Posts Tagged ‘recording’
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'”*…
Like today’s large language models, some 16th-century humanists (like Erasmus) had techniques to automate writing. But as Hannah Katznelson explains, others (like Rabelais) called foul…
The Renaissance scholar and educator Erasmus of Rotterdam opens his polemical treatise The Ciceronian (1528) by describing the utterly dysfunctional writing process of a character named Nosoponus. The Ciceronianis structured as a dialogue, withtwo mature writers, Bulephorus and Hypologus, trying to talk Nosoponus out of his paralysing obsession with stylistic perfection. Nosoponus explains that it would take him weeks of fruitless writing and rewriting to produce a casual letter in which he asks a friend to return some borrowed books. He says that writing requires such intense concentration that he can do it only at night, when no one else is awake to distract him, and even then his perfectionism is so intense that a single sentence becomes a full night’s work. Nosoponus goes over what he’s written again and again, but remains so dissatisfied with the quality of his language that eventually he just gives up.
Nosoponus’s problem might resonate. Who has not spent too long going over the wording of a simple email, at some point or another? Today there is an easy fix: we have large language models (LLMs) to write our letters for us, helpfully proffering suggestions as to what we might say, and how we might phrase it. When I input Nosoponus’s intended request into GPT-4, it generated the following almost instantly:
Hey [Friend’s Name],
Hope you’re doing well! I just realised I never got those books back that I lent you a while ago. No rush, but whenever you get a chance, I’d love to get them back. Let me know what works for you! Thanks!
Nosoponus
But there was a solution in the 16th century, too. A humanist education on the Erasmian model could train its students to produce letters of any length, on any topic – quickly, easily and eloquently. The French humanist François Rabelais, a contemporary of Erasmus, appears to have understood these compositional techniques as automating the creating of text in a way that, retrospectively, looks a lot like how LLMs function. If we want to understand LLMs, and what they are and aren’t capable of, we can look at earlier versions of the same technology – like Erasmian humanism. We can also read authors like Rabelais, who is already thinking about automatic text-generation along these lines, as someone who appreciates the effectiveness of Erasmian generative technology, but at the same time sees it as vitiating the social force of language and, ultimately, ruining language as a tool for moral and political life…
[Katznelson recounts Erasmus’s efforts, Rabelais’s response, and unpacks the important differences between our own authentic speech language created to speak for us and their practical and moral implications…]
What lessons from the 16th century can tell us about AI and LLMs: “Methodical banality,” from @aeon.co.
* Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
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As we honor authenticity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that three U.S. patents were issued to Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta Labs for “recording and reproducing speech and other sounds.” The Graphophone, was an improved (and the first practical) version of the Edison phonograph (from 1877), and became the foundation on which the speech recording (e.g., dictaphone) and recorded music (and spoken word) industries began to grow.
“All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath”*…
Your correspondent is headed eight time zones away, so (Roughly) Daily will be on hiatus for a bit; regular service should resume on or about May 7.
In the meantime, enjoy Michael Turvey‘s (@tichaelmurvey) interactive “Koi Pond.”
* Haruki Murakami
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As we contemplate, we might recall that it was on this date in 2003 that Apple launched iTunes. Downloading music had been already popularized by Napster, torrents, and others, but they operated largely outside the law, “sharing”; the sale of music was still confined largely to brick-and-mortar stores (and in a nascent way, to e-tailers like Amazon).
Steve Jobs approached Warner Music, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music to offer their music for 99 cents a song (and ten dollars for a full album). Their sales wounded by illegal file-sharing, the music labels were eager to staunch the bleeding; they struck the deal with Jobs.
iTunes was an instant success, selling over one million songs in its first week; it became the biggest music vendor in the U.S. five years later and remained a force for another decade or so… when it was overtaken by streaming.
“All of our reasoning ends in surrender to feeling”*…
Alvin and the Chipmunks– a group of three anthropomorphic singing chipmunks named Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, managed by their human adoptive father, David “Dave” Seville– came to life on a 1958 novelty record created by Ross Bagdasarian (who also wrote and recorded Witch Doctor). They were such a hit that they spawned three animated television series, several specials, a series of video games, a feature film– and a number of albums.
During the 80s a few of those albums featured the Chipmunks singing rock tunes. You Tube creator Lunar Orbit (@LunarOrbit_) has taken tracks from several of those cover-fests and recorded them at 16 speed (roughly half the speed of a 33 1/3 LP)… resulting in what @EsotericCD calls “the most important postpunk/goth album ever recorded,” Sludgefest…
* Blaise Pascal
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As we wonder what it sounds like backwards, we might recall that the #1 song on the Billboard Singles chart for the week beginning on this date in 1988 was Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.” You’ve been Rickrolled!
“Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical”*…
From a December, 1969 episode of the BBC series Tomorrow’s World, an eerily-prescient look at the computerized future of banking…
The emergence of the debit card, the impact on back-office jobs, the receding importance of branch banks… they nailed it.
TotH to Benedict Evans (@benedictevans)
* “Prediction and explanation are exactly symmetrical. Explanations are, in effect, predictions about what has happened; predictions are explanations about what’s going to happen.” – John Searle
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As we find our ways into the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that the modern music business was effectively born: Thomas Edison was awarded U.S. Patent No. 200,521 for his invention, the phonograph.
“To me, the ideal artist-to-audience relationship is a one-to-zero relationship. The artist should be granted anonymity.”*…
Wish granted…
Earlier this month a little piece of music history was restored. The news was easy to overlook. Sony Music Publishing announced that one of its outermost divisions would be rebranding: what had been EMI Production Music since 2011 would become KPM Music once again. The change may seem trivial, but it restores a name that has wielded a wide and surprising influence over popular culture.
The chances are you haven’t heard of KPM, despite its roots stretching back to 1780, when Robert Keith (the K of the name) set up a music shop in London. But you have almost certainly heard its music. Since 1956 KPM had been a producer of library music, which is not music to be played quietly for the benefit of readers, but music composed to a brief, kept on catalogue, and then used—in return for payment—to accompany something else.
You have probably encountered the work of KPM’s composers and musicians on television. In America the credits of “Monday Night Football” unfold to the sound of “Heavy Action” by Johnny Pearson; the melody for Channel 9’s cricket show in Australia was produced by KPM, though it was written with a news broadcast in mind. In Britain several shows have drawn on KPM’s library, including “All Creatures Great and Small”, “Mastermind”, “Grange Hill”, “The Two Ronnies” and the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon.
Even if you never watch TV, though, you will know fragments of this music, especially if you like hip-hop. kpm recordings have been a rich source of samples (a segment of sound used in another composition). Of KPM’s star composers, Brian Bennett has been sampled 114 times, by Drake, Nas, Kanye West and more. Les Baxter has been sampled 79 times by the Beastie Boys, Ghostface Killah and MF Doom, among others. Rap’s founding text, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, sampled KPM stalwart Alan Hawkshaw—specifically the song “Here Comes That Sound Again”. “Library music is sought after by producers, collectors and writers because it was played by people, not manufactured by [a] machine,” Mr Hawkshaw once [said]…
One of the most sampled songs in pop history came from kpm musicians playing together for fun in 1968. “Champ” by The Mohawks has a distinctive organ hook—played by Mr Hawkshaw—that was sampled by Eric B and Rakim and Afrika Bambaataa in the 1980s and is still being remixed by Frank Ocean, Janelle Monáe and Nicki Minaj today. “People think that’s a black group from Detroit [playing the tune], but it was hashed together by session musicians in Yorkshire,” Mr Hawkshaw said.
Library music is not the rich trove of unexpected wonder it used to be. These days budgets are tighter and there is less inclination to hire whole orchestras for an afternoon, so there isn’t so much scope for the moments of brilliance a room full of musicians might create. Artificial-intelligence firms are also trying to muscle in on the market, offering computer-generated compositions to accompany video content for a fraction of the cost of real musicians. But there is still magic in the thought of those shelves, full of music composed and recorded for who knows what, sitting there waiting to be used for something else entirely…
Its artists aren’t famous and you can’t buy the records in shops; but its work can be heard everywhere: “KPM Music is one of the most important record labels in history,” from @TheEconomist.
* Glenn Gould
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As we honor the unnamed, we might send suspiciously on-key birthday greetings to Faheem Rasheed Najm; he was born on this date in 1984. Better know by his stage name T-Pain, he is a rapper, singer-songwriter, and record producer. But he’ll surely be best remembered as the person who popularized Auto-Tune pitch-correction technology. Indeed, T-Pain became so associated with Auto-Tune that an iPhone app that simulated the effect was named after him.
Developed in 1997, Auto-Tune was used in 1998 in Cher’s “Believe” to create vocal effects (though the producers attributed the result to a pedal, treating Auto-Tune as a trade secret). Years later, T-Pain popularized the tool… which has become a controversial staple in the recording industry (as it allows recording engineers to turn the tuneless into accomplished singers).
Time magazine quoted an unnamed Grammy-winning recording engineer as saying, “Let’s just say I’ve had Auto-Tune save vocals on everything from Britney Spears to Bollywood cast albums. And every singer now presumes that you’ll just run their voice through the box.” The same article expressed “hope that pop’s fetish for uniform perfect pitch will fade”, speculating that pop-music songs have become harder to differentiate from one another, as “track after track has perfect pitch.” According to Tom Lord-Alge, the device is used on nearly every record these days…
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