On April 1, more than 200 music notables (including Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, 3 Balvin and Jon Bon Jovi) of the Artists Rights Alliance issued an open letter warning against the “predatory use of AI” in the music industry. The letter cites AI’s capability to steal professional artists’ voices and likenesses, violate creators’ rights and “destroy the music ecosystem.” The letter further calls on tech companies, AI developers and digital music services to pledge that they won’t develop or use AI-powered technology the undermines songwriters and artists or prevents them from earning compensation for their art. What are your views and/or concerns relative to artificial intelligence and its impact on music and sound?
We want to participate in building a world that values artists, sound, and craftsmanship. In this world, we envision AI and robots performing the scut work of society, and human beings living a life of leisure, free to engage in the arts. But Nick Cave said it best: ‘Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer. AI has no inner being, it has been nowhere, it has endured nothing, it has not had the audacity to reach beyond its limitations, and hence it doesn’t have the capacity for a shared transcendent experience, as it has no limitations from which to transcend.’” Defending craft matters!
How do new technologies, markets and platforms figure in your creative/business plans. For example, with NFTs gaining momentum, do you foresee related music and sound work resulting? Same for VR/AR? Will increased content spurred on by the emergence of additional streaming platforms open up music and sound opportunities for you? Any growth prospects in the advertising and/or entertainment industry?
A Renaissance is happening in sound. New hardware, equipped with IMUs, is removing traditional stereo limitations in headphones, powered by spatial audio technology such as Mach1. This advancement is making spatial audio more accessible through consumer software and hardware. With the growing consumer awareness of immersive sensor inputs, we foresee a surge in products integrating head tracking, orientation, and positioning. This will drive demand for unique immersive experiences akin to the impact of Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” on radio. Currently, we are in production on a few high-profile VR projects, including Meta’s Red Rock’s Artist Series in VR, which is currently in Season 2, and another VR experience with Kinetic Light, a disability arts ensemble from Brooklyn as well as a project at Sphere in Las Vegas.
How has your role–or that of your business or company–evolved in recent years? What do you like most about that evolution? What do you like least?
Through our collaboration with Mach1, our sound technology company, Q Department, has emerged as a pioneer of immersive and interactive sound, providing best-in-class end-to-end audio services for any scale project. Our workflow has become increasingly agile. At a certain threshold, we are shipping software.
What was the biggest creative challenge posed to you by a recent project? Tell us about that project, why the challenge was particularly noteworthy or gratifying to overcome, or what valuable lesson you learned from it.
We recently worked with an agency to write a song with a scientist, and that’s all I can say on the matter.
What was the biggest creative challenge posed to you by a recent project? Tell us about that project, why the challenge was particularly noteworthy or gratifying to overcome, or what valuable lesson you learned from it.
We worked on two Super Bowl spots that we are proud of. One is Google’s “Javier In Frame,” which put accessibility in the spotlight. We collaborated with SMUGGLER and blind filmmaker Adam Morse. Morse covered the camera lens with petroleum jelly to give audiences some representation of how Javier navigates the world through his eyes. It was an incredible experience for our team to work with Morse on this very sound-driven project with purpose and social impact. Additionally, we worked on Squarespace’s incredibly intimate campaign with Martin Scorsese and his daughter Francesca. We had the chance to weave a whimsical theremin into the poignant score. On the other side of the spectrum, we might have created a wormhole in our studio with “The Music of the Spheres.” In 1619, Johannes Kepler published his mathematical treatise of the universe as a celestial music box he called “The Music of the Spheres.” He imagined the planets orbiting around the sun like the notes in a chord, urging composers to set his equations to music. Many musicians attempted and failed over the decades. Dave Sulzer, a neuroscientist and musician at Columbia, figured out the math and approached Drazen to record it spatially. Kepler wanted listeners to feel as if they were standing on the surface of the sun, hearing the harmony of the planets as they circled around them. We achieved Kepler’s desired effect using our Mach1 spatial audio technology, and it was just featured in The New Yorker.
A growing number of superstar artists and songwriters have been selling their music rights/catalogs in megabuck deals. What will be the ripple effect of this on music creatively and from a business standpoint relative to the advertising, film, TV and streaming platform markets?
Profits vs Prophets.
