On the pleasure of making music

I recently posted a video in which Adam Neely argued against using AI to make music. In that video he showed the CEO of Suno, Michael Shulman argues, “It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice.” Hence the justification for an AI program that does all the work for you.

I’m with Neeley on this one. I note further that the idea and practice of being merely a consumer of music, without being able to make your own, is relatively recent. Before the invention of sound recording in the late 19th century and the invention of broadcast media in the 20th, before those things happened the only music was live music. If you wanted to listen to music, you have to be in the presence of live performers. To be sure only a small group ever became full-time professional musicians, but a somewhat larger group became reasonably competent amateurs. And I strongly suspect that everyone participated in some active music-making or associated dance more than is the place today.

Passive listening is a different kind of experience. To be sure, it is now possible for anyone to experience the best possible performances through sound recording and broadcast, and that is surely a good thing. But it’s not quite as good as being there in person. And in either case the pleasure is not the same as making your own music, even if your music is, shall we say, a bit basic.

Wayne Booth makes that point in his book, For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals (1999), which is grounded in his love of cello playing. Here’s a couple of excerpts:

So what will be the main point here? Well, obviously not the totally, finally inaccessible perfection but the playing itself, good and bad. We usually manage to rise above the distractions and play, for the sake of the playing. While much of the rest of the world is negotiating costs and benefits of a different kind, we are negotiating interpretations—and when things go well, the pay-off is beauty, friendship, and joy. (About the many in the world who can afford neither kind of negotiation—the impoverished, the hungry, the deprived—I'll not say much, and what I say will be said guiltily. To fiddle while much of the world burns is surely wicked, but everyone who has read this far is to some degree already caught up in the wickedness. Will I be able to say any more in my defense than that some kinds of fiddling come closer to redeeming the world than some other kinds?)

Later:

What I hope will harmonize the debating voices is an unqualified celebration of what it means to take on any difficult and complex task for the sheer love of the task itself, with no possibility of future pay-off. In a world filled increasingly with easy pleasures why take on a tough love that requires daily practice, burdens you with a sense of critical failure, and risks leading others to accuse you of wasting your time—and theirs? Or, if you are bored with the easier pleasures, why not instead give yourself more of the pleasure yielded by getting ahead professionally? Steady devotion at the office will get you somewhere, while steady devotion in front of a music stand or learning jazz trombone or gardening—well, won't you just end up about where you began?

And this:

I am an amateur cellist with an uncomfortable vulnerability to that word "lack" in the second definition. I do love to play the cello—especially when others are playing with me; over the years it has come to feel less and less like a mere addendum to life, a pastime, a hobby, and more and more like something beyond even an added luxury: it's now a necessity. But though I "practice" the art lovingly, "for my own pleasure," practice at least an hour a day, I often practice it with little ease and never with any skill remotely resembling "professional."

There’s more at the link.

The idea that we should rest content with having AI generate tunes for us, that ultimately we don’t need humans making music at all because the AIs can do it “better,” that betrays a frightfully shallow conception of being human, of living. It reduces being human to being simply a consumer of experiences, which seems to me to be the ultimate motivation of the fantasy that we’re living in computer simulation, that we’re not doing anything at all but are rather being done to. That’s the (ultimate) triumph of Homo economicus over Homo Ludens.