<em>Steampunk kitty makes music, image generated by the art-crippled author using Adobe Firefly.</em>
Before we get started, first, an apology. In the original article, I hid this important passage at the end. Big mistake! I suspect it will take time for the world to catch up with the wonderful music that Ramesha references, perhaps even centuries. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it now.
Where will music go next? Where can it go? No one seems to know. But I believe the music of the future is here already. No one expresses it better than Ramesha Nani, co-director of Ananda Music. If you despair for the future of the arts, please watch – cancel that, I beg you to watch – this video, where he tells the story of his life with the Ananda music, and his experiences sharing it not only within the Ananda world but, for example, at a sophisticated Vine Street cafe in Hollywood, at farmers markets, and in public parks. Enjoy: Ananda Music History ¦ Ramesha Nani.
Here are examples of the music Ramesha talks about. The performers in the small groups are four experienced singers, sitting around a kitchen table, making magic with their voices with no help from Auto-Tune.
The ensemble singers are (L-R):
Bhagavati Nani (professional flautist)
Ramesha Nani (singer, violinist, singing teacher: Vocal Bliss)
David Eby (singer, professional cellist and teacher: David Eby Music)
Jeannie Tschantz (singer and harpist)
The singers currently live at Ananda Village. The songs were composed by Swami Kriyananda.
Peace (choir)
Brothers (choir)
What Is Love? (choir)
Hello There Brother Bluebell (quartet)
Lord, May We Serve You (quartet)
Praise Ye the Lord (quartet )
Thy Light Within Us Shining (trio)
Now then, this will be a ramble, although I believe that in the end it will knit together to make solid good sense. Can AI replace human creativity? We will take a tour through the lives and accomplishments of a handful of extraordinarily successful figures on the creative and business sides of the arts. If they inspire us, I think we should ask ourselves if the value of their art and their lives could be improved by digital machinery. Art communicates through vibration. Standing before the paintings of Fra Angelico, Rembrandt, or Monet, what moves us is their consciousness. AI will never have consciousness, regardless of the dreams of futurists and sci-fi writers. At any rate, I invite you to reflect on what you feel in the presence of these creative people.
I was amused recently by a YouTube video, “Why AI is Tech’s Latest Hoax.”
Amused, because I witnessed the dot-com bust of 2001, and I knew from the start that the dot-coms were a gasbag. Dot-com companies wanted us to buy digital services that were phonier than a three-dollar bill. Yet they believed in what they were doing, because they were intoxicated by the promise of sudden wealth.
When the dot-com dust settled, a sure instinct told me that the burble over Big Data was baloney, and that it, too, was born of gaseous visions of shiny shekels.
The dot-coms and Big Data helped hardly anyone, beyond the venture capitalists who tiptoed away giggling after they cashed out and scampered off ahead of the inevitable crash.
The “hoax” video argues that AI is just another whooped-up tech balloon, inflated by vain hopes and empty promises. It’s the latest cash grab by the Sandhill Road venture dudes who’ll lope away once again smirking when their over-valued babies are born.
I recently enjoyed a YouTube conversation with Carol Kaye, a legendary studio bass guitarist. The video is wonderful beyond any musical or historical merits. Kaye’s humanity infuses the conversation as a natural, warm-hearted radiance that she projects without conscious intent. (I wrote about her previously: Every Artist’s Friend — Good Vibrations with Electric Bassist Carol Kaye.)
Kaye talks about the silent dialogue of feeling that happens when musicians and audiences share a communion of hearts. Kaye emits those feelings even when she isn’t playing. During the interview, she holds a guitar or bass on her lap and plays brief lines to illustrate her points; but she radiates good music even when she’s just talking.
The thought occurs that her presence witnesses the benefits of long practice in the arts. I’ve happily returned to the video to renew my understanding that doing art with pure intent and positive energy can help make us inwardly beautiful and give us access to a higher part of ourselves. (In the video, Carol talks about the spiritual side of music at around 42 minutes.)
I’m always delighted when I discover stories of people whose lives reflect the rewards of a generous spirit. I’m thinking of three videos in particular: “Bill Cunningham New York” (Netflix), “Inventing David Geffen” (Netflix) and “Hitsville: The Making of Motown” (MAX Channel on Amazon Prime).
I can watch those stories again happily, although I’m sure they may not hold the same appeal for others – it’s just that they serve me well in the present chapter of my inner expansion.
My spiritual teacher hinted that my future spiritual growth would come through involvement in the arts. I believe I was guided to the videos because they show me that it’s possible to participate in the arts in a way that increases our generous instincts and strengthens our ability to serve.
<em>Photo: from the conversation</em>
Carol Kaye isn’t only a wonderful bassist; she’s an admirable person. She took up music at 13, and before long was able to make enough money from teaching and playing nightclub gigs to help support her mother, and later to raise her own three children. She taught more than 5,000 students.
David Geffen didn’t just become the most powerful figure in Hollywood. He gave $200 million to UCLA for AIDS research, and he gave his DreamWorks profits to his charitable foundation. (Geffen founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg.)
Geffen’s career was built largely upon a desire to help artists, and not merely to squeeze their music for every possible penny for himself. He was interested in money, for sure; eight years after he took a job in the mail room at the William Morris talent agency in New York, he had sold two companies and had $10 million.
<em>DreamWorks founders Geffen, Katzenberg, and Spielberg</em>
He wanted money, but he had reached a point in his soul’s journey where he knew, with a clear inner certainty, that he was happiest when he helped others. It’s why he and Elliot Roberts started Asylum Records in 1971, to rescue musicians from the big record companies that were making millions off their work while keeping their rights and paying them a pittance.
Berry Gordy created Motown for essentially the same reason – so that singers, songwriters, and musicians could receive a fair return for their labors. He created an environment that was based on fierce but friendly competition, where any artist was free to help the others. The artists loved it, and Gordy never lost his ability to smile.
<em>Motown founder Berry Gordy with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lena Horne, and Billy Taylor (UCLA Image Files)<br /></em>
Motown’s music had a tremendous impact on American culture. When Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Detroit, he made it a special point to come to Motown and tell Berry Gordy that he wanted Motown to be part of his movement, because the music had done more for racial harmony in America than his political and religious efforts had managed to accomplish.
Bill Cunningham accepted no salary for the two New York Times fashion columns he wrote for 27 years, because he felt that taking money would give the Times too much control over his work. He only accepted a salary toward the end of his life, when he needed medical insurance.
<em>Bill Cunningham during Fashion Week, photographed by Jiyang Chen (Wikimedia Commons)</em>
At the conclusion of the AI hoax video, the narrator refers to the shoddy visual images produced by AI, which lack human feeling, inspiration, or artistic taste.
As a word nerd, I reckon I should be afraid that AI, including ChatGPT, will kill my business. But I’m not worried, because I’ve learned to access a source of creative inspiration through portals that are built into my being, and I know the art of tapping its flow.
When I’m editing a book or an article, and I’m stumped for the right word, I know that if I ask for it with humble and impersonal, detached receptivity, it’ll be there. This is true whether I’m working on a book for my spiritual teacher’s publishing company, or I’m copy-editing a trade magazine on home appliances for a friend who’s the magazine’s publisher.
The stereotypical middle-manager mind loves technology that helps it feel acceptably average. It fears creative expression. Woe betide the individual who sticks his head above the herd. It loves AI because it writes like an encyclopedia. It’s average, factual, and has no embarrassing juice and swing. When AI is widely adopted, everything will sound the same, with all the oomph of middle gray. When robots do the talking, only robots will take pleasure in the words.
I welcome AI, because dumbed-down writing gives me a clear competitive advantage. The abysmal state of language arts education in America has been wonderful for my business. My clients aren’t looking for average.
Carol Kaye expresses her disgust with the state of music. More than 2,000 new songs are published daily, virtually all churned out with help from digital technology. Nowadays a “singer” can mutter off-key lyrics into a recorder and let plugins like Auto-Tune turn the words into music of a sort.
Carol Kaye believes that people are sick of it. She relates how, after 9/11, the BS stopped momentarily, as filmmakers began scoring their movies with sounds from a time when real instruments were played and real voices sang.
Kaye believes the corrective may come from Latin music, which insists on feelings that can’t be digitally aped, and that Latin artists value too highly to want to try. While it’s possible to jump and jerk to the bit/bot boogaloo, I doubt many of us would contemplate marrying our Roombas.
I welcome AI in my work as a utility photographer, because it can remove power lines and high-ISO noise from my photos with a click. I also welcome its potential for creating hilariously ugly images, because I adore comic absurdity in the arts. I understand why George Harrison wistfully opined that the Beatles should have gotten together with Monty Python and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, because they’d have had such fun.
BORING TECH ADVISORY: The following paragraph will induce drowsiness; do not read while driving a motor vehicle or operating heavy machinery. There are technologies that can actually help us reveal the inner beauty of a human face in a photograph. I’m thinking of a handful of special lenses that include the Canon EF 135mm F/2 L. Other beautiful lenses are the EF 35mm F/1.4 L series, and quite surprisingly, the EF 70-200mm F/2.8 L IS II USM, which when paired with a humble beginner’s camera like the Canon R50 can make startlingly lovely portraits. These technical marvels are different from AI, because they don’t create or distort reality; they emphasize it tastefully.
At 82, I’m licensed by the culture into which I was born to say the word “swell.” I emerged from the womb in 1942, a time when the whole world was at war yet everyone sang. Perhaps, as Carol Kaye believes, it was the music that bound people together and helped them win the conflict.
I was eight in 1950 when the Weavers recorded “Good Night, Irene,” a song that became a number-one hit despite gritty lyrics by Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. It was the lilt of the delicious melody that helped it set new records for public singing.
<em>Swami Kriyananda</em>
Our culture now dictates that only the professionals are allowed to sing. It’s an awful state of affairs. Even the rockers are wondering where the music went.
I’m pleased that I can still say “swell” and that I’ve landed among a global community of friends who daily tap a source of unbounded laughter and song within.
Swami Kriyananda was unshaken by trials and unmoved by worldly delights. He gave us four hundred songs for whose creation he took not the slightest credit, because he said that he had received them from a higher source – songs that we can sing sincerely, with inspiration, in a spirit of innocent appreciation and openhearted joy.
— Rambhakta
Visit the Ananda Music Channel on YouTube.
Also: “How AI Will Slowly Destroy the Music Business.” Pop music observer Rick Beato predicts the pending implosion.
Want to compose a bad song using AI? Let Roomie Official show you how! I Tried to Write a Hit Song in 60 Minutes.