Will the Next Great Composer Be a PC?

talk about actually writing music and composing it. And uh, you know, of course some of our most famous music creators are now decomposers. That's a pun. Lauren's just silently

shaking her head. So the discussion I thought would be fun, you know you Joe came up with a great little point of of of research about the earliest known written musical notation, right, because of course we've been creating music, um, you know, even even singing or um you know, percussion on drums or rib cages or etcetera, for for for many, many, many,

many many. But so yeah, we talked about in our last podcast, so we don't even know how old music is, right, We imagine we've been making it for you know, tens of thousands of years. We know it's at least about forty years old because that's how old the oldest bone flutes are. But when it comes to written music, I mean, obviously anything that's a written account, it's going to take a lot for it to be able to survive centuries and centuries. Yeah, we when you think about it, this

is this is kind of strange and creepy. We don't know what that music sounded like. Yeah, we have no way of knowing. You could just try to guess, but you but there's no way to know. Those those vinyl albums are no longer on store shelves. Yeah, no, there's no there's no there's no way of recording it from you know, they didn't have any way of recording it back then, apart from writing things down. In the earliest version we have of that came from a city called Yogurt.

It's in Syria. It was actually written on clay tablets and the Babylonians No No is the Hurrians um in fact that the Hurrians were an ancient people who spoke hero Eurytian. It was a language, and they were from what is now well what would eventually be northern messa potami,

let's be fifty twos for you. But no, they were from that that area Mesopotamia, but now it's known as Syria, or at least that's where the clay tablets were found, these specific tablets, and the tablets had two sections to them, and the top section were lyrics, they were words that was that this was a song, not just a a piece of music, but a song, and the lower section was musical annotation. It was actually as if it were

sheet music for us today. Of course, the problem is that we don't have any ancient Hurrians sitting around to tell us exactly what this musical note annotation meant. So it took some interpretation upon the part of scholars, particularly Dr Richard drumbrell Um. He'd spent a great deal of time trying to figure out exactly what this annotation meant. And the surviving tune is called Hurrying Him number six

and it comes from about four b c E. Wow. Yeah, and uh, it's essentially a hymn to the moon God's wife Nicole. We should put up a link to this because I've heard some of these reproductions and obviously these are just interpretation, because again we don't know for sure if the Yeah, it's like it's like it has a like a series of sort of number symbols. I think that that we're just guessing, like, well, we think that means this series of notes within a mode or something. Yeah, exactly.

We it's it's our best guests essentially. I mean, it's it's an educated guess, but it's still a guess. Yeah. And but but anyway, these interpretation sens of the notation are pretty haunting that they sound pretty cool to me. Yeah, I've got Well, we'll do a blog post that goes along with this one, just as we did with the last one, where we'll have some links to to some

sound samples. Will also include the videos. There's a great video of a musician named Michael Levi who was playing on a solo liar uh and that his version is very haunting and beautiful. And then there was another one that we listened to by the musician Malek Gendali who is a pianist, but he performed also with the Ludwig Symphony Orchestra. And so you have a full orchestral version

and a solo liar version. And it's interesting to listen to these two very different interpretations of the same set of music. Yeah, and then there are even much more different interpretations than that, sure that I saw. And it seems a lot of people have been taking a stab at what this sounded like. Terrific. Uh, yeah, it's really cool. I want to get in on this game, but I just don't know enough about music. Yeah, and same here.

I I'm pretty sure that if I were to attempt the hurry and hymn number six on my ukulele, it would not sound anything like the the Hurrians would have imagined. Okay, but so that kind of thing we can't uh, we don't know exactly what it's supposed to sound like. But but eventually we did get some modes of musical notation that are comprehensible to us today that we're more standardized within their culture, and and that now we pretty much

know how we're supposed to interpret right. Right, even if you are looking at an antiquated piece of music, we have enough information about what those those different scales of music and different keys, all that kind of information. We already know that. So even if it was written in a way that's antiquated, we can translate that into a

more modern version. So that your typical musician would be able to yeah and again, you know, like just like we said in the musical performance, uh episode, A lot of this ends up being down to to musical expression as well. So even if something is written one way on the page, just as you would expect today, you get two different musicians to play the same piece of music,

you're going to get two different experiences from that. Yeah, and so in the sort of the Western classical tradition, we have a very like notation based way of thinking about music. So you have you have a musical staff, you know, and you've written out the notes on it in the standard notation, and you know, yeah, and you you can read from that, and and that's how you deal with music. But I think there are tons of musicians these days who really never even deal with standard

Western classical music notation. Now. They learn their instrument, They they learn what their instrument is capable, the sounds that the instrument makes. They know, you know, they may either have a a true understanding or maybe an intuitive understanding of the way that chord progress sians need to go, that sort of thing, the things that sound pleasing to

that particular cultures ear well. Also, we don't need to, um, we don't need to write those things down in order to reproduce them later, because we can make audio records of that music. Exactly. Yeah. I feel like to some extent, the audio recording has eroded the place that was once held by by written music notation, because when you can record a song, it's not so imperative that you write it down. People can well, we can always go listen to it and then just reverse engineer how it was played.

Sure yeah. And in fact, there are computer programs that can do that that are pretty interesting. Exactly So. I think a lot of people who compose music these days use something use electronically aided composition. Sure yeah. And I've actually got quite a few examples of that. One of the earliest ones that ultimately was not successful in the market, but I thought was interesting to talk about, came from a guy named Sid Meyer. Now, Joe, have you ever

heard the name said Meyer? Everyone in Civilization has that is that is a little bit of a pun because Sid Meyer was the original creator and designer for for the Civilization series of video games that you guys might be familiar with. He also created an awesome game called Pirates. Anyway, yeah.

So Sid Meier known as a video game designer. He had formed a company called micro Pros along with Bill Steely or Wild Bill Steele as he's known, and the two of them started making and selling video games, and h after he experienced some early success, Sidmyer decided he wanted to try something new. He didn't want to keep making military simulations, which was chiefly what Micropros was known for in those early days. He wanted to branch out do something different and uh, and he was a big

fan of music. He um, I believe things in his church choir. Yep, yep. So he thought, why don't I create some software that allows people to create their own compositions in different styles. And that's when he went out and made a program called cpu box and actually watched a demonstration of this software and it was played on the three d O. Do you guys know where the three d O is? Yes? It sounds funny, Okay, So the three d O was a game console system is

meant to be like a full entertainment system. It's a predecessor to the systems that we see today. Things like the Xbox and PlayStation models are really kind of the next step of what the three D O was supposed to be. But the problem was the three D O came out a little too early and way too expensive. This this was what was it the late eighties? Did the three D O have some of those interactive movies

on it? Oh? Yeah, No. This was the same time that we started seeing full motion video get incorporated into video games. And the problem was that everyone was putting full motion video into video games without thinking about how to actually make it part of the game. So it became a real gimmick and you ended up getting these terribly acted shots a full motion video that just were not you know, it looked like lesslike the kind of stuff you would get on your television if you had

really bad reception. It just was not a very satisfying was their full motion video in CPU Box? No? It was actually it was actually all graphics from what I could tell, or at least the stuff I saw was all graphics. So it wasn't. I was kidding, but but

it could have been. It could have been because it was for the three D O. And so the way it worked was that you would be able to create music in various uh classical mode, so you could do a concerto, or you could even do a symphony if you wanted to, and you or chamber orchestra piece, and you would sit down and you would start to compose this stuff through this interface, and then at the end of it it would have a full piece of music. But it did not sell very well. Very few people

really picked it up. I don't think the market was quite ready for it at the time that it came out, so ultimately this was not a success. But there are plenty of programs out there that have various UH features that are great for musicians, like UM here's an example of one. There's one called the Finale Songwriter. Finale Songwriter allows you to create musical notations, you know, so you can get that cheap music you want if you want

to have it written down. UH. You could play a song on a MIDI device, so any device that is MIDI compatible. MIDI is a set of standards for music for for computer music. If you were to have, say a keyboard that's a MIDI keyboard, and you have it plugged into your computer and you play the song exactly the way you want it, this program can then translate that into musical notations, so you can actually print that out and hand that to someone else and say here's

the song I wrote. Now you can play it too. Um. You could also if you wanted to program the song note by note as instead of playing something dynamically and have it be recorded and transformed, you could very systematically go through and say I want this this particular note at this pitch, at this tempo and for this length, and go. You could build it like you could build a computer algorithm. If you wanted to do that, you could.

You could essentially be data from star Trek. That's interesting to me, I mean because with that kind of capability, you sort of expand what the uh what the average person can do, especially like say, if you're not the greatest performer, Like what what if you want to write music but you don't have really good rhythm yourself, or if you're incapable of hitting a note on a particular instrument right or yeah, or you just have some form of impairment that would you know, maybe you aren't, maybe

you don't have the full use of both of your hands, but you have a very musically tuned mind. You can think of the music you want to play, and if you had that capability, you could play it, but perhaps you've lost it, or perhaps you never had in the first place. This gives you that freedom of creating that piece of music. It's kind of like thinking about how Beethoven was able to create incredible symphonies even as his

hearing was going away. It's that you know, you never know, there may be the next Beethoven who is incapable of playing a musical instrument. But the one other reasons I bring up Beethoven is to talk about the third piece of software. And keep in mind, like I said, there are lots of different examples. I just picked three kind of uh. This piece of software is called Ludwig, and

Ludvig is music software. It's specifically for the Windows platform, and again there are different ones for for Max as well, but lets you create music. So what you do is you you insert a melody into this software, so you have to create the melody. But once you insert the melody, it starts to fill out the rest of the song with chords and other elements to make it a full song and not just a melody. And it does this

by following specific rules for specific genres. So you pick the genre you want and then it will fill that out and put it to the right tempo for that genre with the right sound in the background. Um, it's interesting. I would say that it it comes out sounding very

much like MIDI music. So in other words, it's not sounding like a big, rich, you know, diverse set of instruments, but something a little bit fancier than what you would get on say, electric organ the way that like my grandparents had in their house that you could just put like Ragtime Beach number two in the background of Yeah, so the the you know, it's it's interesting because what

they'd ended up doing was they pulled in some sheet music. Again. Um, in this case, they pulled out any a piece of music that was in public domain, find the video I watched, and then applied different h musical genres to it. So they could play like two different styles of music with the same set of notes, the same melody. And that was kind of interesting to hear what it how it

came out. So we're starting to see computer assisted composition here, not just assisted in that it's giving you some tools to work with, but assisted that it's actually sort of helping generated for content. Yeah. So I mean, and this kind of thing goes back to I I know that one of Ray kurtz Wild's first projects was I mean when he was like a teenager. This is probably about in N five I believe it was, was a piece of software that would analyze classical compositions and um and

compose its own based on those rules. There's those algorithms that are first well, of course well known for his work and artificial intelligence voice recognition. Also a well known futurist, aspiring cyborg. He's waiting for that singularity to hit us any day now y forty years. But yeah, so that's one of the things he was known for, was this

early computer program that could compose its own music. Well, that leads me to a really interesting idea, um, and it's something I touched on in the script I wrote about this episode. Um, but the idea of algorithmic composition. Okay, so we already know this is possible, that we can get computers to write viable music themselves. And actually we already talked about in another podcast the idea of say

Ai storytelling. But that's actually a lot more difficult, right because the rules of human language are are such that they're really really complicated and kind of squeege you need millions of rules in order to create a coherent story out of nothing, unless you were just using like some pre built skeleton or whatever um mad libs. But to create a piece of music, that's actually a lot easier

because music already is it's very susceptible to data. It's it's pretty mathematical when you break it down to its bare bones. Yeah, and it's easier to tell a computer what the rules of music are than say, what the rules of storytelling and language are. And so I can very much see, even more so than the AI storyteller. We discussed the possibility of an AI musical composer. Okay, So imagine you've got a music service like Pandora. Okay, okay, and Pandora what does it do to give you the

songs that you want to hear? It follows the music genome projects, So in other words, you tell Pandora what kind of song or what kind of band you are interested in. It starts to look for other bands or other songs that share those same sort of qualities, and then it serves those up to you. Yeah, what does it do? So you tell it, say, you know, I really like a song by Meat Loaf? Alright, So Paradise by the Dashboard Life? Yeah, I really that's the song I give it? So does how does it know what

I like? Well? Does it just give me other songs by meat Loaf? No? No, let's say, does it just give me other songs that are filed under the same genre category as meat Loaf? No? No? Well what does it just give me songs that are on the same label that that album was on? No? Joe, would you like me to tell you what it gives you? Yeah? How does it figure out what songs go with Paradise

by the Dashboard? Like? It's really cool because what they do is they they have people listening to songs and they start to classify all the different elements that go into making that song. So it's kind of the meta data for an individual song. So in the musical feature, the musical features everything from is it a single vocalist? Is it a duet? In case of Paradise by the Dashboard Light? Yes it is? Uh? Is it um you know? Is it a ballad? Is it rock and roll? It

doesn't have a lot of electric guitar? And it does. There's there there are all these different elements that go into it, and so a single song may have forty or fifty or more different specific features that have been singled out, and so then it starts to look for other songs that contain a certain number of those tags,

and then it serves that song up to you. Then you have the option of either hitting the thumbs up, I love this song and make sure you play this kind of stuff more frequently, or thumbs down, this is not what I'm looking for. And as you give input back into the program, it starts to refine that algorithm. Maybe it starts to think that, Okay, this guy really likes cheesy songs, but every single solo artist I've ever given him he has thumbs down. So we are not

going to do any more solo from now on. It's all going to be duets or bands or whatever. And then it'll start to refine your channel over time. Okay, so imagine a program like this. It starts to get a really specific musical taste profile on you. It tells you know, it figures out, and let's imagine that it's even more advanced than pandoras today. Like it, it gets a really specific profile you, like these fifty features in

in songs UM. Right, Now, what it has to do is try to go through its whole library and match songs that have as many of the features you like and as few of the features you dislike as possible. Sure, but using um algorithmic composition, we could imagine that it and technically create songs that have exactly what you want.

So let's just kind of creepy. So if you if you really love Paradise by the Dashboard Light and you love all the things that go into making that song what it is, but you can't just listen to the one song you three times and that takes up half a day. The song is long, it's like a twelve minute long song. But yeah, no, yeah, it could. In theory, let's say it's following those rules, it could start to produce other songs that match the same sort of criteria dynamically.

So this is you're literally hearing this song for the first time. In fact, you're the first person to hear this song for the first time, and maybe no one ever hears that song again because it's making it specifically to match what you want to hear at that moment. Now, we already have algorithmic composition, and we already have UM things like Pandora that can create a really intense taste

profile for the listener. So why don't we already have this? Well, I'd say one thing that standing in the way is that UM algorithmic composition, while it's really good, probably isn't quite there yet in terms of its precision. And also, I'd say the biggest impediment right now is just the fact that the computer generated sounds aren't as pleasing to people as like actually recorded instruments and voices are in most cases. Would would you agree? Yeah, No, I completely agree.

Though I wonder if as time goes on and we get better and better at creating synthesized UM, you know, instrument sounds that are almost indistinguishable from real recorded instrument sounds, if this will become more and more of a possibility. Sure. This discussion always reminds me of that one episode of Next Generation where where Data was playing a violent concert and UM, and that one doctor who wasn't Crusher, who was really mean to him all the time, really got

on his case about it. She was like, yeah, you were technically perfect, but there was no emotion in the music. And whether or not whether or not a motion, whether or not flaws in the playing of music are are somehow critical to the human experience of that kind of sound. To be fair, that the woman only knew one emotion that was irritated. Um, I sympathize with that point of view.

While on the one hand, I'm excited about the possibility for this kind of technology, on the other hand, I think, like, well, so many of my favorite songs, what's my favorite thing about them is I don't know something imperceptible about the sort of emotional presentation that the performer brings to the song, and not just like the sequence of notes in in

its relative harmonies. Although at the same time, you could argue that if a musician is creating an algorithm that's creating a song, it's just a form of an instrument could be. But then again, I think about so I'll just make it more concrete. One of my favorite musicians is Neil Young. Um. I love Neil Young, but he's he's got this sloppiness about how he plays, about how he plays his guitar. There's nothing precise about it. It's

it's very half drunk kind of sound. I was about to say, similarly, like if you're a big Tom Waits fan. I don't think you're ever going to get a song like the algorithm has been drinking. I kind of hope not um And it's it's hard for me to imagine that, uh A an algorithm could reproduce that, because it seems so essentially human. But then again, you know, I I don't wanna. I don't want to overestimate my powers of detection.

Who knows. I mean, somebody maybe could create something that I just wouldn't be able to tell the different maybe in twenty to forty years. And of course, depending upon your opinion of certain pop song artists, you might think that if you had a computer create that's exactly what would sound like. Oh well yeah, in some cases with some types of music, uh and not even to deride it, I'd just say, like, nothing at all against electronic music.

But let's say electronic music, I think is a much is much more susceptible to something like this, the kind of not being played by by three dimensional instruments to begin with, so or it might not be in, or it might not be right, or it might be I mean, there's a lot of great electronic music that's not even performed in real time. It's just programmed music. It's programmed

by a human composer. Yeah. Yeah, And that again, it doesn't mean that that's you know, any less valuable or or or you know, quality wise, that it's any different from any other music. Obviously, the music, uh evokes some response from you. There's something about it that is meaningful to you. So we don't mean to say that electronic is somehow absolutely not now if you're very very no.

And in the end, I think the hardest turtle. So we've mentioned all these things that the instruments, the hardest one is going to be vocals. Vocal music is most of the most popular music I think involved vocalization human voice. Uh. I don't even know how we're going to begin to have the idea of re producing that. So mostly what I'm thinking about with this AI composition is instrumental music.

So I could actually easily imagine, you know, in a maybe a decade's worth of time, that will have uh a like a movie score that was completely composed by computer. I can actually imagine that, particularly if you are able to feed into the computer's algorithm the time stamps of your movie, so you know that this moment, I need to have a sense of urgency and this moment I need to build tension. This needs to be a release moment.

That kind of thing. I can actually see that happening at one point, kind of the opposite of having a having a visualization of music and autogenerated visualization. Actually, one way I can really see this being a big deal is in uh scoring video games. In video games, you want your music to respond dynamically to what's happening in the game, But there you don't have direct control like you do when you're scoring a movie over the exact timing.

So you could have have this AI composition responding to the player in real time. That would be wonderful. That's one of the things that can really take me out of a video game. Actually, when the when the music is either too repetitive or or isn't or is lags behind following me in what I'm doing. I can tell you that if the music didn't change when I was being chased by a ghost to the point where I'm chasing the ghost after I've eaten the power pellet, I

would never play Batman. Well, you know you're you're talking about about the incorporation of data there, Yeah, that kind of thing. It would be data, the data about what's going on in the game would be informing the algorithm that tells what the music should sound like at any given moment. But yeah, there are all kinds of other ways you can use data to create music, right. The soonification or oddification of data is a big topic these

days in music composition. UM there's a few people who are who are working more than a few people who are working in this. One of the more interesting stories I think is a gentleman by the name of Robert Alexander. He's a currently a NASA fellow, started off as a University of Michigan student who is working with um ROS satellite data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which is one of those NASA E s A satellites that that has been recording data from the Sun for the past

thirteen years. Um back in two thousand nine, he created a story of a musical journey from the Earth to the Sun based on a year of data of from two thousand three and did things like added drums to represent the passage of time. Because he was compressing all of these data points down into something like forty four thousand, one hundred data points per second, which happens to be about the hurts of ceed equality audio sound UM, which which happens to equal out to UM every eight measures

being a single solar day and UM really interesting. I also just a trivia note. So Robert Alexander, you said, was went to the University of Michigan. Uh, that's also where sid Meyer went. Really apparently the computer musician types all like to gather over at the University of Michigan. UM.

But you know, he started. The really interesting part about this is that he was looking at lots of data, like many different streams of data from these spector scopes and satellites and U. One one element that he started noticing a pattern from was carbon. And the people at NASCA that he had been talking to about this data

had never really mentioned carbon before. And through his creation of this music and through his analyzing it as a sound pattern, realized that UM that you could use soonified data to analyze solar wind and flares and and so new. I mean this this changed the way that we study the sun. His music has changed that. And that's that's really you know, And there's and there's there's a whole bunch of people who are working and stuff like that.

The astrophysicist Luciana Walkowitz has taken data from the Kepler which which searches for planets and other solar systems. The exoplanet search right right, and you know uses the light frequency of stars, which changes as stars and objects move around. Um mixes in things like Buddhist chants and uh creates some some really haunting things. The folks at the Large Hattern Collider have started up a soonification department and so you can listen to musical compositions based on the sweep

of the Atlas detector. I heard something like this. Maybe it might not have been from that, but where did I hear it? The somebody created Essentially it was the sound of the Big Bang. Yeah, yeah, because because because you can I you know, because it starts with our whole universe was in a hot, dense state. You know, you can you can track the the motion of sub atomic particles and and turn that I mean basically anything

in the electromagnetic spectrum. Most of it's out of our audible spectrum, but you can kind of scale and trans for things down into something that you can hear and and all of these sounds of the universe, um, right down to one of my favorite examples, which is, um, you know, the magnetosphere around the Earth creates non audible sound continuously. It's kind of a very chirping sort of

noise and um and it. I wouldn't necessarily call it music, but I wouldn't necessarily call Japanese noise music either, So I you know, it's it's really interesting to listen to kind of cool. Yeah, and you mentioned in the script Joe for the for the video show the the guy who used points of GPS data to turn into that. Yeah, that's uh so that's a little closer to home, I guess than these amazing sort of atmosphere where you are

when you get the GPS right. Uh so, yeah, you can turn like these big worldwide kind of data points from the natural world into music. But we can also and so that gives us a new perspective on you know, what's out there. Yeah, yeah, we can also get a new perspective on ourselves because yea, what this guy did, he was the artist Brian House. Um so he made house music. He uh, he made this really cool song.

There's a great article about it. We will link up when we put the blog post, uh, and we'll put a link to the song up to because you should hear it. He turned a year's worth of location tracking data on himself into music, and so it worked. The way most data or all data generated music works is that you have a data set and each different value represents ay a different rhythm or a different pitch um.

And so he the way this music worked was everywhere he went, it would track his location and that would represent a different pitch along the musical scale, and and and played at at high speed, you can hear yourself traveling throughout the day and these very predictable patterns. But then say, like when you go on vacation, there's this strange sort of like bridge that goes into a different sonic territory and the song it creates is really hypnotic.

It's cool to listen to. You should check it out. And it it's cool not just because of how it sounds, but because of how it gives you a new way of thinking about what you do with your life. Sure, and you know, all all of us, lets us look at at things from a slightly different angle and notice patterns.

I mean, the human ear and the human brain interpret music much differently than than other data, and so um, you know, this kind of thing has been used to study epilepsy e e g. S electro and cephalograms to figure out what exactly is going on from people's brains, and m seismographic data collected from volcanoes. It's it can potentially be used to help blind people see paintings or

or other images. So I can imagine even this being connected to something like an activity tracker, and then you can turn that into some sort of sound and you can actually hear what your activity would be like during a day, and maybe it gets to a very soothing, lulling kind of tone where you realize, man, I might need to get up and move around a little more. I want to I want to have more of a

Ramans lifestyle and less of the Yanni lifestyle. No, I'm being serious though, I mean that can really be a way of learning more about yourself. I mean we're talking like on different levels, whether it's uh, you know, the activity of your brain, or really just learning in a new way, like how you are behaving throughout the day. Yeah, totally, Yeah, anything you know, we've talked before about big data, and I think that that really feeds into this. I mean,

whenever we are collecting that many points of information. Um. Yeah, Well, let me ask you guys a question. What if we were to ask a bunch of people what things they what? What were the things they liked about music? And then take all the information we had gathered. Oh, I know where you're going with this. Where they've told us all the things that make music great, the best of the best, this is the stuff that resonates, and then we made the best song ever written based upon that data. Okay,

so I found a couple old articles. I actually remember when these came out. But here's the here's the thing. I never listened to these songs until I made you, until you made me, and I am so thankful you did. There are a couple of songs that I think mitigate, uh, our enthusiasm for the well for the self tailored music. Remember we talked about, yes, the AI composition, the idea that you could get a song tailored to exactly all the things you want. Turns out it might be that

getting exactly the song you want is not a good idea. Yeah, so this was something that a trio of gentleman attempted to do a vitally Coomar Alex Melamed and David Soldier, and they did a survey where they asked people about the things they liked about music, piled all that information and then ranked it, and then through that compilation they said, all right, these are the different elements that people really

enjoy and among those. By the way, it was this was five person survey, so you might argue it's not very scientifically rigorous people that that represents the entire width and breadth of musicality. So but the most yeah, this is what they These are the things and songs that they liked the most. That includes songs about love, uh, the soprano saxophone, also the tenor saxophone, the concept of humble ambition. Also uh, cheesy electronic drums, um drum fills, right,

drum fills, also working the night shift. Apparently someone was thinking of a very specific song on that one. The world loves guess so strings, swells, also power chords and uh finally, and these are these These come from an article that our blog posts from Wired and which is a fantastic one. And the Wired posts actually contain the songs. You can actually download the MP three's if you like,

and we will include yes. But the final touch that they mentioned is a saccharine male and female harmonies, also Paradise by the dashboard light. Like, no, this is turning it into easy listening. I wouldn't call Paradise by the dashboard light easy listening. Wait does that have male and female? Or was that Paradise by the dashboard lights? Okay, I'm not thinking if I would do anything. Okay, that's all I can say. Go on, let me do anymore. No, anyway,

they that. So they took all these things and they wrote a song, and it's possibly one of the worst songs I've ever is off Well, first of all, I think consciously, so we're not missing them, No, I think I think even they were doing this totally tongue in cheek. Um. So it was It's an experience. You really have to go and listen to it. But when I first started listening, the first thing I thought was, I feel like I'm

in the dentist's waiting room. This is this is the uncomfortable experience I have before I have to go and have an even more uncomfortable experience of how my teeth drilled so well, this introduces the idea that, um, maybe we shouldn't get everything we want. Maybe it's worth trusting some experts to create music for us. Before we get too far into that, let's also point out this most Wanted song, which by the way, is preceded by a voicing Most Wanted Song, and then it goes into It

is about five minutes long. They also did one for the Most Unwanted Song, where they tried to pull together all the elements that people said they did not like, typically like holiday music, bagpipes of pipe organ, children's choruses, m accordion, ban joe, Walmart, rapping, and opera. You have an operaretic singer rapping about being a cowboy, and then you have children burst in to sing about holidays and children, Yeah, had children in general. Um, the children's course jumps in randomly,

it starts to sing about various holidays. We should just stop describing it and let them listen. Well, it's also I have to say that I don't think I'll ever be able to hear any kind of holiday song ever again without immediately thinking of the phrase shop at Walmart. This had this had all three of us just just

doubled over at our desks earlier. And while the most wanted song is five minutes long, the most unwanted song is about twenty two minutes long and well worth the twenty two minute time commitment it will take to listen.

From me, I found it quite enjoyable um and reminded me less of the couple's skate at at roller skating rinks when I was like twelve, so over you that less than the want, right, So I will say that the unwanted song also to me sounded like, uh, if you had mixed they might be giants song Fingertips, which was a collection of little songs all all smashed together. So it wasn't there's no real theme, and there's no like each little vignette is very different from the one

that precedes it and the one that follows it. Uh. So it was kind of like that because there are a lot of mishmashes in this twenty two minute long song. It also reminded me of the musical comedy of p d q Bach, which is Peter Shile is behind that and it's a he has invented a whole cloth, a fictional son of Johann Sebastian Bach, who is a who wanted to be a great composer but failed in almost every respect. And if you ever listened to p D Box Music and you listen to this Most Unwanted Song,

you're going to recognize some themes. And part of that is because Peter Shiley, when he makes these PDQ back pieces, is specifically incorporating things that are a quote unquote wrong. They are breaking the rules, not following the rules of musical composition. Uh. In that case, he's doing it for comedy. You could argue that the Most Unwanted Song does the

same you know, does it for the same reason. I found it hilarious, and every time a new holiday came up, I was like, hey, um, yeah, As I was saying a minute ago, I think an interesting thing that the Most Wanted Song points out is is it sort of subtly underlines the idea of artistic integrity, like that by by saying that you want all these things is like trying to to say what you would want in a piece of music. You're ignoring the fact that a piece of music as it is now is typically created by

a person, right, and it's not like a burger. It's not like you can just go in and say like, hey, so I want these things and none of those other things. I mean, apparently you can do that, but it turns out the burger might be better if you just trust the chef. Now, what's interesting is I would argue that a lot of pop music that comes out, not all of it, but a lot of it is essentially made to a formula. So there is some very formulaic music out there that is very popular. It's just that this

was taking it to a ridiculous extreme. And it's also a lot of pop music is also written by a few of by a very few people, and um farmed out to the artists. Hey, let's not just say pop music. I mean I think in in some ways pretty much all music, or almost all music, is formulaic, even the most you know what you was say quote authentic music is formulaic in a way. I mean, there there are

like sure, right, that is true. I'm just thinking of a much narrower set of conventions for the particular kind of like you know, like when you're thinking about very specific subgenre like bubble gum pop, it's got this very specific sound to it. And you know, that's one of those things where I'm not saying you don't have to have talent to produce it. It's just that it's one of those things where if I listen to more than five or six songs, I can't tell where it stopped

and where it began. But then I'm also old and I yell at people to get off my lawns. So yeah, yeah, so I mean there's that I'm curious to see where musical composition goes in the future. I am too, I am too. And also, you know, again, just to remind everybody, we are going to have blog post up where we're gonna have links to all this stuff, and you can get those MP three's of the Most Wanted Song and

Most Unwanted Song. They are still available, so if you want to get your your grubby little musical hands on, those will show you where to go. And uh, and I don't know why you wouldn't. These things are brilliant in their own kind of awful way. Uh. Meanwhile, if you want to join in on the conversation, what you should do is go to f w thinking dot com. That's the website where we've got all the podcasts, all the blog posts, the videos. We've got articles there you

can join in on the conversation. Let's know what you think. Is the best song ever written or maybe the worst song ever written. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on both of those, or if you can imagine listening to a song created by a computer. Yeah, let's know. I mean maybe you already have. Yeah, So get in touch with us, let's know what you think, and we will talk to you again. Really similar. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot Com,

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