Greetings from Ghent, where the adventures in advanced studies and research in music continue. (the picture above is of Amsterdam, though)

I’m currently taking very few – and rushed – photos here as there’s barely any time. But sometimes I have to stop and pinch myself to make sure I’m not living in some fairytale town from another era and world.

While I’ve settled well in Ghent, in my office and our studios at the Orpheus Institute I often find myself floating in space: music as we know it – records, streams, songs, performances, composers, songwriters, musicians – suddenly feels like a thing of the past, and we’ve now entered a new period where the function and purpose of music suggest something more expanded and transdisciplinary. Naturally, a lot of this has to do with my own thinking space and reading and research that I’m conducting; we also have composers and musicians firmly rooted in the Medieval and Classical periods (and in-between and after), but also to just observe them interact and collaborate with those working with augmented reality (AR), intelligent systems (AI) and (non-)anthropocentric hyperobjects is hugely exciting: there’s a sense of a continuum – long-term thinking and visioning in regards to culture, creativity and intelligence – that is strangely absent from our current political and economic activity (where it would be needed most).

Occasionally though, I do find myself missing the days when music mostly meant Kate Bush or Prince (et al.) on the radio, and skipping songs meant going to a record shop and skipping through cassettes, CDs and vinyls until you found the ones you wanted to buy and own. Music had a clear cultural function and significance back then – and it sounded unbeatably fantastic!

I’ve been working a lot with the latest AI music generators out there – for 30 minutes in total, to be honest, then I felt compelled to quit (compare this with the 30+ years that I’ve been making music for). Conclusion: they are the most boring thing (after our current economic and political ideologies) in the existence of the universe.

AI music generators can produce utterly perfect and fantastic music in almost every conceivable style in seconds, often surpassing even human creators in quality. Heck, I’d always yearned to hear futuristic arabic punk reggae, but since no one was producing such music, I wrote a short prompt, and in less than a minute I had a fantastic track of, well, futuristic arabic punk reggae! I transformed tracks from my latest album Bloom – pure electronica – into symphonic orchestra renditions in the space of five minutes, and the dubious sound quality notwithstanding, they could potentially be mistaken for the work of some talented classical composer if used in the background of a film, for example.

But that’s not what music is or has ever been about.

If music to you is merely a capitalist pursuit (an end product with the minimum cost), then these AI music generators are perfect – and in my opinion there is nothing wrong with anyone (be they advertisers, companies, creators, listeners etc.) using these tools to get the music they want, instantly for free. Go for it!

If music to you, however, is something more precious and evolved – life, art, philosophy, understanding, progress, journey, intelligence, love, culture/civilization, a deeper and more elevated state of existence perhaps – then I’m afraid the secret to this still lies in the old, long and arduous, process of trying and failing, trying again, failing better. For great music has always been more about the process than the product: the life that has gone into making that final product. Make that process/life count, and the end result will be imbued with music that transcends the shelf life of any capitalist-consumerist product.

Music that just sounds like music is not really music (an old argument of mine which suddenly became a source of an animated debate in our last seminar).

In short: to come up with great music by pressing a couple of buttons feels empty; to come up with great music by learning, trying and actually playing feels like an enlightenment.

From the floatation tank that is my office, I hear medieval church bells ringing alongside distant sirens, footsteps on cobblestones, birds chirping, men arguing, children playing and laughing; my colleague on the phone explaining non-anthropocentric compositional practices to someone on another continent; Brahms being practiced on a grand piano next door; generative NFT (non-fungible token – or “No F*cking Thanks!”) sound art on my screen.

It does feel like the beginning of something exciting, an intellectual as well as creative adventure toward “something that nobody has a name for” (after Kevin Kelly), which simply wouldn’t be possible in a purely artistic or academic practice. I might be wrong, of course – but then that would simply be the start of something new again: a process, a journey, an open discovery.