Will AI generated music replace musicians? …My answer is NO.
Music is not a product, but a process and a practice. What AI gives us is a semblance of musical product without any meaningful content, a shadow without a body.
I had a schoolmate, who helped me realize something important early on. When I met him, he already had his master’s degree despite still being a teen. He mastered most difficult repertoires one after the other with ease, each in a week’s time, completely memorized, ready for a perfect performance. But I started to notice that, however perfect and beautiful, his performances were sometimes forgettable. I realized that my struggles to learn and memorize was my own way of developing my interpretation of, and identification with, each piece of music. Things that come easily are harder to cherish, and to invest more in.
The real point of our daily lives and musical practice is the life lessons we learn from the journey, and the emotional attachments we cultivate that helps us see, and be, who we want to be. I am afraid that we are throwing our babies out with the bathwater with our rapid technological advancement. We are hoarding our memoires and “knowledge” by outsourcing them all to our phones, computers and clouds, while decommissioning our own ability to commit to memory even the phone number of our closest friends. And now, with the generative AI, we are starting to give up our human disciplines – our pursuit of beauty, truth, and order in our daily lives and societies – to machines, too.
Recorded music is a substitute to live music, like canned food to homecooked meals. Just as having canned food is better than having anyone starve to death, having recorded music is better than to anyone left without any access to music at all, even if it was missing the personal associations and the all-sensory experience. If I extend this analogy, AI-generated music is like chewing gum. It may have the flavor. It may relieve your sense of hunger for a moment or two. But just as chewing gum will not sustain us, AI-generated music alone will starve us to death.
