The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI

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What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture.

From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll’s modern AI–pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition―along with the condition of living with machines―through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art―and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: “before machine learning, there was machine teaching.”

With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it―and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn’t be the case with AI today.

(This text courtesy of W.W. Norton.)

Excerpt:

There are good reasons for human beings to resist identification with machines of any kind: Machinery is incapable of feeling, and it has no spirit -- no essence that transcends the physical. It lacks the qualities we tend to prize most about our identity as living beings and our place in the grand scheme, as well as we can understand such things. By extension, we're disinclined to look favorably on ways of living and modes of acting connected to machinery or industry. We reject regimentation, and, if we can, avoid dehumanizing labor that reduces us to serving as anonymous elements in an industrial scheme -- like Chaplin's factory worker in Modern Times. (Parallel jobs are still plentiful, with brigades of workers shuffling boxes in Amazon distribution centers.) We don't live in warehouses, factories, or garages; we don't want to be machines.

And yet...there was a period in the second half of the 20th century when a significant number of people united by common bonds of identity took action together in ways long associated with machinery, subverting the tropes of dehumanizing industry to assert their humanity. Gay men of color, in particular -- along with other people who did not conform to traditional sex and gender categories -- gathered late at night in underground locations such as an out-of-business truck garage, an abandoned warehouse, and other disused industrial sites whose provenance in industry was left undisguised. Amassing by the hundreds and the thousands, they danced with their bodies in synchronized motion, jacking to a new kind of music stripped of all niceties to the raw, bare sound of hard-pounding rhythms and electronic noise. They moved in unity with the precision of machine parts and kept moving, nonstop, for hours, and all for a purpose that transcended industry and commerce.

One of the most notable early innovators in this phenomenon was the DJ Larry Levan, a wiry, high-spirited young, occasionally orange-haired Black man from Brooklyn. A former acolyte at an Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, Levan picked up the rudiments of mixing live audio on the church sound system as a boy. Though he dropped out of high school, he took courses in textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he met another gay Black music lover, Frank Nicholls. A former altar boy at a Catholic Church in his native Bronx, Nicholls was a striking visual compliment to Levan: stocky and bearded, an imposing figure who took up a street name more befitting a mob caporegime, Frankie Knuckles. Together, they found their way into New York's ball culture as dressmakers for drag acts, and migrated from there to the Gallery, a gay disco in Chelsea, doing interior decoration. At the Gallery in the early 1970's, house DJ Nicky Siano showed Levan and Knuckles how he used three turntables to keep music spinning in a constant flow, demonstrating the craft with records of R&B, smooth-groove jazz, and the occasional danceable rock track.

The skill Nicky Siano tutored Levan and Knuckles in, DJing, was most overtly one of connoisseurship and curation: applying a nurtured command over a vast body of materials -- records made in multiple genres and styles, including obscurities and the more obscure the better -- to present in sequences both responsive to and stimulating to the dancers at a given time and place. Great DJing called for the having of great taste for the purpose of taste-making. In this, the DJ upended the assumptions in an old joke musicians told about would-be musicians they considered non-musicians: "What does he play?" "The record player."

Beyond the estimable task of curating music for a body of people with refined tastes of their own and little tolerance for the passe or the ill-fitting, DJing demanded proficiency at turntable technique. Indeed, the complex set of ways DJ's manipulated turntables not merely to play music but to remake the music turned the DJs into musical creators. What does he play? For DJ's in both club music and hip-hop, to say, "The turntable" would be to signal mastery at an emerging art form. A machine for playback had become reconceived as an instrument for reinvention.

With the skills in club DJing he picked up from Nicky Siano, Larry Levan talked himself into a job in the tech booth at the Continental Baths -- at first, working the lights, then doing fill-in DJ work -- and Knuckles followed him there. A luxuriously appointed complex in the basement level of the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the Continental Baths had a long pool for wading, swimming, and having sex; a lounge for unwinding over cocktails and having sex; a ballroom area for dancing and having sex; and private rooms for napping between all the sex. There were some live performances -- typically, by young performers between above-ground jobs, like the Broadway understudy Bette Midler and her pianist, Barry Manilow. The primary entertainment, though, was the non-stop music provided by the DJ's: Knuckles doing the warm-up, starting around midnight, then Levan through the night to the morning hours. Working the Baths, Knuckles began to develop a signature approach to curation, building mixes of richly textured Philly soul tracks and disco, while Levan worked up a diva act behind the board, miming and swooning to the music.

By 1977, Larry Levan was a rising DJ star invited to be the main act at a new club, the Paradise Garage, opening in an abandoned parking garage in the industrial fringe of the West Village -- a rusting area with little residential housing, taken up by gay men and others with fluid, open, or socially transgressive approaches to identity. In the years between the Stonewall uprising in June, 1969, and the first reports of a mysterious contagion not yet identified as HIV/AIDS, in 1981, the community that would one day be known as LGBTQ was actively engaged in becoming a community, and much of that activity was taking place on the dance floors of clubs like the Paradise Garage -- spaces where people who had long been forced to hide could come together as a body and take pleasure in each other's company. From that pleasure grew pride. At the Garage, some 1,400 people per night could dance together, expressing in unison movements to persistent beats that they were united and had the strength to persevere. (And 1,400 was merely the legal capacity of the space. On busy nights, which by the end of the Seventies meant most nights of the week, the club was stuffed beyond capacity, with shirtless, sweating bodies of gay men, the majority of them men of color, pressed against each other.)

The music propelling them boomed at rocket-blast force from a custom-built sound system, with Larry Levan spinning the tracks, seamlessly fading one into the next: James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" into Kraftwerk's "The Robots" into Loleatta Holloway's "Hit and Run" into Donna Summer's "I Feel Love"... Levan soon learned how to edit tracks onto open-reel tape and extend the breaks, so what were once short transitional passages of drums and bass became songs of their own -- a new kind of song without song structure, the music reduced to its rhythmic core. He was doing the same kind of thing that pioneering hip-hop DJ's were doing in the Bronx, but with no one rapping and adding words to compliment and complicate the music.

"At the Garage, I felt like I was a part of something more powerful than myself," wrote Christopher Vaughn, who worked in marketing for General Electric. "At the office, I was the only Black man and one of a tiny handful of gay people. I felt powerless. At night, with the music blasting through us, every one of us there felt empowered. In my job, I would sit through meetings with engineers explaining how electronic technology worked. I wanted to say, 'Honey, you don't know! Come with me, and I'll show you what it's like to be part of a machine."

Advance Praise:

David Hajdu is the rare sort of critic whose deep intelligence and even deeper humanity can challenge or rearrange even the most deeply held positions about culture. I thought I knew how I felt about AI, artifice, authenticity, the so-called machine condition and its relationship to art. The Uncanny Muse made me rethink all of it. A miraculous book, written with extraordinary grace. -Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell At Any Price and pop music critic, The New Yorker

Into a moment when AI’s troubling role in the present and future of artistic creation rules the discourse, David Hajdu’s The Uncanny Muse brings an exciting and essential sense of history, perspective, and boundless curiosity. -Mark Harris, author of Mike Nichols: A Life

A timely, richly informative, and beautifully written inquiry into the origins of ‘computational creativity,’ framed in the historical context of human creativity and our many mechanical muses. -John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory

We humans have always had a deep fascination with mechanical objects and an equally deep urge to create art. David Hajdu skillfully brings these two strands together in a work of elegant synthesis, revealing a deep understanding of what makes us and our machines tick and our art sing. -Daniel J. Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music

Fascinating. The result of David Hajdu’s extensive research, interviews, and expert journalism is a cornucopia of ideas involving art, music, machines, computers, and AI, excitingly interspersed with personal interviews of many of the key innovators still living. Curiosity and creativity combine in this fine accomplishment. - A. Michael Noll, pioneer in computer art and professor emeritus, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC

David Hajdu, one of our most important arts and cultural critics, confronts one of the most divisive aesthetic issues facing us today. . . . What, in the end, Hajdu forces us to ask ourselves, does it mean to sound human? -Robert P. Crease, chair, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, and author of The Workshop and the World: What Ten Thinkers Can Teach Us About Science and Authority

David Hajdu has tapped into something vital. This very engaging book places art and music at the center of our long history of collaboration with machines, reaffirming the importance of situating the human spirit at the center of today’s artificial intelligence efforts. -George E. Lewis, innovator in AI composition and Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Columbia University

Tracing how mechanics has long tinkered with our imaginations, from clocks and cameras to Steinways, player pianos, microphones, Moogs, and beyond, Hajdu’s tantalizingly brief book coasts on that Elvis quote, ‘Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.’ A thought bomb on every page. -Tim Riley, author of Lennon and music critic, NPR

Reviews:

The rise of ChatGPT and other AI-driven creation tools has spiked anxiety about machines cannibalizing, perhaps even overtaking, human creativity. But as longtime music historian Hajdu (Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, 2016, etc.) points out in this lively book, machinery and art have long been closely intertwined. In the late 1800s automata produced music and drawings, and throughout the 20th century devices emerged as experimental novelties and practical helpmates to artists: Bell Labs explored computer-generated drawing in the 1960s, the Moog synthesizer transformed the texture of rock music, and ’80s techno reflected how people “were using machines to produce sounds to stir people to move like components in a machine—a machine of social transformation.” Hajdu doesn’t make a precise distinction between art created entirely by computers and cases in which humans leverage technology to create art—an AI-generated painting that sold for $432,500 at auction in 2018 is not the same thing as, say, the German synth-rock act Kraftwerk. But Hajdu thoughtfully explores how the arrival of new technology has prompted handwringing. (Though not always: The Hammond B3 keyboard was warmly embraced by Black soul and gospel acts for its efficient evocation of an organ.) “The fear of machines taking over for humans is one of the great constants in the history of technology, and it is equally easy to inflate or dismiss,” he writes. A more cohesive thesis about the degree to which concerns are legitimate might offer a path for readers to think about potential and ethical risks of AI and other technologies. But Hajdu is at heart a humanist, and he suggests that the disruptive technologies themselves don’t spell doomsday but are, in themselves, works of art. Wide-ranging, thought-provoking music history. -Kirkus Reviews