THE SOUL OF ORGANIC MUSIC VS THE SYNTHETIC SOUND OF AI

Lets wrap our heads around the coil of mindfulness it requires to keep the real from the not. Everywhere we go, everywhere we look and everything that we do now requires algorithms. In a world desperate to automate everything, authenticity is increasingly becoming more and more of an anomaly. Rather than having Instant Rice or Oatmeal we now have instant music, instant art and instant thinking. But every musician and artist that I speak to has the same thing to say., “don’t come for my soul” AI because that you cannot code. There was recently on Tik Tok a concert set in motion by, R&B legend, Jeffrey Osborne. Folks were out laughing, dancing, singing and making merry was so refreshing to see people having fun. You could not get them to shut up or sit down. The thing that was inherently waiting to come up and out was the soul of the situation. It was live music and there’s nothing like it. ,We used three different examples of this inner feeling that seems to surface without prompt when there is good music. Two tracks, one rock and pop, the third was the live sound of Yussef Dayes and Robert Glasper. The feeling was live. The instrument is an extension of the body. One could feel the love and the intimacy that the artist shared with an instrument, with a sound, with a voice and with movement. Live is real and Ai is what it says, AI. Artificial Intelligence. Keyword: ARTIFICIAL. Recently, we spoke with producer and audio engineer Merrick Yzbick and played his AI-produced track. He explained how he can feed sound, ideas, voice, and movement into an AI platform and it comes out as a ready to hit radio and live stream. Although the track was created with AI, its sound had a surprisingly natural quality. The effort and delivery flawless. Same with station owner, Sam Hasson, who played two tracks that he produced. One pop and one rock. The delivery and sound were flawless. Little to no breathing required. Provenance origin and original energy. When content becomes infinite and effortless. To make genuine human interest the highest value of luxury. However, in a real live session—like the Yussef Dayes and Robert Glasper project. one could visibly see the musicians connecting to their instruments. The nodding of heads, stomping of feet, plucking and picking, as Glasper racked with heightened fingers across the keys and Yussef played the drums as if the sound was buried in hollowed ground beneath the sea. The years of friction, the learning how to play. The discipline required has to have tremendous force just to get out of that way of thinking. There weren’t the inuendoes and woo wahh’s that real music and real voices make. We should all pay close attention to the new world or should I say the reshaping of the old one. The interplay of realness and AI can be very deceptive but human interaction will always be unmistakably human. Photo image: NAMM by Osiris Munir

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