Two Turntables and a Microphone (2006)

https://goodfuzzysounds.com/ma/docs/funnyversion.htm

by mellosouls • 2 years ago

63 43 2 years ago

diggan8• 2 years ago

Fun ad/poster included in the article (https://goodfuzzysounds.com/ma/img/phonovox_250.gif) which has pretty much exactly the same sentiment today where companies try to replace people with AI, like https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/artis...

I wonder if "The Orchestra that draws no salary" was as controversial at the time as "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" is today.

bayindirh7• 2 years ago

I wonder if "The Orchestra that draws no salary" was as controversial at the time as "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" is today.

Ex-Orchestra player here.

I don't think so. A musician who's not playing in an orchestra pit in a play/performance can always play in a concert or in future times in a recording orchestra, or have a solo career. Using the same skill set they have, and even earning more in the process.

Employees replaced by AI find that their whole skill set captured by the said AI, and they're now irrelevant without a new set of skills. Getting a new skillset requires time, money and effort, and sometimes substantial background. What we're going through is much more damaging. The former one was transformative, not destructive.

diggan8• 2 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm dumb or something, but I don't see the difference in your examples.

First: Musician used to play orchestra, but now automation might replace them. Musician can take their skills elsewhere as they still posses them

Second: Software developer (for example) used to write CRUD apps, but now automation might replace them. Developer can take their skills elsewhere as they still posses them.

I don't see how in the second example, somehow the skills as "destroyed" while in the first example, they're used somewhere else instead of destroyed.

vunderba• 2 years ago

I agree with respect to that old advertisement, but GenAI + acoustic physical modeling (SWAM) are likely poised to disrupt music more than you'd think.

You can 100% believe that the moment a composer/company/etc. can sketch out the cello/viola/whatever line of a song as pure midi and have an AI that can render it in a realistic articulable fashion (think some kind of futuristic band in a box coupled with physical modeling of the instrument)... a TON OF GIG/SESSION musicians will unfortunately lose their jobs.

It also wouldn't surprise me with the advent of MPE (Seaboard, Linnstrument, Osmose) that we start to see more instrumental approximations that are considered good enough for many lines of work.

Obviously though live performances will always have their place.

https://youtu.be/11Qprwtzl6s?si=qKlWX35zeOHIkiSS

wiml• 2 years ago

I've read that there was familiar controversy over player-piano rolls in the early 1900s/late 1800s. They'd be created in the eastern US and then be duplicated out west, potentially putting pianists out of a job.

Animats3• 2 years ago

Yes. That's why the copyright license to record a composition is called a "mechanical license".[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license

Animats3• 2 years ago

I wonder if "The Orchestra that draws no salary" was as controversial at the time as "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" is today.

Yes, it was. Here's the view from Local 802, American Federation of Musicians. Nowhere else in this mechanical age does the workman create the machine which destroys him, but that’s what happens to the musician when he plays for a recording. The iceman didn’t create the refrigerator. The coachman didn’t build the automobile. But the musician plays his music into a recorder and a short time later the radio station manager comes around and says, “Sorry, Joe, we’ve got all your stuff on records, so we don’t need you anymore.” And Joe’s out of a job.[1]

This finally came to a head in an 800-day strike. The outcome was that performers started getting royalties from recordings. An unexpected side effect was the end of the big band era and the rise of the pop star.

[1] https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/the-silence-was...

diggan8• 2 years ago

Thanks a lot for digging this up, the outcome of introducing royalties is very interesting.

gorjusborg• 2 years ago

I wonder if "The Orchestra that draws no salary" was as controversial at the time as "Artisans won't complain about work-life balance" is today.

I'm not sure about controversy, but I do think they will look similarly silly in retrospect.

Early vendors of new technology tend to over-promise and under-deliver. They sort of have to, as they are creating a new market. People need to be moved in order to be convinced they need it.

The technology (if there is real merit to it) usually evolves over time based on who pays for it, which helps separate the actual uses from imagined ones.

I do not think today's AI will replace everything, it's unclear where it will be used and where it wont. Just keep doing what you are doing. The salesmen are just doing their thing.

As for whether musicians specifically will be impacted, sure, some will. Good musicians, the ones who channel and share their feelings with listeners will always (well, until AI has something resembling real emotion) have work. Today's AI does not have emotion, and I expect people will know the difference. I'm sure the music industry will go wild trying, but people will always create music for themselves, and real emotion will resonate far further than 'art' created via a prompt.

jancsika• 2 years ago

An unexpected side effect was the end of the big band era

An unexpected side effect was to contribute to the shift away from big bands dominating the musical scene, during/after a world war and changing tastes in music and music-making. In other words, the strike hastened a trend.

And keep in mind that the troops themselves had access to the newest jazz recordings, as mentioned earlier in the same article you're citing:

"As the strike progressed, limited recordings (called Victory Discs, or V-Discs) could be made solely for servicemen, as long as they weren’t distributed commercially."

IIRC, some of those V-Discs featured early bebop performers. Like bop, big band in general had already been getting faster-- often not even dance-able-- and more dissonant-- to the point of becoming avant-garde. By the end of the decade, in 1949, you already had Miles Davis' Boplicity and Israel, and those trends were never going to sustain a popular music industry, especially with the advent of television (where, according to the article you cited, Petrillo negotiated again for musicians' royalties).

In any case, Petrillo apparently had balls of steel. Everyone on HN should read that article, if only to get an idea of the work it would take to get remunerated fairly when a cluster of GPUs can be trained to do all your future work.

Gravityloss• 2 years ago

I can recommend a silent film with real live music to everyone. I've been to a few at the Midnight Sun film Festival.

It can be really good.

keep_walking• 2 years ago

bottles and cans just clap your hands just clap your hands

HankWozHere• 2 years ago

Where it’s at!

Two Turntables and a Microphone (2006)

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