Have you seen the movie Immortal Beloved? It's a fictionalized biography of Ludwig von Beethoven. Gary Oldman plays the composer.
As an aside, Oldman should get a lifetime achievement Oscar for just his absolute range: Beethoven in Immortal Beloved, Commissioner Gordon in Batman movies, Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg in The Fifth Element, and Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Wake up, Academy!
Immortal Beloved is an emotional biography, even though it is less true to the facts of Beethoven's life than it might have been. But it shows Beethoven's struggles as he re-invented the symphonic form, while becoming progressively more deaf. And part of the struggle was the need to find — and pay! — an orchestra capable of performing his work.
Now, imagine him transplanted to the 21st century, where cheap wine wasn't sweetened with lead — likely sparing his hearing — and with hearing aids to compensate as he got older, and you have Beethoven composing in his spare bedroom with digital audio workstations (DAWs) and all the modern conveniences.
For all the technology, and all the medical advances that might have saved his hearing, the 9th Symphony would have been the 9th Symphony, and Beethoven would still have been Beethoven.
The truth of composing and performing music is that the technology has always been changing, from the lyre to the pianoforte, and then Bob Moog and Wendy Carlos, and interesting side trips like the beeps and warbles of Louis and Bebe Barron's primitively-synthesized soundtrack to Forbidden Planet, and Raymond Scott's Electronium.
But music has survived.
The music that is performed and has endured shares one enduring characteristic: it was finally the work of a human making choices.
The most recent transformation has been the availability of inexpensive (relatively!) instruments like Spitfire Audio's BBC Symphony Orchestra and EastWest's Hollywood Orchestra Opus Edition. Our Bedroom Beethoven could compose using traditional music notation or with a DAW, and hear it performed in its full orchestration.
For live performances, there are expressive controllers like the ROLI Seaboard Rise 2 and the Haken Continuum. The music composed with modern technology can be performed live, the performer modulating the performance in real-time, like Leonard Bernstein conducting a human orchestra. But all of these are still a method of converting the thoughts of the composer into sound that can be heard somewhere besides the composer's imagination.
It seems the next step in evolution is AI tools like Suno and Udio.
An interesting example has come up in the world of science fiction. Following the publication of her new book No Man's Land, Sarah Hoyt, on a whim, tried Suno to compose songs from characters and situations in her book. The surprise? They turned out pretty well.
No Man's Land, Sarah's three-volume magnum opus (very! three volumes!), and the music she created along with it, turned out to be so popular among her readers that she's now creating a whole soundtrack for the novel.
There are lots of objections to AI music that seem to come down to three.
"It's too easy." Honestly, this objection has been around for centuries with every new instrument or technique. The valve trumpet made trumpets a chromatic instrument — no need for trumpets in different keys. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier was written in part to demonstrate the advantages of tempered tuning to doubters. Valve trumpets and tempering simply expanded the expressive power available to composers.
"It's soulless." The problem with this objection is that AI music is still being created by a person, no matter the technology. It's soulless if the composer is soulless. Garbage in, garbage out — and brilliance in, brilliance out.
"It steals from human artists." This is probably the strongest objection. Spitfire's BBC Orchestra has a storehouse of musical fragments collected from performances by human musicians. But the other side of this is that human musicians learn from others' performances. Beethoven studied Mozart and studied with Haydn.
There is no writing without a writer, a person with consciousness and conscience, intelligence and knowledge, experience and imagination, uncertainty and confidence.
The truth is that AI doesn't replace human composers, or writers, or artists. It gives people more access to create; with music, to create grand works in a way that was once only available to the wealthy or the well-connected.
While it's a common thought that AI will be the end of human creativity, the truth is that humans will always be part of the process. Creators may use DAWs and Suno and their successors, but they will be the ones prompting the tools, and choosing the results. Those results will then be appreciated — or not — by other humans, not by AI music-listeners.
So don't worry about the end of creativity. Follow Sarah Hoyt and a million others, and make your own kind of music.
