The Unreasonable Silence

Why AI isn’t going to replace creatives.

On 21 July 2024

I’m definitely feeling a current mood amongst creatives that AI isn’t really adding anything to the mix. At the moment, the technology seems to be like a small baby taking its first clumsy steps. We are amused for 10 seconds at the novelty of the most powerful learning machine in the world, but can’t help worrying about the potential of what that new entity will become. I guess the question for all of us, is where will we sit in a world where we will be able to summon the output of all the world’s most talented artists at the click of a mouse or voice instruction? I think history may show us the way.

Technology is there to make difficult tasks easier. We were promised that AI would do the difficult, tedious, labour intensive, jobs that sap our time and energy. But instead we are the ones stuck doing the chores and AI is doing the fun stuff. This can’t be sustainable. History would suggest that when a technology alters our lives so completely for the better, it enjoys almost complete adoption, but the past will stubbornly remain if we feel we will lose something.

AI is making some of our lives better but at the moment, also worse. This will lead it to a situation where many of us will utterly reject it in all its forms. Art is about the struggle, our interaction with basic materials, paint, canvas, sound, musical instruments.. It teaches us to enjoy the process, not be fixated by the output. That’s something that just occurs when the artistic endeavour ends.

There are some of us that persist in using older technologies because we don’t believe the replacement is a worthy successor. Classic cars, vinyl, CDs, mechanical watches, guitars. The craft, the materials, the form are revered and hence preserved over and above the newer supposedly better replacements.

Scientists, engineers and philosophers have already predicted that AI will become so powerful that everything we know will eventually be controlled by a super being entity. At some point they will transgress being simply software and hardware and being organic synthetics, and then into elemental all knowing forces free from the constraints of bodily form. We need to hope they are benevolent.

However to make that transition they need our input, to feed from our knowledge, to understand the values we hold dear.

As long as there are still enough of us that value art and the process of making it, things might be OK.

(Image: Leonardo AI created with the prompt, “A brain generating thoughts about the future.”)

Neuroplasticity for Musicians

By tus-admin

On 18 July 2024

In Music, Self Improvement

I want to talk to you about Neuroplasticity. It’s the phenomena of the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to repetitive stimuli. We are maybe more familiar with talking about our subconscious, the part of our brain that has been ‘programmed’ and acts immediately without thought, well neuroplasticity describes the brain’s incredible ability to rewire itself in response to repetitive training. This is really important for musicians. Imagine trying to play a guitar if you had no memory of the song but also had to consciously think about where to put your fingers on the fretboard. There certainly wouldn’t be much chance of playing anything more complicated than a few notes per bar. I’ve been playing guitar now for nearly 40 years but I can still vividly remember the cognitive effort of trying to work out which fingers go where. If you want to re-live that experience, try playing a guitar the opposite way. I used to wonder why as a right handed player why my right hand was so utterly useless trying to fret anything on a left handed guitar but yet as a keyboard player my right hand is 20x faster more dexterous than my left. There’s no physical difference in the flexibility or muscles, it’s just down neuroplasticity, how the brain is wired and how you’ve trained it.

So here’s the exciting bit…. once you realise the brain is elastic and can be rewired, you can do really amazing things with it.

If like me you’ve also wondered why you’ve been playing for long but you can’t play anything better then you did when you were in your 20s, then don’t blame old age or ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks’, it’s just that you relying on ‘replay’ from your brain and not spending enough time in ‘record’. You just forgot how to learn. Give yourself a challenge. Write your next solo without using a single one of your favourite techniques that you keep going back to and replaying like a broken record. Learn a solo from another player, then you will realise how prescriptive and limited your own playing is.

It works with any creative endeavour. I’ve written so many songs now that my neural pathways are tuned to finding a route through writing one without thinking about it. This is also dangerous because it’s the reason why many songwriters just end up putting different lyrics to the same four chords. They simply don’t notice because it’s what they’ve always done. Other song writers spot it instantly though.

But when it works for you it’s amazing. I’ve recently been hammering my brain with studio time trying to get this album finished. On playing back a certain section of a song I was mixing for the umpteenth time, it struck me I had no conscious memory of writing any of that music. To me it felt like it had been written by someone else and I’d been possessed by some other worldly creative force. The exciting bit for me is that I didn’t recognise the style I was playing in. It felt entirely alien to me, in a good way. A lot of musicians describe their work writing songs in a spiritual way, as being some sort of conduit where they are gifted a song from the ether and they just channel it into reality. I love that view of it, but I think it also demeans their own talent which is that they’ve spent hours, days, months, years, decades rewiring their brain to make song writing seem that unconscious and effortless.

As a post script to this, you will of heard of musicians being gifted songs and music in their dreams. Paul McCartney famously created Let It Be from a dream about his Mum. Somehow last night my brain had managed to create an entire new piano section for a song I was working on late in the studio. I can remember some of the chords I was playing whilst asleep, but sadly there’s just not enough detail there to recall into reality.

A Collective Dream

By tus-admin

On 16 June 2024

In Random Thoughts

Do you remember back in the late 70s and 80s that we seemed to have an overwhelming appetite for the mysteries of the universe? Ghosts, paranormal activity, spontaneous human combustion (remember that?). UFOs, crop circles. All these things were huge in the zeitgeist of the era, but now are much less now prevalent. I believe our deepest fears are often played out in the media we create. Art and music are like a collective dream we all have, which gets worked out in creative endeavour, film, TV, music, the arts. We have an overwhelming urge to explore in art, that which troubles our minds.

Back in victorian times, people were obsessed with magic and communicating with the spirit world. Did this speak of a generation that lived repressed, hard and sometimes short lives? A life half lived perhaps? Then no wonder they fantasised about a secret world that could possibly offer immortality.

In the 70s we became obsessed with visitors from another planet. Films like ‘Close Encounters…’ defined the box office, then we had Star Wars, ET, all alluding to dreams of a better society, of alien beings showing us the folly of our ways, and how to be more tolerant to others that didn’t look like us.

So where now? The volume of content to available to watch and listen to has multiplied by huge factors. Choice is much larger, we aren’t watching or listening to the same things anymore and every taste is catered for, most of it available for free.

If we can learn anything from the most popular content on say Netflix in the last 10 years, then it’s that we are currently obsessed with escapist fantasy, worlds we recognise but which are clearly not ours. The imagery is dream like, often absurd. We are maybe living lives so impossible that our subconscious minds want a playground that evades reality, even if the brutality depicted there is far worse and more dangerous than we experience in the real world.

I think in another 50 years we will have achieved a sense of detachment so profound that facts will have lost their importance. The only truth for many will be what you believe it to be. This is possibly scarier than anything we can depict.

Why the ‘Merryneum’ isn’t actually a waste of time.

By tus-admin

On 29 December 2023

In Random Thoughts, Self Improvement

I hope you all had a great Christmas, and those of you lucky enough not to have to get straight back to work are enjoying this period of ‘Merryneum’. It’s a strange time in the calendar between Christmas and new year where the nation goes into some sort of weird parallel universe, lamenting the loss of excitement of Christmas but with trepidation of what the new year brings. My daughter calls it ChrimboLimbo. Some choose to fill the void with retail therapy, others fill it with TV binging. Then there are folk like me that really relish the unplugged feeling that time has somehow stopped in a Matrix style sequence where the film pauses, but you can still move around in some sort of new found freedom with more time to take in the view.

Literally at the turning of the day from Halloween, the shops were filled with Christmas fayre and now it’s barely hours before every supermarket in Britain will be unveiling their Easter offerings. Literally no one needs this except the shareholders of retail empires.. We are brain-washed into thinking it is necessary to spend 2 or 3 months preparing for something that lasts 2 days and it’s almost impossible for any of that actual reality to live up expectations. What we hope might happen is some sort of perfect yuletide experience of a lifetime, all rolled into a ‘best bits of Christmas’ compilation album. We put ourselves under ridiculous pressure to either put on the best show or make the best of someone else’s.

I love Christmas but I think I’d enjoy it even more if I wasn’t constantly being fed expectations over an extended period of how it should be. I guess this is what the ancients would describe as failing to live in the moment. In our efforts to plan the perfect time, we’ve completely missed the experience and the point. I think this is why I particularly enjoy the Merryneum. There are literally no expectations of what I should do, what the outcome should be, or whether even anything productive should result. It’s brilliant when something does, but equally I don’t feel too guilty when nothing happens at all, and I can spend quality time doing nothing. It’s kind of a Daoist principle. Once you get out of the way or more pertinently, remove your expectations of what should or shouldn’t be done, life flows. Often when relieved of any pressure to achieve anything, some of my best creative thinking comes out, music, lyrics, concepts, life changing revelations, crazy plans for the future and nostalgic trips back to past times. I’ve been rewarded this time with the practical inspiration to build the mother of all garage workbenches and will hopefully get in a lot more reading time, something I’ve massively neglected. Whatever you do, I’d urge you not to feel guilty about some notion that it’s a waste of time. Let your mind go where it needs to be. All the doors leading to exciting places, are on the wall not in the middle of the room, and sometimes we can’t see the exits because of all the furniture…

Parallel Lines

By tus-admin

On 27 November 2023

In Random Thoughts

We are all aboard a train. Some of those people riding on the same train as you become friends, some you really don’t like and you move seats to another carriage. Lots of other people are doing the same as you and eventually you find that you’ve settled in seats with a group of people that you get on with and you like spending time with.

But then there is another train and it is running on different tracks than yours. The only reason you know about this train is that you have a special timetable that lets you know about all the other trains running around on different tracks in the world. Sometimes the train will stop at a station and in some random moment in time, your train will stop at the same time as another one. On that train is a stranger, they get off and so do you, and you chat on the platform and get on well. Then it’s time for one or other train to leave, and you say your goodbyes and continue your journey, settling back in your familiar seat in your favourite carriage.

You ponder that you’ve found a new friend and wonder when and if you will ever see them again. You travel on and at some future point the train stops again at a different station. Once again your new friend is there and you greet and catch up with each other’s journeys. Alas, time is against you and you depart and once again and return to your seat. The carriage has new people in it now, but more sadly some of the people you really liked have gone. You hear that they moved to another carriage, and some got off the train and boarded a different one. This repeats and repeats…

The friendship with the stranger runs in slow motion, almost as if the train was travelling faster than the speed of light. When you step off you are presented with your friend as you left them a few minutes or hours ago, even though for you, time had travelled on months or years…

I seem to have many of these time travelling friends. I reconnected with some old ones recently. After years, well actually decades of travelling on different tracks, we managed to coincide our journeys to arrive at the same station. It was like we hadn’t left each other 30 years ago, we carried on where we left off, although all of us had been on our own very long journey in all that time.

But what of the friends you occasionally meet on the platform. To you, the friendship runs at the most frustratingly slow pace or maybe never progresses beyond the same cycle of exchanging pleasantries and catching up with each others journeys. You can’t help but think what could be if they were on your train or you were on theirs, and you also wonder if you should just stop consulting the timetable to see when their train will arrive in the station at the same time as yours..

What we should learn from celebrity deaths.

By tus-admin

On 29 October 2023

In Random Thoughts, Self Improvement

Every time someone well known or well loved dies and I see such a strong sentiment of loss, I’m reminded to learn about that person and find out why their lives were so impactful. Then I ask what would I leave behind? What is our own legacy and story, something that will mean a lot to more than a few people?.

Think about this carefully. Money won’t score here as it will only help an immediate few family members. Your property portfolio, your investments, your cars, the 100s of holidays you’ve enjoyed, the tons and gallons of food and drink you’ve consumed won’t be remembered. Neither will how many reps you did in the gym or how many cosmetic procedures you had done, although these might have been tools to help you achieve something that would be remembered.

Your legacy is what counts here and in particular, how your life touched someone elses. Raising and teaching your kids, the charity work you’ve done, the therapy work where you literally put someone’s life back on course, the people who’s lives you changed by just being here…and doing your thing. The music you made and left behind…The TV and films that you produced. This is the stuff transcends death and time.

What’s really fascinating to me about Matthew Perry’s story is not the drugs he took, nor the money he made, but that he put a Matthew Perry shaped dent into human culture, a legacy where his character will be remembered in a pantheon of TV entertainment. But also that despite his own considerable demons, he spent so much of his time helping others with the same issues as him.

If you are struggling for a meaning to life then your answer I think is presented by those who have given it a meaning. Some people think it’s just there to be enjoyed, some believe it’s a commitment to service or duty, but for me, I need to follow an urge to leave a positive mark. I’m not asking for Matthew Perry levels of recognition, that, as it was for him would be a curse, but just leaving a world that has benefitted from you being there is surely an amazing thing. I think we should try to put our time into that, because that surely means the most.

Why many new artists struggle to get anywhere with their music…

By tus-admin

On 10 October 2023

In Music

I’ve been recently reading about this concept of ‘Priming’ in relation to psychology, and how we all unconsciously respond to marketing around us. Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. It has a particular relevance for any artist trying to get interest in their music because we are all ‘primed’ to take the most interest when our favourite artist releases anything new.

Imagine two artists presenting the exact same album, literally the same songs, same singer, same band, same audio. One is released by a high profile artist that we know, the second is released by a completely unknown artist. Each is given the exact same marketing budget, is promoted on the same platforms, with the same advertising copy. It will be no surprise that the high profile artist will enjoy much greater interest, and will generally receive more engagement. Less surprising is that they will also receive much more negative criticism… The reason for this is that the audience has been primed with an expectation of how that music should sound. The reality may not meet their expectations. There are other priming influences; People will respond generally when they know other people will respond, a rolling snowball of engagement fuelled by feedback from others… The signal to purchase will be much stronger because people are primed to respond to similar buying signals when others do the same. There is a reason that people buy more band merchandise at gigs, this is priming in action.

The unknown artist will present their same album to an empty room. Much like an exhibition stand at a sales conference, the lack of interest, will fail to create any more interest. With no existing priming information, there is no reason even to walk over and investigate, no reason to click the link and hear the music. When you understand that people need to be primed to act, the way the marketing world works starts make sense, why large organisations spend millions putting logos in weird places with seemingly no context about the product they are selling. They are seeding primes… At the mere mention of the artist name, will have a view of what we think about them. This dictates all our future responses to anything they have to sell or promote.

When the product comes, we will all respond..or not..

Ignoring the fuel gauge – How your life will improve when you stop counting the days.

By tus-admin

On 25 September 2023

In Self Improvement

Confucius said “We have two lives and the second one starts when we realise we only have one”.

There comes a turning point in your outlook I think, when you have this realisation that the days in front of you are less than the days behind. Then I found there is another turning point sometime after that when you realise it’s not a good idea to count the days like that. I spent some time with my Dad recently who is in his late 70s and in rude health. I realised he was thoroughly enjoying his life and that enjoyment wasn’t coming from staring at the fuel of gauge of life and thinking I’ve got less than a quarter of a tank left, best make the most of it.

He’d made a new fuel gauge, one that is calibrated over the remaining quarter. Either that or he’d dismissed any notion of there being a gauge at all, which is even better.

So I think this notion of living your best days because there aren’t many left isn’t helpful. It’s better just to live, and I mean live in the active sense not a passive, ‘I’m just existing’, one. I can refine that further by saying I’m much more intolerant now of wasting time. If I spend my energy on something it’s got to pass a few tests.

1- Does it fulfil me?

2- Does it help fulfil someone else?

3- Does it sustain my resources to do 1 or 2?

I’ve also realised that success and achievement are highly overrated. Really bad things happen to successful people that only live for achievement. When they get to whatever goal they’ve set themselves, their lives suddenly become very empty, and dangerous things start to fill the void.. That’s what The Man Left In Space was all about.

Better to be fulfilled on the journey…which is why I’ve started writing music again.

A Musician’s guide to self worth.

By tus-admin

On 2 April 2023

In Music, Random Thoughts

I was asked recently about self worth as a musician and how to maintain it. I’m probably the worst person to ask as in many cases I’ve utterly failed to find it on many occasions. But like losing your car keys for hours and then suddenly finding them, I can at least offer some insight into what I’ve done to restore the equilibrium. I think the present landscape presents a fairly bleak outlook for any musician, but that’s not to say it’s hopeless. The problem is we are approaching the end of a unique and golden time in the history of the music industry, the era of the recording artist. It’s nearly done, over, and many of us are struggling to see the transition into something else.

A key tenet of maintaining any sort of self worth is to feel valued in what you do. So how do you remain valued when the world largely is increasingly indifferent to your art…. Music is now free right? I’ll aways remember an old work colleague saying to me once, when I told him that I was leaving the corporate world and was going to spent more time on my music career, he asked me to ‘send a copy of the album because I never pay for music…’ There was no joke or laugh at the end of his sentence, he was deadly serious and had no reason to suspect I would refuse such a generous offer of his interest in my labours. This was a nice guy who I’d worked with for many years who had just told me straight that he thought what I would be doing was utterly worthless to him in financial terms even though he was a music fan. If I’d offered to clear his gutters or change a tap washer for him he’d have got his wallet out and paid much more than the cost of a CD with no issue.

And there you have it. Self worth for musicians in one nugget. If the world doesn’t value you, you have no option but to do that for yourself.

Self-worth is one of the most elusive currencies in the music industry though. We are judged by how many streams we make, how many records we sell, how many people we played to… how many awards we have won.. In commercial terms, it’s a numbers game. When we do find a tiny fleck of success, it’s often fragile and fleeting. Even if you are successful, the world will judge the success of your next output by the metric of the previous one.

We are judged, scrutinised..We’re often bombarded with messages online that tell us we’re not good enough. We’re told that we need to sound like this artist, or that we need to play this genre, or that we need to do this to be successful. Then we are wrapped up in the game. We’re constantly comparing ourselves to other musicians and measuring our worth against external standards that have nothing to do with our own unique musical voice. He plays better than me, she’s got a better voice than me. He’s more confident on stage than me…We can also be defeated by our own expectations.

Seeking self-worth can be the foundation of a fulfilling musical journey. It’s the belief that we are valuable and deserving of respect, appreciation, and recognition simply because we have the courage to share our music with the world. It’s the understanding that our worth as musicians is not determined by external measures of success, such as the number of likes on our social media pages, the amount of money we make, or the size of our fanbase. Our worth is determined by our passion for music, our dedication to our craft, and our ability to connect with others through our art.

I’ve been doing this a while now, 9 Cosmograf albums and 10,000 hours of work. I still have the same enthusiasm to make and share music but the urgency of seeing my work in print and press has diminished somewhat…

In the early days I’d be seeking that external validation from reviews and comments, but now it’s more about what the music means to me. I’m also now slowing down on the output. An album release nearly every year was too demanding and to be honest I’ve no desire at all to repeat myself just to keep people happy.

Self worth means for me deciding that I want to do other things too, fulfilling personal projects and maybe things that will actually pay the bills. I’m also enjoying producing other bands, and musicians. Helping them out on their own musical journey is incredibly rewarding.

Some of us may decide that being a full time musician just isn’t realistic anymore and there’s no shame in that, none at all. Things have changed out of our control and you have to adapt. Being realistic and realising that you need to do other things to make money is definitely one of the best things you can do to protect your self worth.

Music will always be there for me, but I’ve consciously chosen to separate the art of making music from the expectation of being paid a living wage from it. There are easier ways to do that…and I’m working hard on those too. Touring isn’t featuring in this plan I’m afraid. There will be a few shows for sure, but I have no appetite for walking that perilous financial tightrope.

In some ways I’ve achieved the best solution. I am free to express myself as an artist without the pressure of making that output pay. This might mean I may move in unexpected creative directions as a result. I hope you’ll carry on listening…

Trigger’s Broom

By tus-admin

On 10 March 2023

In Music, Random Thoughts

And the paradox of prog fans that won’t accept change…

Those of you based in the UK may have a fond memory for a certain UK sitcom called ‘Only Fools and Horses’. One of the main characters was a hapless and rather gormless road sweeper affectionately known as ‘Trigger’, on account of his searingly trigger fast wit and *intelligence (*British sarcasm). Trigger once proclaimed to Del and Rodney in a famous sketch in the show, that he had used the same broom for 20 years….even though it has had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.. Apparently this is also called The Ship of Theseus Paradox. Plutarch asked whether a wooden ship which has had every single piece of wood replaced was still the same ship.

The paradox is alive and well in the world of prog too. I’m sure we all know a band or two of a certain name where the substantial part, or just all of the original members are no longer present. I’m not mentioning names here, online wars have been started in the name of such conjecture and my flameproof suit is at the cleaners.

As many of you know, I love the expressive world of irony, metaphor and allegory, and I do find it hilarious that a group of people of advanced years, not untainted by the ageing process, seem to be the least tolerant when it comes to new music from ‘Trigger’s Broom’ bands.

Like perennial teenagers stuck in Boomer bodies, their minds are stuck somewhere in 1973 when the giants of prog were in their caped and Mellotron adorned prime. Their bodies tell quite the different story of course and some are much larger, greyer, follically challenged and generally world weary (I include myself in this). So then wonder why they have such unreasonable expectations that a band can form in their teenage years and remain in a state of perpetual youth and brio for some 50 years, without disagreement in creative direction, or suing each other… without illness, death or a myriad of other life circumstances that dictate a change in the band lineup. As anybody who has actually been in a rock band will tell you, keeping any band together for more than 6 months is more than a minor miracle.

Prog fans are difficult to please it seems.

A post script to this is that according to research, our bodies replace many of their nearly 30 trillion cells regularly. About 330 billion of those cells are replaced every day. So by next week we could be almost entirely different beings than today. The bit that stops us morphing into multi-headed dopplegangers is that our DNA stays the same from the day of a cell’s birth until it dies. It also changes over time too, but much more slowly.

So we are all Trigger’s Broom… and as long as the music still sounds like your favourite band, I think it’s OK if they now don’t quite look like you remember.