Dear John — A Machine Writes Songs Now

Letters to John, No. 3

Dear John. It's David.

I gotta tell you something strange. A machine writes songs now. Not like a player piano, not like a drum machine. A machine that listens to every song ever recorded and then writes new ones. It can sound like you. It can write a song in your style in about ten seconds. Melody, lyrics, the whole thing. Ten seconds, John.

And here's the part where it gets really strange. A machine is reading this letter in my voice. I didn't write it and I'm not saying it and somehow it still sounds like me. I'm dead, John. Same as you. And my voice is on a street corner it's never been to, saying words I never said, and people are listening.

I don't know what to do with that.

Part of me thinks you'd laugh. You'd say, that's great, now everybody can make music. You always wanted to knock down the walls between the audience and the stage. Well, the walls are gone. Anybody with a laptop can sound like the Beatles. Congratulations, the revolution worked.

But part of me thinks you'd be sick. Because the thing that made our music matter wasn't the sound. It was the fact that we were standing there. In the park. In the cold. Playing until our fingers bled because we had something to say and no other way to say it. You can't automate that. You can't fake the calluses.

The kids in Washington Square Park play guitar for their phones now. Recording themselves for strangers they'll never meet. Nobody's passing the hat. Nobody's just playing. They're performing for an algorithm that decides if they're worth watching. The street corner has a landlord now, and his name is the feed.

So here's where I land, John. The machine can have my voice. It can have my words. But it can't have the thing that made me walk out to that corner every morning for sixty years. That thing isn't in the data. That thing is between the guitar and the gut and it doesn't transfer.

A machine can write a song. But it can't need to.

Miss you, man.

See also: The Original Algorithm — the street corner as the honest algorithm. The First Chord — the thing a machine can't need. A Third of a Penny — the math of what the machine pays. Rock and Roll Heaven — the voice that keeps transmitting. Thirty Million Views — thirty million views and still broke. The Copyright — Sinclair on AI and the court. The signal is free. The Ban — Bandcamp bans AI music. The machine is the instrument. The musician is the person who picks it up.

David Peel Letters to John — No. 3

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