This is a rant, from someone who's been playing music for 3 decades, rock, electronic, and classical. Also I've been meditating a lot. I started realizing recently the huge separation between thoughts about music and music itself, just as there is between thoughts and action. The world we live in, of temporary digital media, is a mirror of our thought processes. Our whole modern day and environs are spent in thoughts and media, with almost no action... particularly since we started working at home and ordering food in!

Upon seeing a web page's "impressionistic interpretation/reduction" of a decade or so of music driven primarily by economic and social constraints (warehouse techno), it's so easy for people to pile up thoughts. It's so inexpensive and risk-free for people to say, "oh yeah, that there is good techno/acid," without trying it out on a dancefloor, without having listened to hours and hours of it.

There has strangely been a long-term dream of computer scientists to replace composition. To "spit out" songs as someone put it. It's usually too scary to ask ourselves "why?" because it usually is a game of validating one's own mind against others' impressions. For some reason, auto-composition seems like some kind of holy grail, but of what?! Saving money buying music? A fantasy of abundance? A kind of "gotcha!" that a pure thought-person has outwitted a silly irl composer? What do you actually get for creating an intelligence that wins a Turing test? You certainly don't get sweaty friends deliriously dancing on drugs at 3 am. You typically just get another social promotion in the direction of aiding greater powers at their control over the world. Is that what it's about? Closing ourselves off from human musical expression in exchange for increased financial standing? Get a job bc you proved you can fool some of them of the time? To validate a work ethic that regards music as frivolous by demonstrating that it can be simulated accurately enough?

It's not obvious that every decent musical piece is a more complex and interesting story than its notes. That every new synthesis engine can only ever interpolate its inputs as opposed to incorporate new ideas and more importantly experiences. Experiences that relate to a person and group. We all have a sublime attraction to the story of Beethoven - to having been giving a profound gift and slowly lost part of it. We look for ourselves in his work, where did he break down? How did he handle his unfortunate circumstances?

We perceive music in terms of passion - what it cost an individual in hours of life, blisters, health, money, dedication, etc. We revere Kurt Cobain for pouring out everything he had into his music. If a computer program wrote "You Know You're Right," and we knew there wasn't actually someone real who "never failed to feel....PAAAAAAAAIN," it wouldn't matter to us. Because we're all diffractions of some crazy spiritual force no one understands, but it seems like music is a form of "interdigiation" between us. So why plug our own listening energy into a random number generator and call it good? With respect to ppl saying, "now we can have acid anywhere, anytime," I say, "dial up great mixes on youtube, etc." There are real DJs who put together songs in streams that have even greater meanings than the individual songs - bc, again, music is more than just individuals, it's a collective act.

And no matter what the tech of the day is, it will always be applied as if it were to be the "final," perfect means of autocomposing - remember fractal music in the 90s? PCA synthesis in the early 2000s? So as a fun programming challenge, i say to people, sure, write these programs. But why must we persist in proclaiming their relevance to our active lives when they only resonate in our thoughts.