AI Music and the Credit for a Decision Nobody Had to Make

A convincing generated track can arrive with a singer whose expressions fit a situation nobody in the room has imagined in detail. The snare has an appropriate size. The second section arrives where a listener expects it. There is no obvious place to start objecting. The experience can be rather like entering a rented house after somebody has taken away the things its real occupants found hard to throw out.

Some of the argument about authorship gets caught in a distinction between making sounds and making decisions. Musicians have long accepted material from performers, instruments, studios and chance. A composer can show extraordinary judgement in deciding what to keep from somebody else’s performance. It matters to the piece when a decision about the material changes what it becomes possible to hear. The novelty of generation involves the scale on which a set of internally compatible decisions can be provided before the person requesting them has found out what they care about.

A plausible take can end the conversation

The music would sound more interesting to me if the person choosing had a reason to refuse one of its successful features. Perhaps the chorus lifts exactly where the implied genre says it will. The songwriter wants the melody to keep losing confidence for another section. At that point the nice result becomes material for an argument. It has to surrender an attractive part of the thing it was made to be before it can do the work the songwriter has in mind.

The work of refusing carries its own risks. A bare room can be a pose. Composers can insist on difficulty because they want high status from somebody who dislikes ordinary enjoyment. A useful collaborator, human or technical, can notice when an artist is rejecting the most interesting part of a proposal out of habit. Judgement includes recognising where the material has got ahead of you. It also includes knowing which part of the resulting record still needs a decision.

A listening question survives much of the debate. What relationship between sounds would have changed if the person asking for them had been somebody else? Sometimes the answer is the entire piece. Sometimes the answer is mostly the selection of an attractive result. I would like music credited to an individual to be interesting to discuss at the place where their decisions became consequential. That seems a more revealing account of authorship than the time it took to get a recording to play.