You know I’m not a music person, but I’ve invited Steve Mallard onto the show to talk about a topic he’s quite passionate about – the evolution of music tech. He is not an expert in this field, he just finds the history fascinating. Steve will take us back to the first acoustic guitars, and explain why electric guitars needed to be invented. He’ll talk a little bit about the early effects that could be added with vacuum tube amps and how the invention of the transistor revolutionized the music industry. Things accelerate after that up to where digital signal processing began allowing new music effects and replication of tone became possible. At the end, we get into a bit of a debate on whether this democratization of music creation has ruined music.
Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2025_03_04
Thanks for allowing me to spout for an hour, great fun! You and I may have to agree to disagree on the worthiness of AI generated music but that’s OK, I enjoyed the debate! For anybody who found that topic interesting, check out AI songwriting tools like the Suno or Udio and see for yourself the quality (and soulless nature!) of their output 🙂
I really enjoyed this episode of Chit Chat, especially the part where you two locked horns on whether modern music is rubbish. I think that at the heart of the dispute is the concept of “What is art?”, with rubbish equating to “not art.” You’d think that the question of what is art would be a pretty settled question, but I’m not sure that it is completely settled, even here in 2025.
My definition of art would probably be: “Art is the skillful, authentic expression of the creator’s inner emotional state.” By that metric, modern music probably is not very art-like: it can sound skillful, but it probably falls down on the authentic requirement – most music heard in the commercial channels is written first and foremost to make a buck, not as an authentic expression of emotional state. There probably isn’t much emotional state there, just calculated appeals to the timeless themes of youth: he or she left me blue, will he or she notice me, we’ve got it so good, you complete me baby, etc etc.
True art is generally hard, so a quick metric for “Is it rubbish?” is whether it takes, or it took, effort to create it. Songwriting is hard. I wrote two dozen songs back in the day to impress someone in my musical community; some were throw-aways, but around half I would call true art: skillful, authentic, quirky expressions of who I was, where I came from, what I was offering, and why. I still marvel that I was able to pull off that project, in fact. (I had kind of lost track of those files when I switched computers about a year ago; they had previously been stored alongside my iTunes library in the Music folder, but when I moved to the new computer I put my iTunes folder on another drive to conserve space on the internal SSD {curse you, Apple, for your non-upgradeable storage!} and forgot to bring along those old songs. I eventually discovered they were missing, and went through backups to locate them. When I played a few of them to spot check the quality it was like cracking open little crystals of ancient feelings.)
Another medium where there has been a robust discussion of “But is it art?” is in image creation. I’m sure that the painters of a century ago looked down their noses at the early photographers – after all, the painters would spend days and weeks creating an image, with immense range of tonality and implied emotion. And then a photographer would come along and go “snap, there’s a landscape photo!” in 1/200th of a second. Nowadays I think we recognize photography as an art form, after Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Man Ray, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Henri-Cartier-Bresson showed everyone how much more there was to photography than just pushing a button.
To bring it back to the question of rubbish: a photograph can be art, but it can also simply be a pretty picture to the viewer instead. And both points of view are valid, in my opinion.
What an interesting perspective, Kurt. Because music doesn’t move me, I don’t have any experiences like yours, but I think I have a photography example. I took a photo of a beach from a balcony on which a single man was strolling in the distance. I used my big-girl camera to capture the image in RAW after carefully framing the shot. I used my editing software to improve the image and to get the tone that expressed how this view made me feel at the time. A few months later, someone with whom I had shared this photo had it printed and gave it as a gift, with zero recognition given to me for creating the image. The person who shared it thought the man in the image was her son. She’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met in my life, so I didn’t tell her how much it hurt that she did that.
I suppose by the definition you created, what I had made was “art”?
Sounds like it was art to me! The sad part of this vignette you’ve shared is that, had your friend stopped to think about it just a little bit, I think her gift would have been even more meaningful from both the giver and the recipient side of the equation if she had acknowledged the artist – you! I think having a connection, even an indirect one like “this photo was taken by a friend of my mom,” enriches us, because then art is not something far off in a museum or a prior century – it can be a part of our everyday life.
I’m sure she would have had she realized where the photo came from and how much work I’d put into it. Like I said, she’s super kind. I think she just found it in her photo library, well after the event, and forgot how she got it.