Arthur C Clarke famously opined that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In my experience, though, the wow factor soon disappears, and we start to take incredible technological achievements for granted. When Clarke wrote his words in 1962, video calls were the stuff of science fiction. Today we FaceTime each other without a second thought. If we ever feel anything towards the technology, it’s not so much wonderment as frustration.
In the studio, meanwhile, it’s hard to recall the heady days of the early ’80s when sampling was a novel technology, and a Fairlight orchestral stab briefly sounded like something from another planet. Magic is terrifying as well as dazzling, and the awe that early samplers inspired was freighted with fear. Would this technology make real musicians and studios redundant? We soon realised that the answer was ‘no’, and learned to complain about lack of memory instead of sitting there open‑mouthed when we heard an aerosol spray used as a hi‑hat.
I suspect that the same process of disillusionment is going on with Machine Learning right now. What initially seemed miraculous is beginning to feel commonplace. When I used AI to transcribe the Ziggy Stardust interview with Ken Scott that you can read in this issue, my reaction was not to gasp “How is this even possible?” but to wonder how it could possibly have misheard Ken's first job at Trident Studios as mixing ‘Give Pizza Chance’!
I think there is a value in reminding ourselves just how remarkable the tools available to us are.
But I think there is a value in reminding ourselves just how remarkable the tools available to us are. A studio local to me hosts birthday parties for young children. Without exception, the thing that most fascinates them is talkback. The fact that a person can press a button in the control room to talk to another person in the live room is still magic to the six‑year‑old mind.
So when we get frustrated because the high C in a violin patch is slightly out of tune, or the legato bassoon doesn’t speak in quite the way we wanted, it’s perhaps worth stepping back and thinking exactly how extraordinary it is that a generic laptop can produce these sounds at all. Sampling hasn’t put real musicians out of a job, as many once feared, but it has certainly made it hard to tell what’s sequenced and what’s live.
Clarke’s idea is sometimes understood to mean that technology appears magical only inasmuch as we can’t understand it, but I don’t think that has to be true. Anyone who reads Chris Korff’s eloquent explanation of How Virtual Instruments Work in this issue will understand very clearly how modern sampled instruments work — but won’t there always be something magical about pressing a key and hearing an entire symphony orchestra bursting from our speakers?