When the Owls Cry in the Night
I never thought this waning of curiosity would happen to me, but now that is another lost illusion from youth. But it seems one of the main effects of abundance is to shift the frame of reference to larger units, from songs and albums to artists and genres. But rather than be taken with the ephemeral singularity of a performance (these can be instigated on demand with a generative AI), we can consume the model’s learning process as the composition, and not the particular sounds it makes at any given time. It could be like listening to birdsong that becomes progressively more complex and interpretable. Its emerging capabilities are more interesting as a trajectory, much in the same way our own emerging tastes can be to ourselves. she laments how many AI music projects attempt to re-create already existing styles: “It gets us in kind of a feedback loop culturally which does not move us forward,” she says. “It doesn’t respond to what’s happening now and music should be responsive to the politic and the material world around it.” This feels like a way of taming the threat of abundance, not by rejecting it exactly but by converting it into a set of rules. It is a way to navigate the infinite without sailing over the edge.