The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AI
What does it mean to be human in a world where machines, too, can be artists? The Uncanny Muse explores the history of automation in the arts and delves into one of the most momentous and controversial aspects of AI: artificial creativity. The adoption of technology and machinery has long transformed the world, but as the potential for artificial intelligence expands, David Hajdu examines the new, increasingly urgent questions about technology’s role in culture.
From the life-size mechanical doll that made headlines in Victorian London to the doll’s modern AI–pop star counterpart, Hajdu traces the fascinating, varied ways in which inventors and artists have sought to emulate mental processes and mechanize creative production. For decades, machines and artists have engaged in expressing the human condition―along with the condition of living with machines―through player pianos, broadcasting technology, electric organs, digital movie effects, synthesizers, and motion capture. By communicating and informing human knowledge, the machines have exerted considerable influence on the history of art―and often more influence than humans have been willing to recognize. As Hajdu proclaims: “before machine learning, there was machine teaching.”
With thoughtful, wide-ranging, and surprising turns from Berry Gordy and George Harrison to Andy Warhol and Stevie Wonder, David Hajdu takes a novel and contrarian approach: he sees how machines through the ages have enabled creativity, not stifled it―and The Uncanny Muse sees no reason why this shouldn’t be the case with AI today.
(This text courtesy of W.W. Norton.)
Excerpt:
There are good reasons for human beings to resist identification with machines of any kind: Machinery is incapable of feeling, and it has no spirit -- no essence that transcends the physical. It lacks the qualities we tend to prize most about our identity as living beings and our place in the grand scheme, as well as we can understand such things. By extension, we're disinclined to look favorably on ways of living and modes of acting connected to machinery or industry. We reject regimentation, and, if we can, avoid dehumanizing labor that reduces us to serving as anonymous elements in an industrial scheme -- like Chaplin's factory worker in Modern Times. (Parallel jobs are still plentiful, with brigades of workers shuffling boxes in Amazon distribution centers.) We don't live in warehouses, factories, or garages; we don't want to be machines.
And yet...there was a period in the second half of the 20th century when a significant number of people united by common bonds of identity took action together in ways long associated with machinery, subverting the tropes of dehumanizing industry to assert their humanity. Gay men of color, in particular -- along with other people who did not conform to traditional sex and gender categories -- gathered late at night in underground locations such as an out-of-business truck garage, an abandoned warehouse, and other disused industrial sites whose provenance in industry was left undisguised. Amassing by the hundreds and the thousands, they danced with their bodies in synchronized motion, jacking to a new kind of music stripped of all niceties to the raw, bare sound of hard-pounding rhythms and electronic noise. They moved in unity with the precision of machine parts and kept moving, nonstop, for hours, and all for a purpose that transcended industry and commerce.
One of the most notable early innovators in this phenomenon was the DJ Larry Levan, a wiry, high-spirited young, occasionally orange-haired Black man from Brooklyn. A former acolyte at an Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, Levan picked up the rudiments of mixing live audio on the church sound system as a boy. Though he dropped out of high school, he took courses in textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where he met another gay Black music lover, Frank Nicholls. A former altar boy at a Catholic Church in his native Bronx, Nicholls was a striking visual compliment to Levan: stocky and bearded, an imposing figure who took up a street name more befitting a mob caporegime, Frankie Knuckles. Together, they found their way into New York's ball culture as dressmakers for drag acts, and migrated from there to the Gallery, a gay disco in Chelsea, doing interior decoration. At the Gallery in the early 1970's, house DJ Nicky Siano showed Levan and Knuckles how he used three turntables to keep music spinning in a constant flow, demonstrating the craft with records of R&B, smooth-groove jazz, and the occasional danceable rock track.
The skill Nicky Siano tutored Levan and Knuckles in, DJing, was most overtly one of connoisseurship and curation: applying a nurtured command over a vast body of materials -- records made in multiple genres and styles, including obscurities and the more obscure the better -- to present in sequences both responsive to and stimulating to the dancers at a given time and place. Great DJing called for the having of great taste for the purpose of taste-making. In this, the DJ upended the assumptions in an old joke musicians told about would-be musicians they considered non-musicians: "What does he play?" "The record player."
Beyond the estimable task of curating music for a body of people with refined tastes of their own and little tolerance for the passe or the ill-fitting, DJing demanded proficiency at turntable technique. Indeed, the complex set of ways DJ's manipulated turntables not merely to play music but to remake the music turned the DJs into musical creators. What does he play? For DJ's in both club music and hip-hop, to say, "The turntable" would be to signal mastery at an emerging art form. A machine for playback had become reconceived as an instrument for reinvention.
With the skills in club DJing he picked up from Nicky Siano, Larry Levan talked himself into a job in the tech booth at the Continental Baths -- at first, working the lights, then doing fill-in DJ work -- and Knuckles followed him there. A luxuriously appointed complex in the basement level of the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the Continental Baths had a long pool for wading, swimming, and having sex; a lounge for unwinding over cocktails and having sex; a ballroom area for dancing and having sex; and private rooms for napping between all the sex. There were some live performances -- typically, by young performers between above-ground jobs, like the Broadway understudy Bette Midler and her pianist, Barry Manilow. The primary entertainment, though, was the non-stop music provided by the DJ's: Knuckles doing the warm-up, starting around midnight, then Levan through the night to the morning hours. Working the Baths, Knuckles began to develop a signature approach to curation, building mixes of richly textured Philly soul tracks and disco, while Levan worked up a diva act behind the board, miming and swooning to the music.
By 1977, Larry Levan was a rising DJ star invited to be the main act at a new club, the Paradise Garage, opening in an abandoned parking garage in the industrial fringe of the West Village -- a rusting area with little residential housing, taken up by gay men and others with fluid, open, or socially transgressive approaches to identity. In the years between the Stonewall uprising in June, 1969, and the first reports of a mysterious contagion not yet identified as HIV/AIDS, in 1981, the community that would one day be known as LGBTQ was actively engaged in becoming a community, and much of that activity was taking place on the dance floors of clubs like the Paradise Garage -- spaces where people who had long been forced to hide could come together as a body and take pleasure in each other's company. From that pleasure grew pride. At the Garage, some 1,400 people per night could dance together, expressing in unison movements to persistent beats that they were united and had the strength to persevere. (And 1,400 was merely the legal capacity of the space. On busy nights, which by the end of the Seventies meant most nights of the week, the club was stuffed beyond capacity, with shirtless, sweating bodies of gay men, the majority of them men of color, pressed against each other.)
The music propelling them boomed at rocket-blast force from a custom-built sound system, with Larry Levan spinning the tracks, seamlessly fading one into the next: James Brown's "Give It Up or Turnit a Loose" into Kraftwerk's "The Robots" into Loleatta Holloway's "Hit and Run" into Donna Summer's "I Feel Love"... Levan soon learned how to edit tracks onto open-reel tape and extend the breaks, so what were once short transitional passages of drums and bass became songs of their own -- a new kind of song without song structure, the music reduced to its rhythmic core. He was doing the same kind of thing that pioneering hip-hop DJ's were doing in the Bronx, but with no one rapping and adding words to compliment and complicate the music.
"At the Garage, I felt like I was a part of something more powerful than myself," wrote Christopher Vaughn, who worked in marketing for General Electric. "At the office, I was the only Black man and one of a tiny handful of gay people. I felt powerless. At night, with the music blasting through us, every one of us there felt empowered. In my job, I would sit through meetings with engineers explaining how electronic technology worked. I wanted to say, 'Honey, you don't know! Come with me, and I'll show you what it's like to be part of a machine."
Advance Praise:
David Hajdu is the rare sort of critic whose deep intelligence and even deeper humanity can challenge or rearrange even the most deeply held positions about culture. I thought I knew how I felt about AI, artifice, authenticity, the so-called machine condition and its relationship to art. The Uncanny Muse made me rethink all of it. A miraculous book, written with extraordinary grace. -Amanda Petrusich, author of Do Not Sell At Any Price and pop music critic, The New Yorker
Into a moment when AI’s troubling role in the present and future of artistic creation rules the discourse, David Hajdu’s The Uncanny Muse brings an exciting and essential sense of history, perspective, and boundless curiosity. -Mark Harris, author of Mike Nichols: A Life
A timely, richly informative, and beautifully written inquiry into the origins of ‘computational creativity,’ framed in the historical context of human creativity and our many mechanical muses. -John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory
We humans have always had a deep fascination with mechanical objects and an equally deep urge to create art. David Hajdu skillfully brings these two strands together in a work of elegant synthesis, revealing a deep understanding of what makes us and our machines tick and our art sing. -Daniel J. Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music
Fascinating. The result of David Hajdu’s extensive research, interviews, and expert journalism is a cornucopia of ideas involving art, music, machines, computers, and AI, excitingly interspersed with personal interviews of many of the key innovators still living. Curiosity and creativity combine in this fine accomplishment. - A. Michael Noll, pioneer in computer art and professor emeritus, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, USC
David Hajdu, one of our most important arts and cultural critics, confronts one of the most divisive aesthetic issues facing us today. . . . What, in the end, Hajdu forces us to ask ourselves, does it mean to sound human? -Robert P. Crease, chair, Department of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, and author of The Workshop and the World: What Ten Thinkers Can Teach Us About Science and Authority
David Hajdu has tapped into something vital. This very engaging book places art and music at the center of our long history of collaboration with machines, reaffirming the importance of situating the human spirit at the center of today’s artificial intelligence efforts. -George E. Lewis, innovator in AI composition and Edwin H. Case Professor of Music, Columbia University
Tracing how mechanics has long tinkered with our imaginations, from clocks and cameras to Steinways, player pianos, microphones, Moogs, and beyond, Hajdu’s tantalizingly brief book coasts on that Elvis quote, ‘Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.’ A thought bomb on every page. -Tim Riley, author of Lennon and music critic, NPR
Reviews:
The rise of ChatGPT and other AI-driven creation tools has spiked anxiety about machines cannibalizing, perhaps even overtaking, human creativity. But as longtime music historian Hajdu (Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, 2016, etc.) points out in this lively book, machinery and art have long been closely intertwined. In the late 1800s automata produced music and drawings, and throughout the 20th century devices emerged as experimental novelties and practical helpmates to artists: Bell Labs explored computer-generated drawing in the 1960s, the Moog synthesizer transformed the texture of rock music, and ’80s techno reflected how people “were using machines to produce sounds to stir people to move like components in a machine—a machine of social transformation.” Hajdu doesn’t make a precise distinction between art created entirely by computers and cases in which humans leverage technology to create art—an AI-generated painting that sold for $432,500 at auction in 2018 is not the same thing as, say, the German synth-rock act Kraftwerk. But Hajdu thoughtfully explores how the arrival of new technology has prompted handwringing. (Though not always: The Hammond B3 keyboard was warmly embraced by Black soul and gospel acts for its efficient evocation of an organ.) “The fear of machines taking over for humans is one of the great constants in the history of technology, and it is equally easy to inflate or dismiss,” he writes. A more cohesive thesis about the degree to which concerns are legitimate might offer a path for readers to think about potential and ethical risks of AI and other technologies. But Hajdu is at heart a humanist, and he suggests that the disruptive technologies themselves don’t spell doomsday but are, in themselves, works of art. Wide-ranging, thought-provoking music history. -Kirkus Reviews
Machines have been inspiring human creativity ever since the technological advancements of the Enlightenment “transformed... the Western world,” according to this hit-or-miss history. Exploring how machines have shaped “our communication through art,” journalist Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street) discusses a Victorian-era automaton named Zoe that purported to draw people’s portraits (it was actually operated by a man hidden under the stage on which it sat); a 1927 exhibition in Manhattan that showcased motorboat propellers, radio sets, and other devices at “the intersection of art and machines”; Andy Warhol’s machine reproduction tools, including silk screens; and AI programs that churn out proficient if generic music and visual art. Running beneath this history, Hajdu finds a perpetual clash between reactionaries who view every innovation as a terrifying dehumanization of art and those who celebrate its creative potential. He’s at his most convincing when exploring how technology helps humans channel their creativity in new ways, as when he explains that the radio brought performers “singing softly, naturally, with the tonalities and inflections of ordinary speech... to listeners alone in the privacy of their homes.” Too often, however, the narrative gets mired in circular ruminations on the metaphysics of information technology (“How can a computer sound like itself?” wonders techno-theorist George Lewis. “How do human beings sound like themselves?”). It’s an intermittently insightful treatment of a timely topic. -Publishers Weekly
Hajdu (Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction), music editor at The Nation, asserts that technology has long assisted inventiveness rather than replaced or combatted it. He traces the interaction of machines—including cameras, drawing instruments, music boxes, player pianos, theremins, electronic drums, and Moog synthesizers—with the visual and auditory arts. Hajdu frames his survey within the historical framework of two women automatons—Zoe, a drawing doll from the 1880s, and the modern AI-DA, an artificial intelligence product. Although Western culture has highlighted the work of white men, Hajdu also points out the contributions of Black people, especially during the height of ragtime and jazz music. He rescues from relative obscurity Ada Lovelace for her work on Babbage’s proposed computer and Vaughn De Leath, dubbed the “First Lady of the Radio,” for helping to popularize that medium with her versatile singing during the 1920s. Modern industry’s cultural influence often democratizes rigidly replicable products. Hajdu opines that, so far, AI shows that action devices operate within human-crafted rules and patterns with the too-frequent biases those origins leave. VERDICT This analytical, historical review should interest readers of pop culture analysis. -Library Journal
In Love for Sale (2016), music critic Hajdu examined how innovations like wax cylinders, sheet music, the microphone, and digital audio files impacted popular culture and society at large. Here, Hajdu outlines how technological innovations in the creation of art reverberate throughout society. Some purists see creativity as uniquely human, making the use of technology in art's creation a source of great anxiety. But using machines to make art is nothing new; what is a piano if not a machine? Cameras dictate how some artists see the world. Hajdu is full of insights and interesting observations. The introduction of player pianos to peoples’ homes made piano lessons nonessential and exposed white listeners to Black music. Original compositions made by modifying piano rolls allowed player pianos to exceed the abilities of pianists. Hajdu covers the ILLIAC computer, which was programmed to create musical composition based on a set of rules; Warhol used commercial- and industrial-art techniques for his creations; TONTO, an offshoot of the Moog Synthesizer, allowed Stevie Wonder to introduce new sounds to pop music. Hajdu concludes with a discussion of artificial intelligence, the latest source of innovation and anxiety. -Ben Segedin, Booklist
The underlying message of David Hajdu’s stimulating new book, >“The Uncanny Muse,” can be summed up in three words: Get a grip. “The fear of machines overtaking humans [has] run deep since the rise of the Industrial Age,” he reminds us (several times) as he surveys the changing nature of the technology used to create music and visual art over the past several centuries. He justifies this focus, which avoids thorny contemporary issues such as the use of AI to spread disinformation, by positing that “fear of machines making art runs especially deep, for cutting into one of the human species’ few claims to special status.”
Beginning in the late 19th century with humanoid automatons that appeared to draw or play instruments on their own — in fact, they were controlled by hidden individuals — Hajdu moves from mechanical devices to electronic and digital equipment, considering the many ways people have employed machines as artmaking tools and, in recent decades, programmed them to create art independently. He strives to refute the ages-old criticism that art made with machines is cold, soulless and artificial. In fact, he argues, machines have enabled radical new art forms, empowered marginalized communities and served as instruments of cultural change.
The chapters on music show Hajdu at his best, parsing the impact of new technologies on art and society. Early-20th-century player pianos, the first machines to transform music from something people made to something they consumed, popularized the distinctively Black genre of ragtime: “Machines that made music with no one at the keyboard brought Black music into American homes of all races and classes.” Later in the century, synthesizers and drum machines forged the driving rhythms of house music and hip-hop, genres that gave voice to people left out of mainstream American society. Hajdu illustrates this with a description of a gay Manhattan club: “At the Garage, some 1,400 people per night could dance together, expressing in unison movements to persistent beats that they were united and had the strength to persevere.” He quotes a patron of the Garage who confides that, listening to his General Electric colleagues talk about how electronic technology worked, “I wanted to say, ‘Honey, you don’t know! Come with me, and I’ll show you what it’s like to be part of a machine.’”
Pairing broad assessments of social trends with human specifics is characteristic of Hajdu’s style of cultural criticism, evident in previous books such as “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America” and “Love for Sale: Pop Music in America.” He also favors thumbnail portraits to add color to his thickly detailed historical narratives, and “The Uncanny Muse” is no exception; he leavens a text that gets increasingly complex as it moves into the computer age with punchy character sketches. One notable example is chemistry professor Lejaren A. Hiller, who programmed his university’s Illiac computer to compose music and in 1956 prompted a storm of controversy with a performance of “The Illiac Suite.” Hajdu, who in previous books has cast a cold eye on the hysteria prompted by pop culture, is in good form as he surveys the overwrought pronouncements that computers such as Illiac could never truly create art and quips, “The authenticity police had raided the party.”
There’s a fine line, however, between deflating exaggerated fears and dismissing genuine concerns. As he moves into computer-generated music and visual art, Hajdu’s desire to present a positive picture leaves a gaping hole in what is otherwise a lucid and instructive summary of advancements in technology and programming that led to artificial intelligence, the term coined by Dartmouth professor John McCarthy to describe the potential of machines to learn and “to think like human beings.” He gives vivid accounts of such pioneering efforts as British artist Harold Cohen writing a computer program that could generate art on its own based on information he input, and of composer/musician George Lewis collaborating with a computer programmed to improvise with him in real time. He includes interesting speculations about whether computer art might be able to communicate “what it means to be a machine,” as human art communicates what it means to be human. The gaping hole is analysis of the implications of what Hajdu blithely describes as “the gargantuan repository of imagery and sound that web users and institutions, public and private, archived on the internet and dumped into cloud storage over the years.” This is the basis for the “deep learning” computers require before they can create art. A one-sentence mention of a class-action suit by writers for copyright infringement is his only acknowledgment of ongoing battles over the lack of compensation for individuals whose creations are part of the mountains of data that enable programs such as ChatGPT to generate revenue for companies like OpenAI (a controversial organization Hajdu treats with studied neutrality). Text is not the main topic here, but computer-generated music and visual art also respond to prompts from text and rely on data that may be copyrighted.
Hajdu may think, with some justification, that this is too big and complicated an issue to grapple with in a book that aims to give an overview of human-machine interactions in art over the course of centuries. But declining to address it makes his argument that we have nothing to fear from computer-generated art less persuasive. Nonetheless, “The Uncanny Muse” offers much food for thought and plenty of room for debate. -Wendy Smith, Washington Post
David Hajdu, the author (Positively Fourth Street, Lush Life), critic, and composer offers a truly novel approach to understanding the mechanics of how artists have made art and music from the machine age to today. The Uncanny Muse runs the gamut from early photography to player pianos; from MoMA’s 1934 “Machine Art” show (cocurated by Amelia Earhart) to modernist “machine-crafted” architecture (and its connection to fascism); from the bluesmen of the American South, who moved north and introduced rock musicians to the wonders of the electric guitar, to fiction created with computer-assisted technologies—and, most recently, AI. Hajdu’s polished prose, wide-ranging scholarship, and original reporting, support a compelling two-pronged thesis: (a) that synthetically generated art is, in fact, the product of human beings, and (b) that artists have always used tools/machines/virtual extensions of themselves to generate their work. In one inspired chapter, Hajdu recounts the birth of the electronic music scene in Berlin in the 1970s and ’80s and its overlap with the corresponding DJ-powered underground gay club culture that arose from New York City’s converted warehouses, explaining how both worlds were foundational to subsequent genres (techno, house, etc.) and contemporary methods of recording. In a word, The Uncanny Muse is a tour de force, a radical reappraisal of how to think about the very essence of artistic creation. -David Friend, Vanity Fair
One ice-clenched night in 1941, prisoners of Stalag VIII-A, a Nazi labour camp in Silesia, gathered in an unheated washroom to listen to a music performance. It was an unusual event, and not only because of the venue. Written by French composer Olivier Messiaen, the quartet was scored for piano, clarinet, violin and cello, an unconventional combination that arose from necessity: those were the instruments Messiaen and his three fellow prisoners of war could play. The performance brought the experimental, modernist eight-movement Quartet for the End of Time into the world and is remembered as one of the most consequential musical premieres of the 20th century. Meanwhile, in the US, the Novachord — the first commercial polyphonic synthesiser — had recently been unveiled. It was greeted, as new technology often is, by panic. Would this machine make humans obsolete in music composition?
Today, we know the answer: the synthesisers that followed the Novachord vastly expanded the sounds available to composers and DJs, spawned new genres of popular music and became an indispensable means of musical creation. We would not have hip-hop or seminal albums such as Radiohead’s Kid A without them. At the same time, today’s musicians are faced with a new encroaching technology: artificial intelligence, with its power to replace their voices, bypass education and remove human oversight. The more new technology attempts to replicate qualities we identify as making us uniquely human — thinking, feeling, creating — that is to say, the more it pretends to act in our image, the more we tend to fear it. And yet, one need only glance at a piece of AI-generated art and then look at a Cy Twombly painting — or listen to Messiaen’s quartet — to be relieved of any such concerns. The distinction becomes clear as day. One artwork approaches human expression. The other is human expression. How worried should we be about technological disruption? And will it one day make creatives obsolete in the making of art? These questions have circulated for as long as man has made machines, but what if they’re the wrong ones?
The two new books considered here — The Uncanny Muse by David Hajdu and Quartet for the End of Time by Michael Symmons Roberts — offer distinctive approaches to exploring how human creativity responds to its changing environments. Can seemingly existential challenges become constitutive elements of the creative process? In Quartet for the End of Time, Symmons Roberts’ meditation on his grief for his parents ebbs and flows with the story of Messiaen’s quartet — its creation, its historical resonance, its personal meaning to him — a subterranean river periodically coming to the surface. Symmons Roberts is a long-established British poet, novelist and librettist, making this book a neat confluence of his talents: it is a novelistic memoir, interspliced with his own poems, that always returns to Messiaen’s music. He discovered the quartet by chance while browsing a record shop in the 1980s as a student, becoming, from that moment, a “lifelong listener” of the piece. Before he was interned in the camp in his early thirties, Messiaen’s musical reputation had been in the ascendant in Paris. Symmons Roberts describes him as a “mystic modernist composer”, a “Catholic visionary, an obsessive ornithologist”, who wrote music that was radically, inventively modern — of which this quartet is the crowning example.
Part of Symmons Roberts’ inquiry debunks some of the myths surrounding its genesis. For example, its premiere at the camp was said to have been performed on torn, battered instruments. Yet, according to eyewitness accounts, a new cello was bought in the nearby town of Görlitz for the performance. The spellbound audience of suffering prisoners wasn’t united in its appreciation; some hated the atonality of the work. And often framed as a response to war, the piece was in fact inspired by St John the Divine’s apocalyptic visions in the Book of Revelation — which promised, in Messiaen’s eyes, “a glorious world of love beyond this world, beyond the end of time”.
These clarifications are important. Above all, Messiaen didn’t consider his situation restrictive but claimed that among all the prisoners, he “was probably the only one who was free”. His constrained environment did not diminish his creative work, it enhanced it.
Opening at the first show of algorithmic art in New York in 2019, Hajdu’s lively The Uncanny Muse traces the relationship between human creativity and mechanical or technological innovations since the late 19th century. Hajdu, an American music critic and journalism professor, writes that “in the making of music, the human-machine dynamic has always been more than a philosophical conceit. It has been a practical consideration.”
From the advent of self-playing pianos in the early 20th century to Andy Warhol’s “automatic reproduction” — machine-based screen-printing to create multiple prints, one after another — Hajdu argues that much technology initially viewed with suspicion was eventually incorporated into artistic practice to enriching effect. He roots the cultural evolution of machines in the arts in a broader history that most will recognise, such as the development of B-3 electric organs in the 1950s, which became the sound of gospel music; Martin Luther King Jr preached with electric organs in the background.
Neither dismissing technological innovation as a threat to authentic human expression nor uncritically celebrating it, Hajdu argues for us to see the human-machine binary as a ‘collaboration’ But it’s increasingly hard in 2025 to view new technology without buckets of scepticism, knowing that we’re in uncharted territory when it comes to generative AI, the people who control it and the threat to artists’ livelihoods. On the one hand, restoration tools use AI to recover historical recordings, such as the isolation of John Lennon’s vocal on a demo of The Beatles’ “Now and Then” in 2023, or director Peter Jackson’s production company, WingNut Films, developing its own AI “de-mixing” software that could uncouple interlocked sounds. On the other, it risks devaluing musical labour as production studios increase their use of AI.
And yet, allaying our concerns isn’t Hajdu’s point. Neither dismissing technological innovation as a threat to authentic human expression nor uncritically celebrating it, he argues for us to see the human-machine binary as a “collaboration”. Inventions such as recording technology, which performers once feared would eliminate live performance, evolved into sophisticated art forms in themselves; he cites Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as “a totem to the recording studio as an instrument” and turntables as the primary instrument of “DJs in hip-hop . . . innovating an original sonic vocabulary”.
If you like listening to electronic music or buying reproduction posters in museum gift shops, you’ll probably agree that technology has expanded rather than contracted artistic possibilities, as well as bringing music and other art forms to a wider audience. Symmons Roberts argues that for Messiaen, his strange constellation of instruments forced him to blend the tones of the Quartet in entirely new ways. The layers of sound were unprecedented, but they worked, making the limited instrumental palette not an obstacle but essential to the work’s character.
One need only listen to the first movement of the quartet, “Liturgie de cristal”, to hear the clarinet play birdsong-inspired figures that soar above the percussive piano and silky string; a multi-layered sonic plane. As Symmons Roberts writes, it’s “like sticking my head into a surreal aviary in which the birds sound like they’ve eaten too much fermented fruit. It’s not just one bird either, all the instruments are at it. There was no turning back.”
Symmons Roberts, striving for the connection that Messiaen, a “connoisseur of birdsong”, felt with the music of the natural world, uses a “bird ID app” to identify the individual sounds making up the dawn chorus outside his house. AI-developed technology brings him closer to, as Messiaen regarded birdsong, “the authentic music of Eden”. The layers of sound were unprecedented, but they worked, making the limited instrumental palette not an obstacle but essential to the Quartet’s character After being released from the camp, Messiaen returned to Paris and became one of the most esteemed composers of the 20th century, living until he was 83.
Yet Symmons Roberts doesn’t present a simplistic narrative of triumph over adversity, just as Hajdu offers no clear solutions to overcoming our potential adversary in AI. The latter’s whirlwind tour through nearly 150 years of cultural history is both pacy and brimming with detail. I had no idea, for example, that Switched-On Bach, a 1968 synthesiser recording of JS Bach by Wendy Carlos, was beloved by revered pianist Glenn Gould, who called the record “one of the great feats in the history of ‘keyboard’ performance” — leaving the reader with a sense of optimism of what might lie ahead. Symmons Roberts’ prose, by contrast, is silky and emotive, with his success in weaving the personal strands with the musical partly owed to the deep connections wrought by his poems, each one seemingly chosen to heighten our understanding of what precedes it. That creativity is in constant dialogue with both our expression and circumstances is the thread that connects the two books, and reading them brings to mind the Oulipo, the experimental French writers’ collective who artificially imposed constraints in order to expand creativity: with limits imposed, goes their theory, we can access new areas of creative freedom. Neither book offers resolution as such, but reading them in parallel offers two ways into the idea that overcoming might not always be the most generative posture. Rather, that true generative artistic power is in cultivating the ingenuity to harness the challenges we find ourselves facing. -Nadia Beard, Financial Times
What is art? What is music? Are they intrinsically human endeavors or can they be made by—not just with—machines? In The Uncanny Muse, his eighth book, David Hajdu traces a lineage of automated creative productions to answer centuries-old questions that have been thrust to the forefront once again with the recent explosion of artificial intelligence. A music critic for The Nation and a professor of journalism at Columbia, Hajdu is well positioned to ponder the philosophical stakes of algorithm-driven art, though the teacher in me wonders whether he is as tolerant of his students’ writing articles with ChatGPT as he is of the gamemaker who won the 2022 Colorado Art Fair with a work produced by the AI technology Midjourney. (I’m not.)
The title of Hajdu’s book borrows from the phrase “uncanny valley,” which, Google AI informs me, is “a psychological phenomenon that describes the feeling of unease or discomfort that people experience when they encounter an object that is almost human but not quite. The term was coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in a 1970 essay.” (When Hajdu directs ChatGPT to write a description of the history of itself “in the voice of David Hajdu,” the AI refers to its own “uncanny ability.”) Uncanny proceeds chronologically from an 1880s automated doll controlled by a magician to a 2023 AI doll controlled by filmmaker Baz Luhrmann. So much for progress. In between, Hajdu recounts tales of largely forgotten, and occasionally forgettable, moments and mavericks. The author of books on subjects as far ranging as the jazz musician Billy Strayhorn, early Bob Dylan, and comic books, Hajdu is a research GOAT. There’s Jane Heap, editor of The Little Review, who in 1927 curated the Machine Age Exposition, an exhibit of mechanical objects as art, and published futurist manifestos with the magazine’s founder and her life partner, Margaret Anderson. Frank Sinatra talks about how he learned to treat the microphone as an instrument, thus changing the course of recorded music. Hajdu even manages to find something obscure in the over-dissected Beatles catalog: Electronic Sound, an album recorded by George Harrison on the Moog synthesizer in 1969.
Occasionally the author gets a little lost in the weeds, and sometimes I wondered what exactly the throughline is from player pianos to Andy Warhol to electronic music pioneer Derrick May. The book can feel more like a series of interesting magazine articles than a cohesive narrative. Uncanny comes together in the end, though, especially in the chapter on the evolution of house and techno music. Hajdu is good at explaining complex subjects. I love the way he describes photography, which, as he points out, was once viewed as a mortal threat to art. “The camera transforms the visible in the name of capturing it,” he writes. Honestly, despite Hajdu’s best efforts, AI still confuses me. At one point, I began to wonder whether the whole book is a prank and written using ChatGPT. That’s when Hajdu admits that he did indeed use that gateway AI portal—but only for the preceding two paragraphs.
Hajdu doesn’t completely address the thorny, age-old ethical issues of replacing humans with machines or of using machines for nefarious purposes. He points out the creepiness of Luhrmann flirting with a doll of a young female, but he doesn’t mention that AI mannequins are already being sexualized in popular culture—or that a mechanical doll, unlike a human being, follows orders, doesn’t age, and won’t sue for sexual assault. Hajdu proves the point that machines are and have long been instruments that are used by humans to make new art and music, and that’s a good thing. But he’s trying to articulate something even bigger, a concept hinted at by the architect Philip Johnson in 1934: “The craft spirit does not fit an age geared to machine technique.” Hajdu calls this statement “practically a manifesto for a new way of thinking about machines: as tools that were not merely conduits for human agency but tools whose use could carry distinctive characteristics that suggest something approaching a kind of agency of their own.”
The development of machine learning, however, goes far beyond this. Cutting-edge technologies such as AICAN and ChatGPT generate their own content. Bye-bye, mankind? It’s easy to dismiss AI creations as not up to human standards of technique, innovation, emotion, and thought. But Hajdu, quoting computational creativity scholar Simon Colton, raises a more interesting question: What if the point is not how AI art expresses the human condition, but how it speaks to “the machine condition”?
The case against AI goes back at least as far as Descartes’s statement that thinking is what makes us human. By focusing primarily on European and American art, Hajdu limits the scope of his book to Western ideas. That in itself seems a little old-school. He is so authoritative in his knowledge and references that I was surprised to find that Hajdu failed to cite the work of science historian Donna J. Haraway. Her writings on the relationships between humans, animals, and technology, beginning with her 1985 essay “A Cyborg Manifesto,” address many of the existential questions that drive Hajdu’s episodic history of artistic production and machines. She writes that science and technology have already erased the line between man and machine, and that feminists and animal-rights activists place humans as equivalent, not superior, to other species. “A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” Haraway wrote. Thinking that art is the sole province of human endeavor is the stuff of old white men. Have you ever seen an orb weaver’s sculptural masterpiece, or listened to a mockingbird’s vast repertoire? Hajdu ultimately reaches a line of thinking similar to Haraway’s but without crediting her. In that, he shows that humans are as fallible as the technologies they create. -Evelyn McDonnell, The American Scholar