Comment by CapsAdmin
2 days ago
I'm honestly not getting the human story thing when it comes to music and maybe art in general. I mean I get what it means, but I don't think it describes why people enjoy art.
To me, it seems more like people place their own meaning in art. A particular song might remind one individual of the good times they had in their teens, while the actual meaning of the song is completely different.
Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.
And what exactly is the meaning of jazz fusion? I really like a good solo, but a lot of people hate it, they need to hear a voice. (though I don't particularly like the signature Suno or Udio solo..)
I found this ai track on Spotify that I unironically enjoyed. I listened to it every day while working on reviving an old passion project, which became its meaning to me. The tune, a long with its album with random disparate suno generations was taken down.
I'm not sure if I have a point here, but something is off with the story thing in art to me from a consumers point of view. Maybe from other artists as consumers point of view?
Your point echoes the "death of the author" concept in literature, where the work is independent of the creator, full stop. It's a useful concept up to a point, but if you really have no idea what it means to have a deep connection to music that is wrapped up in some idea of the creator as a human being, you should trust others when they say they do and it's important to them. For those of us with that value, AI slop is offensive, and to be clear, it has precedents in history with Muzak, early schlager music etc -- what they all share is a desire to use the power of music for non-artistic ends, which sucks from any number of viewpoints. If music has non-artistic utility, that doesn't justify a concerted effort to take away artist-made music from those who may not be paying attention.
I appreciate the honesty. I'm not saying people don't have this relationship with art, I think everyone can have some degrees of it, including me.
But my experience as an artist talking to non-artists about art, I don't think the sentiment that art without a struggling artist, purpose, story to tell, human arc, etc, is not real art is a true sentiment. First of all, because it's not true, because people apply their own meaning and form their own unique relationship with an artist. (The saying don't meet your heroes come to mind.)
Note that I'm not talking about AI at all here. I'm 100% for banning purely generated AI on soundcloud, bandcamp, spotify, etc. What I really want is to filter out art created by people who has put profit as first priority and thrown away any shred of artistic integrity.
But this is an impossible feat, because who am I to judge that someone else's favorite artist is devoid of artistic integrity?
except that what you’re describing is the CONSUMER SIDE of meaning, not the SOURCE of it.
yes, listeners project their own memories onto music, no one’s disputing that. but that doesn’t make the creator, context, intent, or labor irrelevant. treating music as interchangeable stimulus is how you end up defending systems that strip human work of attribution, risk, and livelihood while still feeding on the cultural residue artists created in the first place.
I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
While I personally like it when people put their heart and soul into something, even if the result is technically not very great, it's society who is the ultimate judge of whether that creation benefits them or not.
I know that the track I'm currently listening to is superior in every way to some modern pop song. The artists have practiced for decades, they have their own unique style I can recognize in other tracks. But I also know that 99.999% of people don't give a shit and think it's noisy music, and depending on your perspective, they're correct.
> I think maybe we're talking past each other then. I'm saying I don't agree with the argument that music necessarily needs to have a story to be widely consumed in a positive way.
I can imagine that this is true for a lot of people. There are certainly folks out there who see music as an interesting sensory stimulus. This song makes you dance, this one makes you cry, this other one makes you feel nostalgic. To these people, the only thing that matters is what the music makes them feel. It's a strange, solipsistic way of engaging with art, but who am I to judge?
I personally don't connect to music—or any other art—that way. The process that goes into making a piece of music is as important to me as the music itself. The people who make that music are even more important. I don't believe in separating art from the artist. In fact, I find the whole idea of separating art and artist to be fundamentally rotten.
Here's an admittedly extreme example, but it's demonstrative of how I personally relate to music. In the wake of the #MeToo movement (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeToo_movement), some of the musicians I used to love as a teenager were outed as sexual predators. When I found out, I scoured my music library and deleted all their work. The music was still the exact same music I fell in love with all those years ago, but I could no longer listen to it without being reminded of the horrible actions of the musicians. Listening to it was triggering.
And so to me, music is not just a series of sounds that make me feel good. There are humans behind those sounds, and I care deeply about those humans. They don't need to be perfect—everyone fucks up from time to time—but they need to demonstrate some level of human decency. And they certainly can't be machines, because machines aren't people.
I love machines. I've spent my life building them, programming them, and caring for them. But machines aren't people, and therefore I don't care about the art they make. Maybe one day machines will be able to make art in the same way humans do: by going out into the world, having experiences, making mistakes, learning, connecting with others, loving and being loved, or being rejected soundly, and understanding deeply what it means to be a living thing in this universe. A generative AI model doesn't do that (yet!) and so I'm utterly uninterested in whatever a generative AI model has to say about anything.
3 replies →
> Bachs 5th symphony (or whatever) might be extremely annoying to someone because they had to listen to it every day at work.
Or Beethoven's 9th. For different reasons...
"little of the old ludwig van"?