Warning: This is a long and rambling post. Somewhere, sometime, some beast birthed from AI will try and summarise it. I wish it well; but I can’t help giggling at the thought of it trying and failing. Only recently, I came across the term ai;dr; it made me smile; I smiled further when I watched how the term was being interpreted in at least two different ways: “it was written by AI so I didn’t read it”; or “it couldn’t be read because it didn’t fit into my context window”. But more of that later. Maybe.
When I was young, I didn’t much care for the music of generations past. But I was lucky. My parents had an excellent collection of records covering jazz, blues and classical. They came in the form of lacquer “78s”, 10″ LPs, 12″ LPs and the single, the “45”.
An aside or two. Those were the days. People hadn’t come up with the evil of selling you the same stuff packaged differently on a planned obsolescence journey. So the stuff my dad ha, what happened on 78 stayed in 78. Distinct and separate from the music released on the ill-fated 10″ format, as also on the 12″ proper LP. And 45s were just temporary bridges, singles were something the radio did, stacks of singles were something designed for jukeboxes. Proper music came in LP form. LP. Not vinyl. (And never vinyls).
LPs were begged, borrowed and/or stolen. Traded for anything and everything. Money. Drugs. Sex. Whatever. A sort of lingua franca for the hippie age. A flourishing secondary market where the norm was to buy a second hand LP, tape it, lend it to a few friends, and then sell it back to the shop for half of the money you paid for it. Guaranteed.
Repackaged format-change was unheard of: you didn’t land up buying the same stuff across fifty different releases and formats: here’s the 180gsm pressed, here’s the 10th/25th/50th anniversary, here’s the one with coloured discs, here are some bonus tracks, here’s the music naked, here it is all dressed up, here’s a limited edition, here’s an access-all-areas edition, here are all the ways we can sell you the same stuff again and again and charge you more for it.
You didn’t buy it in different media either, no travelling through vinyl and cassette tape and CD and minidisc and MP3 and FLAC and whatever else.
Sure, I went down each of those alleyways a few times before I stopped parting with my money. I have, however, paid for albums and CDs that contain nothing. Recently, I picked up a copy of Is This What We Want? Some years earlier, I had already acquired Dangermouse and Sparklehorse’s Dark Night Of The Soul, the early edition with just a blank CD in it. (I’ve never even taken the cellophane off, it’s pristinely empty). Before that I’d spent money buying John Cage’s 4’33”. And of course, even though it’s anything but silent, I had and still have Sounds Of Silence. A fool and his money indeed: but I treasure each of those.
Like I treasure the half-dozen bone records I have. Now that’s a medium with history.
Enough rambling for now. Let me get back to the point of this post. I used to think that every generation thought of the music of the generations that preceded and succeeded them as noise. Older generations expressed their enjoyment of what followed saying “will you turn that noise down”. Younger generations found many reasons to escape the room when the older noise began. It was a generation thing, much like Douglas Adams describes in The Salmon Of Doubt. I can’t find my copy right now, so here’s a link to a blog that covers the quotation I was looking for.
When it came to modern “western” music, I was firmly rooted in the stuff that was recorded and issued between 1963 and 1978, give or take a few years. I remain so. (In fact, I used to describe myself as deeply into sixties and seventies music. And then I found I kept going to concerts where the performers were all in their sixties and seventies, even eighties, and occasionally nineties. We’re all growing old). Rather than critique or look down upon the music of the past few decades, I was comfortable with the idea that the music was different and not to my taste. I had enough trouble choosing my 1000 (yes thousand, not a misprint) favourite albums of my chosen period. So I let things be, happy, contented, sated, in my little cocoon of sixties and seventies heaven. (Incidentally, today’s been a Grateful Dead and Traffic day. Yesterday was all Joni Mitchell. The day before, it was all Beatles. And the day before, I was deep into the Who and Crosby Stills Nash and Young. And so it goes).
I was comfortable believing it was all a generation thing. When I was in my teens, I used to giggle at seeing 40-year old grownups dressed in t-shirt and jeans, mutton dressed as lamb. Now I’m one of those, almost 70, still in t-shirt and jeans. Generational? No, comfortable and easy to choose. Blue jeans. Pale t shirt, collarless, usually white (unless it’s to do with one of my favourite albums or bands: I have doubles of help>slip>frank, of Blue, of Harvest, of Low Sparks, Who’s Next, etc).
But maybe there’s something else in play. Last year I came across this paper from a year earlier, “Trajectories and revolutions in popular melody based on US charts from 1950 to 2023”, by Madeline Hamilton and Marcus Pearce, which opened my eyes (or should I say ears) to other possible reasons.
I quote from the abstract:
In the past century, the history of popular music has been analyzed from many different perspectives, with sociologists, musicologists and philosophers all offering distinct narratives characterizing the evolution of popular music. However, quantitative studies on this subject began only in the last decade and focused on features extracted from raw audio, which limits the scope to low-level components of music. The present study investigates the evolution of a more abstract dimension of popular music, specifically melody, using a new dataset of popular melodies spanning from 1950 to 2023. To identify “melodic revolutions”, changepoint detection was applied to a multivariate time series comprising features related to the pitch and rhythmic structure of the melodies. Two major revolutions in 1975 and 2000 and one smaller revolution in 1996, characterized by significant decreases in complexity, were located. The revolutions divided the time series into three eras, which were modeled separately with autoregression, linear regression and vector autoregression. Linear regression of autoregression residuals underscored inter-feature relationships, which become stronger in post-2000 melodies. The overriding pattern emerging from these analyses shows decreasing complexity and increasing note density in popular melodies over time, especially since 2000.
A few weeks ago, I was reading something by an old friend, Om Malik. Been following his writings for years; I may not always agree with what he says, but for sure he makes me think. And ponder. And chew over. And refine, sometimes change, sometimes radically, my mind. I worry about the algorithmic grey-beige world he describes. Uniform pap. Any colour you like, as long as it’s black.
Uniformity of the rebels is a scary phenomenon at the best of times. And everything’s emptying into black. (Gives me a reason to link to one of my favourite Cat Stevens songs, Into White). Give it a listen). We are all on the road to find out, there’s so much left to know.
Any colour you like, as long as it’s black. I was reading something that David Reed had shared, about semantic ablation: the algorithmic erosion of high-entropy information. I love reading what he shares, in the same way as I love reading what Bob Frankston shares. They stretch me, make me question what I know, help me refine how I think. And yes, I don’t always agree with what they say, but they definitely inform me. People like them help me evolve my thinking, challenge my beliefs, shake up my priors and biases and collections of prejudices.
What David pointed me towards was this article in the Register: Why AI writing is so generic, boring, and dangerous: Semantic ablation by Claudio Nastruzzo, published earlier this week.
In his introductory piece David says “good writing is about operating on the “edge”, where consensus is wrong“. Earlier, he refers to Koestler describing creativity as “a collision of distinct frames of reference that produces the improbable but powerful insights of art and science and humour. (I left the Oxford comma in the Register headline above, wanting to refer to it precisely; but I couldn’t help but spell “humour” the English way when using the Koestler quote).
Where am I going with all this? I’m not a fan of pap. Modern society, aided and abetted by technology, appears to help drive a sameness, an averaging out, a vanilla-icing of everything. Any colour you like as long as it’s black. Tails get chopped off. All cats are grey at night. All phones look like derivatives of the iPhone. All crime thrillers now have formulaic titles and covers and – who knows – Milli Vanilli.
My children are old now. The oldest turns 40 very soon, and her first child, my first grandchild, turns 11 a few days later. There was a time, when the children were young, we would traipse off to holiday places and parks and playgrounds for Lego or Disney or cycling or whatever. And the food was pap.
Pap. Largely inedible.
That’s why I was elated at finding a place, I think it was called Radford’s, in Devon, where adults could be served real food while happy face pizzas dominated the rest of the table. Live and let live. I hope there are more Radfords around now, where different needs get met in different ways, and the diversity that makes life enjoyable is there.
There in our food, in our music, in our writing, and in what we watch or participate in or otherwise experience.
The internet was a source of great joy to me. Still is. But there’s a Gresham’s Law for information getting more powerful by the day, as bad information drives out good.
What people like Om and David referred to matters. Unless you are happy with pap.
A coda. People like Dave Winer and Doc Searls have been great encouragements to me when I sit down to write, through what they say. People like Kevin Marks and Stephanie Booth, to name a couple of friends, help remind me that I can do it.
That I can write. Freely. Ramblingly. Even it’s a blog for an audience of one. Because that’s what we all have to do, to read, to write, to regain the power we once had.
Otherwise we are doomed to a preponderance of pap.
(And yes, to the AI summarisers I say, have at you!)