The New Renaissance: AI, Creativity, and the Future of Art and Music

Apologies for the deep dive into philosophy, but let's be honest, when you talk about AI and what we have witnessed in recent years, you’re talking about the first tool that humans have created with the ability to be creative, so a philosophical conversation is sometimes just round the corner.

Creativity was supposed to be the last bastion of humanity. We think therefore we are right? We can have subjective experiences, emotions and empathy. All the things we create, the art, the music, the architecture and stories have a purpose and a meaning that's unique to our consciousness. Is it though?

Coming back to technology, we have all experienced those “holy s**t” moments over the last couple of years where we have used Generative engines like Gemini or Chat GPT, questioned if the picture or video we’re seeing is real, read the news stories about AI generated images winning art competitions and seen the impacts that algorithms in social media are having on the socio-political landscape.

Is this normal behaviour for an animal that's the only truly creative being in this world?

I'd argue well yes it is. We are quickly running towards a world where what's generated by machines is completely indistinguishable from what's created by a human. Where we are starting to see massive leaps forward in machine generation is music.

Even last week we have seen the news from Elevenlabs that they are set to release a copyright-less AI music generator which is cleared for commercial use. They have partnered with Kobalt, a major technology driven music publishing and rights management player, where they have provided significant amounts of training data from the artists they represent for Elevenlab’s AI generation tool.

AI for music generation is adding more legal and commercial complexity to an industry which is still trying to keep up with innovation from a distribution perspective, and how to tie that back to music royalty rights as we have moved from physical records to digitisation, to downloads and now to streaming.

But music isn’t just an empty form of entertainment. It’s an art form and something we hold close within our hearts (for what that expression is worth) as strictly human. In fact music is one of the key civilisation universals with anthropologists finding that it has independently developed in all studied societies being associated with key social events, infant care, healing, dance, ritual, religion and key emotional events such as weddings and funerals.

But music is also a structure, it consists of beats, tempos, melodies and lyrics that seem to have biological effects on you. But all of this can be converted to data known as a digital fingerprint. As you stream music from a DSP (digital service provider) such as Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube, but also video streaming services like TikTok and YouTube, this data and meta-data can be profiled against you as an individual. We can use the masses of data based on your listening habits, how you repeat, how you skip, how you search and what you click the like button for.

So what if, with enough data I could offer you only what I know you would like? Lets go one step further, what if I could build a machine to continuously churn out music using AI generation I know would be perfect for you? The thing about this though is that who’s music is being used to create that perfect song and does it still have the same emotional impact on you?

Another question, what economic impact does this have to song writers, artists, publishers and record companies as the music industry is generating tracks that is catering to smaller more concentrated markets.

Lets take just a single example of RZA putting together “Protect Ya Neck”. The first big song for the Wu Tang Clan. The music for this song was made up as follows:

Beats and rhythm:

Melodic Elements:

Kung-Fu Movie Samples:

This was RZA going through a creative process of his own, layering sound upon sound of beat and melody until he had the track he wanted and knew would give the sound that would introduce the world to the rest of the Wu Tang Clan.

This song will go down as a defining moment of music history, but would we feel the same if a machine had created this? It wouldn’t change the song that was produced but it might change the way you feel when you listen to it and after all isn’t that the point?

So how we ensure that musical creativity remains a human pursuit in an industry of increasing legal, royalty and data complexity as advances in technology and consumer habits change the way the art form is created and distributed. Who and how do people get paid for their talent, as using technology to create music gets better?