Within Reason - #155 AI Music is Not Music - Adam Neely

Episode Date: May 13, 2026

Get Huel today with this exclusive offer for New Customers of 15% OFF with code alexoconnor at www.huel.com/alexoconnor (Minimum $50 purchase).For early, ad-free access to videos, and to support the channel, subscribe to my Substack.Adam Neely is an American bassist, YouTuber, and jazz musician based in New York City. His YouTube content includes Q&A videos, vlogs about performing music, and video essays about online music culture. As a musician, he performs with groups including the electro-jazz duo Sungazer and the instrumental band Aberdeen.Watch Adam's video on Suno here.TIMESTAMPS:0:00 - Music and Philosophy5:17 - Can You Cheat in Music?9:07 - What is Suno?25:20 - Can You Use AI Musically?32:21 - Is AI Just the New Sampling?38:40 - AI and Inclusivity46:21 - Is Music Becoming Narcissistic?57:26 - Does Great Art Require Ego?01:07:04 - Are AI Music Tools Inevitable?01:22:55 - How Would Adam Improve Suno?01:35:44 - Are We Removing the Humanity From Music?01:44:18 - Is Jazz the Blueprint? - CONNECTMy Website: https://www.alexoconnor.comSOCIAL LINKS:Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cosmicskepticFacebook: http://www.facebook.com/cosmicskepticInstagram: http://www.instagram.com/cosmicskepticTikTok: @CosmicSkeptic - CONTACTBusiness email: [e-mail] enquiries: [e-mail]

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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Adam Neely, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I am thrilled to have you here because I've, I spend all of my life talking about philosophy and theology, and that's great. But at the same time, I feel like the whole purpose of something like philosophy is that it's supposed to be applied to stuff. And so constantly, throughout my episodes, I'm talking about particular issues. I'm talking about AI. I'm talking about art. I'm talking about music. I'm talking about beauty, talking about truth.

and I think this tends to get a little bit too abstracted if you don't sort of speak about some of the specifics. I've been watching your content for a very long time and you talk about the way that music works, what makes it work, different ways of thinking about music and music theory. And most recently, a pretty deep dive into the potential threats posed to music, not just as an industry, but also as a creative art form from artificial intelligence. So people might be surprised to see your face show up on a podcast like this, but I think it makes perfect sense. I'm really grateful that you're here. Yeah, I'm so happy to be here. You know, music is my profession, the thing, my avocation, but I'm an amateur philosopher, amateur lover of theology and beauty and art. And, you know, I think AI is one of the most important technological innovations of the past century, and it really will interfere, I think, in ways that I'm very fearful of with the musical culture. and yeah, how we go forward with the wonderful tradition that we have and have had for many hundreds of years. Yeah. Are you more afraid of artificial intelligence in terms of its effect on like the music industry and jobs and all of that classic AI stuff? Or is it more a fear about like the art form, like music as a form of expression?

Like what's the principle concern that you have? Yeah, well, there's two things. Obviously, disruption to the industry is very much at the foreground of my fears. But, you know, disruption to the industry has happened many times before in the music industry. Like the, honestly, like the invention of recorded music itself was a major disruption. Invention of the synthesizer was a major disruption. Many people lost jobs because of that invention of the drum machine. That's a whole process that has been going on for a long time.

The art form itself is something that I am also a bit fearful of. And, you know, people talk all the time about deskilling, which is the process by which we lose our skills because we're automating them or we're somehow giving up our faculties to automated processes like technology. Or, you know, in the case of the early 20th century, like the assembly line. Like, you know, you had all these skilled manufacturers of cars who are very, very skilled workers. but through the process of the invention of the assembly line, they all became deskilled. They didn't need to have these skills anymore. And so the art form of creating a car from scratch or these mechanics,

that largely went by the wayside because of the processes that were automated. And I'm worried that that's going to happen because commercial generative AI like Suno and UDio and all of these platforms automate the process of idea generation. And idea generation is one of the fundamental aspects I think about music making. The ability to come up with an idea and then realize it through the long slog of like, trying out different voicings, trying out different things is something that I think is fundamental to the creative process. and commercial generative AI automates that in a way similar to, you know, assembly line workers

that like industrial capitalism automates so many processes of making a product. You know, I have been talking about what's called the chess problem, or at least the chess analogy for the past three or four years, which is the comparison of like how chess players and how the chess industry, so it speaks or so as it, the chess industry, it's not an industry, the chess world, the chess thing, and how like AI and artificial intelligence has affected that world. And in some ways, it hasn't affected it because chess is a game and music is not as much a game. It's more of a, honestly, it's a product that people consume. But it also, you know, it's presented quite a few issues.

with like cheating because now the whole industry is like very much trying to prevent people from cheating through using tiny little mathematical edges in tournaments that they get through computer or computer assisted performance computer assisted you know uh gameplay so I think deskilling is a very real issue that I'm worried about and yeah that's at the foreground Do you think that there's such a thing as cheating in music? And the reason I ask that is because, like, intuitively, it feels like you want to say yes. But I don't know. I also think of, like, probably at the very invention of recorded music, there were people saying,

this, oh, this isn't real music, this doesn't count. At the invention of MIDI, which is sort of like an electronic, recreating. of real-life instruments. People said, no, no, that's cheating. The drum machine. Like, anytime there seems to have been something which we can call a musical innovation, people have said, this is a form of cheating,

and it's kind of ruining the nature of the art form. When really what's been happening is a transformation. And, you know, if I went into a recording studio and I saw someone with a MIDI controller, I don't know what you've got in front of you under your desk. I think it might be a MIDI controller itself, right? It's not like a piano. It's a MIDI controller.

it has MIDI functionality, yes. I can play a notes and it's not actually a piano sound that's coming out. It's a digital recreation of a piano sound. Exactly. Yeah. Which is cheating, right? Oh, for sure, for sure. Well, I'll say this. Like, my position on this has evolved quite a bit. I would say that, you know, there is no such thing as cheating in music because music is ultimately not a sport. It is a form of self-expression. It is a form of self-expression. It is a form. form of community building. It is a form of communicating emotion from one person to the next. And as long as you're communicating that emotion authentically and honestly, who cares? And part of the issue is, that is one thing music is. Another thing music is is a product to be sold and consumed by a public. And in pursuit of constructing as many are making as many products to sell at the highest quality to compete against other people making products, people use all of these tools to basically sell an idea that is maybe not honest. And that's, you know, the issue with Autotune. That's the issue with quantizing, which is the process by which you take a recording

and then perfectly align each beat and each note to the grid so that it's perfectly in time. So if you play something but you're not actually playing it in the real world perfectly, it makes it sound like you played it perfectly. And we're at the point now where you can use autotune live and live performances. And it's very, very common. And it's very, very subtle to the point where an audience probably does not know that when they're watching somebody perform, especially in a big arena, or something like that, there is a fair amount of tuning on the singer.

And, you know, it's not a competition, but at the same time, it is a competition. And I think a lot about the relationship between music and sports and also music and capitalism and the market economy, because they're both very related in these ways that people don't normally think about when they think about art. They think about art is this beautiful thing that is somehow above the vagaries of the real world. But down here in the trenches, you really are competing with other people in a very real way. So I agree. Express yourself however you're going to express yourself. But there's a degree of honesty that's required in terms of saying, this is what I did.

This is what I didn't do, I think. So tell me about Suno, which, I mean, God knows what the sort of big AI music company will be five years from now. But right now, Suno seems to be the focus of attention. It's like the chat GPT of music. But tell me about it. What is it and what does it do? Chat GPT music. That's basically what it is. It's a one of, it's a company that does commercial generative AI, which involves many different processes, but basically. Basically, they have taken these models and trained them on essentially every available audio file on the internet. They have admitted to it as much. And use the models to essentially spit out whatever you type into a text box. So if you wanted, like I want a, I think famously on the website, they say, make me a jazz song about houseplants. Or like make me a reggae song about something.

And it will generate it. And it's quite a bit more powerful than that. You know, you can upload, like, yourself just singing and playing guitar. And then it will realize maybe a full orchestra around the guitar. You can do all these different things in the studio. It sounds like I'm kind of like an advertising for Suna right now. I'm saying, like, look at all these cool things you can do. And it does it. It does it pretty decently. I would say it's a, you know, on the grading on a curve, if you're to submit, any of the assignments for music school or whatever, you'd get a D, you'd get a passing grade with Suno, but it has become the dominant commercial generative AI platform on the internet. And I think that what they've done with their training is highly unethical. And I think that the processes that people adopt with Suno are not particularly musical. And what I mean by that is typing stuff into a text prompt usually to me is not a very musical action. Musical actions to me are either playing an instrument, singing, or going back and forth with a digital audio workstation and identifying musical elements and reacting to them and writing different things in the digital audio workstation.

I don't like Suno. that's my that's my that's my that's my thing yeah I mean if anybody's seen your video about Suno AI and the bad future or the bad outcome whatever it was called they'll know that you don't like Suno very much and I think people are also pretty used the idea that AI is bad like everybody kind of gets that you know it's it's dubiously ethical environmental impact potential copyright infringement that kind of stuff. But I want to know why. You said that Suno's sort of training process, the way it's trained on every audio file on the internet, is incredibly unethical. As well as being unmusical,

which we can talk about, I think people will get why that's the case. But why unethical? Yeah. To me, I feel like if you are going to record something and put it to the world, there is a social contract between yourself and the world so that you know that you know what that recording is going to be used for and then Sunno comes along and then says oh no we can use this to train our model and without the consent of any

of the millions and millions of artists that it trained on and since the beginning of recorded music And with also kind of the express purpose of replacing those recordings and replacing the pattern of listening. And to me, that's unethical because, or it feels slimy at the very least. I know in court, Suno will say that this is transformative or it's fair use. I know they'll say things like, oh, this is just how humans learn. They listen to recordings and then they process those patterns and then they make music themselves. But I think that's a false equivalence and something that I talk about.

a little bit about in my video, where if you make the comparison to human learning, it's kind of like, I've heard this said many times, it's kind of like submarines are just like humans, because submarines swim also in the water. It's the same thing, except just on a very inhuman scale, like forklifts are very strong because they can lift things like humans. Suno learns music like humans do, because it detects patterns, except it's detecting patterns and generating things off every single piece of music ever to be recorded in a way that's very unmusical. Like Suno's not identifying chord progressions, identifying fingerings on guitar, learning lyrics. It's doing things in a much more brute force way. I don't pretend to know how Suno trains its model or any of these models actually work,

but they are doing it in a way that is, I think, not human, not musical. So because of that, I would I would consider it to be unethical. I'm not the smart philosopher, moral theorist, but on a gut reaction as a musician, when I know that my music is in its training data, I'm like, I didn't consent to that. To me, that feels very strange and very weird. Would you feel the same way if either Suno intentionally limited its interaction with training data so that it was still arbitrary, it could still use your music, without you knowing it, but it only used, say, you know, as much music as a person could reasonably listen to. Like if I came to you and said, you know, Adam, I wrote a song yesterday and it's just for you for this podcast. I went and I listened to your entire discography and I studied it in depth. And I noticed all of the musical motifs that you use and your favorite rhythmic patterns. And I've constructed a song which I think is sort of in the style of Adam Neely.

You know, if I played that for you on the guitar, something I'd written, I think you might find that quite charming, maybe even complimentary. And yet you could also say, hold on, I didn't give you consent to use my music in that way. And there's a part of me which wants to say, but you put it in the world. And you knew that that could happen. And as long as, like, if you want to say you have like a sort of informal contract with people that they won't use your music in that way, then you're led into quite sort of dicey territory when it comes to human copyright cases, like when Ed Shearren gets sued by Marvin Gay, because he's used a similar corporate. and it's like, hey man, that's just how music works. Yeah, and that's the big paradox with my opinion because I can very clearly see the

contradictions there. First of all, if you were to do that, that would be the highest compliment I would ever feel in my entire life. When other people learn my music, which happens sometimes and I post it on the internet, or to me, that is so beautiful. I love that so much. When they write music in the style of Sun Gays or my band, it's the coolest, coolest thing. And the reason I know that the reason why it's so beautiful is because

I know how much time it took. It took a lot of time. You have to dedicate so much time, which is a very finite, valuable resource to doing that thing. And it's not easy. And so when people do that, to me, that's so awesome because it's also the music in a very real way now lives in their body. Whenever I've learned another piece of music from somebody else, it's now a part of me because muscle memory is a hell of a thing and it doesn't go away. And now until I'm, you know, until I'm 70, 80 years old, I now know that piece of music and now it's part of me. So it's a huge, huge honor. I don't feel the same way about people imitating through Suno because it's not the same musical processes that led them to do that kind of imitation of my music.

Instead, it was a brute force calculation of those things. And there's no resists. And there's no responsibility, there's no ownership, there's no actual attempt to, you know, grapple with some of the same things that I've grappled with, that I grapple with when I learn other people's music, that to me it feels lazy. And it's just, it's like a very disrespectful thing. And it's happened before. Somebody has sent me some music in Suna. They said, oh, this was inspired by Sungazer. And my gut reaction was just horror. It was just like, this is awful. Because I know, people who have done it the musical way, which is to take the time and learn it. And, you know, I don't pretend to say that this, you know, this is an opinion of mine, a feeling of

mine that I haven't like intellectually examined that deeply except to know that it's coming from a place of a strong conviction and deep reaction to what it is that I'm hearing in the world. So I guess maybe for me, it's like the amount of time, I respect. time dedication. And, you know, if people are spending a lot of time on working on something and, like, figuring out the details of something and they're using commercial generative AI, I might, I might respect it. I don't know. But it's something that I've been grappling with quite a bit recently. We'll get back to the show in just a moment. But first, if you're anything like me, then perhaps getting the right kinds of nutrients in your diet can be a bit of a

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on a technology level and in terms of just like plain usefulness, this is revolutionary and incredible. And I want to try this out with all my friends. It's great fun. But also recognizing that it's kind of terrifying as well. But you know, I got a friend who is like a rapper and he's just sort of tried to start getting his sort of rap thing off the ground. He doesn't know how to use a digital audio workstation. He's got a full-time job. He probably We couldn't learn to do it anyway. He doesn't really have the time. He came up to me.

We'd sat years ago with this idea for a song, which we thought could make a really cool tune, and we were just sort of humming it in the pub. We thought, this would be really fun. I was like, oh, yeah, maybe one day we'll, you know, we'll try and do something with that. But, like, that's never going to happen, right? But now he comes up to me and says, hey, listen to this. And he's like, I took that idea that we had, and I'd sort of use this AI tool to, like, see what it would look like as a song.

And I was like, this is really, really cool. because he's not going to take that and release it, I think. What's probably going to happen is firstly he's going to use it as a writing tool. He'll now be able to write the rest of the track. And secondly, maybe he'll just be able to then take that to a producer and say, this is kind of how I want it to sound. That to me is an invaluable tool. It's like using the voice memos app in writing songs.

The way that you said that an AI system, like, Tuno, can, I could play one of my songs into it, and it could like orchestras. other instruments that I don't play around it, which I could then take to real musicians and tell them sort of how I want them to play. Like, I don't know if there's a way to restrict Suno just to be used in that way. But that to me seems like it has essentially like no downsides. Yeah, so I will say this. I don't, for the first one, I see that being how a lot of people will use it and are using it,

meaning taking this idea that's in their head and then realizing it in this way like Suno as a demoing tool. The thing that maybe the pushback, the slight pushback that I have is that for a digital audio workstation, it's exceptionally easy, in my humble opinion, to use garage band or to use like one of these very basic

free digital audio workstations and drag loops into the timeline and start recording essentially immediately. Ethan Hine, who's a wonderful researcher in music education and technology, he says, he's written quite a bit about AI and music education, he says that the barriers to entry are usually not nearly as high as people think they are because they haven't been marketed to

essentially as like, this is the cheap free version of the professional digital audio work. workstations, you could do it here in Garageband and you can do it very easily. I mean, they were marketing it maybe 15 years ago, but not so much anymore. And now the marketing is so much through Suno as like, this is the cheap, cheap, free version that you can do if you don't have the time or if you don't have the expertise, you can use Suno. And to me, it's like, well, garage band feels quite a bit more musical. And I've seen, you know, I've seen eight-year-olds create ridiculous beats. in garage band in like no time at all. So to me it's like, okay, what actually is the barrier

of entry here? And it largely is just a matter of like people's familiarity with the tools. The second thing I would say is that for realizing a full piece of music, I think that is very exciting. And that's how it's been being used in a lot of like professional circumstances, at least from what I've heard, don't like, this is, I'm hearing it from secondhand, but in demoing circles in like Los Angeles and Nashville right now for pop singers, you know,

what you have is these writers rooms, which are, you know, traditionally pump out a bunch of these demos that get sent to these artists. And they're using Suno or other, other platforms to mock up a full version of these recordings very quickly, essentially, you know,

putting session musicians who would be recording those demos out of business, which is unfortunate, but this has kind of been what's being used right now. I see that being okay. To me, it's, you know, it ends up being like, you wouldn't ever say that

because you can kind of like screw around in Photoshop, you're like a professional photo. editor. But the Suno gives the illusion of that being the case, essentially. I'm open to it, but of course, like, I'm a musician whose career and craft is threatened by it. So I kind of have to play the role of the Luddite in this situation. Yeah, that's fair enough. I think, like, I get what you're saying. And the stuff about the barrier to entry is important. Like, yeah, you can, you can drag loops into garage band. But, like, I don't know, like, if you had like a specific idea in mind for like a particular kind of like, I don't know, like drill beat and you wanted it to use, you know, particular kinds of samples and stuff like that, I feel like that's something that loops can't do for you.

I also feel like, yeah, there are people who are like eight years old who can do like crazy stuff on garage band or logic or whatever. And that's cool. But if your brain isn't wired like that, like I know, like there are professional musicians who. in the traditional sense, are like totally just well-respected musicians or singers or whatever, they wouldn't know the first thing about how to use pro tools or logic. They show up as a producer and an engineer, and they sit down on the sofa and they say, like, here's how I want it to sound. I want it to sound kind of sparkly and happy.

Oh, I think the vocal there is a little bit too sort of, um, bit too nasally. Can you like fix that? And the producer and the engineer then fix it for them. And people might say that there's a talent that they don't have, and it'd be really cool if they had that talent, right? But I don't think many people accuse them of not being like musical because they don't have the technical ability to bring about the idea that's in their head. And these people are essentially sat there. Like I'm sort of imagining a thought experiment where I'm in a recording studio and I record a guitar part and a bass part. and I don't actually know if on the other side of the wall is a suno generative system or a human team of producers.

All I know is that if I speak, you know, into a microphone through the wall and I say something like, I'd really like this to sound, you know, kind of poppy and sparkly, or I'd really like this. Or can you like slow it down a bit? Or can you make it sound like it's in a big room, out a bunch of reverb and stuff? I feel like I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So whether a human's doing that or an AI is doing that. And if I were getting a human to do it, I don't think people would say that I'm being unmusical, right?

So what is it about dictating to an AI, what you want something to sound like and allowing it to be the technical path by which it comes to life that makes it not just to sort of threat to people's jobs, which, yeah, that might be bad in its own right, but also like not being musical anymore. Sure. Well, for me, music is more, for me, music is like, for me, music is. like a is a communal thing and it's always been a communal thing. So the communication between human to human is essential beyond just what is the end product of it. So, you know, it's the

using chat GPT for therapy. Like, well, you know, what's the difference if I can't tell the difference at the other end? Well, it's because it's a very one-way conversation. When you have those situations in those right, like those rooms where there's a musical artist who doesn't have the technical detail and they're trying to communicate and telling a producer, you know, what to do. There is back and forth there. There is pushback. There is something that is profoundly human, honestly. So, yeah, so maybe, you know, the producers should be getting some of the credit here. Fair enough. One of the things that I think about a lot is craft. Like, what is craft? What is actually making music? What is the actual process of doing it? And often it is, like, very embodied.

That's the thing that I always go back to learning an instrument. There's so much a muscle memory that is connected to your ear, that's connected to just the songs that you're playing. And then even if you're working in a digital audio workstation, your body is reacting to the sound that you're creating. And there's always a back and forth there. So, yeah, I think a lot about craft, broader ideas, broader ideas of discipline. and, you know, when you have somebody like, when you have somebody who is in that driver's seat in the producer's role or in the artist's role, like dictating what the music should be or shouldn't be, that's a question of taste. Like, your taste in music is dictating the end result, the end product, the end thing that you're trying to create. And often, you know, in AI circles, they make a huge deal about taste and how important taste is in the future.

of not just music, but just in the future of art, in the future of AI generated anything, and how that is the human element that's left, because AI is the thing that takes over the craft of it all. And to me, that is a bit of a horrifying, like, future. This is the bad future that I talk about in the Suno and AI video, because there is very little inspiration to be had in another person's taste. whereas there's a lot of inspiration and a lot of direction that you can gain from another person's craft. The role models that I have had when I grew up had amazing, beautiful musical crafts, and that was what I wanted to do with my life, is I wanted to develop the crafts like they had.

And I didn't really care what their taste in music was. I cared what they could do. I wanted to see what they could do. I wanted greatness. I wanted greatness for myself because they were great. And I don't see how greatness can come from a tool like generative AI. It might, but I don't see the path, especially considering the fact that so many of the people who run Suno and talk about all this stuff put so much emphasis on consumer taste rather than the abilities that you can develop through Sunno. Like your example of your friend who like wrapped something into Suno and then generated a demo, that's awesome.

But effectively, the only thing that your friend did was rap, which is great. And that's awesome. But beyond that, the skills that he developed or they developed haven't gone really beyond that, meaning there wasn't much actually fiddling around in Suna. There wasn't actually any technical development there. There was no new skill learned, essentially. And that's fine for a consumer product, but for the future of music making, I see that being ultimately problematic. It's like having somebody played the game for you. It's like the computer making you, you know, win the game, which is, it's fun. You get to experience the story and that's awesome. But there are no skills developed and you don't actually, you know, you don't actually, to me, it's not as fun without going through the process of like learning to beat the bosses and all of that. So to me, I think that's probably the best analogy.

of like taste versus skill is like, you know, computer-assisted gameplay in that regard. It's fun. It's great, especially if you're, you know, you don't have the ability to play the game, but maybe not the thing that is ultimately inspiring. Yeah, I get that. But then I think of how rap music kind of got started. And one of the most important features of rap history is sampling. and what you essentially have with some forms of sampling. I mean, I don't know much about how this actually works, but I sort of picture in the 80s somebody finding a record that they like,

sort of taking this musical moment, maybe sort of chopping it up, and then maybe they've got like a drum machine, and it's a big sort of console with buttons, and they sort of fill in the pattern, and they put a drumbeat underneath it, and they start literally just like chopping up other people's sounds and gluing them together and creating this kind of collage, which is really cool. And there's a lot of human intentionality

that goes into pulling those pieces together. But I think if somebody came along and said, well, I'm not doing that as an art form. The only reason why I'm sort of taking this thing and my drum machine is because I'm a rapper and I don't know how to play any musical instruments. I don't know any of that kind of stuff. I just want to rap and so they just put together whatever they can just to get the lyricism across. I would actually think to myself, I'm kind of glad that they have that tool because now I've got this lyricism that I otherwise wouldn't have heard. Similarly, people who just make the beats and don't know how to rap might just take somebody else's like acapella rap track, find out what the BPM was, and build a beat around it to sort of engage in the musicality

of beat making. They can then go and replace the original track if they like or whatever. But I know that beatmakers do that all the time, right? They use a cappella rap tracks to make beats. And so, I don't know, I feel like if we're too allergic to these kinds of processes, because, well, that's not really music, I think that even if you are just a rapper and all you do is rap, that's musical, and that's lyricism, and that's artistic, and that's something that the world is better off having. And there have got to be, and this is me doing the sort of Sunno plug here now. There have got to be thousands, if not millions of people who have that within them that we won't get to hear except for tools like Suna.

Yeah, I mean, I'll just go back to the digital audio workstations. There's so many free digital audio workstations that can and have been used for the past 10 to 15 years where people can do that very, very easily. And I will say with Splice, this is going to be my plug for Splice. Anytime you mention a tool, it's like, oh, this is the plug for this. particular tool. Splice is a loop library that you can find anything. I mean, it's the professional loop library and it's very, very, very extensive with the kinds of really cool sounds you can get. And I use Splice all the time. It's the standard. I'll say this. Yeah, I agree that like, first of all, with hip hop, there's a huge amount of human intentionality to sample selection and

record diving and, you know, chopping it up on a drum machine, you know, some of the greatest honestly, I think musical achievements in recorded musical history come from people like Jay Dilla, who really kind of expanded the rhythmic vocabulary of what was even possible because of layering different kinds of time fields and samples in these really interesting ways that could have only been done by sampling other people's music and arranging them in this beautiful collage. And his impact on terms of musicianship, like live musicianship, has been huge over the past 10 to 15 years. And then in terms of like rappers and the lyricism, the wordplay, the rhythmic delivery, like, that to me is just deeply musical on just such a deep level. It's so inspiring. Their craft is so inspiring.

What they can do is awesome. The selection of a beat and then the pairing of the rapping with the beat, you know, you could say that that's like a wine and cheese pairing. There's something very like, you know, it's a taste thing. thing. But there's something beautiful in that. Part of why I don't find the same kind of inspiration in Suno is because of the slot machine aspect of it. Meaning you don't really, it's like you keep kind of like going back and like seeing if you can get something good, seeing if you can get a bangor, seeing if you can get a bangor. And the idea of like craft being repeatable is an important one, meaning like when you are doing something, doing a skill, have a skill, you want to know

the outcome of that skill. You want to know, like, if I do this, this happens. That is what a craft is. And the more that you develop it, the more you kind of know what the end result of your skill is. And that's essential. Like my partner is a platonic scholar. And she says that Plato says that, you know, you want a doctor to know whether or not

they are going to kill you or cure you through their actions. A skilled doctor is necessary for that result. And so, you know, I think about that like, oh, yeah, like, I want to, that result of my actions to be predictable. I want that to happen because that's inspiring for myself and other people and essentially, like, very important in many ways. And so for hip-hop, you know, there's sampling and chopping up samples, you, like, that's a very, you know the end result of it. There's, uh, there's a craft and a skill there that I think is, um, that is that I look up to. Um, but I hear what you're saying. I do hear what you're saying in terms of taking these tools and then inspiring other people to wrap and to write lyrics and to sing and use these tools to bring something out of them. I can see that very honestly

being a very useful tool. And I don't want to make people feel like that I am completely against this or completely identity ideas here, I just think that this is maybe the wrong way of going about doing it. What if like, and I do want to move on from this, but. Oh, yeah. No, by the way, I love, I love the pushback. Keep it going because it's like, this is great. Well, I just, I feel like I spend so much time abstractly thinking about, like, AI.

And my job is something which could be quite severely threatened by AI, like a, a sort of great AI interviewer who asks the best, most interesting questions, you know, I can, I can see that sort of fear. But it's nice talking somebody who sort of lives in an industry where this is a much more direct and obvious threat, at least in the terms of technologies that are being developed. I haven't seen any AI interview tools yet. But they're probably there just not very good. Yeah. You're someone who, you're someone who, you don't just sort of, it's not just that your job is in music and that you're some like exec at a, at a music industry, you know, company or whatnot. Like presumably you also love making music. Like there's something about the musical process which you enjoy, that you feel is meaningful and without which you feel like your life wouldn't be what it was. And so like, I'm just imagining to myself. Like, suppose that you just like, you just lost your ability to do it. Like, I don't know, you lost your arms and your legs and you were sort of bedridden. You could no longer play an instrument, suppose you also maybe just like lost the ability to communicate in anything other than

binary code or you sort of had a stroke and couldn't speak English anymore. Basically, like, you still had this desire to get ideas and musicality out of your system, but you can't play an instrument and you can't have meaningful discussions with other people. The only way that you could do it would be to sort of feed your ideas into a computerized machine that would produce some music where you could go, that is at least some. what the result of my musical ideation, would in that circumstance you just go, like, no, like I'm just not going to do that? Because the reason I ask this kind of ridiculous thought experiment is because I would imagine that you being completely disabled in that way, like

physically and communicatively, is probably a bit like what it feels like to be someone right now who doesn't have any musical ability. They can't play an instrument. They, yeah, sure, you could like learn the guitar, but it's going to take 10 years before you could even play a barcode, you know what I mean? And like, you can't even communicate with other people because you kind of don't have the vocabulary. Like, even if you just wanted to go and work with the producer, you know, you don't know what EQ is or reverb. You don't know what terms like automation mean. You don't know how autotune works or when it would be useful, or maybe even if it exists in the first place. And so like, I don't know, if you were in a, that's why I sort of have to imagine you in this

ridiculous sort of circumstance to be like, would you just say, I can no longer do music? Or would you be like, actually, no, I love the process so much that if this is the only way I can get my ideas out of the world, I'm willing to do it. So there's two things. If it's me specifically, if I, if me, Adam Neely, was bedridden and unable to interact with the world and only had computer technology with which to write my music, I would probably use Sebelius or a digital audio workstation or some kind of other means of writing. Honestly, a text, a text document would do it for me because I've trained myself to be able to hear music in my head and be able to work out ideas that way.

And, you know, there's ways of notating music and expressing that through audiation, which is the musical idea or the musical term of audio, audio imagery, audio visualization, basically. And so like most musicians train themselves through many years of practice to audiate very, very clearly. And so because of that, I feel like for me particularly, I would use other tools because Suno, quite frankly, doesn't do a great job of matching that audiation. But for somebody who is not me and for who doesn't have those tools, I can see it. And I honestly, in the video that I made, I suggested that that that was a possible, means of for people who for whatever reason they are not able to engage with music in any other

possible way maybe because there's this deep deep desire in essentially all of us to make music and connect with other people through music there's you know there's some theories about how you know human musicality developed through evolutionary means i talk about this a little bit stephen has this great book called singing neanderthals which suggests that before language developed the way that we use it now through like grammar and semantic meaning, musical cues, sung musical cues, rhythm and timbre and pitch were a very, very important means of communicating emotional states between early humans or human precursors. And essentially, we sung as a means of creating bonds between us in early social bands.

And so there's a very, very deep need to do that, to communicate emotional states with other people through music. And we are profoundly alienated from that as a culture and as a society, at least in the West, because we didn't grow up singing. We didn't grow up making music usually. I mean, we may make music in schools. God bless the public school teachers. And for anybody who, and church, and if you're in church, honestly, to me, that's the strongest argument for organized religion is the amount of music that's made in organized. religion. I grew up going to church and that was the thing that, you know, I took from it is like I learned a little bit about singing. I learned a little bit about music making in church. And so there's something

very, very deep in there, but most of us are not in that. Most of us just never had that. And so there's this really, really deep thing in the back of our brains and the back of our bodies saying that we need to be making music. We need to do this. But for many, many reasons, we are alienated from that music making. Recorded music gives us a little taste. We get a little taste of experiencing music and singing along the different songs of, you know, being very close to other people because of shared musical tastes and shared experiences with recorded music.

But we don't have much experience making the music. And I think that's why Suno is so popular is because at least it gives that, it scratches that itch and it gives an easy entry point for many, many people. That said, I think that there are many other entry points that are potentially better that potentially can connect us a lot deeper. Like honestly, singing with other people is probably the big one. Even if it's just like shouting a football chant or something like that, that goes way deeper. You know, I was at like a Mexican restaurant the other day. And there was karaoke happening on in the background and just in the other room. And it was like, you know,

crazy people were singing and screaming. It was great. I remember thinking, like, this is, this is the most profoundly human thing. And it's something that brings people together in the way that, you know, singing in church or singing in sporting events or just singing in general does, that people are cut off from if they're using AI to have that same experience because they're making music, but ultimately there's not that connection with another person. So, to answer your question, Yes, I think that's okay. But I would prefer if we don't get to that point where we need it. Yeah.

I want to talk about another concern you raised in your video, which was about this development of narcissistic music. Oh, yeah. I mean, you talk about how, yeah, it's all very well and good taking other people's materials and reusing them like a sampler does. But at least in that case, people know who their influences are. They point to particular people who they grew up listening to,

who they were trying to emulate. But I think it was on the like the R-slash-Suno subreddit or something. Somebody asked like, who are your greatest like AI musical influencers? And everyone's just like, no, like, oh, I don't know what you mean. Like, I don't really have any. and also when asked for people's like favorite AI musicians, they were like, oh, who are your favorite, like, people to listen to? It was just comment after comment of people saying, like, well, myself, you know,

like I like my own music. Isn't that the point? That's why we have a tool like Suno, because now we can create the music that we want to hear. And I think people see it as a kind of, you know, in the way that, like, Spotify does your Spotify weekly, and it sort of handpicks music that it thinks you will like. because, you know, ideally, music is, the music that you discover is going to be the music that you particularly really, really like. And if you can just, like, create music from the ground up with that kind of selectivity, it's like really cool. So now, yeah, like my favorite musician is me because I can produce the music that I want to make.

And isn't that like the point of music to create the kind of stuff you want to hear in the world? Isn't that, isn't that the whole point? I would say no. We have been led to that point through exactly what you are saying, the Spotify algorithmic Discover Weekly or whatever that is, where we're being fed music that is uniquely curated to our tastes. But what's interesting, the pattern that's developed over the past 10 years, is people have stopped really looking at the bands.

People don't follow bands. People don't trust a band or an artist for that. They trust Spotify for it. that. And so because of that, Spotify generates these, these playlists, but you stop having any kind of personal relationship to the band, understanding who the musicians are, who might make the music, the artist, who's the singer, you know, all that. It's instead essentially alienating consumers from the people who make the music. And so Suno and commercial generative AI is essentially the next evolution of this, because, you know, at a certain point, you just don't need

that person who makes the music for you, you can be the person who makes the music for you. And that creates a little bit more of a sensation of ownership over your listening patterns. And there's this tendency towards creating your own experience, your own cultural experience through AI. And the people who are, you know, making these AI songs, they really love the songs to the point where they're not listening to any other AI music, because why would you listen to any other AI music? You could just curate your own AI music. But what's worrying is they stop listening to music that other people make, like, you know, classic recordings, classic pieces of music that everybody knows and loves, because they are so involved in their own creations is the term that people

end up using. I'm a bit worried about that because music is a culture. Music is the cultural touch tone by which we can interact with other people and find some kind of meaning with other people. This is what culture does. It's a means of expressing yourself through a larger identity. And so the thing I always say is like if you're in a discussion with another person about like a TV show or something or a movie or a song, and the discussion is happening among other people about a TV show that you haven't seen, like people are talking about Breaking Bad or severance or whatever. it's profoundly alienating because you haven't seen the show and they're making references to the show

and they're excited about something that happened in the show and you don't care and you kind of maybe vaguely want to join them but like at a certain point you're like eh whatever i'm not part of this there's something very like oh i'm not part of it it feels so weird and wrong and off when your friends people who you were close to just a second ago are now having a shared body or shared discussion about something that's different. When culture is so personalized, essentially every discussion about culture becomes the equivalent of people talking about, you know,

severance without you having seen severance. And that is the direction if you have this kind of very fragmented culture. Now, we were already kind of headed that direction because we don't have pop stars in the same way that we do. You know, people's individual musical tastes are so fragmented anyway. But at least you can find a culture in a group of, people that like get excited about a piece of music and get excited about this stuff in the same way. But the danger, I think, is that people having hyper-personalized music will lead to total

cultural isolation, which is a bad thing, in my opinion. That is, of course, assuming that live music isn't a thing, by which I don't just mean, like live performance, like going to see a band. I mean things like going to a nightclub and they start playing a particular song and, you know, all the girlies run back from the bathroom because it's, you know, their favorite tune is on, that kind of thing. That is something that AI can't replicate, except insofar as people do listen to other people's AI music because you all need to sort of have the familiar sort of touchstones. And I feel like if you're going to put on music at a house party, if there are just two people in a room, if you're like with your partner and, And are you having a romantic dinner and you're going to put some music on in the background? Like there is this role that music plays importantly for people, which goes much beyond the sort of inner listening.

And to me, I guess I do see, like, I don't want to give you the impression that I don't see the problems that you're raising. I just want to see how far they go. And I'm sort of representing a more mild view on AI here, although I am actually on your side about this. I think this is all extremely terrifying and horrifying and all the like. But I think, you know, I feel as though I've kind of got two different musical discographies in terms of what I listen to. There's the kind of thing I listen to when I'm like on a walk with my headphones in. And it's the kind of thing that I would play if I had some like friends over. And it's like it's not the same music because those are two different kinds of experiences.

When I'm like headphones in on a train, you know, I want to sort of absorb myself into a particular world. you know, it's the classic looking out of the window and imagining that you're in a music video kind of thing. It's almost, it's this extremely personal thing, you know. You almost imagine yourself like in the song or something. Whereas when you're playing music for other people, it's like, hey, listen to this thing that we're participating in together isn't this cool. And I feel like as far as AI music is kind of narcissistic is about what I like is about, you know, just me. I feel like to some degree, that might be how people are already kind of engaging with music, the private level. And that would only be a massive problem if there wasn't this other context

in which music is much more just necessarily shared. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, the musicologist Christopher Small has this great term, I love using it, called musicking, where it tries to move music away from a product or something that is an object and more into an activity. And this is kind of where the musical academic field is starting to really think about music as select like activities that you do and your relationship to other people with sound and the space that you're in. So what you were doing on the train with the earphones and just like having that cinematic experience, which is so fun. It's like one of my favorite things to do, put on some like Dexter Gordon ballads and then ride the subway in

New York is like, oh, it's awesome. Highly recommended. But like that, that, particular experience is a fundamentally different experience, different musicking of music than so many other things. You're talking about like, you know, the DJ at the bar and the girlies come in to dance and all that, you putting on music at a party with the friends. Those are different ways that we engage in musicing different kinds of music. And the AI thing is essentially the equivalent of just the headphones in and then that's what music is. And to me it's like, oh, like that's one thing, that's cool, but if you've, I'm sure if you've used Suno and you have shared your AI music with your friends and family, chances are they're not that interested. And I don't

mean, I don't mean that like in a pejorative sense. That's the experience that I've heard from the vast majority of people. They're not particularly interested because that music was designed very specifically for you to listen to in your headphones. And that's the only musicing that that was designed for. But the shared social experience of like check out this music, this music from this band, or like, you know, the DJ is doing some crazy mashup of all these different styles. That requires some kind of shared, I guess, contract, social contract between everybody that these are the pieces of music that we're going to do this thing too. And, you know, there might be some musical elements that cause you to dance or want to dance or do stuff. Usually it's like, usually it's some kind

reference or some ridiculous thing and that's very important i mean i was in a wedding band for uh for six or seven years and you know we're playing we're playing all the hits we're playing like aba but we're also playing i don't know we're playing pink i guess i don't know why i'm saying ab and pink but uh journey don't stop believing like all these pop songs from a very different styles and everybody knew all the songs all the lyrics all the time and at a wedding which is you know there's always music at a wedding. And that human experience of everybody going on the dance floor and sharing these specific piece of cultural knowledge is just such a deeply human thing.

This is why the narcissistic listening pattern is a, it's just, it's a bit terrifying for me that this is now the thing that is becoming the standard, or at least a lot of people are doing. Yeah. But I, you know, when I heard you talking about this in the video, like, this fear that people said, like, you know, my favorite music is my own music. I thought to myself, like, in any other context, I would think this is the mark of a true artist. I mean, people like to sound humble. So they don't say, they don't like to big up their own music.

But can you imagine like a painter who, like, you ask them about, you know, what they thought their art was an expression of, like, what it meant to them. And they were like, oh, I think it's a load of crap. No, I don't really care for this. I don't think it's very good. But people, you know, people seem to love it. So I keep painting it. You'd be like, well, that doesn't make you a very good artist. That makes you kind of commercial.

Whereas the artist who says, you know, when somebody says, oh, like, are you excited that people are really enjoying your art and they're sharing with each other? And they're buying prints to put in their living room. And he goes, I don't care about any of that. Like, I mean, you know, good for them, fine. But that's not why I do this because I felt like this was missing from the world. I didn't see anyone else making this, and so I produced this because I felt like it needed to exist. That's like, yeah, there's the artist, you know. In other words, I feel like the most artistic kinds of creators are quite like inward looking.

And if we didn't have this allergy to, you know, sounding a bit prideful, you know, a lot of artists could honestly say, yeah, my favorite music is my music. That's why I make it is because I enjoy the process and I enjoy what results. And so I just kind of wanted to question this suspicion you had of people saying, I love my own music. Like if you were to go and ask a bunch of kids who had just undergone like a two-year music course, right? And you interviewed them before the course started. And they said, my favorite artist is Katie Perry and Sabrina Carpenter. And at the end of this music course where they learned how to play guitar and piano,

you ask these kids, what's your favorite music? And they went, you know what? It's the music that I make, you know? It's the stuff. You'd be like, yeah, awesome. Oh, dude, that's so great, man. good for you. You'd feel good, right? And so, I don't know, I just wanted to, like, when I heard in your video you're talking about this problem of people, everyone saying, my music is my favorite

music, I kind of thought, I get why that feels wrong, but are we sure? Like, is that not the mark of a great artist? So I got a lot of pushback on that one. And I agree. I actually do agree with what you just said. my own relationship. So there's actually quite a lot of detail in this in my response. I'm saying, like, for my own music, like, I like it, but it's not my favorite. There's a difference between my compositions and then my recordings. And this is one of those interesting things that we need to separate sometimes when talking about music, the composition versus the recording, which is actually what the copyright industry does anyway.

I love my compositions. My compositions are awesome. They're honestly my favorite music. I like what I write and I like to play what I write. It's honestly why I do it. I love writing stuff and then playing it. It's awesome. Recordings to me are like a kind of a capture of the composition,

but sometimes an imperfect capture of the truer, you know, platonic ideal of the composition or whatever. But it, I can hear the things which are like, it's not quite right, you know, all that stuff. But for the most part, I love, I love the stuff that I write. And, you know, for people who don't perform their compositions and the recording is kind of like what the best reflection of the composition, sometimes, you know, they make that correlation like recording and composition are the same, especially in styles of music like electronic dance music or any kind of electronic style where they really are the same. And they, you know, when I made these statements about like, you know, people who are,

become self-obsessed about their own music, they didn't quite understand that. So I want to say this, that I love my music, and I think it's awesome that people love their own music, and I think that's beautiful, and you kind of have to have that sort of self-assuredness that what you're doing is necessary for the world, like you said. The thing that makes it like, wait, what?

Is stopping listening to other music? Because I, like, I mean, I listen to my own music, sure, but I certainly listen to, you know, I don't know, Stevie Wonder or Victor Wooten is, of course, like, the bass player that, like, really inspired me. I listen to all these other musicians. I check them out all the time. Like, part of what makes it so exciting to be a musician is to listen to other people's music because then when you get ideas for your own stuff, but then you can also be, like, inspired by their greatness. I was talking earlier about the craft. there's something very inspiring about greatness, whatever that might mean. And looking towards other people for greatness is one of the things that I do all the time so that I can try and be as great as I possibly can be. And I feel like if you stop looking outward, then and everything becomes very like self-referential,

there's no room for growth. And for people who are artists, we constantly want to try, or for anybody, honestly, not for artists, but just for humans. We constantly want to be growing and becoming the best and better versions of ourselves. In order to do that, we have to both look inward and outward. And so thank you for pushing back on that, because I wanted to clarify that.

I love my own music, and I think everybody should. It's just that there's another step there. You kind of have to love other people's music, too. You think everybody should love your music? Everybody should love mine. They should. But seriously, like, I think that the ability to love other people's music is very, honestly, I think you need to do that. Yeah.

And, you know, even, like, somebody might be listening and say, I don't need to do that. Like, you know, there's no rule of the universe that says I need to listen to other people's music. And I kind of want to say, yeah, fair enough. But I would slightly maybe rephrase what you say in that, like, maybe. making the context clear. We're talking about what counts as art and music. And I think we could just say, look, I mean, if you are not listening to other people creating like things through a particular process, then fine, you can do that. You don't have to go and listen to music, but then you're just not doing anything with any musicality, right? The context of the conversation

is like, what counts as musicality, what counts as art? And it's almost like, it feels like you want to say that although these AI systems can produce sound waves which bring sort of pleasant feelings that are rhythmic and melodic, they kind of don't count as music or as art. I don't know how you define what music is. I know that's a bit of a sticky question. But perhaps a more important question would less be what counts as music and more what counts as like musicality or art or artistic music, because we could just start to sort of pull those things apart and say that what we're really talking about here is not music per se, but rather like artistry.

And for artistry, you need to listen to other people. It's a definitionally human thing. Like, yeah, sure, you can have AI music and you don't have to listen to anything but AI music, but you're not listening to anything involving artistry in the truest sense. Yeah, I mean, I agree. Like, I would say, I mean, in some of my more controversial statements, I've said that AI music is not music,

which I think is not necessarily true. Yeah, sure, you could define it as music. Um, musicality to me is more defined by interactions with other people. Um, and your ability to communicate an emotional state from yourself to another person, which like I was saying earlier, is a fundamentally human thing. There's evolutionary basis towards that. And your ability to communicate an emotional state from person to person is your artistry. Um, great artists are able to communicate great things and communicate it very effectively from person. person to person and maybe to many different people at the same time. So to me, that's artistry

and that's musicality. I was thinking about like definitions of music. And music is one of those things that it bumps up against language very frequently, meaning like I use the language analogy all the time because the more you think about music as a language, it means of communicating from person to person, the more. The more. or it makes sense, even though it's not a language. It's certainly not the universal language, which is something that people sometimes say. But it is very language-like, and it's a useful way of understanding how music functions, how we learn music. Our relationship to music is to think of it as a language.

And I think of, you know, with that regard, it's like listening to your own AI music is like just having conversations with chat GPT all day. Sure. You can do that. Fine. What's going on? Like, and then what? I'm not saying that listening to your own AI music will lead to some form of AI psychosis, which is what happens sometimes when people have conversations with chat GPT all day. But it's certainly not healthy and it's certainly not human and it's certainly not musical, in my opinion. So where does this go? Like, I mean, here we are, like, you know, scared businessman at the year sort of 2000 really worried about this internet thing and how it's going to change everything. But, like, isn't there a kind of inevitability to the development of AI music tools? And at the same time, perhaps an inevitability of an increasing reluctance of people to engage with them. I can kind of imagine a future in which in the same way that you have to put like, you know, age ratings on music or you have to label food when it contains certain allergens, that there'll be some requirement to label AI generated music and there'll be this whole organic music industry similar to like, you know, how you can go buy organic eggs at the shop or whatever. Like, how do you feel about that? Are you like optimistic about it? Do you think that kind of thing will exist or do you think we will just end up in some kind of like,

AI music dystopia. You know, I'm cautiously optimistic. You know, Band Camp has already banned AI generated music from, from Band Camp. There is a huge pushback, and it's interesting. There's a youth pushback, which typically you don't want to have youth pushback in your new musical movement. Typically, that's not how culture is disseminated. Because the people in Gen Alpha, who are currently using That's So AI to mean something that's fake or bad are going to be people who are using musical and artistic tools for the next 30 to 40 years. And so their formative years are thinking of this technology as something fundamentally uncool. I don't think that that is good for the future of this technology as a cultural item. Now, it will change things. I just don't know how.

but I think the adoption of it has been lopsidedly from much older generations than younger generations, especially in music and art. It has been, and I think for a couple of reasons, one of them being like older generations who have felt locked out of the musical process now find a very easy way in, whereas younger generations who are maybe more technical savvy, technically savvy or otherwise know of a lot of the other tools that are available to them have been using them. up until this point. So don't feel as locked out of the musical process or locked out of culture as older generations do. Older generations always feel locked out of culture. That's what happens.

Like, I'm a millennial. I'm starting to feel very locked out of culture, which is fine. And I understand that I'm not going to be with it. And I'm certainly not with it right now. But AI as a means of grabbing something for yourself is, you know, very alluring there. I think human-generated music, there's a premium on that for sure, and we're already seeing that and how advertisers think about using AI-generated art and ads. You know, like Coca-Cola is using AI all the time in their ads. They've really gone all in. But then other brands like Porsche make a big deal about how using AI, or they're using

like human artists for their ads. And so it's become like, you know, AI. is for the masses, humans are for the elite, basically, or it's the prestige version of it. So I imagine that happening more and more, like being human-generated, being a sign of class almost,

that there's a wonderful creator by the name of magic, I believe. She has this video essay. I saw, I think she's a DJ, called The Chronically Online will be the new underclass, where people who are online and require the use of AI tools

are engaged in the AI slot that is going to be generated over and over again on the new internet, whether it being music or art or what have you, are going to be profoundly disadvantaged to people who have the ability to touch grass, essentially, who have the ability to log off. And I see that really being the case in music,

meaning like the ability to go see a live musical performance or the ability to engage with live music and I'm using live music kind of like you did where like a DJ performance I'm considering live music in this regard like being in a room with other people sharing a kind of musical experience is going to be seen as like the like almost a class signifier because for many people there are unable to join that kind of experience and I find that may be kind of part of the bad future that I'm talking about in my Suna video because, you know, live music and the experiencing of live music is kind of just, there was no class signifier beforehand. Like every social class across history made music in some regards,

but now live music or being able to perform or being able to engage with that is going to, I think, become a lot more, a lot rarer or a lot, seen as more premiere, I guess. That's my fear and I think where things are headed. But I think the good thing is that, like I said, the younger generation isn't on board. And that's not normally a good thing if you want to, if you want to like show how cool and awesome your product is. Yeah, that's true. I think it kind of makes me think of like lab grown diamonds.

or something. I have never been interested in jewelry at all, but as far as I understand, we can now create like chemically identical diamonds in a lamp, such that they are like literally the same thing. But people just, people just want the one that was dug up from the ground by some, you know, poor slave child somewhere probably, you know, they want, they want the real thing just because it's the real thing, even if the produced alternative is like, chemically identical. And I can kind of imagine a world in which AI music gets so good that it can just make you weep buckets. It's so beautiful. It's like almost like more perfectly beautiful than anything a human has made. But people want the real thing not just because it's better,

but because it's human and the same reason, for the same reason they want to play real people at chess rather than chess computers. I mean, you can play against chess computers which are designed not to like automatically beat you, which is designed to like perfectly match your skill level, which in theory is like the perfect opponent, right? Like it's going to be more brilliant at not only knowing how to play chess, but also knowing exactly the kind of game that you need to play to make you a better chess player. Awesome. But you just want to play a human because there's something about that which for its own sake is worth having. And surely people are going to feel the same way about music, which is the most like human thing that the people

can do. It's like the most human thing that I can basically imagine. Yeah, for sure. And the reason for that is because when you're doing music, there's so much more than music in the doing of music. You're trying to do, you're trying to make a connection with people. You're trying to make a, trying to understand another human being. That's a very fundamental thing. Like I keep saying, it's trying to understand emotional states so that you can feel closer, you can feel like you're in community with another person. And if the second that you know that something is AI, that part of the brain like shuts off, meaning like, yeah, it sounds good, but like I'm not learning anything. Like deep in here, even if you don't understand

why you're shutting off, but deep in the back here, your brain shuts down is like, oh, I'm not learning anything. I'm not making any kind of connection here. I'm not able to, I'm not able to find any real connection because there's nothing at the other end. And yeah, the humanity of it all is something I think really fundamental. Now, you point about like making something perfect or beautiful. I don't know about that, maybe. And the reason why I'm saying I don't know about it is because our individual reactions to music are so personalized that, you know, what might make you cry or whatever will, I might feel like that's not, that's not really it. I don't know. Like, that's, I don't get it. I don't understand it. And then that kind of like interaction where like,

you're crying, you're like, oh my God, this is the most beautiful thing. And another person doesn't understand it is alienating. And I think that will push a lot of people away from the AI music to try and find something that both people can find at least some value in, even if it didn't have such the emotional reaction in one person. You know, like I'm a huge, huge fan of Nina Simone, for example. Like one of the, there's some, some recording. that I cannot help but have an emotional reaction to every time I hear them. And Nina Simone's Don't Cry in Bed is one of them. And it's so beautiful.

It's so beautiful. But if I was to play that recording for one of my Sun-Ga-Zer bandmates, they might not have that same reaction because they don't know Nina Simone's story. They don't know the whole history behind the song, et cetera. And so I probably won't do that. I probably won't have that kind of interaction with those bandmates until we kind of come to some discussion or like we learn a little bit more together about the story and the history and the backstory and all of that. And with AI, you can't like what is what is there to learn

about the song? What is there to learn about the history of the song? It might make you cry because the lyrics are so beautiful, but who is the person doing it and why did they write it? And to me, that's ultimately why I find value in recorded music because of that kind of connection. Yeah, I always talk about this example from the famous art like art critic or so on. I never know how to pronounce his name. I think it's John Berger,

but it might be John Berger. And he wrote a book called Ways of Seeing and made a really popular TV show titled The same. And one of the things in the book that really jumped out at me was when he sort of showed a painting. He like puts a painting.

He says, just take a look at this and see what you think, right? And you look at it and it's a picture of some like birds and you're like, okay, it's pretty cool, you know, whatever. And then you turn the page and it shows you the same image. But now it says it's labeled. It says this is the last painting that Van Gogh painted before he killed himself.

And he's sort of asking how that changes your interaction with the painting. And this happens in the art world all the time. Like you see people interacting with like, I don't know, I went to see, I was in Vienna like yesterday. And I saw The Kiss, this famous painting. Oh, yeah, yeah. And it's like, you know, cool, and you sort of go into this museum and it's in this room with other paintings by the same artists. And I've got to say, it's not really my kind of art. Like, I'm not really that interested in it.

And had I not known that this was a super famous painting, I probably wouldn't have even looked twice at it. Right? I would have looked at all the stuff on the wall that wouldn't have jumped out at me. But because I knew that that was the famous one, I was like, I stood for a little bit longer and I was like, yeah, maybe I should give this some more sort of attention. In other words, the context in which we view a piece of art is like a part of the art itself. It always is, whether we like it or not. It changes our experience of the art. It changes how much we enjoy it.

Because even if the art, say there are two pieces of art that are equally as good. If one of them you were expecting to be really cool, even though it's as good as this other one, it will be more underwhelming than the other one, because you had no expectations on the other one. So in a weird way, you'd kind of prefer the second one in terms of how, like, whelmed you were. and that context never gets detached from the art. And so to think that like music, which is always a process of storytelling to some degree, there's always some reason why a song exists, even if even if the song itself isn't telling a story,

even if there's just a story about how, oh, this person like accidentally pressed this button on the machine or how there's that gorilla's song where the guy just pressed the preset on the piano or whatever. And that becomes kind of part of the story of, a song. The story of AI music is always exactly the same, which is something typed in a prompt and it spat it out. And so, yeah, maybe the isolated music on its own is one day going to be just as good as anything else. But as you say, when people do music, they're doing much more

than just the music itself. Otherwise, it wouldn't be an art form. It would just be a bunch of vibrations in the air, which are tickling your eardrums, which is great, but that's not the same thing is all. Yeah. Well, I said I love the painting The Kiss because in my parents' house growing up, we had a poster of The Kiss. And so I remember seeing it every day. I don't know anything about the painting. I remember seeing it, but I think I really liked it. And it's part of my story. And the way that music is a part of so many people's stories. Like, I remember just growing up listening to like the Beatles. My father was really into the Beatles. Maybe you can drive my car for whatever reason when I was five years old, I screamed that at the top of my lungs. And so that's a part of

my story. It's like a really big part of my growing up in my relationship to my family. My mother is a musician and she and her family are musicians. And so because of that, like I have a relationship to all the pieces of music that, you know, I had to learn when I was like playing piano Clementi and, I don't know, like all these composers who wrote these like little piano pieces. There's a long, part of my life is defined by these pieces of music and my relationships to them and the world around me. And that is vitally important. Now, I can see how pieces of AI music could be important to people. Like, people, like, one of the big things that Suna loves to tout is, you know, if you, like, funny meme songs among friends, like, you know, like you do something really stupid

and like going out and then you make a little song and text it to each other. And that could be part of your story, like this funny meme song that then is like stuck in your head and then you share it among your friends. And in a way, I think that that's okay. I think that that ends up being a means of connecting people together. You know, if you've, the only way that you have to connect to a relative

who maybe is, you know, in hospice care, for example, and, you know, this is very important that you're able to before they pass to be able to reference something in your life that you have shared together and now you can create a piece of music very easily and give it to them and share and have that moment.

That is something that I think is valuable too. It's these stories, these little individual moments in time that make music so valuable and art so valuable and culture so valuable because it becomes part of yourself in a very real way. The memory, the stuff that's burned in the back of your brain. And, you know, I think as long as it continues to be that, and as long as we cultivate that in ourselves and our society, I think there is a good future for us.

So not to be all doom and gloom, I think there is a good future, just knowing that that story is very, very important and how we shape ourselves and the world around us. Is there a redemptive story here for technology like Suno? know, like, I'm wondering if you were on, like, the board of directors, and you basically had this attitude of, like, look, this technology is inevitable, you know, it's not, it's not going to stop. These people aren't just going to shut it off because some people kicked up a fuss about it. But they give you this option of some input. They say, but, you know, you're a musician and you know a lot about the music industry, and we're just, you know, business people.

We don't really know. Like, is there anything you would say to them, like, okay, if you have to do it, then fine, but at least do it this way or change this. Is there anything that you could do, aside from just getting rid of the technology that you think would improve, it'll make it more musical? Well, so I'll say a couple different possible answers. The first one is a very interesting one, from Timberland, one of his responses. So Timberland is a legendary producer who has worked a lot with Suno, creating AI compositions and all that. In an interview, he very interestingly suggested, you know, he's a big advocate for the technology,

very interestingly suggested that it shouldn't be for everyone. You have to know your craft, your musical craft, before you can access these musical tools like AI, which is almost completely contrary to, you know, the stated mission of this. It's like completely the opposite. And I wish more people made a big deal of that statement because to me I was like, oh, this is very interesting

and it's not what is in the common narrative, Meaning like this is a specialty tool that only people who have passed a certain threshold of skill and craft and dedication to the culture and all this can access. So I know that's impossible. But, you know, maybe like, yeah, maybe like live a good thing. Sorry? Why would that be a good thing? It means that there's less slop in theory, meaning there's less stuff polluting the internet, less stuff which is low effort designed. specifically to create money specifically as a grift,

meaning that if you have spent enough time dedicating towards making music and in yourself, you then therefore can use these tools for other things. I'm only half serious when I'm suggesting that. Like, okay, yeah, whatever. I just thought it was an interesting one. I also would push back in saying that I don't think it is inevitable. Nuclear energy seemed inevitable. It seemed like it was the future in the 1950s, but at the same time, you know, it's here, but very tightly controlled because we recognize the danger that it has to the world and society.

I think personally not that I know that much about it, but I think, you know, safe nuclear energy is something that is worth considering, the same way that safe AI is worth considering. But, you know, nuclear power is a profoundly dangerous thing and it's a profoundly powerful thing. and it wasn't inevitable in the ways that we thought it was. I think AI is very similar. Profoundly powerful, profoundly dangerous, profoundly potentially good, but we're going to need to be very, very, very careful with it moving forward. I think the first thing, if I was on the board of directors with Suno, is I would insist on spending some of their marketing budget on compensating the musicians

that they essentially stole from. That's the number one thing. I don't think that's ever going to happen, but that is the big thing that I would insist upon. And the other thing is, is I would insist that the music, the tool is geared more towards music making and sharing music with other people. When I say music making, I mean making musical decisions, like understanding where downbeats are, understanding where chords are, not even names of chords, just like where things are,

so that it becomes more of a musical education tool in the same way that it becomes a creation tool. And that way, you know, that's maybe not the best business decision, but in terms of like influencing what I feel like is the best outcome in the world. If technology is there, I think music education is the way of channeling it in a way of, you know, teaching, teaching people. Like, I generated this thing. This is the thing that I'm generating.

But having a little bit more friction. there because that friction is the thing that gives people ownership over it. So I don't know, it's a good question. I honestly would maybe shut the company down. And if I was going to be working with a generative AI company, I'd pick a different company. There are people who are making great, you're doing great things with ethical models that I would maybe want to work with a little bit more. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, like people often compare AI to other technologies, but this educational aspect is interesting, like with MIDI, for example, you can open up, you know, garage band or something, and you can create like a MIDI track,

and it will give you like a little sort of, give you like a grid on your computer screen and a little, like, piano running down the side, and you can just paint in the music. And maybe you don't know what all the notes on the keyboard are, on the keyboard, are, but you just sort of use this paintbrush tool to paint in a note and you listen to it, does it sound right? If not, then you sort of can drag it up or drag it down and you're listening responsibly such that if you just were to sort of paint things on and listen to, does that sound kind of cool for like a year? You'd probably start to kind of get a feel for what kind of notes go together, which notes sound happy and sad. You might get an idea of how major chords and minor chords

work and you might keep coming across different intervals. Then it would be like really easy after doing that to intuitively get a grasp of the basics of music theory of like intervals, how they work, you know, what chord extensions are, that kind of like melodies and time and time signatures and stuff, just from like messing around in the way that a child could with, oh, this sounds kind of cool. Why does that sound kind of cool? But you don't get any of that with generative AI because I guess the technology up to now, well, has not been generative. The technology is a, it's like a technology of tool. It's a literal tool. You know, it's like a hammer, which you have to grasp and hammer the nail in. Whereas this kind of technology is, is more like, you know, the movement of the hammer itself. You don't even have to sort of get up out of your chair. And so there's no...

You tell the hammer the nail, right? Yeah. It's like, hammer the nail, right? Yeah, exactly. Right. and it's it's a different kind of experience and again i kind of want to say like i think by the way most people are on your side here i don't think many people are going to be like you know like you're talking nonsense get with the system but i i just want to be clear that for those people who do kind of think yeah but i want to be able to tell the hammer how to hit the nail it's like fine but i think to be precise here again there's no rule of the universe that you can't or even shouldn't do that, but maybe it's like you're not engaging in the thing you think you're engaging in. You're not part of this tradition of music creation that Suno is trying to

convince you that you are and you'd be better off downloading garage band and playing around with a MIDI keyboard. Yeah, I mean, the narrative that Suno loves and everybody loves to tell themselves about this is like, this is just the next progression of technology. People said the same thing about, you know, the drum machine. People said the same thing about synthesizers. People said the same thing about all these things. You're clearly just Luddites. You clearly don't, you know, dar or just part of the past. You don't know what you're talking about. And I'm going to say yes. Also, every time those technologies came about, people created new crafts, new skills. In other words, like there became a new body of work, a new skill craft that was associated with these new

tools. I really want to see, and I want to see how people use generative tools in a way that is craft-based, meaning like what you said, trial and error, or like input-based, meaning like you're doing an action, and then you're receiving feedback, and you're modulating your response based on that feedback, which is how we learn and that's how things happen. I don't see that yet and it could happen, but to me that is the fundamental thing that's different about previous technological revolutions and music is that the shift from craft to taste, the shift from being essentially a doer to a musical director or the person who is like ordering, you know, this is the classic thing. Like, it's your doer,

order. Like just because you can customize your DoorDash order or your, you know, your delivery order doesn't mean that you know anything about cooking. You're just creating the thing specifically to your taste. And great for you. That might be a delicious order. But saying that you're now, you know, Anthony Bourdain should come and interview you is ridiculous. And it's the same kind of idea as like there's such a divorce from the actual doing of the thing. I know that people in the comments will. will have a variety of opinions. But the fact of the matter is the war has almost been already won,

meaning, and it feels like it feels almost like a gloating kind of thing, not even gloating, but like I'm saying something that is too soon. But popular opinion, especially in the past year, has shifted pretty radically. And I know people, I'm preaching to the choir very far. frequently when I'm saying a lot of these things. And the people who haven't already been convinced are probably not going to be convinced by anything that I'm saying right now. But that doesn't necessarily mean that I need to stop saying it.

I was at a conference recently about AI and music at Indiana University in Bloomington. And I was amazed by the fact that the student body was universally against AI, like the student body at this AI and music conference universally. Every single one of them that I talked to was extremely skeptical for a variety of reasons. But I was amazed by how many people in the faculty were very, very pro-AI and very optimistic about it. And to me, that was a strange course of events when you're talking about how technology interacts with culture and generations and youth, where an older generation is enthusiastically adopting it, where a younger generation is not. And I don't know what that means in the future, but it certainly is unusual.

And it's certainly a difference between previous technological revolutions like the electric guitar or what have you and what we have right now. Yeah. I mean, people booed Bob Dylan, didn't they, when he sort of whipped out the electric guitar at that folk festival. But I imagine it was probably the older folk fans booing him rather than the new sort of cutting edge. kids on the block. I mean, I think that if there's a technology which older people think is really cool and exciting and younger people think is like really bad, what you basically got there is a really lame technology. That's like, you're talking about Facebook, you know, you're talking about like Facebook emojis and stuff. It's just, just lame, man. I don't know, I kind of, it's, it's shrimp Jesus. Yeah, it's like, it's the equivalent, like, it's the cultural cachet of

shrimp Jesus is like what is like what is this guys like um yeah and that's that's really been the case and i i don't see much course correction i mean there might be course correction we might see some really cool hip people doing interesting things that are radically radically radically different but i don't i just don't see it so please also i do want to be open minded uh if there are people doing cool things with a i commercial generative ai please let me know and please leave it in the comments or what have you, because I want to know and I want to check it out because I always want to be open to learning. I always want to learn new things and new workflows, new workflows, but I haven't seen it yet. Yeah, I mean, I would not be surprised if there are just like

developments and uses of the technology that we just aren't even like capable of imagining right now. I suppose the good news is that I would, I would get. that most people share your suspicion and my suspicion that this is not a good thing. But I think for that reason, while we should be worried about the effect that this will have on an industry and the job market and stuff like that, I'm not sure that we need to be too worried about the effect that it has on artistry, because I think that for most people, the most important thing about artistry is that it's human and that if you remove that element, you're just now talking about something else, which probably will find usage in Coca-Cola commercials, but is unlikely

to be the source of somebody's, you know, wedding first dance or, you know, their song that they have with their romantic partner or whatever, because it just doesn't seem to fulfill that communal role in the same way, I think. I mean, I don't know. You know, I could be surprised, but I just don't see it. So there's an interesting, I'm going to call this the Rick Beato argument Rick Beato, of course, is the great patriarch of music YouTube. And he has a reputation of being, you know, very old man and yells at clouds. Like kids these days with their pop music back in the day was better, which of course, you know, it's very easy to argue against that kind of mindset. He isn't that, by the way, but that's his reputation.

He made an argument maybe two or three years ago that I keep thinking about, and this is interesting. He said that the prevalence of autotune and quantizing in the pop industry and how everything everybody ever hears is either auto tuned or quantized has prepared essentially the listening public for AI slop because essentially, what people are doing are like hyper-correcting all of the humanity out of musical recordings and I've been doing it for decades. And so because of that, there is now the aesthetic, we have been listening to the aesthetic equivalent of AI slop for generation, well, like a generation now. And, you know, when he made this, I was like, oh, that's ridiculous. You know, like, what, you know, sure, Rick, fine, whatever.

But I've been thinking about that a lot recently about how, you know, it's hard to tell if an AI generated pop song is being sung by a human or not because it's affecting the same kind of auto tune aesthetic that pop songs have been doing for quite a long time now. And we've been essentially listening to this stuff for a while. And we've been like as a, so I said I was a wedding musician for a while. I remember very distinctly, like I was playing a lot of top 40 pop songs that I thought were kind of garbage. And I couldn't exactly say why they were garbage. Like I'm playing the songs. Like sometimes, you know, there might be an interesting chord progression. It's fun. It's high energy. There is one song in particular. I think it was Justin Timberlakes

can't stop the feeling from the trolls to soundtrack. I don't know why that was so popular. It was just to me that I don't normally shit on other people's music, but to me that song was just like it felt like AI garbage 10 years before AI garbage existed. I played it night after night. And on paper, it seemed like it should be a good song. Like it was a funky baseline. Some of the chord progressions were interesting. But at the time, it was like, this is not, this is something that was generated specifically to make money. And now we're in the, you know, the equivalent of that AI.

Basically that generation of pop music has now given us this new aesthetic of slop where it's the regression to the mean. And so I think about this Rick Beato argument a lot of like, we've been. prepared by this. We've been prepped by this for a while now. The humanity has been sucked out. And, you know, I think the next generation will, their job is to be put it back in. So I imagine that there might be some aesthetic qualities in the music of the next generation that people really will connect with. And there's a French-Canadian band named Angine du Petrine, I believe. There are a microtonal band that has been going quite viral on the internet where we're discussing right now at the internet.

And they're a microtonal band. They're very weird and they have a weird aesthetic. But it's so radically different from other pop music that people hear these days that they have this viral moment because it's something genuinely different. It's something genuinely that has not been heard in the mainstream because of many reasons. And I think and that's- They like dress up, are they like the- Yeah, they got this gimmick.

They have, they polka dot things. I'm sure you may have seen it you'll they do that one where they sort of play the same riff over like it's like the same amount of notes but it switches from like a 6, 8 beat to like a 4-4 beat or something they do a lot of fun metric

metric tricks yeah they're I think I've seen these guys yeah it's they're fun I like them a lot actually I haven't made a video about them but there are plenty of music theory YouTube videos that you can see about them. I know David Bennett has done one. Stephen Weigel is a great micotonal

transcriber. He's like written out all these pieces. And I think people are excited about it because it's something that is not in that hyper-polished aesthetic. It is a little weird. It's a little raw. It's a little rough. So maybe that is where we go, something more in that direction. I think it would be good to have a bit more imperfection. I was watching a video the other day. It was like some compilation of like mistakes in music recordings. I can't remember whose video it was. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the classic stuff, there's sort of like the hey Jude thing

where you can hear Bonifam swearing and playing the wrong chord. Or like at the beginning of Roxanne by the police where like someone like sits on the piano or something. You know, it's like cool stuff like that. And it hadn't really struck me, but like all of these songs were like from the sort of 70s, 80s, maybe into the 90s. And then this guy who made this video sort of said, yeah, and that's kind of it. like we won't have any more of these now because everything just gets cleaned up and taken out. And yeah, we still have mistakes in the sense where someone's like, oh yeah, like I played this

chord, but it actually worked really well. So we just decided to keep it. I mean like the kind of stuff that's like baked into an imperfect recording and the Beatles are the place to go for sort of the wellspring of that kind of stuff. And that again becomes like part of the story, you know? And it becomes sort of part of the song and it makes it more interesting. Like I remember When I was a kid and I first heard strawberry fields forever, I remember feeling like something really funny was going on when that chorus came in and suddenly everything sounded a bit sort of darker and more intense. And I thought that for years.

And then I found out about the sort of the two different recordings that got messed together. And I felt so validated. And there was something so kind of, I don't know, it really highlighted the fact that I was dealing with this thing that people had created and made decisions. They've got implications and stuff. And we just don't really get that. And this is like the Rick Beato thing.

It's not just that we don't get that from AI music. Of course we don't. But we're also kind of not getting it from like modern music at all because everything is so pristine in the studio. Maybe we need like a resurgence of live music. I mean, it used to be that people would, you know, they would make a record, which is supposed to be a record of a particular event, which is a performance of a song. You know, they'd stick a microphone in a room and they would play it and they'd say, all right, there you go,

you can take this home. And it was kind of almost like an advertisement for the band, for the music. And now it's almost like the live shows, the performances are the advertisement for the recorded version. And I don't know, that that's why we're also seeing like live performances become much less live. It's like everything is supposed to be perfect. And I don't know. That's why we're also seeing like live. the use of autotune, the highly perfect like choreography, it's like a stage show where you want everything to be like identical every single night when part of the charm that's kind of missing is perhaps the rawness. So maybe we just need to encourage a culture of like live music and imperfection. Yeah, may I interest you in some jazz? Because the entire point of jazz music is

being in the moments and experiencing improvisation and reacting to things in the room and all of that. So this is my pitch for jazz. This is my pitch for the improvisational art of jazz music in small spaces because it genuinely is that. Now, it's obviously not for everybody and it sometimes is a very opaque genre. But it's also a very exciting genre of music, specifically because it places so much emphasis on spontaneity and realness. and the environment. And it's also typically best experienced in small venues. You know, part of what you're talking about,

like the hyper process with the auto tune and the choreography and everything is usually for like these big stage shows and live venues, which is a very different kind of musical experience than being in some basements with, you know, 30 people and listening to jazz or like a rock band or like some. small group of people. And there's something very, very special about that. There's something so, so awesome about that. There's something so awesome about a bad sound system with a bunch of amps on the floor.

And, you know, like, you know, you have to wear earplugs, protect your hearing. But like something about that kind of environment, that's so, so, so cool. And I think, you know, people, I think about this. So the pandemic, of course, was such an insane. time for the world. And the thing that I think about the most is that that was the longest time in human history, by far, that live music didn't exist on the planet. The Spanish flu in the Spanish flu of 1918, I think they, I read some newspaper articles

where they canceled concerts for like two weeks. And then they immediately went back to playing just like with open air or something like that. So, you know, even though millions of people died, it was still, people still were. like rushing back to make music or listen to music. Because of the internet, we can connect with each other and experience music over the internet in all these amazing ways. So we didn't have that burning social need to experience music in the same way. But the second that people were able to experience it more safely after lockdowns stopped, people rushed back. And I remember

very vividly, the first concert that I had in Nashville, Tennessee was one of the most incredible experiences I've ever had on music of the sheer joy, the sheer electricity in the air after people had not experienced this thing for more than a year, like a year and a half or whatever. It was awesome. And I think that, you know, AI will kind of clarify that even more. The more that you polish away the humanity, polish away the sweat and gunk. away from it, the more people feel disconnected from it. And then the second that they can experience it, oh, baby, oh, is it a, is it, you know,

you reconnect with your humanity in this really beautiful way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So jazz, by the way. Yeah, jazz. The London music scene is very jazzy. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. And I know lots of, I've got lots of friends who are exceptionally talented, like, jazz musicians and so I go to a lot of these jazz jams and it's it's it's kind it's almost depressing how good these musicians are you know and they're just and it's like you know a few people there and as you say it's like it's like a small room and I got to say like I don't I'm not really into jazz man I like I like some some jazz like sure why not as everybody does but it's it's not my genre let's put it that way but nonetheless I like keep going to these things just because they're so fun because like it's just like watching people do it's the same reason I'd watch like

you know, I don't really follow football, but if I might watch a complation of like the hundred greatest goals in history or something, because like I love watching people just be excellent at things that they're excellent at. And yeah, that that's like where it happens more than anything I've ever seen in music. So I go to a lot of these, um, these jams. But even though like it's not my favorite genre, you know what I mean, because of the humanity of it. And, and yeah, like, you're going to sort of hyper-emphasize the, um, the, inhumanity of like computerized automated music that will probably just increase the demand for that kind of stuff, you know?

Yeah, and I have great memories of Troy Bar, I think, is in Hoxton. Yeah, that's right, yeah. Is one of the places I've come through when I've been in London. Yeah, it's awesome because it's a memory that you make with other people in a space. And when you're physically in a space, it's a different, it's a, it's not, it's not the same thing as listening to, you know, a jazz recording on headphones. It's just there's food, there's, you know, drinks, there's a conversation, you know, you're half listening. And then you turn around and then you see somebody do something crazy, like, whoa. And then you go back to conversation and then somebody else comes in and sits in.

And then there's like, there's, it's, it's a, it's just what, to me, that's like the essence. of what jazz culture is and it's very exciting. We'd be part of it and like to be, just experience it both as a musician and as a listener and somebody who just does it because it's fun. It's cool. It's often in these sort of like ridiculous rooms. It's just like some like white-walled, like, bear room.

There are some beautiful, beautiful jazz bars and famous ones, you know, that are beautiful and plush and lovely. But like a lot of, like, I used to go to this one that was in, there was one in Brickson that was like above a cinema, I think it was in a cinema, the Rixie. in in in in briskson i think which was i don't know it was almost as if like these guys are just like found the most convenient sort of small venue that they could and it's just like i don't know there's something so charming about being in this like random space like you say

there's like a bar there's some drinks and stuff and you're just watching these musicians play things that you didn't know were even possible it's like how like why like why is this person not like the highest paid musician in the world right now you know what i mean um Yeah, and I will say... Yeah, I feel like that's something peculiar to that, to that, like, vibe and genre. And I will say this. They're often very highly paid musicians who are going off and doing all these crazy pop tours and all that. And then on the weekends when they're at home, they're in a crappy bar.

Like, in New York, that's the thing. Like, yeah, yeah. The most amazing musicians you will ever see in playing to 10 people, and that's the hang, you know. I grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. And D.C. has like a really killing jazz scene. And I remember I played at a in the house band of a jam at an Eritrean restaurant with amazing East African food. And I just remember like that being the formative experience of like, yeah, music and food and community is the thing. Like this is everything I always wanted and I want to do this from now until the end of time.

And, you know, I still do that. I still am able to jam and go whenever I'm on tour, like, one of the big things is like, okay, you play the gig. And then afterwards, you go find the jam. You go find the thing, the real event, which is the community thing, the community hang where everybody goes and plays music and does whatever. Yeah. Yeah. And that's like the equivalent in my world of that is that you go to. the talk or the debate or whatever and you pay your ticket and you sit down and you watch this

hour and a half long event and then the event finishes and everyone goes to the pub and then you keep talking. And that's one the real. Yeah. That's one the real show. Yeah. And that's why people go because I mean there's a really interesting question to ask like why do people listen to live music rather than a recording? Oh, because like you know it's more like it's louder and yeah, okay fair enough. Why do people go to a live debate or talk that's being filmed? I'm not like more inspired by like the bassy reverberations of the person's voice. Like why bother going? Because when you're there, firstly, you focus better.

You're like more in the zone. You're paying more attention. And that surely happens with music too. But also like you're talking to people. You talk to the person next year. You go to the pub afterwards. It's like a communal thing. And that's like part of the whole experience.

Yeah. The talk isn't just about the talk. And the music isn't just about the music. It's about the experience and the creative process. And once you realize that those two things, when it comes to anything to do with art, are kind of inseparable context and product, then when you have something which removes the context and leaves just the product, you are left with something which is necessarily, you know, only half art.

And I think that is where AI essentially takes us. But then, you know, we say all this as though, I don't want to, I want to be careful not to sound like someone who doesn't understand how clever, AI is, you know, like the sort of the chess players from the 90s being like, yes, but a chess computer could never, could never do a creative mood. They don't understand the artistry of chess. They don't understand the beauty of a queen's sacrifice in the right. And it's like actually, five years later, they're better at doing it than you are. But with this, I feel like it, I feel like we're on pretty safe ground saying that it's, it's not something that can suffer the same

usurpation. Yeah, I mean, with chess, I keep going back to chess because it's so interesting because chess is a game and the point of a game, usually a competitive game, is to test your skills against another person's skills. But most people who are athletes or, you know, people who play games, I guess a chess player

as an athlete, that's a debate that I don't care to have. but you know they'll say that you know yeah you're testing your skill against another person but really you're testing your skill you're testing your own self like it's all about self improvement and you do that by which of this exchange between another person and yourself and you don't really learn that much i mean you can learn from a playing against a bot and you can certainly improve yourself by testing your skill against a bot but people don't find the excitement in that there's no spectacle in that in the same way. There might have been at one time, you know, like at one time, but now it's so clearly that the bots are so much better than humans that it's like it stops

being interesting because now there isn't that kind of friction and there isn't the story that can be told. I don't know if that's a great analogy with music because the, you know, you're not really challenging. Like, how are you going up against the AI? The AI is not adversarial necessarily because that's not how music works. We don't have adversarial. relationships with other people. And I say adversarial in a positive sense, because the adversary is the thing that makes us grow and this is where greatness comes from. And, you know, I find chess so fascinating because the same kinds of pattern matching and the same kinds of skill and dedication and focus, I can find parallels in my own thinking and my own music making. But yeah, it's it's,

it's one of those things where I don't, I keep going back to it because it seems like it should, should learn more from how the chess world has reacted, but I don't quite think it's the same exact thing with music and art. And I don't think it ever will be. Well, Adam Neely, I will put the relevant links in the description to your channel, which I usually say, you know, I think our channels are roughly the same size, and usually when that's the case, it feels a bit pointless because people have almost certainly heard of you. But I wonder, I'm hoping that there are people who maybe don't know about you and what you do

on YouTube. I think your videos are really cool. They are super accessible and sort of bring a kind of interest to music that is beyond just the listening of it, which I think is really important and cool. So appreciate your content. Thank you for taking the time. And yeah, the video that we've been most relevantly discussing is your most recent one. And its actual title is Suno AI Music and the bad future. So I'll make sure that's linked in the description as well. But yeah, thanks for your time, man. Thank you so much, man, for having me. I'm very excited to see how this comes out. And yeah, I'm a huge fan of your channel too, and I've learned a lot. So really, it means a lot that you would invite me here. Sweet.