I struggled to get my head around computer viruses to begin with. The whole concept was at odds with my understanding of what real-world software was about. And I frowned at the first mention of self-healing DSP. Doesn’t intelligent technology belong to Asimov and his Three Laws?

American neuroscientist Christof Koch reckons that ‘consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system’…

I need to backtrack to the mid-1980s, when I commissioned an article on computer viruses for Music Technology magazine. With a hi-tech readership, many of whom were using computers in music making (a BBC B or Atari ST, for the most part), there was something intriguing about a computer ‘virus’. Few of us had heard the phrase, and still fewer knew what was just below the horizon. None could have anticipated how significant it was to become. 

It didn’t really make sense… software did what it was told, even if you hadn’t instructed it well. It certainly didn’t go wandering around like a delinquent teen, did it? It did. And from the bedrooms of early hackers, extremely sophisticated viruses have evolved to become a new front on which international wars are fought.

OK, so digital audio fixes itself using error correction circuitry and digital mixing consoles can now ‘heal’ themselves when something goes wrong. Still, the leap to claiming consciousness for number-crunching circuitry seemed pretty ambitious – until recently.

A religious radio broadcast took me on a philosophical examination of the essence of the soul and threw up something of a conundrum. Unable to either define or bottle a soul, philosophers have had to settle for a model based on connected thoughts and individual experience to account for our sentience. And if a machine can be made to behave in ways that are indistinguishable from an intelligent life form, the logical conclusions are a little uncomfortable.

So, the scientific community is shaping up to accept machine intelligence and leave room for machine souls. In the artistic community, we’ve been messing with techniques such as aleatoric composition for a while now and are happy to discuss the emotional validity of the results. Among these Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies are readily accepted as a tool in the hands of its user, and Frank Zappa’s use of recordings from different sessions to create apparent musical nuances relied on his judgement of what has musical validity.

Computer composition programs, however, take a set of rules and starting parameters and take them into the realms of AI. As Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle and part of the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, Christof Koch would likely back this as an example of machine consciousness. 

Ai contact

Using Koch’s convictions to bridge the Rubicon into Asimov’s future, music and its associated forms of entertainment is in line for some truly spectacular developments. Led by ‘the great posthuman pop star’ Hatsune Miku, Japan has already seen the first virtual performers bring William Gibson’s vision of the synthetic media personality (in Idoru) onto the live stage – and be accepted by their audience.

The drum machine hasn’t replaced the drummer any more than electric guitar has replaced the acoustic. Nor has live music been replaced by recorded music. While there have been some pretty heated encounters along the way, we have found appetites for a startling variety of entertainment. It seems inevitable that machine intelligence will play a significant role in the future.

It may not be until we find ourselves competing with AI for tickets to see acoustic music performances, that we will really know the score.

It would be wrong to sign off here without mention of the recently departed John Tavener, whose music was matched by his own exploration of spirituality. He is greatly missed.

Last/Next Blog