A principle I discovered while making my last album is now proving to be valuable in other projects.
The principle:
If you find yourself going down the path of using tools to masquerade as something else, turn your attention onto the tool itself. Find what is uniquely possible with the tool fully exposed by leaning into the fact that it’s artificial, limited, or strange, and make that the value. The audience/user knows exactly what it is and they love it for what it is.
My problem was that I wanted to write for the piano but I didn’t have free and easy access to a real piano or a virtuoso pianist. The closest thing I had was a MIDI keyboard and a piano sample. Though piano samples are good enough to convince most ears that they are hearing a real acoustic piano, I didn’t feel right about faking it like that. The few who could tell the difference are the ones who mattered most. Also, if I made human-playable piano music with my digital piano and simply told people it was not a real piano, it risks being perceived as a cheaply made piano album that would have sounded better on a real piano. So the solution was to turn my attention to the digital piano itself and explore the unique techniques I could create with it that would make it very obvious it was digital and that it could be cool as its own thing. Read the full story here.
We are currently in a paradigm where AI music is posing as something it’s not. It is at the quality now that we are convinced we’re hearing real musicians, but then we get upset when we find out it’s AI. We don’t like being deceived in that way. That approach won’t last long. There’s a handful of people right now whose names you’re not aware of yet who are conjuring brand new forms of music that only AI is capable of making. It serves a different purpose and comes from a different angle than human-made music. It is cutting edge and a bit weird, but it is transparently AI and we will love it for what it is.
This principle can be used for literally anything that tries to imitate something else. New paths and new innovations will be discovered by those who embrace this principle. Stop and think about the tools you are using to imitate something else. There is magic to be found in the unique capabilities of those tools. Allow the goal to change. Be open to entirely new possibilities. If it’s weird, you might be on to something. Many, if not most, innovations are weird at first, even rejected at first, then they become normal.
-LW❤️🔥