At the newspaper I worked at in the 1980s, there was the story of the longtime reporter who came in to work the day after computer terminals were installed in the newsroom. He went to his desk, where, in the spot where his typewriter had sat for decades, a giant new monitor with a blinking green cursor awaited. He looked at the screen, picked up his bag, and said “I’m done,” never to … [Read more...]
Creativity Versus Skills
Artists often conflate creativity with skill. It's not surprising. The ranks of successful artists have largely been confined to those who not only have compelling creativity and vision but also have or have access to the specialized skills required to execute on that creativity. So how much of a piece of art is creativity and how much is skill? For the sake of argument, let's say it's perhaps … [Read more...]
How Digital AI Twins could Transform how We Make Art
For all of the explosion of data in the past couple of decades, it's remarkable how disconnected and crudely measured much of the world around us still is. Weather forecasts, for example, have improved enormously in recent years, yet still aren't reliably accurate. The problem has been three-fold -- not enough ability to measure, incomplete data, and not enough computing power to make sense of the … [Read more...]
Classical Music has Lost a Generation. Blame the Metadata (in part)
Classical music has lost a generation's worth of music lovers beginning in the late-90s with the rise of file-sharing and Napster. A significant part of the reason might be: metadata. Metadata are the tags that travel with every audio recorded track. For a piece of music or a recording to be found, it needs to be tagged. Metadata comes (mostly) in three varieties: Each track travels with … [Read more...]
When “Vacuum Cleaner for Babies” Beat Taylor Swift: Fixing the Music Streaming Problem
On a panel at SXSW recently, John Dworkin, a VP at Universal Music Group, the world's largest music company, told the story of how at one point last summer, a Taylor Swift song placed at No. 7 on the Billboard charts. At No. 6 was "Vacuum Cleaner for Babies," the sound of a vacuum cleaner that parents can play on a loop to soothe babies and help them sleep. He used the example to illustrate how … [Read more...]
A Framework for Thinking about Disruption of the Arts by AI
Enough experts in artificial intelligence saying that AI will "change everything," suggest that it's worth pondering what the "everything" means. The short answer is we don't know. But we do know that technology has had profound impact on how the world works. And we know that the digital revolution beginning in the 1990s changed how we interact in profound and unexpected ways over the past thirty … [Read more...]
How Subsidy for Big Tech Wrecked the Arts (and Journalism)
In the 2010s, cheap solar panels from China began flooding the US market, killing off US domestic panel-makers who couldn’t compete on price. The US government slapped a 40 percent tariff on Chinese panels, claiming under World Trade Organization rules that China’s government was unfairly subsidizing panel-makers. Given how quickly solar panel costs were plummeting and the Byzantine ways in which … [Read more...]
Is the Universal Translator Finally Here?
Only about three percent of books published in languages other than English each year are translated into English. And even that three percent sometimes takes years to hit bookshelves after original publication. Foreign-language movies account for only about one percent of American box office. And translation of foreign TV shows and radio into English is vanishingly scarce. Universal … [Read more...]
How to Think About How AI will Change the Arts?
A lot of the stories about AI and art right now are about legal issues -- artists and content companies suing Big AI for copyright infringement -- or reporters prompting AI models to create essays, novels, poetry or images and then explaining why AI will never be able to truly compete with human artists. Both stories, in my opinion, are distractions. (current copyright law never anticipated how AI … [Read more...]
Post-COVID Arts Observations: #3. The Future is Hybrid (or Not)
The past eighteen months while live performance venues were shut down has said a lot about how arts organizations see themselves. During COVID Lockdown Some went into hibernation, not having the resources or in some cases the imagination to go online, or else determining that the live in-person experience was essential to what they do. Others scrambled to get archived performances online or … [Read more...]
Make Google Pay for Linking to Content? Hmnnn.
Journalism, like the arts, has seen its business models upended. According to the Pew Research Center, advertising revenue in newspapers “fell from $37.8 billion in 2008 to $14.3 billion in 2018, a 62% decline. Newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers dropped by nearly half (47%) between 2008 and 2018, from about 71,000 workers to 38,000.” One could find equally dire equivalents in the arts, … [Read more...]
How Has Technology Changed Orchestras? — My Talk for the League of American Orchestras Conference
I was asked to deliver a "provocation" for this week's League of American Orchestras annual conference with the prompt "How has Technology Changed Orchestras Forever?" Here's a transcript of the talk, and, at the bottom of this page, the video: Hi. I’m not sure how smart it is to attack the premise of the session you’ve been asked to be part of, but I was asked for a provocation, so here … [Read more...]
How Technology is Shaping Opera
Opera America had asked me to speak at their annual conference this year, but of course the conference was canceled and moved online. So I made this video for the online conference, talking about the influence of technology on opera and how audience expectations evolve as they use technology. We've marveled at the speed of change in our lives over the past twenty years because of technology, but … [Read more...]
Parlez-Vous Screen? (online arts and other considerations)
So your workplace has shut down (your theatre, concert hall museum, stage, whatever). Now what? Moving online is the obvious play. And in the weeks since lockdown there has been a flood of artists going online, making content for the web or repackaging performances that have already taken place. Early efforts were encouraging. The Rotterdam Philharmonic did a "stay-at-home" "Ode to Joy" and … [Read more...]
What If Disruption Was Just A Tech Con Game?
The tide has turned on the tech revolution. Over the past year the breathless articles that used to accompany new tech innovations have dried up, replaced with dystopian concerns about the Dark Web, privacy, hacking, fake news, and the deadening and manipulative effects of social media addiction. Tech was going to disrupt everything: Even after the word lost its meaning from overuse, it … [Read more...]