I was in the inspired orbit created by the brilliantly remastered voice of Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, listening to his Bahar, a spring-time, early morning raga when a pop-up appeared on the laptop informing me about a new Beatles song. Once the Bahar ended, I looked for the Beatles release.
John Lennon was singing: “I know it’s true/ It’s all because of you/ And if I make it through/ It’s all because of you.”
The song is with us, thanks to Yoko Ono, widow of the late singer, for preserving an audio cassette that had Lennon casually singing the lyrics. Thanks to Peter Jackson for developing the Machine Audio Learning algorithm that segregated Lennon’s performance from a 1970s magnetic film.
There are diverse views on the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced Lennon voice. Many admirers are emotionally charged against the eviction of his voice’s temple-bell-like dynamics from his mortal body. I do endorse their sentiments. However, one must not forget that the word “art” is embedded in the word, “artificial”.
In The Recording Angel (1987), Evan Eisenberg provides a thoughtful, exhaustive look at the history of recording and the way it has changed our understanding, appreciation, performance, and possession of music. He writes: “If recording ‘falsified’ music, digital recording transports us to a realm of pure fantasy where truth and falsehood have no meaning. Maybe that is where music belongs. What happens, though, to the idea of music as a test of the human body and spirit, a distillation of one earthling’s hard-won skill and experience?”
The history of arts is also a history of the arts’ long-standing marriage with technology. Microphone moulded the voice culture of the singers of the early 20th century. In the early days of recordings, most of the recorded singers had to project their voices loud enough to be written on wax. The progress of technology helped us experience the baritone universe of Ustad Amir Khan. Carnatic music can be proud of Madurai Mani Iyer because of the microphone.
Studios, editing rooms and sound engineers in the last 50 years have already made our recorded music artificial. The voice that music lovers have been listening to for the last century or more has been far from being “truthful”: The word “truth” has a different meaning in the realm of the arts, especially about the recorded voice.
There can be ethical debates on the rationale behind artificially creating the voice of Lennon, of course. That has to be addressed in other rooms, not in the music room. Lennon had recorded this song of his (written by him) in an audio-cassette recorder with piano support. Lennon was shot in 1980. There had been efforts to release “Now and Then” even in the 1990s. It didn’t happen because George Harrison, one of the Threetles alive then, had reservations about it. Harrison died in 2001, and the Twotles (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) with the consent of the legal heirs of Lennon and Harrison, went ahead with the present project.
The Beatles were democrats. All decisions on music albums and their tours were decided through consensus. Even if one of the four voted against it, the Beatles would shun the project. If that has been the case in the past, what ethical ground does the AI-created “Now and Then” stand on? Let me borrow from Pablo Picasso, who said: “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth. The artist must know how to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.” What Picasso said in the context of Cubism applies to music, the new Lennon song, as well. “To paint and nothing more... Neither the good nor the true; neither the useful nor the useless.”
“Now and Then” is artificial, of course. But it’s a tribute to an important period in the history of the arts. As I write from a city where man is hoping for artificially created rain to contain artificially created air pollution, Lennon is singing:
“I know it’s true
It’s all because of you”.
S Gopalakrishnan is a writer and founder of the podcast, Dilli Dali. The views expressed are personal
All art is ‘art’ificial, why pick on ‘Now and Then
3
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11.11.2023
I was in the inspired orbit created by the brilliantly remastered voice of Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, listening to his Bahar, a spring-time, early morning raga when a pop-up appeared on the laptop informing me about a new Beatles song. Once the Bahar ended, I looked for the Beatles release.
John Lennon was singing: “I know it’s true/ It’s all because of you/ And if I make it through/ It’s all because of you.”
The song is with us, thanks to Yoko Ono, widow of the late singer, for preserving an audio cassette that had Lennon casually singing the lyrics. Thanks to Peter Jackson for developing the Machine Audio Learning algorithm that segregated Lennon’s performance from a 1970s magnetic film.
There are diverse views on the Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced Lennon voice. Many admirers are emotionally charged against the eviction of his voice’s temple-bell-like dynamics from his mortal body. I do endorse their sentiments. However, one must not forget that the word “art” is embedded in the word,........
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