From Synthesiser to AI: A brief history of music’s love-hate relationship with technology
In America, in 1942, music was silenced. It was a time when people needed it more than ever, given that the nation had just joined the Second World War, but that gave little cause for the American Federation of Musicians union head, James C. Petrillo, to pause his call to action. Instead, he rallied: “I am satisfied that if the public of America knew the plight of the musician – knew what he is up against – that the public sentiment would immediately change.”
The main plight that they were up against was the rise in technology. In the 1940s, roughly 60% of the American population went to the cinema once a week. In previous years, each cinema employed a player piano, as Kurt Vonnegut calls them – ironically, in his novel that satirically muses about the technologically driven obsolescence of humanity. However, when recorded soundtracks could be synced to the talkies, cinemas cleared out their orchestra pits and thousands of musicians were out of a job—jobs that cinema had afforded them just a few years earlier.
This is indicative of the double-edged sword of music’s relationship with technology. Microphones gave crooners a chance to have their voices heard, and then jukeboxes kicked them to the curb. And so on and so on. This led to Petrillo putting his foot down in 1942. When he became president of the American Federation of Musicians, he quickly decreed that union musicians would hereby refuse to enter recording studios. It is also indicative of the double-edged sword of music’s relationship with technology that this move now seems somewhat obscene.
However, he recognised this and eventually demanded that if recorded music was to go ahead, then the musicians should be paid royalties every time that a record they played on was spun. After two years, the strike ended, with the royalties dispute still lingering on. Did it turn the tide on people buying records? Well, in 1941, 127million records were sold in the US, and in 1946, after the strike had settled, 275m records were sold. Naturally, musicians profited from these sales and studios were flooded once more.
This is not the only time that industrial action had called a halt to music when technology began to encroach. Enter the battle against the synths. Once again, bloody Barry Manilow finds himself as the antagonist in this cultural war. In 1982, he was about to head out on tour. In an efficiency bid, he binned off his orchestra and employed a selection of synth players instead. The Musicians Union hated this. So, on the birthday of that dastardly synth pioneer Robert Moog, they decided to push towards outlawing this new musical contraption.
Obviously, they failed in this motion, and the 1980s became the most synth-heavy decade in history. While synth players were banned from the Union until 1997, this did little to curtail the rise. In fact, in a sort of anti-Luddite storm, the facsimile of synthesised sounds became an artistic tenet of the era—musicians used the technology not to mimic a handful of violins with just a few keys, but rather to enact some ‘Computer Love’, so to speak.
Once again, the cause for concern was valid, but the fight against it was in vain, and in many ways, the victory was turned into art with consummate ease. But was it for the better? Well, that is a question that we must now seriously address more than ever. The rise of recorded music is a Godsend that we indulge in every day, but by the same token, has it made us happier, or are we cocooned by our ever-present accessibility to music and ushered away from social concert halls and unifying scenes towards a lonelier existence?
And pressingly, will AI now push further towards insular fantasy? Its presence in music moving forward seems inevitable. Bands like Everything Everything have already utilised it to help make records, ‘fantasy albums’ have already been put out by fans, and people will soon be synthesising elements to lay over a core melody to create full arrangements. Some might call this innovation, but others might call it the final straw.
As Nick Cave recently opined: “I understand that ChatGPT is in its infancy, but perhaps that is the emerging horror of AI – that it will forever be in its infancy, as it will always have further to go, and the direction is always forward, always faster,” he added. “It can never be rolled back or slowed down, as it moves us toward a utopian future, maybe, or our total destruction.”
Fortunately, as the AI guru Jaron Lanier told The Guardian: “From my perspective, the danger isn’t that a new alien entity will speak through our technology and take over and destroy us. To me, the danger is that we’ll use our technology to become mutually unintelligible or to become insane, if you like, in a way that we aren’t acting with enough understanding and self-interest to survive, and we die through insanity, essentially.”
This is exactly how Cave fears it will infect art. “Songs arise out of suffering,” he says, “by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. ChatGPT has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.”
Concluding: “What makes a great song great is not its close resemblance to a recognisable work. Writing a good song is not mimicry, or replication, or pastiche, it is the opposite. It is an act of self-murder that destroys all one has strived to produce in the past. It is those dangerous, heart-stopping departures that catapult the artist beyond the limits of what he or she recognises as their known self.” So, if history tells us anything, maybe an AI boycott might come shortly before it has its first hit.
