What Artificial Intelligence Taught Me About Music
we’re gonna do a little thought
experiment
imagine if in 1950 cats started getting
smarter
smart that by 1955 they were able to do
advanced math
and then by 2020 they could fly
airplanes run accounting firms
deliver millions of letters every second
connect us with our friends and family
from around the globe
and operate our most advanced weapons
if we heard music written by a cat
composer even if it was
really terrible music we would
acknowledge that the very fact of the
cat writing music is significant
now you can probably see through my
metaphor and realize that i just
described the journey of complex
artificially intelligent technology from
1950 to today
at the risk of disappointing cat lovers
in the audience felines can’t actually
write music
but complex artificially intelligent
technology can
and these kinds of cats already write
music that would fool you into thinking
it was written by a human
maybe not like the most talented of
humans but it’s still a milestone
but will cats ever be able to write
music with emotion the kind of music
that moves us the kind of music that
stirs us
the kind of music that might be your
favorite song
the answer seems obvious right of course
complex artificially intelligent
technology
can’t write music with emotion in order
to do that
it would have to have feelings that’s
what i thought anyway
but to be sure that complex artificially
intelligent technology can’t write music
with emotion we have to answer one
simple question and that question is
where does the emotion in music come
from
now i’ve been a composer for about 20
years
and i never thought to ask this most
basic question about what i do
and how i do it and maybe even why i do
it i never thought to ask this question
until i collaborated
with complex artificially intelligent
technology
i’m going to tell you the story of what
i learned by thinking about
these types of questions through three
pieces of music
the first one is hallelujah a song that
probably everybody has heard at one
point or another when leonard cohen
first played hallelujah for the
president of cbs records
the stoic middle-aged exec executive
broke down weeping because he knew that
he had just witnessed the birth of a
classic
i’m just kidding that never happens that
has never ever happened in the history
of music
what he said was we’re not releasing it
lenny it’s a disaster
cohen was eventually able to release it
on an independent record label
and 19 years later hallelujah found its
way into the mainstream
when it was featured in the animated
classic shrek
it became a pop standard when kids
started singing it as these things
typically do which is
funny because it’s a song about sex the
rejected leonard cohen album that it was
on was called various positions
someone come back yeah that’s funny it’s
weird it’s a weird song it’s a weird
song it’s a weird album
so we’ll come back to hallelujah in a
moment the second piece in our story
was a collaboration with a cat using
complex artificially intelligent
technology i finished schubert’s
unfinished symphony
in order to do this i had to teach a cat
how to sound like schubert now the piece
has been performed and recorded by
orchestras around the world which i
think attests to the fact that we got
some really interesting results
how much it sounds like schubert is
probably a subject for another talk
but the interesting question for today
is how do you get a cat to sound like
any composer
um and the answer is you show it a lot
of music like hundreds maybe thousands
of hours of music
and hope that it figures out what music
is what style is
and creates more of it this is what the
computer scientist told me anyway
and when i thought about that i thought
why are we asking cats to decode
music why don’t we just tell them what
music is and then
let them use all of their processing
power instead of having to calculate we
can let them use it to compose
and maybe that will help them get closer
to that emotional paradigm that we’re
shooting for
and that leads to the next obvious
question which is
well what is music and you think that as
someone who spent half a lifetime in the
study of the subject
i would have the answer to that question
on the tip of my tongue but the reality
is after 40
000 years of human music making we’re
still unable to define it
the best definition we have the one we
use today comes from a 20th century
composer named edgar varese
who was asked by a reporter maestro what
is music
ferez summoned all the gravitas he could
and in a
somber voice said music
is organized sound
now if you don’t think about that too
much it sounds very profound
but if you do think about it it leads to
some really absurd conclusions and
the next uh the next piece in our story
is um
one of those conclusions it’s called
thought experiment infinity and i’m
gonna show you the sheet music on this
uh
screen there it is okay i was a little
short but that’s okay i’m gonna explain
it
so for those of you who can’t read music
um well actually you know everyone can
read music but for those of you who
don’t read music let me explain
it starts 13.8 billion years ago with a
big bang represented by a note with an x
then it moves on to a rest one measure
of rest which is repeated
at an infinite tempo for an almost
infinite amount of time
and this rest is repeated until there’s
a cue now normally a queue
is like a nod from a conductor or the
guitar player does one of these or the
pianist stands up
but in this case the cue that stops the
repeat is the penultimate moment in the
universe
at which point you move on to the last
note another note with an x which
represents the end of time i’ll show it
to you again now that you know what it
is
so the piece is all of the sounds
in between the two x notes which means
that the piece is all of the sounds in
the universe
and in time organized in musical
notation it can even evoke emotion
if not awe at the sheer grandeur
of my musical accomplishment frustration
confusion and disappointment are also
emotions
music is organized sound leads to the
absurd conclusion that music
is everything i thought if i could
answer the question what is music that i
could make the perfect cat composer
but in researching the question and then
researching
works of musical epistemology from
throughout the ages and
definitions by plato that were later
refuted by definitions by socrates that
were later refuted by
schopenhauer and meta definitions all
this crazy philosophy and
interesting thoughts by really
interesting people i realize that
questions like what is music
don’t have answers at least not single
answers
they’re just great questions a great
question makes you think that the answer
is on the tip of your tongue
but when you try to articulate it you
realize that you can’t
and that’s because a great question is
not a request for information it’s not
what time is it or where’s the bus or
donde la biblioteca
it’s an invitation to contemplation
and it’s an invitation to discussion and
it’s an invitation to connection
a great question is an invitation to
connect with all the people who came
before you
who’ve thought about great questions and
written their thoughts down so
articulately
that you can question them even today
and get answers
it’s an invitation to connect with the
people who will come in the future the
people who you will never meet
who might think sitting in their studio
or whatever a studio is 100 years from
now
what is music i’d like to know and think
that they’re alone in the universe for
asking this question
but realize that from plato up to me
up to them this question has been asked
throughout time um and
that’s they’re not alone they’re part of
the biggest human community that um
that has ever existed the human
community of ideas the human community
of sharing ideas and the human community
of thinking
the people who ask great questions don’t
always find answers
but sometimes you find new questions and
i found a new question and that the ques
that is the question that we started
with which is where does the emotion in
music
come from and that question does have an
answer
and that brings us back to hallelujah
hallelujah reminds me that one idea can
be many things
the story of hallelujah demonstrates
that the art we make
can sometimes take a while to resonate
and that the composer’s intention
in this case the composer of the album
various positions
is not always what the audience
perceives
but the song itself reminds me of my
friend’s wedding
they were high school sweethearts who
got married after 40 years and i played
hallelujah for them as they walked down
the aisle
these ideas and the emotions that i’ve
attached to them are the content of
hallelujah for me but that’s not the
content of hallelujah for you
it’s not the content of hallelujah for
the millions of people who know and love
the song
hallelujah invites us to feel feelings
associated with many different personal
stories
all at the same time stories of the
song’s composer
leonard cohen never knew
music is emotional not because composers
make it so but because music
acts like a mirror so to answer the
question where does the emotion in music
come from
the emotion in music comes from you
there is no reason why a cat cannot
create music
that reflects our deepest and most
sincere feelings back to us
does this mean that complex artificially
intelligent technology has feelings
no it means that we have feelings we
have enough feelings to connect with
anything we have enough feelings to
animate any idea
it took 19 years for hallelujah to
transform
from an obscure rejected vaguely
prurient
disaster into a pop music standard
maybe the next hallelujah has already
been written by a cat
and we haven’t heard it yet until we do
and until we attach our emotions to the
song
it’s just organized sound thank you very
[Applause]
much