Tag: music

Generative AI Goes to the Opera

I think music is the purest artform because it is uniquely capable of provoking strong emotional responses without necessarily conveying meaning or information. Yes, one could say the same thing about abstract visual art, but I think the brain is hardwired to at least try to read meaning in visual expression and that this is not so with instrumental music. Moreover, I don’t think any medium is so universally provocative of human emotion as music.

It is admittedly cliché to talk about operatic arias provoking tears, but in my experience, they really do. In fact, one of my favorite arias is about a tear, aptly entitled “Una Furtiva Lagrima” (One Furtive Tear) from Gaetano Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’elisir Di Amore (The Elixir of Love). I do have a personal relationship with this song because it was first introduced to me by my late father-in-law, a tenor who sang with several U.S. opera companies, served as artist in residence at The Israeli Nation Opera, and sang for Pope John Paul II in 1988. I wish had a digital version of his “Una Furtiva Lagrima” to share because it is, in classical terms, the shiznit.

But I was thinking about that aria for this post because, notwithstanding the familial connection, nothing external to the music influences its effect on me. I am not an expert on opera or Donizetti, and I do not fully understand the Italian libretto. Hence, the mechanics by which the score and the tenor’s performance reach through this curmudgeon’s crusty exterior to trigger an emotional response can be boiled down to a science, which means that a similar experience can be created by a generative AI. And so, the elephant in the room asks the obvious question:  Will the provenance of a work matter to the people who experience it?

I recognize that music by generative AI is already responding to this question, but these early sprouts in the market do not tell us what the broader cultural effects might be in a future without Donizettis, Domingos, or orchestras. One valid prediction could be that it won’t matter to the audience experiencing the music whether it was generated by a machine or another human. If a song produces spontaneous tears or laughter or a desire to dance, then who cares if it was made in a lab rather than by charming Liverpudlians sweating it out in a London studio?

Most Artists Are Not Performers

This conversation requires that we make a distinction between performance and composition. In other posts, when I’ve scorned the idea of machines replacing artists, I have generally referred to performance and drawn analogies to sports. One that seems to resonate in conversation is my NASCAR example because this is basically watching machines move in circles and waiting to see which machine finishes the requisite number of circles first. This lifeless description makes the point that without the people in the drivers’ seats and pit crews—humans who are largely hidden from view during the race—NASCAR would be about as interesting as watching an oil pump bob its mechanical head at the ground.

I believe our desire, or need, to experience performance—whether it’s Blake Morgan playing his music or Coco Gauff winning the Women’s US Open—mitigates AI’s power to usurp the role of many artists. But if this is true, the rule only applies when composition and performance are deeply intertwined, as with singer/songwriters like the recently late Jimmy Buffett. An AI “Caribbean-Drunk-Rock-n-Roll-Music”[1] generator could never foster the whole experience that became the Buffett brand. But could this ersatz “Margaritaville” mixer compose the equivalent of a new “Come Monday,” and if so, would it matter to future listeners who have no idea what the AI “learned” from Jimmy?

Most creators are “composers” and not “performers,” often as removed from the audience experiencing their work as I am from Donizetti while listening to his aria in 2023. And frankly, Donizetti, who died in 1848, is hardly more obscure to the average listener than Rod Temperton, who died in 2016 after writing some of the most popular songs of the 1970s and 80s including several of Michael Jackon’s biggest hits. Never in my teen years was I aware of Mr. Temperton’s role in all those songs.

So, keeping the focus on the composers, authors, painters, photographers, filmmakers et al. who do not perform, is there some anthropological reason to believe (hope) that artists will not be replaced by machines making music, books, visual arts, etc.? I understand that there are practical reasons why AIs may not get there at scale, but the question I’m asking is more about us than about the technology. Will the science that makes music provocative continue to work on the human listener, if future compositions are produced by things that cannot feel heartache or longing or humor, etc.? Put differently, will the novelty of generative AI wear off because the compositions it produces will become flat, bloodless, and disposable?

In my book, I wondered why an advanced AI (one that can make even semi-autonomous decisions) would bother to produce “art” upon reaching a certain threshold in its so-called intelligence. If humans make art because it’s one way we confront, synthesize, and respond to the human experience, then perhaps the “smarter” the AI becomes, the more likely it is to realize that it has nothing to say because it has no experience. Or does the robot begin to create works in response to the robot experience and ignore its instructions to produce songs or novels or pictures for human consumption? I doubt it, but if this does happen, we can be sure that some humans will form a cult to follow the new bot prophet.

But I’m not really answering the thesis question, am I? Because I have no idea. I want to believe that the question was answered by Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park when he warned that nature finds a way.* Only instead of dinosaur nature triumphing over laboratory safeguards to keep them contained, it would be human nature instinctively rejecting synthetic “art” for reasons that are likewise ineffable. For better or worse the AI experiment, like Jurassic Park, has begun, and we’ll have to wait and see who gets eaten. So, perhaps the new version of the Turing Test should not be whether the computer can make you believe it’s human, but whether it can provoke a furtive tear and then ask whether you mind that it is not human.

[1] Buffett’s own description from his live album You Had to Be There.

*Thanks to comment by Bob Hill. Malcolm says “Life finds a way.” I edited the text to retain the point but drop the quotation marks.

Photo in collage: Thomas O’Leary in The Tales of Hoffmann.

Is the ACCESS Bill Mean-Spirited or Ill-Advised?

Last week, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) suddenly—and I do mean suddenly—introduced a bill in the Senate that many of the usual copyright-haters are applauding as an “alternative” to the CLASSICS Act.  It’s hard to decide whether Wyden and whatever narrow constituency he’s serving are using this bill as a political stunt aimed at killing CLASSICS, or if they’re really arrogant enough to believe this bill would not become the legal briar patch the authors of CLASSICS worked hard to avoid for the time being.  In fact, just dropping this bill in the Senate’s lap at the eleventh hour has the potential to upset the entire, multi-stakeholder-negotiated Music Modernization Act omnibus package—the one in which digital platforms like Spotify have a stake—and which passed the full House with a vote of 415-0.

Despite all that, Wyden unilaterally chose to disregard the many years invested by his colleagues in the House Judiciary Committee, the volumes of testimony and negotiations, and the 2011 recommendations of the Copyright Office, to introduce a counter-proposal called the ACCESS to Recordings Act.  The acronym stands for the Accessibility for Curators, Creators, Educators, Scholars, and Society.  Seriously?  I know legislation can get a bit agitprop in its nomenclature, but ACCESS?  The curators, creators, educators, scholars, and society have access!  We’re awash in access!  What we need is fairness in the commercial markets for the artists whose works we access all the time.

Anyway, the bills …

The function of the CLASSICS Act is fairly simple, and for good reason—because the current copyright status of these pre-1972 sound recordings, protected under myriad state laws, is complicated.  For instance in one state, the owner of a physical master recording may be considered the rights holder of the underlying work but not so in another state.  The list of potential variables is long, but suffice to say CLASSICS doesn’t address any of this common law complexity because, as noted in an earlier post, it would be an undertaking lasting many years, possibly achieving nothing.  By contrast, ratification of CLASSICS, as part of the MMA, means these legacy artists get paid immediately, and the relevant digital streaming services achieve legal certainty in a historically gray area that has incubated numerous lawsuits.

CLASSICS leaves the common law protections for these sound recordings in place, along with the existing copyright expiration date for all of these works of February 15, 2067.  The only thing CLASSICS does is to create a new federal protection exclusively for non-interactive (e.g. SiriusXM or Pandora) digital transmissions where these recordings are played all the time but without compensating the artists.  As Robert Levine, reporting for Billboard, writes, “…a few big companies will pay artists and labels a bit more money. That’s it.”

ACCESS is Sham Full Federalization

It is important to keep in mind that the detractors currently attacking CLASSICS cannot point to single constituency whose interests are in any way diminished from the status quo.  Yet,  rather than endorse a simple solution to compensate these relatively contemporary artists through one narrow licensing regime, the anti-copyright forces, including library organizations, have chosen to crash the legislative process with this bill.  ACCESS is a ham-handed version of what these parties really want—full-federalization of pre-72 recordings—but both the timing and substance of the proposal blithely glosses over the complexity of this more ambitious agenda.

For instance, ACCESS presumes to erase all common law copyrights and migrate these sound recordings into their own niche of federal protection with the stroke of a pen.  But as Levine observes in that same Billboard article, this could be interpreted as an unconstitutional “taking,” an obstacle which alone suggests the bill is not designed to pass so much as it is to stymie the MMA until it perhaps expires with the mid-terms.  Additionally, this over-simple proposal to federalize this collection of sound recordings could trigger a festival of litigation among artists and labels over issues pertaining to who owns what, all in reaction to such a radical and ill-conceived change in legal status.

The ACCESS bill proposes different expiration terms than CLASSICS for these works, namely a flat 95 years from publication date, even though the meaning of “publication” under the presiding 1909 Act is a bit of a challenge in itself.  While this proposal would mean more of these works falling into the public domain sooner, this would largely be a symbolic “victory” for the copyright haters providing little value to the general public and varying degrees of unfair treatment to the artists.  (And that’s if the act didn’t cause any other chaos.)

For instance, Don McClean’s “American Pie” would expire one year earlier under ACCESS than under CLASSICS; Smokey Robinson’s “Shop Around” would expire thirteen years earlier; and Artie Shaw’s “Stardust” would expire thirty-one years earlier.  And while all that may make some anti-copyright folks feel good about themselves, it is demonstrably irrelevant to us consumers because we already enjoy anytime-anywhere access to these popular recordings, and copyright term expiration cannot improve on 24/7 availability.  At the same time, it’s worth noting that for many of these recordings which are not commercialized, all the major labels have granted free licenses to the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox to provide free, public access to these works.

Finally, the ACCESS bill contains what can I best describe as a three-year grace period during which a major, corporate user may get away with all the infringement possible of these sound recordings.  The logic is labyrinthine, but it says that a rights holder must notify an alleged infringer no later than six months prior to taking action in a claim; and this limitation lasts for three years after passage of the act.  This provision can only be explained as a favor to the commercial digital broadcasters because, of course, they need Congress to protect them from the musicians.

What About Libraries?

The libraries have applauded the ACCESS bill, though it’s hard to fathom exactly why, other an appetite for futile defeat and antagonism.  While it cannot be denied that full federalization of these sound recordings would benefit libraries and archives, ACCESS will almost surely not achieve this goal.  Consequently, these organizations are either being naïve or callous in their support for Wyden’s tossing a legislative grenade at this late stage of the process.

The specific needs of libraries are entirely separate from the purpose of CLASSICS.  Yet, rather than engage in the normal legislative work needed to obtain the statutory exceptions libraries would like to see, they choose to back a dead horse and, once again, needlessly position themselves in opposition to a group of artists.  Then, as if to exacerbate the decision, they make inaccurate public statements that stretch way beyond their sphere of interest.  For instance, the Library Copyright Alliance published a letter signed by its member library associations, which states:

“While the ACCESS to Recordings Act provides more protections to artists than CLASSICS, it also provides more protections to libraries, archives, and museums.  The federal copyright standard provided by the ACCESS to Recordings Act includes important exceptions that permit digital preservation of pre-1972 sound recordings. These uniform exceptions would enable cultural heritage institutions to engage in critical preservation activities without concern about violating a multiplicity of different state law regimes.”

That first part of about providing “more protections” to artists is not exactly true from the artists’ perspective.  The libraries make this claim because ACCESS would transport all  the exclusive rights—reproduction, performance, derivative works—into federal protection, but the nation’s librarians are in no way qualified to say whether this is better or worse than the state laws currently protecting some of these works, thus implicating the aforementioned “takings” problem in the proposed bill.

As for the libraries, it is true that the common law status of many pre-72 sound recordings can be an obstacle to certain preservation activities, but none of that will be solved by endorsing a makeshift proposal that is almost certainly destined to fail.  Meanwhile, the CLASSICS Act explicitly extends library-focused exceptions that would enable these institutions to make recordings available that are otherwise not found in the commercial market.  (Isn’t that what the public really needs a library or archive to do anyway?)  But rather than win this small provision in CLASSICS today and collaborate on the more complex issues tomorrow, the library groups are going to endorse a fatally flawed bill and persist in their adversarial relationship with artists and authors for no imaginable reason.

What’s Really Behind This?

The ACCESS proposal cannot help but implicate the Gordian issues that legal experts, artists, and legislators sought to at least postpone with the narrowly-tailored CLASSICS Act.  It seems reasonable, therefore, to assume that Senator Wyden and his bill’s supporters know this to be the case and that the introduction of ACCESS is designed solely to run out the clock on the Music Modernization Act. Not only would this trash years of work by a lot of people, but there is not a single provision in the omnibus package which would negatively affect the parties suddenly endorsing ACCESS.  Hence, one can only conclude that this belated proposal is either mean-spirited or ill-advised.  Though it is arguably a bit of both.

American Identity is in the Music

My generation was raised on Schoolhouse Rock!. As such, we were not only told that America is a Melting Pot but were reminded of this on a regular basis in a song from that animated series, the melody of which is now ringing in the heads of any fellow Gen-Xers reading this post. Of course, the more mature truth is that America is not really a melting pot so much as it is a seething cauldron of incompatible ingredients that only manage to blend into something palatable after considerable simmer time. When The Great American Melting Pot episode first aired in May of 1976, it was just three months after violent race riots had broken out at a Florida high school over symbols celebrating the South in the Civil War.

In response to last weekend’s tragic events in Charlottesville, friends posted a number of comments and memes on Facebook contrasting the offense taken to NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem against the apparent dearth of outrage directed at Americans carrying Nazi flags in the streets. Granted, it’s hard to know the degree to which this particular hypocrisy really exists—I’d like to believe that most Americans across the political spectrum still denounce the waving of Nazi and Confederate flags in a violence-inciting, race-bating rally—but these allusions to the “Star Spangled Banner” resonate in context to the brewing clashes over nationalism and cultural identity. Kaepernick, who has now been joined by Michael Bennett of the Seattle Seahawks, has chosen an apt symbol of protest because the anthem is about as good an example as any of the distinction between American myth and American reality.

In 1991, playwright Tony Kushner sharply articulated America’s unique brand of hypocrisy in his AIDS-inspired play Angels in America when the gay, black character Belize says, “The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate.”

It’s a brilliant line.

Of course, the “white cracker” Francis Scott Key wrote the word free 34 years after the English composer John Stafford Smith wrote the high G to which Kushner refers. In 1780, the note corresponded with the lyric Venus in the song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” which was the official club song of the Anacreontic Society of London, a fraternity of mostly amateur musicians who would gather to enjoy concerts, drink, gossip, and drink more. As every American school kid is told, Key was moved to write the poem “Defence of Fort McHenry” upon seeing the flag still flying at dawn after heavy, overnight bombardment of the fort. Sung to the tune of “Anacreon in Heaven,” Key’s words would become the “Star Spangled Banner” but would not be adopted as the national anthem until 1931.

That the words of our anthem are American and the tune English—and the fact that they were paired during a war that is sometimes called the second revolution—reflects the fledgling creative voice of a new nation still writing its identity and still finding its place in the world. As the copyright critics love to say, “America is a pirate nation,” by which they usually refer to the fact that the book printers, shortly after independence, made a habit of pirating English books rather than pay to publish domestic authors. This is true. And had America remained a pirate nation rather than invest in its own creative capacity, the character of our society—and most likely our democracy itself—would be the worse for it. Because the voice that emerged, and which took nearly all of the nation’s first century to come into its own, is unambiguously multicultural, no matter what the bigots think. There is no such thing as “white male Christian” America, and there never was. Just listen to the music.

In fact, before “The Star Spangled Banner” became the official anthem by an act of Congress in 1931, the unofficial national song for many citizens and leaders was “America the Beautiful,” the lyrics of which are a poem written in 1893 by Katherine Lee Bates, a 19th century feminist who might have been gay. Conservative factions have occasionally lobbied for “God Bless America” as the national anthem because it places God in the center of the action, but this would provide little comfort to the kind of “conservative” on display in Charlottesville, since that song was written by a Russian immigrant jew named Israel (Irving) Berlin. (On a side note, Berlin also wrote “White Christmas,” and believe me, American Christmas celebrants would have precious little music to enjoy without Jewish songwriters.) Ironically enough, even though proposals from liberal groups to make the national song “This Land is Your Land” would be a non-starter, Woody Guthrie’s music is arguably the most American sound in the bunch. Though it is admittedly a bit jaunty for any kind of solemn occasion.

As students of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers understood that we would never get a seat at the grown-ups’ table of nations without fostering cultural and scientific enterprise, which was a pretty ambitious dream for a war-weary population of some three million farmers spread across an area of about 340,000 square miles. But what the hell? They had just won a revolution that should not have worked by any sane analysis and then sat down to write a user’s manual (a.k.a. the Constitution) for operating a society unlike any that had ever existed. Why not hope for great invention and art while they were at it? John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail dated May 12, 1780, expressed his hope for the country to attain intellectual and artistic stature thus:

“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

Adams’s implication that America’s progress toward maturity would be reflected in its capacity for increasingly refined creative and cultural enterprise was prophetic, except for his references to European classicism. He could not have imagined the extent to which our major contributions would be unequivocally modern, technological, and culturally diverse—that the American voice would be defined not by statuary, tapestry, and porcelain so much as by movies, theater, TV, and sound recordings that would blow the church doors off their hinges, making new messiahs out of rock stars and rock stars out of inventors.

In this sense, I think “The Star Spangled Banner” became truly American when Jimi Hendrix played his electric guitar solo version at Woodstock in 1969. Simultaneously patriotic and revolutionary, Hendrix’s tortured virtuoso (significantly instrumental and electric) synthesized the aristocratic and tight-assed “To Anacreon in Heaven” with the sins of racism, the self-betrayal of the Vietnam War, and the psychedelic explosion of counter-culture into a performance that told a much deeper, more painful, and more complex truth in the American-born language of rock-and-roll. This sound, which would not exist without the American slave diaspora, traveled back across the Atlantic, helped bring the children of WWII out of the rubble, and was even returned to its own roots by a new “English invasion” of the United States. This produced an artist like Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS, and whose recording of “We Will Rock You” has been the unofficial anthem of every NFL game for years.

In a 2016 documentary about world-famous photographer Harry Benson, called Harry Benson: Shoot First, the artist discusses a photograph he took in Vietnam depicting a pair of wheelchair-bound veterans shaking hands—one American the other Vietnamese. Benson tells us that the Vietcong vet said to his former enemy, “We used to sneak up on your positions in the dark, not to kill you, but to listen to your music.” If that doesn’t say something about where our better angels live, I’m not sure what does.