Social media was abuzz with the back-and-forth between an old fogey clinging to outdated skills—claiming that AI music lacks soul—and a middle-aged man who mistakenly fancies himself a creator, but now that the fuss has died down, I thought I’d take a brief look back in time.
Music only really comes alive through live performances or a single, passionate take.
If you’ve already got the gist of what I’m trying to say from this headline, there’s no need for you to read on. As someone who’s all about efficiency, I’d recommend you go and look for some other interesting articles instead.
Music created using DAW technology with a modern architectural structure
A DAW that has contributed to the creation of music that is as pleasant to listen to as a comfortable home, through repeated copy-and-paste and re-recording of flawed sections. It may be ingenious, but it lacks soul. So what? Even this old fogey aims for pleasant listening experiences, and when faced with AI that further enhances this quality, one can almost see him grinding his teeth at AI users—who, like young upstarts meticulously measuring timber with an electric planer, seem to think, ‘I wouldn’t need to use such things myself.’
Lyrics that are an extension of social media
Leaving aside the old farts who can’t take a hint, the claim that ‘soul is poured into the lyrics’—where the personality of deluded ‘childish old men’ relies entirely on the lyrics—brings to mind the phrase ‘age-appropriate’ as a counterpoint to ‘old farts’, especially given that so many lyrics these days read like long-winded social media rants.
So what? These days, the only people brave enough to reveal their real age on social media are genuine teenagers and clueless ‘childish old men’. Everyone is spilling their guts on social media whilst role-playing their ‘middle-school syndrome’. It’s only natural that lyrics exist as an extension of that.
The difference in the expressive power of melody and lyrics
For many people, musical notes mean little more than mere symbols, whereas words, when strung together into sentences, convey thoughts and imagery. From the perspective of the information content of sound, it cannot be denied that melodies are inferior to lyrics.
The effect of combining melody and lyrics
- The effect of preventing melodies from becoming stale
- The effect of preserving the oral tradition of words
- To extend the length of a song by repeating the same melody, one creates lyrics for the first and second verses and links them together.
The practice of setting stories intended for posterity to music is a common feature in much historical literature.
I can’t shout out what I want to shout
We must be careful about the lasting impact of passing on words. It can easily serve to reinforce embarrassing memories, and extreme lyrics can end up becoming a permanent online stain.
If you’re serious about sharing your thoughts, wouldn’t X be better?
If you just hand the whole song over to AI using an abstract prompt, you can sort of feel like you wrote it yourself, and you can get away with saying the AI wrote the lyrics. If you really want to pour your heart out, wouldn’t X or Threadsbe better?
If you really want to pour your heart and soul into the melody, go for a live performance!
If you have to spend over three minutes listening to something that could be conveyed in less than a minute in writing, people are likely to fast-forward or skip it after hearing barely a third of what you want to say. That’s the way of the world these days. With instrumental music, there’s no visual narrative to begin with. If you still want people to listen to the end, the best thing you can do is let them see you performing live, sweating it out on stage. Hardly anyone opens the soundproof door and walks out in the middle of a song.