“To me musical instruments are the best user interfaces that have ever been invented”: Why the founding father of virtual reality isn’t convinced by AI music generatorsFew topics dominate the global conversation right now quite like AI. Some hail its ability to improve workflow and efficiency, with many music tech brands implementing AI features in their products with the aim to improve the quality of life of their users.
Others, however, are more fearful, and worried that AI music generators, for example, may dilute the potency of human-made art.

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Taking the listener out of the equation for a second, though, and focusing purely on AI music generators as opposed to tools to aid the creative process, should we really be worried?
One person you should probably be listening to is Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley veteran, Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft, founding father of virtual reality and a long-time key voice in the AI conversation.
He’s also a dedicated multi-instrumentalist and musician, and last year spoke with Brian Greene of World Science Festival about his thoughts on the potential of AI music tools.
Asked whether he had explored these tools to explore music composition, and whether there’s potential in them for utility and creativity, Lanier replies: “For me, no.”
He explains: “The reason why is I’m actually going totally in the opposite direction. To me, musical instruments are the best user interfaces that have ever been invented. If what you think a technology is for is to help a person affect the world with ever greater acuity, then musical instruments are the most advanced technologies that have ever existed.
“So what I’m trying to do is to make computers more like them – the other direction seems absurd to me.”
“When you play an instrument,” he continues, “you start to get this connection where you’re getting a lot of intent and data out there. It’s not just a question of the volume of data, it’s the focus and the acuity. It can be really remarkable.
“The control a violinist has over the string and the bow is, by some measures, close to quantum limit on occasion. It’s this very intense thing.
“And so what I want is for computers to be more like that. I want computers to be expressive machines that people can connect to with their whole bodies, with their whole nervous systems, with their whole cognition with ever more subtlety and ever more acuity.
“So to me the instruments have so much more to teach the computers than the other direction.”

So does the future include not AI tools that essentially do our composition for us, but technology which allows us to play music more expressively and intuitively than even what’s available today can?
To be quite honest, I have yet to hear an AI-generated piece of music that genuinely touches me, or evokes a significant emotional response. Perhaps where AI music generators will excel is in background music; lo-fi beats to work to, or more formulaic types of dance music.
It’s hard to predict the future, but at its core, music is a vehicle through which humans convey ideas via sonic art to other humans, so it’s hard to believe that more visceral forms of music like rock, metal, or even country are truly endangered, by current AI tools, at least.
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