✘ AI as a Game Piece, or the tool is the medium
And: Sound and music affect the way we eat; Prototyping social forms of care; Is AI making us dumb?; Remastering royalties; The future of the internet is smaller communities
How can we learn to think of tools as tools instead of letting them influence our lives as media which determine our interactions with the world as we know it? We need different ways of thinking and metaphors to help us with this. Here, I’ll discuss how we can currently work to escape thinking about AI in reductionist terminology. Instead, thinking about AI in relation to physical spaces and Game Pieces in music.
Space is the place
The way that cities and other spaces are designed influence the way we engage with them. Sometimes, we transgress the rules of such spaces. For example, that little path in the grass to cut the corner of the pavement. Then, the tools we use in these spaces can create transgressions in and of themselves. Think about the impact of the mobile phone on the way we move through spaces. There’s some great research from early 2000s on this. Take the work done by Mizuko Ito and Okabe Daisuke on the impact of mobile phones and text messaging on young people. They concluded that while it gave kids a way to subvert adult control over spaces they live in, it also created new rules of social organization in virtual spaces. The latter would happen regardless of the location of the youth in question. Similarly, Joachim Höflich showed that the impact of the mobile phone meant a restructuring of the social principles governing town squares in Italy.
Our online spaces operate in the same realms of effectiveness. Often, the way we use the tools that create these spaces is as much the art as any product that would come out of it.
When tools become media
We’ve now become so accustomed that the tools that have determined our online lives for the past 25 years are media, that we barely question it. However, they started out as simple tools. Take social media, which at first were just tools to connect and showcase and build networks. Soon after, they began to determine these connections and networks. Worse, we mostly see these media as the definitions of connection and network. Similar to how the design of spaces like town squares determine how we walk across them and where we sit down, so does the design of these media determine how we use them. The best (worst, really) example here is the endless scroll - which some MEPs in Europe are actively trying to ban. The message is that you need to stare at your phone screen, forever: do not look up, do not look around. The endless scroll thus became a medium for experiencing social activity. Instead of engaging with it creatively, like cutting the corner through a piece of grass, we’re simply sucked in.
When we look at AI, or blockchain or AR or any other piece of tech, we tend to look at the output instead of the tool itself. When the first AI-generated images started to populate our feeds, we thought it was funny, scary, impressive, etc. But the output isn’t the point at all, the tool itself is. And the tool, like those before it, as it grows in popularity starts to determine the way we think about the data it’s built on. As Holly Herndon put it back in 2023:
“The model is the artwork. It’s not the sculpture or the painting. It’s the model that can generate infinite artworks, in any kind of medium.”
She and Mat Dryhurst recently showcased this in the Serpentine Gallery in London with their The Call exhibition.
This was built around a choral AI model. And the model was built by traveling through the UK and recording lots of different choruses. In an effort to create new metaphors for thinking about AI, Holly argued against calling this artificial intelligence. Instead, in The Ezra Klein Show, she put forward to call this ‘collective intelligence.’ Her reason being that “AI is aggregated human intelligence.” It’s built on our data, the stuff that we generated over year, decades, centuries. It also allows us to look exactly for the uncanny instead of the perfect. A notion that resonates strongly with improvisation in music.
AI as a Game Piece
Back in 1985, the communications scholar Joshua Meyrowitz wrote about the impact of electronic media on social behaviour. This is what he said about television:
“Television not only demystifies the places actually exposed on it but also promotes a new sense of access and openness to all places.”
We’ve seen the impact of electronic media on music which has led to every consumer expecting to have all music at their fingertips at all times. Now, with generative AI, the creation of music also sits at everyone’s fingertips. Following Holly Herndon, it’s easy to ask how the output of these models constitute art. However, the question we should be asking is about the tool as medium - how can we regard and hear the tool as art? One way to do this, is to think of it as a Game Piece.
Xenakis to Zorn to large music models
Iannis Xenakis wasn’t the first to compose pieces of music based on John von Neumann’s Game Theory. What he understood, though, was that the mode of interaction expected in Game Pieces had precedence in long-standing traditions of music:
“In certain traditional folk music in Europe and other continents there exist competitive forms of music in which two instrumentalists strive to confound one another. One takes the initiative and attempts either rhythmically or melodically to uncouple their tandem arrangement, all the while remaining within the musical context of the tradition which permits this special kind of improvisation.”
The special kind of improvisation Xenakis refers to is the agency of musicians within the rules of the game. John Zorn took this much further. While Xenakis created pieces for two orchestras each with their own conductor, Zorn’s pieces involve more individual musicians. The rules are not simple:
But the rules to many games aren’t simple, and we still enjoy playing them. We also usually learn the rules of the game while we play them. The thing that sets a Game Piece apart from other types of composition and improvisation is that it really focuses on the players. For example, while the conductor is in charge through hand signals, players can put on a cap or headband to take control.
Zorn never wanted the rules to be shared or published, but instead saw the Game Pieces as an oral tradition. Here he is in the liner notes of a Cobra - probably his most famous Game Piece - recording:
“To do this music properly is to do it with a community of like-minded musicians and an understanding of tactics, personal dynamics, instrumentation, aesthetics and group chemistry. It’s about cooperation, interaction, checks and balances, tension and release and many more elusive, ineffable things both musical and social … These pieces can go where anyone wants to take them, and since they live on in the underground as part of an oral/aural tradition, this becomes one of the dangers as well as part of the fun.”
The danger Zorn alludes to here is the ‘unauthorized’ versions created by musicians. In other words, versions not organized/led by himself. And yet, this is also where the fun is - where others can put their creativity into the Game Piece.
A large music model is, in the words of Holly Herndon a ‘collective intelligence.’ A Game Piece is also a collective intelligence. The difference is that with the latter the collective also knows exactly what their individual agency is within the rules of the game. Most large language and music models are fully elusive and we try to effect agency through prompts. And yet, we can learn from The Call and Cobra that to understand how to influence the model itself is where the true art lies. This is where we should cooperate and interact with the tool - both on a social and musical level.
What it means
To learn to think about AI, and generative AI specifically, outside of its output we need new metaphors. One of these could be to see the AI tool as a Game Piece. In other words, it’s a game - it has certain rules - and it’s a piece - it is a musical composition. With this, we can move away from thinking about AI in terms of its output and move to thinking about AI in terms of process. That’s also where we want to influence what’s going on. And, again, this isn’t just about AI. This argument holds for any advanced technology impacting the music industry. Rethinking them, finding new metaphors is the way to understand their place and learning how to engage creatively.
Otherwise, as in the 1983 film WarGames: “The only winning move is not to play.”
And, as we know, by the time a technology comes around the first move has already been made.
LINKS
🍜 How do sound and music affect the way we eat? (Caroline Wood)
“Even the sound of a food’s packaging can alter our perception of the food’s quality. Crisp makers know this well, and deliberately design their crisp packets to be as noisy as possible, to increase the impression of crispness and freshness. Many beverage makers have also heavily invested in giving their products distinct noises as they are opened and poured, such as the iconic ‘pop’ of Snapple juice drinks, apparently a cue for freshness. There is even evidence that the sound your spoon makes when it rubs against the side of a product’s container has an influence: for instance, one study found that yoghurt is perceived as sweeter and more expensive when contained in glass-sounding jars.”
✘ The overlapping of our sensory experiences of the world around is strong. Our senses don’t exist in silos but riff off of each other as we try to make sense of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.
🫶 Prototyping social forms of care (Toby Shorin, Mati Engel, Sam Wolf)
“Experimentation with social forms is thus a different route to cultural renewal, one which is more open to ingenuity from a wider range of actors. Socially minded founders and designers, health professionals and practitioners, community builders, and small businesses can play a role in developing new templates for communal life that are better adapted to today’s cultural context. Where many existing interventions are couched in the pathological frameworks of “health” and “crisis,” prototyping novel ways to gather, learn, and heal is pragmatic and optimistic.”
✘ An excellent way of thinking about the different forms a community can take, especially as this community supports an artist or scene. It’s more than 4 years ago now that I called for a Care Manifesto for the music industry. It’s time to revisit this idea again.
💭 Is AI making us dumb? (Amanda Silberling)
“In order for workers to compensate for the shortcomings of generative AI, they need to understand how those shortcomings happen. But not all participants were familiar with the limits of AI.”
✘ A nice companion piece to my article above. This reiterates the need to understand the rules of the game and how compositions gets made to make sure we don’t let the technology determine what can be thought or done.
📝 Remastering royalties: The future of music (Daniel Dewar)
“The allure of stablecoins extends far beyond mere technological novelty. They represent a tangible opportunity to reclaim control over their financial destiny and transcend the limitations imposed by traditional banking infrastructure. That’s the promise. What does that mean for artists? Imagine a world where royalty statements aren’t just a quarterly glimpse into past earnings, but a continuous stream of value flowing directly from fan purchasing power.”
✘ As I’ve written before, I think that this type of infrastructure is where we’ll see the effectiveness of blockchain tech for the music industry actually have an impact.
🔽 The future of the internet is likely smaller communities, with a focus on curated experiences (Edwin Wong, Andrew Melnizek)
“Digital spaces are coming up short compared to relationships. While social media connects people, most believe it has fueled societal divisions by creating echo chambers. The appetite for genuine, meaningful connections is growing — and platforms that can facilitate this “connection shift” will redefine the next phase of the digital community.”
✘ A topic close to my heart, I’ll write more about the shift described here soon. For now, this is a great report to dig into if you want to better understand how niche communities are going to dominate the Internet of the next few years.
MUSIC
When it comes to noise music, there’s Merzbow and then there’s everyone else. For me, at least, he’s a hero of the genre and someone who has continued to define how I listen to music for around 25 years now. He’s got a show on NTS, and his latest shows us a very different side of him. Moving smoothly from ambient to free jazz and Japanese pop, check out the show.
