Brian Eno explains why modern music is less “human”
Our world is becoming increasingly intertwined with technology, especially in music. The rise of artificial intelligence and digital music gear like amp modellers is causing raucous debates among both creators and listeners, with many—including famed producer Brian Eno—having shared concerns about how our art is becoming less “human”.
Eno may be best known for his trailblazing output in electronic and ambient music, but he has always approached his work with unconventional techniques. He experiments with gear in ways it was not designed and aims to leave human character at the heart. Not informed by professional training, Eno has often referred to himself as a “non-musician”.
Revered for collaborating with the likes of David Bowie, U2 and Talking Heads, Eno’s work has gone on to become the subject of a number of documentaries, including the July 2024 release Eno, for which a different version of the film was played each day in cinemas, in true, unconventional Eno fashion, with AI informing different outcomes in the moment. However, it must be stressed that the affected flourishes were minor—creating rogue snippets of originality amongst the more conventional arc.
Alas, its input was messy and fleeting by design. Though most artists are only now discussing the threats that AI and over-digitising music can pose, Eno has been conscious of making music that sounds a little too perfect for years. In a BBC documentary shared online in 2012, Eno explained why he felt producers should refrain from cleaning up every aspect of their compositions.
“Do you know when you were a kid and you had plasticine? It was all lovely colours and after about a week and a half it was all that kind of brown-y, purple colour? Well, I think that’s what digital technology does to music sometimes, and that’s not because of the sonic fact of it, it’s because you can endlessly keep working [on] something,” he explained.
Stereo sound in its original form was designed to separate these colours even more vividly, but he claims the digital age has compressed them back into a brownish mush. His point somewhat holds up when you consider the fact that we don’t often comprehend music as a live recording when we listen to it in headphones—we don’t picture bands or guitarists.
Eno continued: “The temptation of the technology is to smooth everything out. You’re listening to a thing over and over, and there’s that one bar [where] the drums are a little bit shaky and you think, ‘oh, I could just take another bar of drums and put them in there’“. This perfectionism takes out humanised nuance.
“And indeed, when you’re doing that, the immediate effect is ‘oh, that’s better’, but if you keep doing that, what you gradually do is homogenise the whole song until every bar sounds the same… until in fact, there’s no evidence of human life in there at all,” he explains. So, who do we think is better, then: Elvin Jones or the unknown and barely credited drum who laid down an absolutely perfect beat on whatever new song currently tops the charts?
