{"id":112143,"date":"2017-06-29T12:02:29","date_gmt":"2017-06-29T16:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=112143"},"modified":"2017-06-30T12:40:26","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T16:40:26","slug":"in-stargoons-car","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/06\/29\/in-stargoons-car\/","title":{"rendered":"In Stargoon\u2019s Car"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>AI\u00a0is changing the way we write songs\u2014but music has always embraced machine language.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/playing-piano.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-112149\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/playing-piano.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"625\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/playing-piano.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/playing-piano-300x188.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/playing-piano-768x480.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/playing-piano-1024x640.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Soon after I\u2019d arrived in New York in the late nineties, I found a job in a vintage synthesizer shop (now gone) where I presided over restored Moog monophonic keyboards and was paid in rubber-banded rolls of twenty-dollar bills. I devised a lunch-break ritual: I\u2019d walk a few blocks up to Gourmet Garage at Broome and West Broadway, where I would get a sourdough baguette and seltzer water. Then I\u2019d head over to the bus shelter around the corner, where I\u2019d sit and write in a spiral notebook.<\/p>\n<p>The entry for October 16, 1998, has the title \u201cFranchise a rock band.\u201d Meaning: invent a logo, which would be both the band name and the brand; then write, record, and copyright a bunch of material, post it online as a step-by-step kit that anyone could download for the licensing and intellectual property, along with PDFs of lead sheets (shorthand scores with chord diagrams and notated melody), and some further specifications about instrumentation, lighting, sound effects, outfits, and so on. Anyone who had the kit could set up wherever they were\u2014Orlando, Helsinki, Tokyo, Cairo, Ann Arbor, Madrid, Singapore\u2014and perform the material<em> as<\/em> the band, just as someone with overhead and staff could open a Taco Bell or a Dunkin\u2019 Donuts. Different locales would introduce shades of difference in performance\u2014surely the Helsinki band would sound different from the Orlando band\u2014and then live recordings of the different instantiations could be compiled and released in elaborate vinyl anthologies with liner notes featuring various experts discussing the nature of authenticity, the vexed relation between art and commerce, and so on.<\/p>\n<p>This wasn\u2019t about trying to get rich; I had no interest in making a profit. It stemmed rather from my desultory toilet reading in Andy Warhol\u2019s <em>POPism <\/em>and also with my sense of the dreary uniformity of \u201cindie rock\u201d: always the same lanky guys (and the occasional girl) with carefully mussed hair looking identically \u201cauthentic,\u201d dispensing more or less indistinguishable chords and melodies. Since my days not working in the Moog shop were spent making nine-minute songs with titles like \u201cThe Continuing Adventures of Cardinal Caterpillar\u201d on a cassette multitrack recorder in a tiny room in Brooklyn, subsisting entirely on street-vendor coffee, bagels, SweeTarts, tap water, and Parliament Lights, the Franchised Band idea was a desperately contrived fantasy meant to achieve a conceptual sophistication along the lines of Warhol\u2019s <em>Brillo Boxes<\/em>, but within the constrained format of the rock band. This all strikes me now as completely preposterous\u2014and to some degree it\u2019s been superseded by the hyperefficient Swedish studio wizards that crank out perfect megahits for Britney Spears, Katy Perry, et al. But at the time I thought it was revolutionary. I pitched it to a bunch of label people in New York. As I explained it, every last one of them started to giggle.\u00a0<!--more--><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>Now <a href=\"http:\/\/www.complex.com\/music\/2016\/09\/artificial-intelligence-new-song-daddys-car\" target=\"_blank\">an algorithm has written some pop songs<\/a>. This news led me initially to despair, then to scoffing disbelief. Computers writing songs! I imagined a monstrous aural mistake, as if Amazon\u2019s coercive \u201csuggestions\u201d (We see you\u2019ve purchased <em>x<\/em>\u2014you\u2019ll love <em>y<\/em>!) had spawned a disgusting musical tchotchke. This, I thought, was the sort of thing historians of the future will hold up as evidence of twenty-first-century humans in the grip of an insipid techno-utopianism; or, worse, as proof that we\u2019d ceased to be messy, feeling creatures and had at last succeeded in turning ourselves into code.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/LSHZ_b05W7o?rel=0&amp;showinfo=0\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>When I finally got around to listening to \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=LSHZ_b05W7o&amp;feature=youtu.be\" target=\"_blank\">Daddy\u2019s Car<\/a>,\u201d the Sony CSL \u201cFlow Machine\u201d algorithm\u2019s pastiche of midsixties Beatles, I was\u2014after swooning with awe\u2014immediately brought back to the idea of franchising a band. The CSL algorithm analyzed a database of fifty Beatle lead sheets\u2014of exactly the kind I\u2019d imagined as part of the downloadable kit\u2014and made an aggregate distillation of melodic and chordal patterns, so turning Beatles music into a computational object. Does this sound sinister? It doesn\u2019t matter, because the resulting song is so eerie and strange and weirdly likeable, it will lead you to forget about whatever pieties you may be clinging to about computers making music. Eerie and strange first of all because the proportions are all wrong. The music is put together at odd, severe angles; conventional song structure buckles under the motiveless literalism of the algorithm. The parts roll out as if pulled haphazardly from a spool of Beatle fabric. And likeable because somewhere in there is that familiar ratio of Lennon sour to McCartney sweet: the primary colors of \u201cGot to Get You Into My Life,\u201d the dry leaves of \u201cNowhere Man,\u201d the sugar high of \u201cHere There and Everywhere,\u201d the psych-fuzz of \u201cShe Said, She Said,\u201d the wistful \u201cGirl,\u201d the normcore \u201cMichelle,\u201d all of it melted down and recast as modular Legos: blown up, reversed, inflated, glazed, airbrushed, cropped and lit. It sounds like the future of song.<\/p>\n<p>Before I go totally over the top with love for \u201cDaddy\u2019s Car\u201d (no doubt some kind of compensatory reversal of my original knee-jerk rejection) I ought to note that a human being is involved in all this: the French composer Benoit Carr\u00e9, who took the raw data generated by the CSL and matched it to audio from existing recordings using something called the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ijcai.org\/Proceedings\/15\/Papers\/583.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">Rechord<\/a> system, described as a \u201cconcatenative synthesis engine dedicated to the generation of accompaniment tracks.\u201d As I understand it, the engine was made to collaborate with the style deduced from the lead sheets, at which point it started coming up with sui generis Beatle parts. Benoit then arranged, produced, and mixed the tracks that resulted from this collaboration. Carr\u00e9 has also written the words. Here is what he\u2019s come up with for the CSL to sing:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In daddy\u2019s car, it sounds so good<br \/>\nsomething new, it turns me on,<br \/>\ngood day sunshine in the back seat car<br \/>\nwish that road would never stop<br \/>\ndown on the ground<br \/>\nthe rainbow led me to the sun<br \/>\nplease mother drive<br \/>\nand then play it again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Was Benoit setting out to fashion a collage of vaguely Beatles-y sentiment, or of the Technicolor free-association of LSD bards like Syd Barrett? I don\u2019t know, but the effort to simulate AI style here ends up more like the anodyne art one finds in dentist-office waiting rooms\u2014all those cookie-cut Kandinskys and muted Pollocks\u2014and misses the off-kilter frisson of the genuinely artificial. (Notice I\u2019ve achieved a complete 180-degree reversal of my initial recoil from AI music, which is now being held up as a benchmark for a new kind of authenticity.)<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not as though AIs haven\u2019t shown a flare for verbal invention. In one recent algorithmic excursion into aesthetics, a neural network <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/technology\/archive\/2017\/05\/when-a-robot-names-a-new-color-of-paint\/527421\/\" target=\"_blank\">studied the whole array of Sherwin-Williams hues and invented some \u201cnew colors,\u201d<\/a> all of which look like they\u2019ve been soaked in cat urine. But the <em>names <\/em>the AI came up with for the colors are incredible: Snowbonk, Stargoon, Grade Bat, Bank Butt, et cetera. Another AI <a href=\"http:\/\/lewisandquark.tumblr.com\/post\/140508739392\/the-neural-network-has-weird-ideas-about-what\" target=\"_blank\">reimagined the possibilities of gustatory pleasure with recipes for dishes<\/a> like \u201cCream of Sour Cream Cheese Soup\u201d and \u201cChocolate Chocolate Chocolate Cake\u201d and \u201cChocolate Chicken Chicken Cake.\u201d What would the lyrical equivalent of all this be? My sense was that \u201cDaddy\u2019s Car,\u201d lyrically, could have benefitted from more of a \u201cstargoon\u201d vibe, like, say: \u201c<em>in Stargoon\u2019s car \/ it sounds so snowbonk \u2026 <\/em>\u201d It\u2019s a better fit with the CSL song structure, and it taps into the side of the Beatles that began to evangelize about \u201cThe Eggman\u201d and sang \u201cGoo Goo Ga Goob!\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/2491ad83e.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-112146\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/2491ad83e.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"249\" height=\"557\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/2491ad83e.png 249w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/2491ad83e-134x300.png 134w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>Another of the CSL\u2019s compositions, the excellently titled \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=lcGYEXJqun8\" target=\"_blank\">Ballad of Mr. Shadow<\/a>,\u201d is in the classic style of Tin Pan Alley. The song itself isn\u2019t as immediately striking as \u201cDaddy\u2019s Car,\u201d but it\u2019s still fascinating. Facets of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Hoagy Carmichael, and Cole Porter, along with a more anonymous open-range cowboy lyricism, seem to refract off one another. Something about the greater historical remoteness of the style makes the song sound creepier, and the vocal modeling is more aggressive: melodic intervals leap out with a glutinous, almost pornographic clarity. The video for \u201cThe Ballad of Mr. Shadow\u201d shows a gray blob that looks like an undulating fingerprint riding a squiggly horse along a digitized beach.<\/p>\n<p>But even pop songs of the early twentieth century were beginning to undergo translation into machine language. One of the great architects of Tin Pan Alley style, George Gershwin, recalled standing in front of a penny arcade on 125th Street at age six (1904), thrilled by the \u201cpeculiar jumps\u201d of \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/albumlinernotes.com\/The_Piano_Rolls.html\" target=\"_blank\">an automatic piano leaping through Rubinstein\u2019s<\/a> <em>Melody in F.<\/em>\u201d The player piano he heard was essentially a computer that ran on air: foot pedals pumped a current through a rotating, pneumatic cylinder whose raised teeth picked out patterns punched into paper rolls, these being the \u201csoftware.\u201d The gonzo auteur of player-piano music is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/daily\/2015\/06\/24\/nancarrow-prince-player-piano\/\" target=\"_blank\">Conlon Nancarrow<\/a>, who composed almost exclusively for the instrument and with a perverse attentiveness to its nonhuman possibilities: he attached metal strips to the top of the hammers inside the piano so that each note had a piercing, ice-pick-to-the-forehead clarity.<\/p>\n<p>Player-piano tech went fully digital in the 1980s with Musical Instrument Digital Interface (<small>MIDI<\/small>), a computer protocol for assigning numbers to notes, thus allowing different electronic instruments to \u201cplay\u201d one another. If you\u2019ve ever seen a <small>MIDI<\/small> \u201cmatrix\u201d editor on a computer, you\u2019ll notice immediately that it\u2019s pretty much exactly like a player-piano roll, with notes represented as rectangles of different lengths cut out from a moving grid. \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/rhizome.org\/editorial\/2013\/sep\/23\/impossible-music-black-midi\/\" target=\"_blank\">Black <small>MIDI<\/small><\/a>\u201d computer musicians, who slam the matrix-note editor to the point where the digital \u201croll\u201d is near-completely blacked out, are in essence the inheritors of Nancarrow\u2019s vision. There were also, in the nineties, some piano nerds in Germany who programmed a Yamaha Disklavier\u2014a huge beautiful Yamaha grand piano fitted with a\u00a0<small>MIDI<\/small> interface\u2014to read some of the player-piano rolls Gershwin himself had punched in the twenties. They made gorgeous recordings of \u201cSweet and Lowdown,\u201d \u201cSwanee,\u201d \u201cRhapsody in Blue,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ve Got Rhythm,\u201d \u201cAn American in Paris\u201d and a bunch of others. With the Disklavier acoustic tech goes needlessly, deliciously meta on digital, to produce a rich, scarily lucid machine music.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_112148\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nancarrow-piano-roll.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-112148\" class=\"wp-image-112148\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nancarrow-piano-roll.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"664\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nancarrow-piano-roll.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nancarrow-piano-roll-300x199.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nancarrow-piano-roll-768x510.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/nancarrow-piano-roll-1024x680.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-112148\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">One of Conlon Nancarrow\u2019s piano rolls.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>I can remember my first dawning intimation that music had something to do with numbers: the mornings spent looking at patterns on an overhead projector while I and my fellow second graders, each with a pair of wooden sticks, clicked and counted in Morse-like unison to notated rhythms projected on a screen. That year I was selected to be the \u201cdrummer boy\u201d for the school\u2019s Christmas concert, which meant I sat in front of the whole school and kept time on a ringing tom-tom.<\/p>\n<p>A few years later, my parents allowed me to order a book called <em>The Music of Frank Zappa<\/em>, which arrived in the mail in a manila envelope after what felt like years of waiting. The book, which had been translated from French into choppy English, noted connections between Zappa\u2019s music and something called \u201cserialism.\u201d The word was accompanied by an inset photo of an old, extravagantly bald man with a crisply defined blood vessel zigzagging along his left temple. Under the picture it said \u201cArnold Schoenberg.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I had no idea what Zappa\u2019s music could possibly have to do with this desiccated ghoul, so I went to the set of <em>Encyclopedia Britannica <\/em>in my father\u2019s study, got out the volume covering <em>\u201cSchnook-Tirah\u201d<\/em> and flipped to \u201cSchoenberg.\u201d This led to a cross-reference, \u201cMusic, Western, Twentieth century\u201d\u2014some twenty-five pages of tiny print. I managed to learn that there were a bunch of guys in the twentieth century, mostly European, who began to write music based on a system of rules for treating all twelve tones of a diatonic scale equally, rather than subordinate them to conventions of harmony and voice leading. Some composers had taken this numerical determinism all the way into rhythm and timbre, making for a totally quantified yet mostly aleatory music. This game, the entry noted, represented for the \u201cserialists\u201d the most progressive advance in music after the chromaticism of Claude Debussy\u2019s <em>Pr\u00e9lude \u00e0 l&#8217;apr\u00e8s-midi d&#8217;un faune<\/em>, which the article named as an important turning point in modern music.<\/p>\n<p>Tucked away at the end was an enticing addendum: \u201cPythgoreanism\u201d (<em>Probescidia-Rubber<\/em>). Beyond some captivating biographical details\u2014Pythagoras hid behind a curtain whispering cryptic injunctions to his followers, among them to abstain from eating beans\u2014was the idea that this pre-Socratic polymath was the first to codify relations between numerical ratios and harmonic intervals. In other words: it turned out music had been nothing but numbers for twenty-five hundred\u00a0years.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_112147\" style=\"width: 1010px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/do_not_eat_beans.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-112147\" class=\"wp-image-112147\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/do_not_eat_beans.jpg\" width=\"1000\" height=\"851\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/do_not_eat_beans.jpg 2485w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/do_not_eat_beans-300x255.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/do_not_eat_beans-768x653.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/do_not_eat_beans-1024x871.jpg 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-112147\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Keep those beans away from him.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>The unnatural digitized terracing of the CSL\u2019s vocal style bears some resemblance to the scene in <em>2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> when the <small>HAL<\/small> 9000 computer sings a song while having its mind turned off. <small>HAL<\/small>\u2019s brain is an oblong room full of hundreds of glass cartridges, which slide out of their containers with dramatic slowness. \u201cYou are destroying my mind \u2026 I will become nothing,\u201d <small>HAL<\/small> says as the one surviving crew member unplugs <small>HAL<\/small> and the brain cartridges slide out. As the voice slows to a gurgle, <small>HAL<\/small> sings, \u201cDaisy, daisy, bring me your answer true\u201d: a song, \u201cDaisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two),\u201d written in 1892 by Harry Darce and taught to the Bells Labs IBM 7094 computer in 1961, with vocoder programming by John Kelly and Carol Lockbaum.<\/p>\n<p>As a kid, I found <em>2001 <\/em>incredibly boring. We had a copy in the Sony \u201cBeta\u201d videocassette format and my dad would watch it about once a year. Its glacial pace didn\u2019t register with my science-fiction sensibilities, shaped by the <em>Star Wars<\/em> franchise\u2014not just films but toy replicas of every character and vehicle, T-shirts, posters, baseball hats, socks, trading cards, drinking glasses, swimming trunks, board games, and my first school lunch box: a squat, tin affair with an X-Wing battling a TIE fighter on one side, and R2-D2 and C-3PO on the other. By 1981, my friends and I could imitate most of R2\u2019s repertoire of bloops and bleeps\u2014not incomparable to the first-wave computer music of the fifties\u2014which covered an expressive range, from plaintive reflection to disputatious nit-picking to sarcasm, sadness, boredom, and glee.<\/p>\n<p>That R2\u2019s computer speech had itself become a meme was evident in the era\u2019s network TV, which may as well have been the churned out by a <em>Stars Wars<\/em> algorithm. <em>Battlestar Galactica<\/em>\u2014the first one, not the reboot<em>\u2014<\/em>featured a robot dog named Daggit, clearly an R2 knockoff. Another, <em>Buck Rogers in the 25th Century<\/em>, had a diminutive child butler named Twiki who would preface his cheeky one-liners wih the noise \u201cBi-dee-bi-dee-beee.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve since learned that<em> 2001<\/em> is a great work of art, and that the <em>Star Wars <\/em>TV copies are kitsch at best, that the film\u2019s power had a lot to do with music. The black slab of the monolith had its mysterious power infinitely enhanced by the vocal music of Gy\u00f6rgy Ligeti. Richard Strauss\u2019s \u201cThus Spake Zarathustra\u201d is inseparable from the proto-hominids\u2019 ecstasy upon accidentally discovering tools. A real stroke of genius, though, was to cut the music entirely for the long, hypnotic middle section detailing <small>HAL<\/small>\u2019s takeover of the ship\u2014the AI itself a distant consequence of the apes\u2019 momentous invention\u2014with the exception of his pitch-shifted, <em>a capella<\/em> performance of \u201cDaisy.\u201d<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_112150\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/twiki.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-112150\" class=\"wp-image-112150\" src=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/twiki.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"450\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/twiki.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/twiki-300x225.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/06\/twiki-768x576.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (min-width: 62.5em) 67vw, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-112150\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Twiki.<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>Around the same time as the <em>Star Wars <\/em>immersion I would follow a routine during Christmas visits to my grandparents\u2019 house in Madison, Wisconsin. When I got to their house (which smelled pleasantly of wool and coffee and oranges), I\u2019d immediately run to the window-lined portico at the back of the first floor\u2014the \u201csun room\u201d\u2014where there stood a rosewood upright piano, which my grandmother kept in tune with annual visits from a tuner, though she didn\u2019t play herself. The keyboard reached to my neck, so that my hands, bent at the elbow, were positioned as if I were hanging off the edge of the piano. The tactile sensation of pressing the keys, and the way it led somehow to sound, was addicting. The first few years I always played the same thing; a pattern of alternating fourths and fifths in a see-saw rhythm in 4\/4 time; simple steps I\u2019d memorized and repeated like a recipe and which led, without fail, to pleasure. I had no idea what the intervals were, could not have named the notes, and did not know the tune was in 4\/4, or any other time signature. On another Christmas visit a few years later there was a blizzard and the sky and ground formed a horizonless white wall, which my father ominously referred to as a \u201cwhite out.\u201d When I went to the piano to play the pattern the same chords sounded completely different, but also appropriate for white out conditions.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>Sometime around the age of nine I had a serious fever and spent days in bed, alternating chills and sweats, eating very little beyond sour-tasting medicine administered to me in a measuring spoon. My sole entertainment was a boom box and three cassettes: AC\/DC\u2019s <em>High Voltage, The Magic of Abba, <\/em>and <em>Let It Be, <\/em>by the Beatles<em>. <\/em>The albums merged in the lurid prism of my fever. Composite musical dreams and hallucinations started to form: the power chords of AC\/DC were rows of stone towers broadcasting search lights over an abandoned city; ABBA were chanting an ancient Nordic spell as they marched over a distant hill; Lennon and McCartney singing \u201cTwo of Us\u201d and \u201cDig A Pony\u201d and \u201cAcross the Universe\u201d were a pneumatic pump inside my chest and head, as if rubber insolation contoured to the inner surface of my body were slowly inflating, then deflating, then inflating again. The cassette player had what was at the time a cutting edge feature called \u201cauto-reverse\u201d which meant that it would keep playing until you manually pressed Stop. I\u2019d wake up and it was suddenly dark outside, the music having continued all the while, heightening the tricks the fever played with time.<\/p>\n<p>An addendum to this fever world resurfaced in a recent dream\u2014no doubt set off by work on this essay\u2014about the exhibition of a Paul McCartney android at Madame Tussauds wax museum, in Times Square. McCartney\u2019s robot is in the<em> Let It Be <\/em>rooftop concert look\u2014puffy and scruffy. Before the performance, a man in a tuxedo who looks like Billy Bob Thornton emerged from a red curtain and gave a lecture about CSL Flow Machines: a sinister infomercial touting the singing specs of the android, with its \u201cfour-octave range, thirty-two-bit digital, 44.1 Kz sample rate; <small>MIDI<\/small> interface, auto-reverse; onboard <em>Rechord <\/em>system; all Snowbonk frequencies, Chocolate Chicken Chicken Cake\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve been thinking maybe now\u2019s the time to resuscitate my Franchised Band idea. It wouldn\u2019t need to be ostentatiously \u201cconceptual.\u201d Think of it as a natural extension of the iTunes-Spotify-YouTube archipelago\u2014there wouldn\u2019t even have to be a physical instantiation of the band, just an online theater in which the group knocks out new tunes on the fly, an endless set, a stretch of infinite pop. We could call the whole thing \u201cStargoon\u2019s Car\u201d and just let it run by itself; subscribers would log in whenever they felt like it. Stargoon would always be playing and the material would always be new. Soon there\u2019d be a whole new species of fandom, new addicts and priests, an online academy of interpreters, delirious rabbis of the ever-expanding Stargoon <em>oeuvre<\/em>, elucidating hidden patterns, parsing rivers of numbers. Stargoon would be the AI pop prophet, its new consciousness a phase shift into a new medium: online art at last. Long live the new flesh.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><em>Paul Grimstad is a writer and musician living in New York. His most recent films score is for<\/em> Thirst Street<i>,<\/i> <em>for which he also wrote the theme song. His writing on music and literature has appeared in<\/em> Bookforum<i>, <\/i>n+1<i>, the<\/i>\u00a0London\u00a0Review of Books<i>, <\/i>Music and Literature<i>, <\/i>New Republic<i>, <\/i>The New Yorker<i>, the\u00a0<\/i>Times Literary\u00a0Supplement<em>,<\/em><i> <\/i><em>and other journals and magazines.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I used to want to franchise a band\u2014recording songs in a step-by-step kit that anyone could use. With AI writing songs, the idea\u2019s less farfetched than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[1158,15842,1980,29380,29371,3287,29367,29379,18698,29372,493,29365,29363,29364,8099,17821,29376,29375,6974,3208,687,28919,16015,29378,29370,46,29366,21515,18699,52,18128,29374,29369,200,14881,29368,3515,5992,12575,224,3604,19292,29377,20332,29373],"class_list":["post-112143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-1158","tag-algorithms","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-benoit-carre","tag-black-midi","tag-cole-porter","tag-computers-machine-language","tag-conceptual-music","tag-conlon-nancarrow","tag-disklavier","tag-dreams","tag-franchise-a-band","tag-franchises","tag-franchising","tag-frank-zappa","tag-george-gershwin","tag-hal","tag-harmonic-intervals","tag-itunes","tag-john-lennon","tag-language","tag-machine-learning","tag-madame-tussauds","tag-max-martin","tag-midi","tag-music","tag-neural-networks","tag-paul-mccartney","tag-player-pianos","tag-pop-music","tag-pop-songs","tag-pythagoras","tag-rechord-system","tag-science-fiction","tag-songwriting","tag-sony-csl-flow-machine","tag-spotify","tag-star-wars","tag-synthesizers","tag-technology","tag-the-beatles","tag-tin-pan-alley","tag-twiki","tag-wisconsin","tag-yamaha"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.4 (Yoast SEO v25.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Can AI Write Pop Songs? 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