From AI to floppy disks, musicians are 'collaborating' with tech to make wildly original sounds
The latest episode of digi-Art is all about music made with machines ... and by machines
CBC Arts' new series digi-Art looks to the horizon to see what's possible with tech and art — charting a course led by creatives and innovators toward new worlds and ways of creating.
Maybe you've heard the story about Eminem and David Guetta — or not Eminem, exactly, but "Emin-AI-em," a deepfaked version of the superstar rapper. In February, Guetta, the Grammy-winning French DJ behind hits like "Titanium," tweeted a video from a recent gig. In the clip, he plays a brand new track for a massive crowd, and it's an unreleased banger that sure sounds like it features an Eminem guest spot.
That "performance," if you can call it that, was entirely generated with AI. Guetta has insisted that he made the song as a joke, with no intention of releasing it as a record. But the shockwaves have been felt, nevertheless. Are pop stars an endangered species? Is AI already capable of making music better than humans?
Let me introduce you to… Emin-AI-em 👀 <a href="https://t.co/48prbMIBtv">pic.twitter.com/48prbMIBtv</a>
—@davidguetta
Plenty of industry experts have sounded off on that hot topic, but Guetta, for one, says AI is leading a revolution. "I'm sure the future of music is in AI. For sure," he told the BBC earlier this year. "I think really AI might define new musical styles. I believe that every new music style comes from a new technology."
And on the latest episode of digi-Art, host Taelor Joseph-Lewis meets with two Canadians who are working with technology — new and old — to create wildly original sounds.
Machine music
The episode begins with a blast from the recent past. Over the last decade or so, a whole online community has formed around making musical instruments out of upcycled tech — obsolete hardware that's destined for the scrap heap. You've probably seen viral videos like these: covers of "Sandstorm" or "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as played on wonky disk drives. Maybe you even backed this Polish creator's Patreon so he could build The Floppotron 3.0, a veritable mega-orchestra that includes 512 floppy disk drives, four flatbed scanners and 16 hard disk drives.
Heck, disk drive music has even gone Hollywood. Emmy-winning composer Bear Grills (Battlestar Galactica, The Walking Dead) used old disk drives to produce his score for Revolt, a 2017 sci-fi flick starring Lee Pace. Whether you've heard of it or not, making music with old tech is sure becoming more legit.
Vaser888 is a YouTuber who also makes music with floppy disk drives, and digi-Art went to his home in Montreal to learn the nuts and bolts of how he does it.
"Most people would look at this stuff and think it's garbage, but you can re-use this to make music instead," he says on the episode, showing off his collection of disk drives. As he explains on the show, he's connected 12 floppy drives to a microcontroller, which is then connected to a computer. The drives themselves are capable of making a range of sounds, all produced by the vibration of their mechanical parts.
"You can almost think of it like a guitar," he explains. "When you play a string, it vibrates at a certain frequency. String them all together, then you will create music."
Music by machines
Computers can inspire creativity, and you can even use their parts to produce some seriously unique sounds — as all those floppy-disk cover songs have shown us. But what happens when computers do the creative work themselves: composing, arranging and even performing?
Arne Eigenfeldt gave digi-Art a demonstration. He's a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and as part of his research, Eigenfeldt works with "Musebots" — autonomous software that's capable of composing and playing music.
A Musebot can improvise with other Musebots, or even human musicians. And on the show, Eigenfeldt introduces digi-Art to an AI jazz trio: Musebots that have been modelled after Miles Davis and his band. As Eigenfeldt explains, each Musebot has been programmed to approach the creative process with a different personality.
"These Musebots can make music by themselves?" Joseph-Lewis asks Eigenfeldt in an interview.
"Mmhmm. That's the whole point," Eigenfeldt replies.
So what's his role in the process?
"I kind of view it almost as a parent and children," he explains. "I'm teaching the Musebots to do something a certain way. I'm really guiding them. I'm very involved in how they react, but at some point I just sort of let them go and see what happens."
By machines for machines?
The Musebots are capable of creating music, but the question remains: do they ever play music just for themselves?
"I think that's one of the goals," says Eigenfeldt, but as it stands, he's amazed by what the technology can already do.
Eigenfeldt has jammed with the Musebots over the years, and he says he responds and reacts to their contributions the same way he would any human player. "They influence me. I change my mind and I go, 'Wow, that wasn't the direction I thought I was going to go, but let's go down there and explore that.'"
"For now, what they're capable of already feels magical."