“Embeddings” is a technical term from the field of machine learning (i.e., what is marketed as “artificial intelligence”).
These are mathematical representations of meanings, connections, and patterns—vast numerical spaces in which words, images, voices, songs, and ideas are stored as points.
Put simply: Machines don’t “understand” content; instead, they break it down into statistical relationships. The word “grief” then lies somewhere near “loss,” “loneliness,” and “farewell”; a fiercely played double bass drum lies somewhere among a gazillion brutal guitar riffs; and a sad folk song lies close to thousands of other sad folk songs—and all of this is clustered together because, in a dimensionality unimaginable to us but very much calculable by a machine, it is somehow related.
These embeddings later lead to what people perceive as “generation,” a process in which the system doesn’t simply assemble pre-existing content, but systematically explores probabilities within this semantic space.
Mikey Shulman is the CEO of Suno, a company that has scoured and stored every piece of music in the world and broken it down into embeddings, so that even people who have absolutely no interest in music can claim they’ve “made a song”—simply by telling Suno: “Please make me a sad ’80s pop ballad about loneliness.”
Mikey claims he’s doing this to do the world a favor, because hardly anyone enjoys making music these days. Because it’s so difficult.
And Mikey never tires of claiming, “Music should be more like a video game.”
You really have to let that sink in.
Music. Should. Be. More. Like. A. Video. Game.
The trouble is, we now live in a world where, when reading these words, a great many people don’t groan in despair, but simply shrug their shoulders and think, “Well, it’s true—I can’t do music. It would be great if I could.”
Yes, that’s true—it would be great if you could “do music”.
Because to do that, you’d have to sit down and learn an instrument. And if you really did that, you’d be embarking on a long, never-ending journey. And on that journey, you’d learn a lot about yourself, and about other people, about the world, about God, and about the divine within us. You might even learn something about nature or mathematics… depending on which paths you take along the way.
None of that happens when you give Suno a quick prompt and it spits out a song that lets you tell your friends: “Look, I’m a musician now, I made a song, hehehehe”
I’m really sorry having to tell you this, but:
You are not a musician.
You’re a fraud and a liar.
You didn’t make a song; instead, a hundred thousand other people (and almost certainly me among them), who were never asked if it was okay, made a song for you.
And that’s not even the saddest part. The saddest part is that you’re lying to and deceiving yourself.
Back to “Embeddings,” the song.
“Embeddings” is based on a dream I had, or maybe a feverish fantasy… I can’t really say for sure anymore, but it’s a metaphor for how I, as an artist, feel about the existence of platforms like Suno – which harvest my art, your art, everyone’s art and culture, just so that the stupid neighbor kid can “make music.”
I imagine myself lying on an operating table, and the anesthesiologist is inserting an IV to administer the anesthesia, and I’m asked to count to 10 (something I’ve had to endure a few too many times in recent years).
I feel myself growing tired, unable to move, and unable to defend myself.
And then along comes Mr. Mikey “Music Should Be a Video Game” Shulman, poking around inside me, taking out everything that makes me who I am, so that some charlatans can turn it into music.
I feel his soft, dry hands on me, hear the laughter of my former coworkers from my old company – people who never gave a cold shit about the about my music, but who are now standing in a group around a laptop, letting it generate one Suno song after another, and calling them “great,” “awesome,” “fantastic,” and “wow, that’s good,” and all the while I feel myself becoming less and less as the machine extracts from me whatever can be marketed.
Yeah.
That’s pretty much what “Embeddings” is about. And that’s pretty much how I feel when I look at how “AI” is affecting art and culture.
And that’s one of the many reasons why I conceived this album as an “offline” album.
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