Published by Hearing Things
Words by Ryan Dombal
Illustration by Poan Pan
Lots of people will tell you that using generative AI in the creative industries is just straight up bad. But in this story for the worker-owned music and culture platform Hearing Things, editor and co-founder Ryan Dombal feeds himself into the machine to see what he can learn. Scroll down to hear his own teenage garage rock, and the AI version of it, and his feelings on the experiment as a whole.
Keeping up with new artists, new sounds, and new musical innovations is my lifeblood. As a music journalist, it’s often a requirement in order to remain relevant and earn whatever little money is left in this beleaguered profession. But beyond the practicalities, I’ve always been drawn to the thrill of the new. Even at 43, an age when some among my tribe are leaning on nostalgia or diving into longform historical projects, I’m still finding the most pleasure in surfing the now – striving to stay atop the wave, juiced off the sound of what’s next.
This tendency goes back to my formative years as a listener, around the turn of the century. My teenage brain took in the horny Björk humanoids in her 1997 music video for “All Is Full of Love” and imagined a not-so-distant future teeming with mechanized beauty. After waiting in line to buy a copy of Radiohead’s Kid A on release day a few weeks after I started college in 2000, I went back to my dorm, stuck my headphones on, and slipped into a realm where the electronic and the organic wrapped around each other like vines, heralding infinite possibilities.
Writing about music professionally, I embraced my generation’s techno-optimism. I was obsessed with how T-Pain and Kanye could twist and warp their voices with Auto-Tune, bringing out bloody emotion; I scoffed when a 40-year-old Jay-Z wrongfully eulogized the ubiquitous technology in 2009: classic old-man behavior. To this day, I pride myself on avoiding knee-jerk rejections of musicians whose ways of working are different from the norm. But generative AI is testing my openness like never before. I can’t help but wonder: Is this just another tool, or is it the end of music as we know it? Or both?