In Mozart’s day, mechanical instruments were all the rage. Self-playing instruments weren’t new — the first musical automata had been made centuries before. But innovations in clockwork mechanisms made Enlightenment automata something extraordinary. The novelty of seeing an instrument play without human input was so thrilling that clockwork organs became a must-have item for Europe’s elite. Mozart himself composed pieces for self-playing instruments, as did both Beethoven and Haydn.
There is a rich history of classical musicians working with the latest technologies to expand what music can be. Today, it’s artificial intelligence — though even here, composers have been experimenting for decades. Take Voyager, an artificially intelligent system designed to improvise live with humans, built in the 1980s by award-winning composer George E Lewis. When you see it in action, an unattended keyboard plays alongside the musicians, giving the same kind of visual novelty that fascinated 18th-century audiences. Unlike the mechanical organ, though, Voyager isn’t playing something a composer has written. It’s creating. Lewis’s systems are trained to “make decisions”, he tells me. “You’re in dialogue with them and you don’t have control over what they do.” The style is experimental and atonal, sometimes bordering on free jazz, but no two performances with Voyager sound the same.
Lewis has thought deeply about his motivations for working with AI, about the data he uses and how to centre human creativity. But his improvising systems are very different from large language models such as ChatGPT, the form of generative AI making headlines now. Tools that generate vast quantities of artistic material from a text-based prompt are reshaping the creative industries, with companies announcing new models with grandiose claims about “democratising” creative work before being valued at millions or billions of dollars.