Tag: music

Categories
progress voluntary cooperation

The Real Randy Travis

Randy Travis, music, AI

In 2013, Randy Travis had a stroke so severe that doctors thought he was not long for this world.

Yet his life wasn’t over. And although he remains partly incapacitated, his career, amazingly, wasn’t over either: his wife Mary tours with him, and voice-​cloning technology is helping him create songs with a Randy Travis timbre.

When things were at their worst, Mary rejected the doctors’ prognosis because, as she says, her husband was still fighting.

“There was never a doubt in Randy’s mind that he could make it through it. It was that magical moment that I went to his bedside when they said, ‘We need to pull the plug. He’s got too many things going against him at that point.’ He had gotten a staph infection and three other hospital-​born bacterial viruses … one thing after another. And the doctors were just saying, ‘He just doesn’t have the strength to get through this.’…

“That’s when I went to him. That was the moment that I knew that Randy Travis was gonna make it because he squeezed my hand and a tear went down his face. And I said, ‘He’s still fighting.’”

Mary Travis praises artificial intelligence. 

Along with musician friends, AI is helping her husband complete lyrics and is simulating his voice so that he can, indirectly, sing again. 

The technology is guided by a human attention to nuance, and Randy himself obviously feels that what is being created conveys his spirit.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Categories
education and schooling ideological culture

De-​colonize Our Music?

music, freedom

Music is, arguably, the crowning artistic achievement of our civilization. 

It grew out of many folk and ecclesiastical practices, but one of the great innovations that allowed both Bach and The Beatles, Beethoven and Broadway, Bartok and “beats,” is the theory of music. 

Which rests on that great innovation, musical notation.

Not my area of expertise, alas, but I tip my hat to the educators who know the physics and the art in precise and powerful ways.

Unfortunately, stupidly racist anti-​racism has infected even music education. The latest example? The University of Oxford is considering a plan to get rid of teaching music through teaching notation.

“Sheet music is now considered ‘too colonial,’” explains The Telegraph, “while Beethoven and Mozart, and music curriculums in general, are believed to have ‘complicity in white supremacy.’”

While mainly an attack on classical music, our popular music rests upon a lot of basic western technique, too. The idea that musical notation is racist is itself bizarrely racist. Do these people think because whites invented musical notation, non-​whites are oppressed by it? Yes, the opponents of western musical notation, who include “activist students” as well as “activist professors,” are apparently ashamed of a tradition focused on “white European music from the slave period.”

But until fairly recently, all civilization was “the slave period.” And Europe, which developed the tradition, wasn’t the world’s most slave-​ridden society during the period of western music’s development: Africa and Asia were. 

Slavery is bad. Very bad. Freedom is good. Very good. But you don’t reject good things because they once upon a time touched bad things. We can have both freedom and music. 

And musical notation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Image from William Creswell

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