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Boston Globe

AI music? Give me the human touch.

After weeks of speculation, and adamant So yes, AI is making music. And who can tell the difference? Advertisement When I checked out the Velvet Sundown album 'Floating on Echoes,' I heard a hodgepodge of big-rock and folk-rock signifiers — prominent guitars, blues and shuffle beats, and vaguely anthemic choruses, with the ever-tasteful loud-quiet downshift for the bridge. A cleaned-up, folkier version of grunge. It didn't sound awful, just like something I would not listen to by choice — definitively generic. By track 12, I was feeling a little bit ill. Advertisement Art for the Velvet Sundown albums 'Floating on Echoes' and 'Paper Sun Rebellion.' AI Generated Illustration Yet the music's easy-listening folk-rock vibe was appealing to the yoga class instructor Post reporter Ethan Beck interviewed, who called its 'emotional tone' good for 'the end of a power yoga or vinyasa, where you're deeply stretching.' Even Bogost concluded by singing the praises of the utility of being 'lulled … into oblivion' by anonymous music on a long road trip in the Midwest. I feel better already. After all, what's new here? Wasn't supermarket Muzak (created by actual humans) the precursor to anodyne AI-generated tunes? The use of background music has long been ubiquitous, from the dentist office soft rock to whatever we're pumping through our noise-canceling headphones to get through a cacophonous day in our open-plan offices. When the restaurant critic Pete Wells a few years ago referred to a kind of What's new is that AI is already Advertisement So what's the problem? Give the people what they want, right? Arguments about authenticity and 'fake' music are almost as old as pop itself. If the Velvet Sundown can become a hit, is there a problem with AI, or with art — or what passes for art? The problems are many. What about all the human content providers who are going to be put out of work? Spotify has already That underscores a basic point: At heart, many of us want to know the music came from somebody, somewhere. In his book 'Dylan Goes Electric!' Elijah Wald writes about the effects of encroaching commercialism at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where fans and musicians felt something essentially 'handmade' was in danger of becoming 'mass-produced and marketed like breakfast cereal.' In that light, the Velvet Sundown is the apotheosis of manufactured pop. Some years ago, I reviewed a club remix of Billie Holiday performances. It didn't sound bad, and that was her voice, all right — but stripped of its original context. No Lester Young, no Buck Clayton, no Jo Jones. It was Holiday as 'oontz oontz oontz' music. At around the same time, I was checking out some live recordings of the Berlin Philharmonic with the legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, recorded in Berlin in 1949. The audio fidelity was not great. At one point, someone coughed. But the performance came through — vibrant and alive. Even that cough was part of it — evidence that this performance was created by human beings in a particular time and place. Advertisement That's far more than you can say about the Velvet Sundown — even if AI music is here to stay.