Being a music and audio person, I have some thoughts about how AI will relate to our listening consumption in an increasingly AI-laden era. Unlike much of the AI slop and other...stuff that now permeates the internet and social media, this article was written exclusively by a human, me, and the opinions expressed are strictly my own.
I can’t resist the delicious irony of using Google’s AI Overview to state the definition of AI, a fact that in its recursive self holds volumes of implications:
“Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans. This includes abilities like problem-solving, learning, decision-making, and language understanding. AI systems can analyze data, recognize patterns, and adapt to new information, enabling them to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence.”
That’s it. AI is not the Terminator or Colossus or the progenitor of end of the world as we know it – well, maybe it’s too soon to tell, but I don’t think so. Doing a deep dive into the subject, rather than having anxiety attacks over whether HAL 9000 is coming, is actually quite fascinating. Did you know that the GPT in ChatGPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, a large language model? Neither did I. Or that AI research was founded as an academic discipline (according to Wikipedia) in 1956?
The current applications of AI are almost dizzying, ranging from search engines to customer service bots to autonomous automobiles. Being a musician and writer, music and writing are the two areas where I think about the applications and implications of AI the most, along with speculating about whether, as futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil puts it, the singularity is near.
In the area of music production, AI has become a powerful force. It can assist in mixing and mastering, automating these processes and saving time. And we all know about AutoTune. Have you heard the “new” Beatles song “Now and Then?” It was created using AI techniques of isolating and extracting individual tracks from a complete mix and by restoring a John Lennon demo. The public and critics didn’t seem to mind – the song won a Grammy this year. And now you can generate complete AI songs with ease, using a variety of available programs.
I think that for us audiophiles, AI has the potential to be a great thing in our never-ending quest for better sound. I don’t think I’m some kind of brilliant sage for making this kind of prediction: I imagine most of it will come down to ever-better applications of DSP, digital signal processing (and the same can be said for live sound reinforcement). Already we have remarkably sophisticated tools for digital audio, room correction, and surround-sound processing among other aspects of sound reproduction, and they’re only going to get better.
Materials technology will advance, in our quest for ever-more-responsive loudspeaker driver materials and inert enclosures, and efficient amplification, and straight wires with gain. Computer aided design can be considered almost a legacy technology now, and AI-aided design (AIAD) is the logical next step. And if quantum computing ever becomes a reality, who knows how advanced things might get?
(I have to note: the latest issue of The Absolute Sound (Issue 362, Fall 2025) features an excellent special section, "Innovations Shaping the Industry." They explore some of the same territory I've speculated on here, in greater detail. So does Joseph Caplan in this issue's article, “Quantum Technology and the Future of Music and Audio.” I wrote this article about a week before I got my issue of TAS or read Joseph's manuscript. Interesting serendipity.)
Hearing aids will continue to improve and get more high-end, if you will. And who knows what AI-enabled advancements in medical science may be around the corner? When I hear a ringing in my ears I dream of cochlear implants that might give me the hearing I had when I was 18.
For me, however, the potential negative and insidious capability of AI in all this is in its application to music creation. Like ChatGPT for writing, you can simply type bunch of parameters into a music generation program and get an “original” composition based on tempo, style and even mood. No musical knowledge required.
Is AI a useful tool to aid the creative process, or squash it? Well, music is an intensely human form of expression. Or is it? Beginning in the 1970s, pop music has been driven by drum machines and sequencers. I love the sound of bands like New Order and Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode. Yet a friend will not listen to anything with a drum machine. Who’s “right?” Neither of us. I think it comes down to this – if the musician uses AI as a tool and shapes the final product, then AI is a creative adjunct. If someone just generates a piece of music without any personal input, it’s not music creation, it’s button-pushing.
But will anyone care? Part of the charm of listening to recordings of music made through around the 1980s is that it was largely made by musicians playing together, the process of overdubbing notwithstanding. The sound of a 1950s jazz quartet is the sound of musicians feeding off each other and improvising at the highest level, the magic moment captured forever. Today’s pop recordings are the result of comping and cutting and pasting hundreds of takes and isolated tracks together and locking rhythms to a grid to get a perfectly-polished production. I would argue that's a big reason that most contemporary pop and country music sounds like soulless forgettable crap. (Never mind that so much of it is music-by-marketing committee, with too many cooks spoiling the broth.)
Supposedly, this was the first AI-generated pop song, created in 2018:
It doesn't sound any better or worse to me than what passes for pop music these days.
But I’m an old guy. Will most people, who are younger than me and who don’t know anything about music theory or production, even think about it, much less care? The sound of computer-produced music is the sound of today, and hasn’t pop music always been about the latest thing? If so, wouldn’t contemporary listeners prefer the “modern” sound of pop music…and if AI adds an additional sheen of modernity, eventually come to prefer AI-produced music even more?
Let me detour for a moment. Jeez, is every single freakin' “article” on Facebook written by AI now? It sure seems like it at times. As someone who has edited more than a thousand articles, I can readily spot that stilted, pseudo-authoritative AI style laden with adjectives and phrases no person would really use.
If AI does to music what AI-generated writing has done to a lot of writing I’ve seen lately, then I can’t imagine the depths to which pop music might sink. I know I’m Grampa Simpson yelling at clouds here, but for me, most of today’s pop music is unlistenable pap (of course there are exceptions; I’m digging “Bad Dreams” by Teddy Swims).
Noted YouTube music personality Rick Beato has some thoughts:
But, to look at the other side of the coin, today's Top 40 has gotten so torturously bad for me that I welcome the potential of AI music as possibly being an improvement.
The bigger issue I see in all this: to quote Google AI once again, and this time I don’t know if it’s ironically: “the quality of the output from a system, especially an AI model, is directly determined by the quality of the input data it receives. If the input data is flawed, inaccurate, or irrelevant, the resulting output will also be flawed, inaccurate, or irrelevant, according to the principle.” In other words, garbage in, garbage out. And AI feeds on itself to evolve. Will it be self-correcting, or not, and will it get to the point where it exhausts its knowledge base? Or becomes bizarre? Also, where is AI on the S-curve of technological development? According to one study, it’s still on the rise and hasn’t plateaued. It will be interesting to see where we are five years from now.
Will AI ultimately fuel a new renaissance in music creativity, recorded sound, and high-end audio? If it does, It won't be without the help of humans. I can’t imagine AI ever being a part of creating something like Beethoven’s Fifth or “Waltz for Debby” or ‘Eleanor Rigby.”
The OG man-machine didn't need AI: Kraftwerk at the Beacon Theatre, March 14, 2025. Courtesy of the author.
Header image courtesy of Pexels.com/cottonbro studio.
