AI as an instrument: what it has in common with the drum machine and the synthesiser

Every generation of musicians has had its devil's machine. Mine, apparently, is artificial intelligence. I use it to produce the music of PLANETA GAYFOLK, Suno specifically, and every time I say so I catch that look on someone's face, the look of a person watching a wet dog walk into the living room.

I understand. But I have the feeling we've seen this film before, at least a couple of times, and that it's worth remembering how it ended.

The drum machine

When drum machines arrived, plenty of people thought drummers' days were numbered. It was a reasonable worry. For the first time a gadget the size of a shoebox could keep time without getting tired, without asking for a beer and without turning up late to rehearsal. Some of those machines sounded, to the ears of the day, pretty awful. Dry, rigid, a bit toy-like.

What happened next is well known. Those toy sounds ended up as the foundation of entire genres. Hip hop, house, electro, a good chunk of eighties pop. People who couldn't play the drums made records with one of those boxes that are studied today. And drummers carried on existing. Some started programming machines. Others played on top of them. Others never even noticed.

What interests me about that story isn't the happy ending, which wasn't so happy for everyone anyway. What interests me is that the machine didn't come with the music inside it. It came with a sound and a way of working. The music came from whoever decided what to do with it.

The synthesiser

Something similar happened with the synthesiser, with more drama. In Britain, the Musicians' Union went as far as debating, in the early eighties, whether its use should be restricted, for fear that one bloke with a keyboard would replace an entire string section. From today's vantage point it sounds overblown. From the inside, with your wages at stake, not so much.

The synthesiser had another thing I find very familiar: at first, the main complaint against it was that it sounded like a synthesiser. Cold, artificial, soulless. That word, soul, crops up every time a new machine arrives. It amuses me, because today there are people who get misty-eyed listening to synths from 1983 and describe them as warm. Soul, it seems, takes a few years to show up.

Where they're alike

I'll be specific, because pretty comparisons sometimes serve to hide differences.

Where AI resembles those machines is this: it expands what one person can do alone. Before the drum machine you needed a drummer. Before the synthesiser you needed an orchestra or a lot of money. Before these tools, someone like me, who writes lyrics and knows exactly what song he wants, needed several people for that song to exist. Now I can direct that process myself. I decide, I discard and I choose. Often I throw out far more than I keep.

It resembles them in another, less comfortable way too. Each of those machines brought an avalanche of music made without judgement, because suddenly it was easy. There were thousands of records with the same drum machine sounding the same. The same thing is happening today, multiplied. Something being easy to produce doesn't make it good. It makes it plentiful.

And here comes the part I don't want to dodge.

A drum machine doesn't know what a song is. It does what you program, hit by hit. Nor does a synthesiser: it sounds the note you press. The AI I use does something else. I give it directions and it hands me back a whole proposal, with melody, with arrangement, with a character. Not hit by hit. All at once.

That changes the relationship. With a drum machine, the musician is inside every small decision. With AI, I'm in the big decisions and the final choice, but there are lots of small decisions I don't make. It would be dishonest to say it's the same thing. It isn't.

That's why I don't like saying AI is "just a tool", the way you'd say a hammer is. It's a strange instrument, one that answers back. It's more like working with a very fast session musician who never gets tired and has no opinion of his own about what he's doing. The opinion has to come from me. If I don't bring it, what comes out is correct and says nothing.

What I take from all this

When I look back, what I see is that the question "is this music?" has been asked every time a new gadget arrived, and that the answer never came from the gadget. It came from the songs. Some made with a drum machine were forgotten within a fortnight. Others are still played at every wedding.

The same will happen with mine. In about two years I've released 273 singles. Not all of them will last. That won't depend on their being made with AI, but on whether the lyrics say something, whether the title makes you smile, whether the chorus sticks. When I write «La dieta del cucurucho» (The ice-cream-cone diet) or «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour), what matters to me is that the title already puts a smile and an image in your head. No machine does that for me.

I have one doubt I haven't resolved. Drum machines and synthesisers ended up with a recognisable sound that people learnt to love for its own sake. I don't know whether that will happen with AI, or whether its charm will be precisely that it doesn't sound like anything in particular. If it's the latter, the job of giving it character will be even more mine. I don't mind that idea at all.

The songs and their lyrics are at mikesaintlouis.com.