Behind The Tech with Kevin Scott - Jacob Collier and Ben Bloomberg: Bonus Episode

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

Kevin’s conversation with this amazing duo was so fascinating, we’re publishing this bonus episode! Grammy-award winning musician Jacob Collier and MIT PhD Ben Bloomberg reflect on human and artificial intelligence and its impact on creativity. Find out how AI is playing a constructive role in this amazing duo’s creative work. Click here for transcript of this episode.  Kevin Scott Ben Bloomberg Jacob Collier Subscribe to Behind the Tech Podcast with Kevin Scott - Microsoft

. I can imagine a world where there's some kind of creative feedback from human to AI, where human gets a cool idea based off something that the human could never have imagined. If it generates ideas or makes space, then humans will fill it, and that's cool. That's exciting. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Behind the Tech.

I'm your host, Kevin Scott, Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft. In this podcast, we're going to get behind the tech. We'll talk with some of the people who made our modern tech world possible and understand what motivated them to create what they did. So join me to maybe learn a little bit about the history of computing and get a few behind-the-scenes insights into what's happening today. Stick around. Hello and welcome to Behind the Tech. I'm Christina Warren, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft.

And I'm Kevin Scott. And today our guests are Ben Bloomberg and Jacob Collier in a bonus episode of their conversation with Kevin. If you didn't catch the first half of their chat in the last show, definitely have a listen. As many of you know, Jacob is a multi-Grammy award-winning instrumentalist, songwriter, arranger, and producer. He's up for three Grammys this year, including Album of the Year. And Ben is a creative technologist and recent PhD graduate from MIT. Jacob and Ben began their collaboration about six years ago and have partnered to create

music and video and a one-man stage tour. Well, anyway, you just kind of need to jump onto YouTube and see for yourself because what they do is incredible. Yeah, you have no idea how excited I was to do this interview. Like we've been trying to get Jacob on the podcast for a while. I am that were sort of visual and audio, just these rich, multilayered experiences. Like everything from these sort of whimsical songs, like he made this video and a recording of the Flintstones, and he won a Grammy for that Flintstones arrangement. But he's also composed some incredibly compelling new music. The thing that makes him relevant to this podcast, which is about technology, is that they use technology in such interesting ways to help Jacob realize his vision.

And part of that is how you put a song together that is so layered and interesting with so many vocals and so many instruments. Part of that is how you translate that into a live performance, which is very, very hard. And then part of that is how he uses technology to create community and to collaborate, which I think is really, you know, interesting. And he's sort of a, you know, like an internet native, a YouTube native, a social media native. And, you know,

like he uses all of those things to incredibly good creative effect. So anyway, like I'm an enormous Jacob fan. As am I. Okay, so the conversation got started before we even had a chance to do our soundcheck, but it was too good not to share. So next up, you'll hear Kevin, Ben, and Jacob first jumping on the line together, and then we'll pick up with the bonus episode from their extended interview. Hello. Hey, Kevin. Hey, Jacob. And Ben, so nice to meet both of you.

You too. This is amazing and a privilege and a treat indeed. Oh, goodness. It's such a privilege for me. You have no idea how many of your videos I've watched. Oh, geez louise. My wife and children and I have been running around all summer long listening to All I Need, and it's a variety of iterations. There have been a few different versions at this point. That's amazing to hear. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. When I was a kid i was a enormous and i still am an enormous fan of classical piano and one of my favorite pianists was vladimir horowitz and

he you know he had such a long performing career that he performed the same repertoire over and over and over again but like nothing was ever the same like other pianists like everything you know had this consistency to it and like his performances were just wildly different sometimes just amazing and sometimes like they were just total duds uh but he he just he was fearless uh like i don't even know if he was capable of performing the same thing the same way twice. How do you think about performance? Like, they always seem to be, you know, mutating and changing, you know, with time. Yeah, yeah. I guess it's something that you get addicted to after a while.

You know, you can't do the thing you already did because that's already been done by you. So you have to find something new. And Ben and I have been thinking in this way for, I guess, a few years. I guess, since we met, you know, about six years ago now, whatever it was. But, you know, once something has been done, you kind of seek the edge of it and then you grow from there, you know. And so it's been a funny thing with All I Need, but, you know, I think it's eight or nine different versions, variants of that song that now exists. And each one has taught us something new and each one is kind of evolves the song

and evolves the concept and gives me a clue about what it is I like and what it is that I want to grow towards, I guess. I really love the, you added melodica to the, what was it, the Jimmy Kimmel performance. Yeah, right. That was a beautiful touch. I appreciate it.

Thanks so much. All right, so that was a little bit of the behind the scenes. You can just see how great that conversation was. And we hadn't even started yet. Now let's get to the bonus episode focused on AI and creativity. One of the things that I spend an enormous amount of my time on is AI. We are building very, very sophisticated systems for doing natural language and vision and speech. And increasingly, AI is becoming a systems problem almost at the largest scales. So we're building supercomputers to train models on. But one of the things that's happening from all of that investment

is AI is getting used in more and more places. And I'm just really curious about how you all think about how AI plays a role in what it is that you're trying to create. I've seen AI systems that can imagine performances, like actual performances, like in the style of Chopin or Rachmaninoff or like Pick Your Thing. I'm not sure that's super interesting,

but there are other ways that AI is being used. And you guys are some of the best users of technology to create these experiences. I'd just love to hear how you're thinking about it. Yeah, like you say, there's so many people trying to use AI to create sort of quote-unquote creative performances or outputs. And it's really interesting because a lot of these systems, sort of the success metric for them is not being able to tell the original or the you know, the, or the output from the real thing, I guess we could say. So it's sort of a, it's sort of a copy. And I think the big question that a lot of people have is whether it will ever get to the point where we value the AI for its own creativity rather than just sort of as an imitation. And, you know, one thing that we always say is, whether it's sort of style transcription or these models, Markov models and things that are combined to create these sort of

very realistic but not quite there representations of other things, all of that gets to what we would say is like maybe the 85th percentile of what we would call sort of good. And I feel like when you get to creativity, I think somebody like Jacob or anybody who's really coming up with truly new and groundbreaking sort of material, that's all in the upper 5% of sort of what we can do. And so, you know, as a toolkit, AI is really interesting to be able to sort of automate things that maybe would previously take a lot of work or would take a lot of, you know, drudgery. But I have yet to see an application where it's going to come up with something, you know, necessarily truly new or anything along the lines of, you know, like what Jacob would do, you know, where it's actually iterating. And, you know, of course,

there's these things like GPT-3 and, you know, even like Sony CSL and Francois Pochette's flow machines where people have gotten really far. And I think that has an application for like ads and cinema music and things where we're not sort of really zeroed in, dialed in on, you know, on what this is. And then there's a whole, there's a whole, you know, genre of output where it's just completely surrealist. And, you know, you look at like the half bird, half cow, you know, or all these faces that get generated. And that's kind of its own thing. It's different, but Jacob and I talk a lot about like, well, could we create a harmonic intelligence that sort of like encodes Jacob's sense of composition

and sort of harmony into an AI? And I think we could do that as a compositional tool for other people to use, but whether something is really going to actually be able to do what he does in the best way that we could do it, it would just be an imitation of what he had done up until that point. And that would never be enough, I think. Have you guys seen, so Google did this really cool thing uh called blob opera right around uh christmas which is i think exactly what you're talking about so it's it's more instrument than uh you

know like a thing that's trying to create an entire performance or creative experience um and like that's sort of how we think about ai as well like it's like i'm not trying to like god knows like i would never try to replace someone like, uh, like Jacob because like, you know, the, the, the precious thing that we have in, in, in this world is our humanity. Um, like what I want is to create more tools and more instruments to help us be more human to enhance that humanity, uh, you know, not, not, you know, diminish it or, like, take the dignity away from it by, you know, sort of substituting for it.

And, you know, I thought that blob opera, like, in an artistic context was, like, an interesting thing. You know, they trained it from a bunch of professional opera singers' voices and, you know, like, they gave those voices an instrumentality for other people to play around with, which is interesting. I love it when it applies to play and when it gives you ideas.

From my perspective, the half cow, half cat thing is wicked. I love that. I mean, I love hybrid animal images anyway. I have like a soft spot for them. But I think it's really brilliant when it's not trying to be reasonable because then it breaks me out of my shell

and something becomes possible for me that wasn't possible before that I wouldn't have thought of because I'm only a human, you know. That's cool for me. I think AI trying to be serious is doomed to fail, partly because I think of the way that it would receive feedback, actually.

If you go back to the feedback loop thing, if you put an AI on stage and you give it an audience response, I don't know if it would be able to read that. And I think that the amount of humanity that's needed to turn up and care about all the different levels of that, kind of empathy mixed with confidence, mixed with kind of fearlessness, mixed with doubt, mixed with inspiration, the sort of combination of elements there, you know, plus collaboration if you're on stage with other people. And even, you know, it's a bit like comic timing. You know, it's like, it's like, doesn't AI get better than a human at comic timing? Because a lot of being on stage is about this is the moment for this, or is the moment for this you know just a moment or i'm just going to wait a moment longer

so the audience can laugh again or so the audience can feel what that meant or whatever those those kinds of that to me is why i love touring not because you know people buy more tickets for example to the shows or because the applause is louder after a particular song or there's more voices that sing along you know these kinds of things and like sure these are metrics that i will judge the performance onto a point like well everyone was singing in that last song i must have done a good job but but actually i think i just don't think an ai would would necessarily um ever be subtle enough to and in some ways imperfect enough to care. It takes a performer to be on stage and second guess what you're doing to make it special to a point. If you go and parrot

something, it doesn't work so well. And that to me feels like one of the most fundamental differences is how the kind of consequence of a creative action is reacted to and how that's received and then changed. Because sometimes you stick and you say, I'm not going to listen to you and you flirt. And sometimes you say, yeah, okay, I'll go with you, audience. Or you say, oh, okay, that's a good idea. I'll move with that.

And sometimes you say, you know what I mean? It's so dynamic and it's so unable to be replicated. Look, and I think even if you could build an AI that would do all of those things, what I'm chasing in music is goosebumps. And if an AI gives me goosebumps, it feels like manipulation. Whereas if a performer gives me goosebumps, it feels like manipulation. Uh, whereas if a performer gives me goosebumps, it feels like connection. And like, I just don't even like, even if you could have it, which I think you're right. Like it would be very, very, very hard. It's like, I don't,

I'm not looking to be manipulated. I want to be, I want a connection. I think when I get goosebumps, I, I, I sense a fallibility in something that I relate to. I think that is often what gives me goosebumps. It's like, wow, and you're still shining anyway. Wow, so mucky and so shiny. I see a part of myself in something's imperfections or in something's kind of power. I don't know't you can't articulate it you can't articulate but ai by nature is not fallible because it's always the best iteration

of itself and it has to be articulated exactly yeah everything's already been articulated and so the thing that's unspoken yeah and i think kevin what you said at the beginning you know we're trying to have the technology get out of the way. And it's such a narrow balance of sort of feeling, getting those goosebump moments and not pulling people out of the sort of immersion. And that's very difficult. And that's a very hard problem to quantify. There's a lot of unknowns and there's a lot of constraints. Yeah. On the other hand, if you can use something like AI to, you know, for example, with the looping show, we always talk about giving Jacob 12 arms so that he can play 12 instruments at the same time. That starts to get interesting. Or maybe there's a system out there now where you feed it a photo of a room and it gives you a reverb trail for that room.

Those tools start to be fun. I think we're excited to explore that going forward. Well, and look, I think, you know, I'm not a musician. So, like, maybe what I'm about to say is just sort of nonsense but you know it it seems to me like there's just this distinct difference between a score and instruments and uh and a performance um you know like i can listen to murray play that uh you know like that that chopin g minor ballad like i can get goosebumps at the moment like i can go look at the score and it's like okay like you know like like that Chopin G minor ballad, like I can get goosebumps at the moment. Like I can go look at the score and it's like, okay, like, you know, like, and I have many, many times like,

all right, you know, what is going on here that is giving me goosebumps? And it's not the score because like, I can like put the score through a MIDI player and like, it can, you know, robotically play the notes and it's like, all right, no goosebumps there. You know, I can listen to a whole bunch of other performers play it no goosebumps there like there's just something about like this very like very complex that you know and and it just being feels deeply human uh and like i don't want a machine trying to replicate that you know but if a machine can come in and like help a human like produce more of that like great and and sometimes it can be helpful to to bounce off and to bounce

on it off against something that's neutral as well you know if i if i'm working on something and i share it with a friend of mine or someone in my family or whatever then i i kind of risk their their judgment filtering into my overview of the song and then my mind being changed or whatever, you know. And that doesn't change, doesn't matter how old you are, you always have that slight fear when you show someone something that they might just say, oh, this is whatever. But I can imagine a world where there's some kind of creative feedback from human to AI, where human gets a cool idea based off something that the human could never have imagined. If it generates ideas or makes space, then humans will fill it. And that's cool. That's exciting.

Yeah. This is the other thing too about AI, like imagining an AI that was trying to compose a thing or deliver a performance the same way that you do. Like you, you know, one of the things that I think is very interesting about what you do is you don't always give people what they're expecting in a song. Like you will, you'll be sort of trucking along and it's like, okay, like, you know, here's the, here's what we expect. And then you will like do this harmonic thing that's like, oh crap, like why is there dissonance here now?

And, you know, and if, if you like the things that AI are really good at is sort of like reading, you know, reading someone's response to a thing and like giving them more of what they want.

And like this special thing that you do is like, you are like challenging us to think more about the music by occasionally and strategically giving us something that we're not expecting or like even literally making up new notes and like i just don't know how you like build the objective function or the feedback loop yeah that's totally the challenge it's a really individual dance isn't it like everyone has to do it there you know my idea of what too much is or too dissonant or the right moment, like that changes all the time. Um, and I learn from things I like and from things I don't like and all this stuff. And, and then I just come out and I, and

I'm a person, you know, and I think what can be moving about that if it works well is that a person is doing it all, is doing it all. And as you say, you can take I give you what you want and pander to the thing that will do well or people like or is reasonable to do or makes sense? And then how much do I do the opposite? Do I push you in the other direction? And that push-pull is magical. know it really is interesting have you guys uh seen this uh there's a video of bobby mcferrin at a neuroscience conference where they're they're sort of talking about you know what's built into our brains uh about music and he gets up in front of the audience and he like hums a note on the pentatonic scale and points at the audience. Like he says nothing, but he points to the audience and then they parrot the note back to him. Then he does this thing where he grounds that note on the pentatonic scale to a position,

and then he jumps and he goes to the next note on the scale and hums it and then points at the audience and they hum it. Then they've got the pattern. Then he does this performance on the audience where as he's jumping, they just automatically know without him having to hum it what the next set of notes are on the scale. And it's the most incredible thing. And he says at the end of it that no matter where he goes in the world,

he can do this same experiment with an audience and like they all have the pentatonic scale in their in their head and so like we do have this expectation in our head about you know like what a musical performance is uh and like you know i think the things that you do are sort of interesting in that, uh, like you, you sort of are pushing, you know, that inbuilt, uh, thing that we've got in our head and like very compelling ways. Uh, you know, and again, like it's, I think it's just about like, yeah, giving people a new lens on like something that biologically even they may, uh, like just deeply understand and expect. I guess you could say the same for, for storytelling. Um, I love that, that video even they may just deeply understand and expect.

I guess you could say the same for storytelling. I love that video of Bobby's. I was bold over the first time I saw it and it gave me lots of ideas. But I was going to say it's the same with stories in the sense that everyone kind of knows about departure and arrival. And everyone kind of knows about um you know hate and love and and kind of yeah just i i guess tension and release in in a primary color sense people

people tend to feel that and so in some ways our job as artists is to it could be with a completely new set of materials it could be like i'm going to lay out the the fundamental elements of this equation here like this is this is the the ground the resting point and then here is so and these are the elements that are attached to that and then and then maybe one of these elements is going to make a journey away to a different place and this is the other and then maybe there's some complication or there's a tension or a change of a change of speed or something's inverted or whatever. And then, you know, something happens over here and eventually you maybe move to a new place or maybe whatever. And then maybe at the end you come back home and you land home and you think, oh, I remember what this feels like. This is some kind of resolution.

Now, obviously, not all stories are like that and so forth. But a lot of them are. I mean, it's very interesting. I mean, so, you know, you have this Joseph Campbell, you know, hero with a thousand faces. Like so many of our stories like fit this pattern. And so, like, there's just something, you know, again, like the pentatonic scale almost. Like it's almost like we're sort of built in with this uh you know this this narrative framing of what a story ought to be uh you know and on the one hand that's amazing and on the

other hand it's sort of depressing like you you don't want to think that every story has to fit that pattern uh in order to be interesting yeah i think people just people keep on iterating different ways of making tension and then releasing the tension. And that's so interesting in an infinite way. It has unlimited potential for innovation and new feelings, new spaces, new whatever. Ben, what do you think? I actually think that that's true for designing the production technology and the instruments as well. Because you really are trying to create the sort of infrastructural pieces that support that to the performance. Um, and yeah, it, it, you know, you can, you can spend all this time on engineering and trying to sort of get all of your details correct.

And in the end, it's really about sort of supporting that kind of story and that kind of experience. Yeah. And maybe, maybe even building the infrastructure in a way. I mean, like, I think you said this earlier, like you don't want the instrument to dictate the performance uh like you don't want to make too many assumptions about what the performance is going to be uh you know that you are constrained by the instrumentality or the you know like the yeah i don't know like is it fascinating it's actually interesting it's it's a funny balance because we sort of say and this this is sort of slightly related, is that there's this balance between something being too obvious and sort of connected to what the performer is doing and what the music is doing,

that's not great because it's just confusing. If it's really obvious that you push this button and it makes that noise, it gets kind of boring really fast. And so there's this middle ground where you're sort of playing with expectation and you kind of draw people in. And that's something that we chase like we we really are trying to find things that are complex in an interesting way and i i think in terms of building the harmonizer that was sort of the that was the most important piece um is to find something that's sort of infinite in in very connected ways to what jacob is doing. So using the voice as an input, for example, does that because there's so much variability sort of continuous and it's so directly connected to

what Jacob's doing, but it's also very clear what that connection is. So I think that's a huge, huge thing that we care a lot about when we're building all this stuff. That's so fascinating. So we're almost out of time here, although I could talk to you guys all day long. Like, this is so great. But maybe the last question I'll ask is, you did this fellowship or residency at MIT. I watched some of the video there. Like one of the things that you did is you gave an orchestral performance of Hideaway. And I don't know, Ben, like if you were like, you know, obviously you were a PhD student at

MIT. Like when did you defend your dissertation? Like recently? In February. Yeah. Or sorry, in November. Congratulations, man. That is unbelievably awesome. You should be so proud of yourself.

Like, it's just great. Um, but so like in, in that residency at MIT, like I, for me, like, I felt like you just did this incredibly moving thing. Like hideaway is, uh, you know, like I've watched a bunch of your videos before and I'm like, oh my God, these are like so interesting and entertaining. And like hideaway was like moving. Like I, I, you know, I don't know what it is, was like moving like i i you know i don't know what it is like the lyrics the you know the it's just and then translating that to like this orchestral thing with this big group of people and you know like there's you know it's just uh it's super interesting did you realize that there was something special going on with that song and that whole experience of creating a thing with so many people? I didn't think too much about it, honestly. I think I knew the song was special when I

wrote it because it felt like I was opening a real door to my own creative process because I'd never done anything like that before. I'd never really written a song, funnily enough. I was almost like I said, well, what if I gave myself permission to just write a song? And like a few times I've done this, it starts being kind of simple and then it ends up being kind of complex and detailed and stuff.

And so it starts with this kind of simple melody and then takes you on this other journey and it moves away. And I was very excited about that. And it felt like I was touching something that felt new and felt interesting. And it was a real, you know, like, you know, when you're just, you've gone further out on a limb than you've ever gone and you're just walking and you don't know where you're going to go, that feeling and an idea. It was a special moment with Hideaway. And, you know, I remember, Ben, when we sat and put together in my room and we were mixing everything and we were thinking about how that song felt,

you know, we both kind of felt that this was a song that we loved. But I think our job at that point was just to see the song as what it was and make it sound good on the album, which I think we did. The orchestral arrangement thing was such a, it was like a whole nother level

because I've sat in my room and made music and done it kind of alone for so long. And the feeling of taking a song like Hideaway, which is almost about that space, about this space of of making music here and being alone and the trust within that and the questioning within that and the all that and to take that and to to kind of rock up on the other side of the world and have such wonderful kind of enthusiastic warm-hearted people who are who are there to play it it was really

really really crazy for me because you know it's it's important to remember that at that time, I had very little experience meeting anybody who had ever listened to my music outside of my friends. I'd basically just left home kind of thing. It's like I was just... When I went to meet Ben, that was my first flight alone without my mom ever, you know, to the States in 2015. And, and it was only only about a year later that we were doing those, those songs in, in Kresge Hall at MIT. And, and it's a spectacular feeling and you feel very, very small and very big at the same time. You know, you feel like you're, you're kind of, you know, your, your values are resonating quite literally in a space

filled with people, but you feel like you're one of a great number and that the whole thing is much bigger than you are. And so it's a mixture of kind of humbling and joyous and I suppose almost like a celebration of what life is about. And you slave away at these ideas, these songs, these concepts, these technological accomplishments, these things that we build and dream up. And then there's a moment where you have to take your hands off the wheel and say, well, okay, let's put this into the world and see what happens and let's see what people make of it. And I remember playing Hideaway. I'll never forget playing Hideaway at that particular gig. And it was really slow. We did it really, really slowly. We did it way slower on the gig than we'd

ever done it in rehearsal. It was like 30 BPM, you know, really slow, but it felt really special and really good. And we were kind of swimming in the spirit of it. And it's almost like the moment where you look back and you say, oh, so that's what the song was about. Because I didn't know until now, you know, and you have to kind of jump into the water, see what happens with something to be able to look back and say, huh, that's what it was all about. You know, this is one of the things that I love so much about music

because there's just this mysterious element to it. Like we can talk about all of the things like the harmony, the music theory, the technical aspects of playing the instruments, like the software, the music theory, the technical aspects of playing the instruments, like the software, the harmonizer, the mixing. But, you know, then you have this performance, right? And there's a handful of things in music that literally give me goosebumps, like right down my spine. And, you know, it's just a handful. So Murray Pariah playing Chopin's G minor ballad, like right around bar 63,

where, you know, like the tension's building up and then it just like blows out, like goosebumps every time. Like Mozart's, the Adagio, like beginning of the Adagio for the, uh, the clarinet concerto, like goosebumps every time. And like that performance of hideaway, uh,

like goosebumps every time. And I can't, I can't explain it. I don't know why. I don't know why it's, uh, like that performance and not the video. Uh,

I don't know why it's that song and not, not others. Uh, and it's, it's, I, I don't even understand what's going on there. But it's like something that,

like obviously there's something neurobiologically going on in your brain. And it feels like a connection. And it's incredibly special. And I don't think anybody knows how to replicate it. And it's just great. Thanks so much for saying that. Yeah, I was goosebumps all over it in performance,

which is always a sign that I'm doing something right. But as Ben and I try to think about things sometimes, I think we just sort of follow our goosebumps into the next thing that we're doing. And it's like, well, I'll follow it it see where it goes and oh we don't know you know no one knows and i think if there's one thing that the past 12 months has taught us it's that whatever you think you knew you you don't know but but you can still turn up you know and you can still find joy and stuff and you and you can still play yeah it's so fascinating um again like i could i

could talk all day uh with you all again i'd love to love to meet you all in person and uh and just spend spend a bunch of good time uh chatting oh yeah that sounds sounds brilliant i'd love to i'd absolutely love love to yeah yeah thank you thank you Thank you. Thank you. Well, that was Kevin's conversation with Ben Bloomberg and Jacob Collier. Kevin, you didn't talk too much about AI in your conversation, although you were talking about technology and how things have evolved. But I was just curious, from your perspective, I don't know if you've seen the Jukebox project from OpenAI.

It's basically a neural net that generates music. And I was curious if you had any thoughts about that project or projects like it and how those worlds could interact in the future with people who are doing and creating things like the work that Ben and Jacob are so good at. Yeah, I think it's an incredibly interesting space. We got into it a little bit right at the very end of the episode. And maybe that's the next episode if we can persuade them to be back on. I think that these AI technologies have an enormous potential to help power the creativity of artists and entrepreneurs and makers of all ilks. And Jukebox is really interesting. To me, the application of that AI will be most interesting when it puts a tool into the hands of a creator that helps them to expand their creative possibilities and opens up their horizons is like things that you're trying to do where you make the AI itself like the sole creator agent. Right.

Yeah, no, I totally agree with you. And I think it would be great if we could have Ben and Jacob back to talk more about that because I totally agree with you. interesting for the AI to be the creator, but if the AI could be used to make the tools better so that the output could be even more new and different, that could be really, really special. Yeah. And look, I think we're at the point now where the tools are capable of a lot. Things like Jukebox and like there've been a few other experiments, like we've even done uh done some things at microsoft research and i know huawei uh has done a few interesting things where you can have an ai now compose a a piece of classical music in the style of your favorite composer you can say yeah write me a piano piece that's uh in the style of Rachmaninoff or Chopin. And it can do something that is stylistically very much like Rachmaninoff or Chopin.

And you just sort of listen to it the first time. You're like, wow. There's this YouTube channel called Two Set Violin that are these two professional violinists who comedically have these conversations on YouTube about classical music. And on one of their episodes, they looked at, I think, that Huawei AI that was trying to write the third movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. And it's just sort of staggering what the AI did. It, in that third movement, really picked up the stylistic things that made Schubert special and gave him a unique voice as a composer. Whether or not the thing was compelling, who knows? I think what we really need to do is to get these tools into the hands of artists who will actually figure out the interesting

things to do with the technology. 100%. That's the thing that makes me excited as somebody who loves both music and art. All right. Well, that's all for today. We were so delighted to have Ben and Jacob on the show. So thank you again to both of them. Send us a message anytime at behindthetech at microsoft.com. And thank you for listening. See you next time.