A few vignettes, then the point:
When I was an impressionable young musician, I attended a masterclass with Angel Romero (one of the famous Romero family of guitarists). He was drilling a very short passage with a technically accomplished guitarist who was getting bored trying to pull off a phrasing idea. The student finally complained, “It’s just five notes…”
Maestro Romero promptly threw him out of the masterclass and left to get a coffee.
In my grad school days when writing papers was a significant part of my life, I used to work on papers for weeks before writing them. This involved a lot of reading, score study, note taking, and thinking about stuff on the bus or while walking around Baltimore. Usually the night before it was due I would sit down and write the thing start to finish, then edit early the next morning before turning it in. (This process caused my wife great distress. Much like Donald Draper napping on the office couch, it was impossible to tell if I was working or not most of this time).
The majority of the work was figuring out what I wanted to say. How to say it was the final stage. Saying it with some level of style took up the smallest amount of time.
In an interview, microtonal pop musician Maddie Ashman says, “When you have to program every note of a song individually you really think about if it is the exact right note at the right time or if it should be left out.”
This is a great observation made necessary by a stupid music culture. Imagine a composer from the 18th century commenting on how labor intensive it is to choose all those notes. The writer who must find all those words for each sentence. The painter mixing colors. The horror! (Maddie’s music is actually very interesting, though likely not everyone’s taste).
My kids were recently watching this animated version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. While the animation is lovely, what struck me was the incredible quality of the music. Someone wrote and orchestrated a beautiful piece and then a whole orchestra of live humans (who got paid) with a conductor (who got paid even more) sat down to record it in a studio. For a six minute cartoon. When this was the only way to do it, it was normal.
Edited to add another:
I’ve been wrangling versions of this post for weeks and couldn’t get it to work. It was up to over 1000 words of the kinds of thing you read everywhere about AI. It had a tortured aside about Sturgeon’s Law. It was terrible.
After giving it another go this morning, it all clarified in a single moment. The stories were the post. They say everything I was trying to say on their own. It took a lot of friction to get there.
This is my post about AI. Let the reader understand.