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Aug 19, 2023

The artists who predicted AI's involvement in music in 1909

In the UK, the Metro newspaper recently ran a story with a headline related to

In the UK, the Metro newspaper recently ran a story with a headline related to experts warning that AI poses an existential threat to humanity… it was on page four. We have become so used to the pervading ways of new technology that now even the risk of extinction is a moot point not worthy of the headlines. Its presence in the modern world is so seamless that we are blasé about its strangeness. However, imagine living in an era whereby new-fangled machines called ‘cars’ emerged out of primitive industry and suddenly came trundling down the road. It's such a mind-bending proposition that it almost cost two young Italian boys their lives. In the process, it set up a movement that would soon forecast the future.

It all started when a poet by the name of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was speeding down the road in a brand-new car. A pair of young pals on bicycles, who were used to looking out for rogue donkeys and nothing more, were cycling along the same road when they suddenly had to swerve to avoid Marinetti's marauding death machine. In the anger and uproar that followed, the idea of futurism was seeded in the madcap mind of Marinetti.

As he was berated by these youths, Marinetti realised that machines were mightier than man. It was survival of the fittest and industry was far fitter than individuals. The near-miss of two humble lads resulted in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto. Therein came the following decree: "We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath…a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

The Victory of Samothrace is a Hellenistic Greek sculpture of the goddess Nike standing on the bow of a ship. Aside from the missing head and arms it's a cracking piece of work. But it doesn't move, it doesn't thunder along. It doesn't do anything, in fact. It is pretty without purpose. Those days were gone as the world outpaced simple beauty. It was all now about doing, and nothing did things mightier than machines. As he asserted: "Destroy the Museums. Crack syntax. Sabotage the adjective. Leave nothing but the verb."

So, when I recently spoke to the founder of the new AI music creation app, ITOKA, when he talked about how AI will facilitate the streamlining of music creation, his point on artistic efficiency struck a chord with the futurist decree. "The goal of this AI technology is not to replace human creativity, but to expand the territory or the boundaries of human creativity in music by providing greater efficiency when people are producing their music," he said.

In essence, the claim is that it is to musicians what battery-powered tools were to carpenters. "It's just that it's a tool, right?" he asserts. "People can use this tool to do something more magnificent, something that can move our human societies or cultural recognition further. They can bring more creativity into space. And those people who are not willing to adapt and not willing to use this technology for creativity might suffer from the gap that we have created between the people who are using data and who are not using it."

It is this aspect of a gap – essentially a gap between the humble powers of humanity and tech – that perturbs people. However, back in days of the Futurist Manifesto, this power to perturb was all part of the beauty. As points one and two of the manifesto state:

Breaking away from the capacity of humanity was part of the program for the futurists no matter what destruction that may reap. Being out with the old and in with the new was the only way to advance the world even within art.

This radical notion spread as a new work of art, and it piqued the interest of a certain Russian composer. Arseny Avraamov cut an odd figure at the time—he was, essentially, a man interested in musical theory and propaganda. By the time he began to hear about futurism he was teaching a course on Musical Acoustics at the Pressman Conservatory in Rostov-na-Donu city and mingling with high-ranking officials. Shortly after the October Revolution he proposed to the Commissar of Public Enlightenment, Anatoly Lunacharsky, a new project: to burn all the pianos in the USSR.

This did not come to fruition, but needless to say, Avraamov had his eye on a new future for Soviet music. During this time, he revolted against twelve-tone scales and focussed on the harmoniums of noise sources similar to modern stereo-sound. In the process, he devised new genres of music to match the growing urban environment of the world.

In the process, he accurately predicted synthesised sounds, amplified vocals, and many other techniques that underpin modern music. As he wrote in the 1916 article, Upcoming Science of Music and the New Era in the History of Music (given that music was largely acoustic and almost entirely separate from science at this time, that title alone is prescient enough): "The timbre is the soul of a musical sound. To build abstract harmonic schemes and then ‘orchestrate’ them is not creative any more; in this way it is possible to reach a full decomposition of the process of musical creation down to the sequence of compositional exercises: to invent a sequence of tones, to incorporate any rhythm, to harmonize the melody obtained and, finally, to start its colouring, using an historically readymade palette."

So, now as we stand at the precipice of the ultimate futurist future of music whereby technology not only facilities the creation of music, but actually creates it itself with merely a human jockey at the helm, we see the dream of the dangerous Marinetti creep ever further, and we have humble musicians standing beside their bicycles berating this movement. The question of who wins the debate remains to be seen.