What is Music and Will AI Change It Forever?

What is music?

The story begins, as Western thought itself begins, with the ancient Greeks.  Plato believed that music existed in a world of perfect forms. The composer or performer would access the platonic world and bring a piece of it into our reality. So, for Plato, music was pieces of a higher dimension.

A beautiful thought, maybe a useful metaphor, but not really a practical definition.

In 1818, the venerable curmudgeonly genius, Arthur Schopenhauer, published his treatise, “The World as Will and Representation”. He included in it a chapter on music in which he argues that the composer is “unconsciously philosophizing”. Music, therefore, is unconscious philosophy.

This has the ring of truth, I think, because anyone can understand philosophy in principle.   There is, however, nothing unconscious about writing music. I could just as easily say that philosophy is unconscious music or that architecture is unconscious choreography.  In fact, Franz Leibnitz, the co-inventor of calculus, called music “unconscious calculation”. Both Schopenhauer and Leibnitz viewed music as the unconscious form of the art in which they were experts.

When two geniuses make the same mistake, we have a problem. That brings us to the most recent definition of music which is attributed to the 20th century composer Edgar Varese.  

When asked by a reporter, “maestro, what is music?”  

The great composer replied: “Music is organized sound.”

This definition is long on gravitas but short on content, but this is the most widely accepted working definition today. John Cage used this definition to write what is probably his most famous work, ‘4’33’.  

Regardless of your musical skill, you can play this piece. To perform ‘4’33’, a musician (or anyone, really) sits at a piano and does nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The “piece” is the sounds that happen in the room during that time. John Cage cleverly ‘organized’ the sound by simply putting a frame around it.

But if ‘4’33’ is music, certainly ‘4’34’ would also be music. So would 4 hours and 33 minutes… And so on.

This brings us to a piece I wrote called ‘Thought Experiment Infinity’.

The piece is performable in excerpt only, on any instrument or no instrument, and by any entity or no entity. 

It begins with the Big Bang and ends with the end of time.

The composition is all the sounds in between.

‘Thought Experiment Infinity’ is every sound in the universe and in time, organized in musical notation. Beethoven’s ‘9th Symphony’, all of Mozart, ‘’The Nutcracker’, the score to ‘Star Wars’, ‘Thriller’… These are all but small parts of my grand composition. 

The piece can even evoke an emotional response. If not awe at the sheer scope of this musical work; then frustration, confusion and disappointment—which are all emotional responses.

The score is copied below for those interested in studying it.

Music is a completely different thing to the people who make it than it is to the casual listener. To the listener, if the composer has done their job, music is a forest. To the performer, music is the details of their particular tree and to a composer, it is the shapes of the branches on the trees, and the exact hue of each leaf.

 In the first half of the 20th century, many of the details in a piece of concert music were lost to listeners of records simply because of the low fidelity of early recording. This meant that, to the casual listener, the overall effect of the recorded music was still perceptible, but the details that were important to composers and performers were largely missing. 

As the public ravenously consumed this sonically degraded music, traditional composers and performers alike wondered if music was coming to an end. It seemed like the audience no longer cared about details that musicians had spent lifetimes mastering. Or maybe the audience never cared about those details in the first place.

Popular music however evolved with the media it was recorded on, and eventually its sound was tailored to the medium on which it would ultimately be heard.  That’s one reason why popular music is always changing: because the technology used to create and listen to it is always changing.  

Ultra-high-fidelity recording, digital audio workstations, and ubiquitous high-fidelity playback devices have made all music, especially pop music, so sonically rich and so thoroughly genre-blended that even the tamest modern pop song might not register as music to a listener of just a hundred years ago. A centenarian listener would simply lack the cultural and technological context to appreciate minimalist pop songs or super produced trap music.

This evolution, like the evolution of all technology, is happening at an exponential rate. Music will likely change as much in the next ten years as it has in the previous century. When my infant son, Jude, is a teenager, I may not understand his music; and not just in the charming way that all parents misunderstand their child’s music. My son may enjoy music that I find to be literally incomprehensible. 

Will that still be music? 

What will happen if I, as a composer, collaborate with a piece of AI to create music that is so rich and so detailed that it defies contemporary imagination? 

And what will happen when the music that an AI writes without my help achieves a level of detail that is beyond human comprehension? 

Will it just sound like silence to us?

 Will it be like ‘Thought Experiment Infinity’ and ‘4’33’? 

If so, will it still be music, or will it be something else entirely?