Hummadruz

Around about this time, 40 years ago, I set about an undertaking that, in retrospect, was the kind of grand folly that can only be attempted by the young and dauntless.

For some time now I’ve been very conscious of a kind of reflexive terror response among many of my musician friends to anything that’s touched by the encroachment of AI.

When the AI mavens talk about the problem of distribution collapse, they are describing the now imminent situation where machine learning algorithms have so thoroughly scraped the breadth of available original human resources, that they begin to turn inwa…

In the footnotes of the last post I briefly mentioned the problem of distribution collapse in machine learning, that is, AIs training on datasets that are ‘polluted’ with data that has previously been generated by AI, forcing their output into ever-more c…

In my last post, I raised two questions that I thought might give some insight into what the future landscape of music and music creation might hold for us: •Who, exactly, will want to listen to AI facilitated music?

In my last post I discussed the immense turmoil that the digital revolution wrought on the world of sound and music in the 1980s and how we had really no idea how it would shape our musical future.

Humans are spectacularly bad at predicting the future.

Back in the 1970s, when I was a young teenager, I became intrigued – and maybe even a little obsessed – with a new musical machine that was making its appearance in popular music of the time: the analogue synthesizer.

Like many Australian kids who grew up in the ’60s, 10-year-old me eagerly tuned in every week to watch Skippy the Bush Kangaroo on our family’s newly-acquired black & white television set.1 The very first thing that you see in the Skippy opening titles is…

One of the things about having a career – indeed, a whole life – that is strongly based around sound and listening, is that aging brings with it the certain knowledge that one’s hearing will, at some point, begin to deteriorate, and many of the joys of the