Alogrithms and all that music

As time goes by, greater intervention by technology is changing music making, and in return, changing tastes. In societies like our that take so much pride in natural sounds, both instrumental and vocal, the contradiction may appear to be stark and working against each other. The use of the computer and digital sound has been increasing over the years and has reached a level where the basic questions about the definition of creativity are being raised yet again.

Ever since the industrial revolution and, as a reaction, the Romantic Movement beginning in the late eighteenth century, the man versus machine debate and the fear of the machine taking over eventually has gripped intellectuals, philosophers and poets. It is bandied as a sufficient reason to find ways to counter it for the advancement of technology seems to be irreversible.

The best that can be achieved is to come to terms with it or that what has been defined as creativity due to the exponential advances in the world of high tech be subjected to a review. The use or manipulation of technology forms the core of what is seen as human ingenuity rather than as it has been conceived and spelled out in the past centuries.

In the West, one anxious response regarding music is the factory-inspired approach to making music. The encroachment of technology into music, which in turn continually provokes anxieties about where humans end and machines begin are best exemplified in standardised Motown Model Acts meant to appeal to as big a market as possible. Algorithms, once an obscure computing term for a sequence of steps to perform a task, has acquired a sinister connotation in an era where big data has critical significance. It is imagined that algorithms enmesh us, invisibly shape our behavior as they process information about us, slotting each person into place in "a network of marketable personality types".

Alogrithms are being used to do both -- compose music on a computer and entrust computers with the task of making music themselves. Auto-Tune, a software created by Andy Hildebrand and released in 1997, was initially envisioned as a means to correct vocal pitch but the electronic quality it ended up providing to a singer’s voice soon became so popular that it surprised the creator himself. The trend started with Cher‘s 1998 hit "I Believe", and now it’s nearly impossible to imagine pop music without it. It is being said that the computerised cadences of modern music has ushered us into the post-human age. But where algorithms struggle is in developing new trends, and stumbling across epiphanies.

Preferably music should be constructed on its own music software and can be specific. Whenever alternate software is used there is restriction because so many design decisions are made in advance. However, there seems to be a strange misunderstanding of algorithms like it is some dark thing with no human connection although there are questions of authenticity and authorship when it comes to alogrithms. If the percolation of individual expression through the circuitry of a computer can be considered creativity in contemporary times, then so be it.