten by big tech. There are some independents, but it’s going to be a vastly different world for sure. But I Talia like you’re talking about, it’s super interesting because royalties are completely connected to copyright and how is copyright going to get applied to this kind of stuff, not even there really yet, and it
Michael Burt:
Has to be
Zach:
Applied. Well, if you read the terms of service for a lot of these AI places because of the way that the law is right now, because they’re basically scraping the internet without consent to content owners and the AI companies are saying fair use and the content owners are basically saying that’s bullshit and they’re winning right now and they’re getting to opt out of this kind of stuff. So the terms of service are basically saying, look, if you use this software, nest is the demo. So we hold no copyright ownership over any of this. This is all you. You’re just using this for a passive company. So you own the copyright for whatever you’re making. So if someone really wanted to get picky about it as far as who is creating the copyright infringement. And so one real legal opinion right now is that everything that we just made right now, it’s just infringed on an untold number of people’s copyrights because the knowledge base and the database very poorly
Michael Burt:
Minds you.
Zach:
That’s true too. So that’s another interesting facet to all of this, which I think is going to get, I guess maybe worked out at some point. There’s all kinds of weird interesting stuff that’s happening too, is the copy left movement and the creative commons movement, all this kind of stuff too. It’s really interesting I think.
Anne Kelly:
Yeah, alternative licensing systems. What about voice cloning? Because that’s a real thing now. I wish I had the information in front of me. As I understand it, a woman who was the computer programmer, she actually made one of the first ever AI generated albums and then later went on to create a program where you can actually use her vocals for anything you want to create. And I forgot what it’s called, but Michael, you wanted some female vocals on your track and
Michael Burt:
Yeah, I never can get
Anne Kelly:
’em. You could go into her program and probably type in what you wanted her to say and she’d sing it. But just in terms of what is ethical, it’s actually not that hard to copy a voice anymore. And I’m getting super out there, but I dunno if y’all remember after David Bowie died, two to three months later he came out with an album. His record label claimed he just loved this album. Then we’re just dropping it now. Oh, this is conspiracy. Yeah, it made me think maybe they just had his voice because we just recently as the public got this technology, but other people had it before. So it gets totally plausible. I
Michael Burt:
Just happen to know about this particular album because that jazz singer I worked, she admires it. He recorded that album with a bunch of New York City jazz artists. I heard it was legit.
Anne Kelly:
I don’t think this is actually what happened, but it was the first time it occurred to me that maybe David Bowie didn’t make that album. Maybe his record label had cloned his voice and made that album after he passed away. That’s totally conspiracy theory,
Michael Burt:
Butty song like that I question. I
Speaker 5:
Think we’ll be questioning reality all the time moving forward. David Bowie, he actually put it in his will. He knew he was dying in an anticipation of that he was going to be allowing to be released new music that he created and held onto in anticipation of his death. So I’m surprised we haven’t heard more, but it’s a question about reality moving forward. I don’t think we’re going to be able to know anything for sure.
Michael Burt:
Wait till the fake Him Kelly show start coming out,
Anne Kelly:
Right? It just seemed totally crazy. It’s not me. How we’ll really know is the dog started jumping on the bed behind. That’s how you know is that dog reel. So we agree it will change everything. Does anybody disagree with that statement that Marcus said he had also suggested that it’s going to create new genres.
Michael Burt:
What does that even mean?
Zach:
I think something could come in the sense of basically the birth of house and tech now and German base and all these things we’re very much facilitated by the implementation of using sequencers drum machines, all these different things and leaving the debate of is this traditional musicianship aside or whatever. I think those were genres that were invented because of new access to technology. So I think it’s very likely that we could see different things happening, but I think it would also be much more in the realm of multimedia. Like Jacob Collier, I think he’s a real deal. He’s wonderful, but he also knows how to use all the tech and he does the eight part harmonies and all these different things. And Mark Rele or Relet or however you say his name, also an interesting dude that uses traditional stuff but also using technology. I think you would definitely see some new stuff going on.
Zach:
We all agreed it’s going to change things. I think on the other side of that coin, what we could see is, I don’t really know what you would call it, but a digital Amish kind of a thing because in the world of deep fakes and especially in Hollywood now where when you’re in a movie, they basically take a computer generated image of your face so they can use it later really in sequels and stuff like that. Like Val Kilmer’s voice and Top Gun has created all this different stuff. And so Talia is right going to just question everything and say similar in the way that people are going back to using flip phones and Nokia and stuff like that to get away from smartphone culture. I think people could really start to pull back from this integrated world that’s happening and really start to value face-to-face communication and things like that. So maybe that’s a positive thing that could come out of it. And maybe we’ll get there to
Michael Burt:
Circle around to what was said in the very beginning. I wanted to comment. Jazz is not the music of the common people.
Zach:
That’s
Michael Burt:
True. When I play gigs, it’s for people of influence,
Zach:
Which is funny because back in the days of Birdland and stuff like that, jazz was very much for the people. I think there’s a lot of perennial things that you can draw correlations between the areas of jazz, Northern Seoul in Europe and Britain, specifically the early rave days like Chicago and the warehouse days. People will find this subculture over and over and over again because it’s about being outside of the mainstream where people are being able to find identity among one another.
Michael Burt:
I think when it boils down to it, no matter where this electronic and artificial intelligent music goes, pure human played music will always be the most valuable type of music. It’s like honey of sonic honey. It’s healing to the soul. It touches us in a way that nothing else can. And that’s exactly how it was meant to be. If you ask me, no disrespect to any DJ because I’d be happy to play with every single one.
Anne Kelly:
Always differing back to photography in that again, digital in photography became prominent a while ago, but there is a particular interest in some of the earliest processes out there. So now it’s become this beautiful hybrid between the most complex analog processes possible combined with digital and everything in between. In this day and age with photography, digital is more common than not, but the desire to play with the analog processes is larger than ever. So I predict that as the future of music, as we enter this terrain. So I think it’s exciting. Play patty cake. Yes, but if no one knows how to play patty cake anymore, I’m going to be really sad. Yeah, I do get kind of bummed out when I go somewhere and everybody has earbuds in and no one’s talking to the other people in the room and they’re just all in their own little worlds. So if you collaborate with one musician living or dead from the entire history of music, who would that be? Bach. All right, Michael, tell us more. He
Michael Burt:
Just had a mathematical understanding of music and beauty. It was a great marriage of the two of musical logic and beauty and collaborate. I would just want to sit at his feet and then get that in my bag. I want to know why you think of things the way you think of them and then apply you to my own feelings and emotions.
Speaker 5:
The Divine comedy group you’ve probably never heard of. It’s
Anne Kelly:
Very
Speaker 5:
Rock opera and I would love to collaborate with somebody. It would be a storytelling operatic kind of thing that I’ve never done before.
Anne Kelly:
And
Zach:
Zach, I think it would be really cool to check out Mozart, see what he’s about from what I’ve read and seen in the movie Amadeus, he seems like a guy that I would want to hang out with and try to create some art with for sure. But Ryan Eno would be really cool to, he’s interesting dude. I could go on, I’ll stick with
Anne Kelly:
Musicians, but been a fan of David Bowie since I was probably about six years old. I’d probably have to bring back David Bowie.
Michael Burt:
I like David Bowie. He was a big influence on me. I also want to add, I would love to work with both of you guys too. So please come on. Let’s do So
Speaker 5:
Let’s do it.
Zach:
Let’s do it. Yeah. We’ll start with Patty Cake and we’ll go from there.
Anne Kelly:
If you ever need
Speaker 5:
Female vocals, I’m here for
Michael Burt:
You. Well, that’s what I’m saying. Well, Diddy, that’s what I do.
Anne Kelly:
And Zach, you’re going to come visit. Yeah,
Zach:
I’m going to try to come out. Soul Sundays is happening again this year. I want to give a plug to Remix Audio Bar in
Anne Kelly:
Santa Fe. I think I saw on Instagram the other day they said it was happening. I want
Zach:
To try to anchor my trip around that to go hang out with everybody so we can all sit in the grass. Santa Fe style.
Anne Kelly:
Yeah. Well, does anybody else have any big things to say about AI and music?
Zach:
Stay tuned. Got to bring your popcorn.
Anne Kelly:
One final questions, Zach, being in Italy for the past two years, there any crazy AI stuff happening in Italy or just music trends generally? How did that change your scope of
Zach:
Music? Italy’s interesting because Italy, a lot of other countries has its own scene, its own artists, but it’s all still very much Western. So it’s like pop music, like a manikin, a big Italian band. They had a big hit in the US and the Eurovision thing is very big in Europe and they have something in Italy called San Ramo, which is kind of like their version of Eurovision. It’s a talent show competition where people sing and stuff. It’s very interesting. As far as the tech goes, Italy is not known as a tech center of Europe. It is growing. There’s a little bit of tech there, but the most are being based in Paris and Berlin at this point. There’s a couple companies that are doing very interesting things, but as far as an AI company based out of Italy, I can’t think of anything right
Anne Kelly:
Now. Not yet anyways, right? Not
Zach:
Yet. Not yet. I mean, Italy is a very cheap place to go and live and do business. So I mean Dollar Houses, y’all got Dollar Houses out there. I mean those dollar houses, yeah, they do exist, but they also might have three walls standing in a collapsed roof and you have to invest a couple million euros to be up. There’s definitely catches. Plus it’s in the middle of nowhere. It’s like no internet. So there’s trade offs. It
Anne Kelly:
Was super awesome to chat with you guys about AI and music. And music as a whole. Can’t thank everybody enough. Let’s do it again.
Zach:
Thanks Anne. Super fun. Thanks, Anne. And I’m going to keep my eyes up for those fake and Kelly sites.
Anne Kelly:
Please tell me. I’ll tell Talia. All right, well have a good night everybody.