During 80’s and 90’s, I taught Jazz in Berklee College of Music in Boson.
When I quit a job there I thought I would never involved in anything related to Berklee, but it so happened that the college I am currently teaching has a partnership with Berklee, surprisingly I have been in contact with Berklee for almost 30 years!
In this August, I travelled to Boson and met again some of Berklee staffs I communicate for college work, had a nice time chatting with over a dinner.
These days when we talk about music education and industry with people, AI often becomes the center of conversation.
Berklee seems to have a very advanced curriculum in which they utilize VR or Laptop (they treat laptops as a musical instrument I was told).
This simply tells us the technology is advancing, and advancing fast!
I always like the development in technology.
Not that I am tech savvy but I always try to follow what is new in the world only because it is so fun to feel and see what was not in the world before.
“The high tech is good”, “The high tech is bad” putting all those justification aside, AI is rapidly changing the world for sure.
It can process enormous amount of data in such a speed and accuracy that no human can ever come close.
In every aspects in our life, AI’s contribution will become more visible everyday in the future.
Now how would AI change the world of music?
There used to be a thing called drum machine that can instantly create drum tracks for music and some people still use it now.
AI on the other hand, will be capable of creating the whole song, melody, harmony, groove, and maybe even lyrics.
My friends who write music for movie (those music almost like BGM behind each scene) once told me that very often shooting schedule delays and when they bring the product to him to start writing music, it is already so close to the final date that they sometimes only give him a few days to finish the music for whole movie.
When it comes to AI, though, music making might not have to be done by composer, as long as this person knows how to operate the program, he or she can create the music simultaneously during the movie shooting. All the commercial music including jingles will also benefit tremendously from AI. AI knows all the data from the past about the sales of the product, how effective and ineffective the certain jingles were and so forth.
Not only in commercial music, evenJazz improvisation could be done by AI. It probably knows all the improvisation done by the great Jazz artist in the past and by utilizing the data, it will create whole new improvisational music.
So, AI might be taking place of all the role of professional musician.
Then, my prediction is that many music lovers or professional musicians will try to earn the knowledge in creating AI or operating AI, instead of putting effort into actually creating music itself.
Some or many musicians certainly will loose jobs.
According to CBS News article, only in this past May, AI made 4000 jobs disappear.
Soon, we might be living in the world where most of the music we hear everyday is generated by AI.
So, there should be a time soon when artists need to really sit down and rethink about their own identity and go deep into what really is human being, what really is you.
No human can beat AI in its skills, perfection and speed.
More than ever, artists will need to think of their self expression and the real meaning of it.
High tech is always a nice thing that brings us a new breeze.
Either we resent it or take the opportunity to go deeper into ourself.
It is completely up to us, artists.
Personally.. I love High tech!!
