Hosts
Derek Thompson
Derek ThompsonAbout the episode
Artificial intelligence tools for musicians are getting eerily good, very fast. Their work can be maddening, funny, ethically dubious, and downright fascinating all at the same time. TV and podcast composer Mark Henry Phillips joins to describe his experience working with them. We talk about the job of modern music composition, why he’s worried AI might eventually do much of his current job, the morass of AI copyright law, and the ethics of creative ownership.
But above all, Mark gets my brain whirring about the nature of creativity—how great new ideas, like songs, come to be in the first place. The line between stealing and inspiration in artistic history has always been blurry. Picasso famously said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And that is not just a memorable quote. Many of my favorite musicians were famous borrowers, to put it lightly. Some of Led Zeppelin’s most famous songs—such as “Whole Lotta Love”—were such obvious lifts that, after years of court cases, the band agreed to add the plaintiff to the song credits.
But analogies to music and art history also fall short to capture the weirdness of this moment. Neither Picasso nor Jimmy Page had access to an external technology whose deliberate function was to slurp up musical elements from millions of songs, store their essence in silicon memory, and serve them up in a kind of synthetic stir fry on an order-by-order basis. Musicians have been writing music with partners for decades, even centuries. What happens to music when that partner is a machine? Will it open up new horizons in songwriting and composition? Or in a sad way, will super-intelligence make the future of music more average than ever?
Links:
WNYC: “How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music”
“In February’s Cruel Light (Goodbye Luka)”: full AI song
“L.A. Luka (I Wanna Puke-uh)”: full AI song
P.S. Derek wrote a new book! It’s called Abundance, and it’s about an optimistic vision for politics, science, and technology that gets America building again. Buy it here.
Plus: If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here.
Summary
In the following excerpt, Derek and Mark Henry Phillips dive into how Mark got his start in music and the first encounters he had with AI-created music.
Derek Thompson: How’d you get into music? When did you first catch the bug?
Mark Henry Phillips: Wow. I mean, I guess it was … I think it was the summer between fifth and sixth grade. I made a Beatles mixtape, and I was obsessed with it. I listened to it nonstop doing gardening work for an entire summer and then convinced my grandma to buy me a guitar, and I tried to learn every Beatles song I could. Then I was like, “Oh, wait, the piano songs, those are my favorite,” so I started learning piano. Convinced my grandma to get me a four-track recorder, and then I experimented with layering stuff, and then it just became my favorite thing to do and kind of still is in some ways.
Thompson: And these days, how do you explain your job to someone, say, at a party?
Phillips: Well, I usually freeze because I don’t know exactly how to answer the question. But I’d probably say I’m a composer for films, commercials, and podcasts. I mean, the truth of it is, like a lot of musicians, I have to do a few different things to piece together a full income. So if they pry, I’ll also say that I’m a podcast producer and editor. But a lot of times, I just leave it as I’m a composer, probably because I think that sounds the coolest.
Thompson: Tell me about the first time you discovered an example of AI music that made you feel like this might be the beginning of a professional existential crisis.
Phillips: I saw these large language models, and I think probably a lot like you and everyone, it was like, “This is cool. This seems like a promise of things to come, but it’s not mind-blowing yet. It’s just really cool.” And then I was like, “Holy shit, these models are going to be perfect for emulating music. The input of music and the output of music is perfect for the way these models work.” And so I was just waiting and poking around thinking one of these is going to come and it’s going to be mind-blowing. And so I kept googling and the spring of last year, I saw a new one that was kind of popping up online, and I went to the Reddit forum for it, and I found someone posted a track, and it was basically a rip-off of Toots and the Maytals, an early reggae star from Jamaica, and I love reggae, old reggae.
And I heard it. I was like, “This is music.” It’s not like, “Oh, that’s cool.” This is good music. It has some artifacts here and there, but it’s amazing.
Thompson: So for people who don’t know Toots, who don’t know reggae outside of Bob Marley, what did we just listen to? As a musician, what made you stand up and go, “This is a little bit spooky. This threatens my professional ego.”
Phillips: I had been hired to make a reggae song that’s supposed to sound like 1969 Jamaica. I can do a pretty good job of making something. It’s certainly of the same spirit of it, but it doesn’t feel like it was recorded on a hot summer night in 1969 in Studio One, which was Lee “Scratch” Perry’s original studio, and with this brother duo on drums and bass. It doesn’t have the same vibe, and this one, just the vibe is good. It’s really good. And it’s like you kind of need a time machine to re-create something like that. And then the vocal performance, yes, there are weird parts here and there, but by and large, the vocal performance is virtuosic just like him.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Mark Henry Phillips
Producer: Devon Baroldi