Applied Science #17: We Are All Synthesizers

On human creativity.

“Son, you know how I made it?”
“No sir.”
“I was an original. There was nothing like me before me. If you’re scared to be an original, tell me now.”
- James Brown to a young Al Sharpton (James McBride - Kill ‘Em And Leave, p. 110)

“We live in a world of refinement, not invention”

- Marco Pierre White

“My mind ain't nothin but a big ol' collage”

- New Kingdom, “Animal”

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When I was a teenager, I considered my creativity a well that would one day dry up. I started writing this piece as my understanding of human creativity evolved.

A variety of factors cause us to look at creativity through limited lenses, some commercial, some social. In a moment when technology has made the creation and dissemination of art easier than at any point in history, it may be helpful to rethink how we judge human creativity.

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As fears mount of AI replacing creative people and mechanical jobs alike.

As digital tools alter the ways we think of art, information, attribution, and originality.

As artists of all stripes across the globe continue the battle to protect both their work and their intellectual property’s fleeting value.

As every genre in every medium folds back on itself, referencing everything and nothing at once, a fruit punch of indeterminate ingredients.

As history flattens into a subjective stew cherry-picked by whoever’s watching, reading or listening at a given moment.

It is easy to wonder where creative work is going. Where human creativity itself goes next.

I’ve lived with some of the existential questions posed by present challenges to copyright, by the fragmentation of support for independent creators (twice!), and written hopefully, if skeptically, about solutions.

Rarely have I written about creation itself. To paraphrase an old adage, writing about the creative process is like dancing about architecture. It can feel as uninspiring as a tax return, lacking so much of the magic that emanates from the infinite ways and means artists conjure their art.

Rapid systemic changes and the algae bloom of new technologies inspired me to imagine a rubric for understanding different kinds of creativity, if for no other reason than to craft better support systems for the people with whom I work. As a chronic list-maker, I crave a bit of ordering.

I see artists along a spectrum with two poles: Generators and Synthesizers.

Generators: Artists whose work (whether singular or across an entire catalog) consists primarily of unprecedented or unfamiliar elements.

Synthesizers: Artists whose work consists primarily of existing/familiar elements, arranged either in novel or wholly familiar fashions. Within synthesizers, there are basic mixers and there are great stylists, those that take influences and refashion them with such flare they feel singular.

Generation and synthesis don’t define quality. Either can be as exciting or revelatory as they can be banal or confusing. Rather than highlighting what’s good or bad, the Generator/Synthesizer scale places creativity on a gradient from the almost unrecognizable to the completely known. I see this distinction evolving creative conversations away from value judgments that treat originality and authenticity as holy grails. These characteristics can typify great art and artists, but they can also limit our enjoyment of art on its own terms.

Acts of generation can be difficult, often misunderstood in their moment, loved by the few on their way to later becoming influential or hidden by time. Consider a painter like Hieronymous Bosch, whose grotesque religious triptychs have little precedent and precious few contemporary reference points. Underappreciated in his moment, he became a figure of major study and influence as years passed. In music, I think often of Three 6 Mafia, a group whose haunted house distortions of hip-hop in the early ‘90s spurred regional success, only to become the most influential aesthetic of their multi-decade career (notably, their more nationally successful records are, while still incredible, much more cleanly produced and akin to other hip-hop throughout the south).

Acts of generation can, of course, gain commercial recognition in their moments. Producers like Timbaland and Skrillex reshaped the sound of popular music in real time at multiple points across their respective careers, crafting hits that sounded unlike anything else, inspiring armies of copycats and selling millions of records in the process.

Some other artists I consider generators (it should be said, an incomplete list): Aphex Twin, Missy Elliot, Rakim, Burial, George Clinton, Andre 3000, Sophie, Joni Mitchell, Bjork, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Wu Tang Clan, Holly Herndon, Kraftwerk, FKA Twigs, Sun Ra, Flying Lotus.

Acts of synthesis are often more popular, blending sounds, sights, and ideas that tap into our various primal centers, proving enjoyable because they harbor universal truths in small or large parts. Or simply because we’ve heard them before in one form or another. In the pop of stars like Dua Lipa and Ariana Grande, we experience homage and pastiche that hardly attempt to hide influences. Someone like Frank Sinatra might readily be considered a stylist, giving the words and songs of others a singular feel with his iconic voice. The well worn structures and tropes of narrative behemoths like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas display high level synthesis in film.

Some other notable artists I consider synthesizers (it should be said again, an incomplete list): Kanye West (even in his errant antisemitism, West has chosen an amalgam of well-worn tropes rather than something original), Madonna, Rihanna, Beyonce, Eminem, Madlib, Jay Z (as he put it: “I’m not a biter I’m a writer for myself and others/ I say a BIG verse I’m only biggin’ up my brother”), Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, Elvis, Drake, Jason Derulo, Diddy (perhaps the pinnacle of simply taking sounds and putting his name on them, to say nothing of his particular brand criminality), Morgan Wallen, Post Malone, Michael Jackson, Frank Sinatra.

Of course, dividing synthesis and generation is an imperfect practice. Acts of synthesis can verge on generation in their combinations of elements. Love it or hate it (I, admittedly and somewhat guiltily, love it), Korn’s self-titled debut album is an act of synthesis that mutates into generation. You can hear Soundgarden and Alice in Chains in “Blind,” but by “Ball Tongue,” the screeching influence of the Bomb Squad and N.W.A.'s production collides with past sounds of funk, grunge, and metal, forming something that simply hadn’t existed. Rhythm guitar screaming like the siren in “Bring the Noise” (itself a saxophone sample), detuned bass from another world, a bridge wracked with fake crackle, filtered to feel like a distant sample, chorus shot through with explosive, incomprehensible scatting. “Ball Tongue” is a sui generis genre car crash, an everywhere and nowhere that transcends even the album surrounding it and the far more successful songs that would come to make nu metal/rap metal loathsome.

Some synthesizers can become generators. Prince comes to mind. In his early work, he wrote stalwart, stylish R&B mainstays like “I Feel For You.” By 1984, he collapsed the bounds of rock and R&B with the skeletal, sinewy groove of “Kiss,” a classic that sounds like little before and inspired pale imitation. J Dilla jumps into this frame as well, a masterful sample selector and beat maker who bent time and rhythm to his will in ways no producer had before. Stevie Wonder might be perhaps the greatest synthesizer turned generator. His early work hewed close to the time tested Motown formula of the ‘60s, occasionally paying homage to Ray Charles as a predecessor and the rawer band sound of Motown rival Stax. By the start of the 1970s, Wonder used the room-sized Tonto synthesizer to create backing tracks that had never been heard in pop music (the multi-layered funk masterpiece “Higher Ground” always sounds like the future to me, no matter how many times I listen).

At some point, we are all synthesizers. It’s impossible to avoid inputs and the brain’s unconscious reaction or interpretation. To engage with this spectrum is, in part, to understand that there are no true generators. Every idea has some primordial origin in the collective unconscious, in strains of conversation and notes traded in practice. Time-tested ideas stick around because of their communicative or survival value. We can identify figures as inventors or originators, but most points of origin comprise inspiration from global circumstances and the good fortune to have acted on that inspiration in a timely fashion. Something must influence these creators, whether they react to their surroundings or synthesize elements so unusual as to seem entirely novel. Invention is the collision of cosmic inspiration and historical narrative. Who pulled it from the ether before anyone else and who have we been told brought it to the people?

This notion of synthesis feels healthier for understanding human creation in the enveloping shadow of the A.I. age. Endless blending defines our now. Media is infinitely available. We consume, broadcast, sample, mix, distribute, share, and interpolate. The artistic imperative is no longer solely to glorify a god or gods, speak truth to power, or capture the truth of the moment, but to combine the elements of history into an articulation of the paths running through that particular artist. Autobiographical collage, defined moment to moment. I know many producers using Udio and Suno to create ideas that only previously existed in their imaginations, strict and imaginative prompt authoring leading them to sounds and samples they can then flip into songs with artists. That is but one example of the mind/machine meld positively and negatively defining our coming years.

I see growing resignation to the omnipresence of A.I. in creative fields. The groans and concerns make sense, particularly as nonhuman slop not only soaks up Spotify streams, but also what precious little space remains in the music press. In attempting to hold out hope, I turn to two passages from technologist Jaron Lanier’s 2023 New Yorker op-ed, “There is No A.I.”

On our fears about A.I., Lanier wrote:

“The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature. My attitude doesn’t eliminate the possibility of peril: however we think about it, we can still design and operate our new tech badly, in ways that can hurt us or even lead to our extinction. Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams. We can work better under the assumption that there is no such thing as A.I. The sooner we understand this, the sooner we’ll start managing our new technology intelligently.”

While we may have likely passed a point of no return for safe management of this new technology (and the “data dignity” approach Lanier advocates), his more hopeful definition of A.I. has stuck with me:

“If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.

A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures. In both cases, it’s people who have written the text and furnished the images. The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but it can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations, rather than as the invention of a new mind.

As far as I can tell, my view flatters the technology. After all, what is civilization but social collaboration? Seeing A.I. as a way of working together, rather than as a technology for creating independent, intelligent beings, may make it less mysterious—less like HAL 9000 or Commander Data. But that’s good, because mystery only makes mismanagement more likely.”

I have already spoken a bit about the future I see taking shape. I do not think laws will save us. As I noted in last year’s piece on the state of copyright, “At some point in human history, every combination of notes will have been played, every chord strummed, every drum beat pounded out.” And what then? Will that mean we’ve run out of ideas? That we should simply stop making music or art? That we should depend on legal structures to make art valuable, a condition that has only been the case for a blink of time’s eye? That’s obviously absurd and doesn’t mean there won’t be exciting new combinations that cast old ideas in different lights and also go on to create tremendous value for their creators, commercial or otherwise.

In our present frightening moment, as we try to square human creation against the gaping, cold capabilities of computers without morals, it is important to remember how young humanity is still, how infantile our language, and how limited our ability to process all existing corpuses of art, literature, music, film, and any other attempt at making sense of a likely meaningless reality. The legendary Cormac McArthy’s essay “The Kekulé Problem” speaks to the development of our linguistic capacity as a species and the constant evolutionary state of any system that seeks to order shifting realities:

“The evolution of language would begin with the names of things. After that would come descriptions of these things and descriptions of what they do. The growth of languages into their present shape and form—their syntax and grammar—has a universality that suggests a common rule. The rule is that languages have followed their own requirements. The rule is that they are charged with describing the world. There is nothing else to describe...

We don’t know what the unconscious is or where it is or how it got there—wherever there might be. Recent animal brain studies showing outsized cerebellums in some pretty smart species are suggestive. That facts about the world are in themselves capable of shaping the brain is slowly becoming accepted. Does the unconscious only get these facts from us, or does it have the same access to our sensorium that we have? You can do whatever you like with the us and the our and the we. I did. At some point the mind

must grammaticize facts and convert them to narratives. The facts of the world do not for the most part come in narrative form. We have to do that.”

Expressive forms naturally must evolve to meet their moment. This metamorphosis calls to mind a passage from another legend, Amiri Baraka (born Leroi Jones). In his seminal Blues People, Baraka writes:

“The reason for the remarkable development of the rhythmic qualities of African music can certainly be traced to the fact that Africans also used drums for communication; and not, as was once thought, merely by using the drums in a kind of primitive Morse code, but by the phonetic reproductions of the words themselves—the result being that Africans developed an extremely fine and extremely complex rhythmic sense, as well as becoming unusually responsive to timbral subtleties.” (p. 26)

Baraka’s analysis makes McArthy’s feel overly burdened by mathematical logic and incomplete, pointing further still to our lack of imagination around the bounds and purposes of language, more specifically art as a vessel for meaning. In small ways, I’ve observed and participated in singing as a purely communicative medium. For the last year, my young child has attended a Waldorf school for a parent and child class every Monday. Before he began, I had only vague awareness of Waldorf philosophy. I did not know that instructions were often sung. That music, poetry, and storytelling guided actions big and small. I have seen my son develop a profound love of music in his nearly three years on earth. Some of that, I imagine, comes from the amount of music we’ve played him. Some may be inherent. But when he delivers a joke or question in a sing song form, I see the understanding of Waldorf that music can be a purely communicative medium imprinted on his brain.

Here again, Baraka’s words seem prescient, when he mentions that “[bepop] by the mid-forties had also begun to get tagged with that famous disparagement art (meaning superfluous, rather than something that makes it seem important that you are a human being)” (p. 199). That parenthetical speaks to my Waldorf experience, the singular importance of music as means beyond entertainment or commerce.

Baraka’s work echoes in the equally prophetic Mark Fisher, whose Capitalist Realism crystallizes this notion of creation’s potential spiritual loss when confined to commercial art:

“In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts.” (p. 4)

Fisher’s work in Capitalist Realism lays out a kind of end of originality, a world in which every piece of art now constitutes hollow simulacrum at worst and moderately inspired recombination at best. As much as I appreciate the insight, I find this concept suffocating, particularly when I can derive such simple beauty from freely associative song with my son. Fisher’s analysis may apply solely to commercialized art, but his vision of capitalist systems is so totalizing that a sense of creative output as purely remixed distraction fodder seems the only logical conclusion. Perhaps the only real resistance and a refurbished understanding of creativity’s value comes in continued engagement with art outside of purely commercial means, strengthening communities with uncommodified creation wherever possible while determining new means of remuneration for creative people.

As pure generation becomes more difficult, clear taste and well-defined brands will become even more important for separating art from the daily glut of things distributed into the digital swamp. Attribution and monetization technologies will also play key roles in saving copyrights from the A.I. slop pit, but no intellectual property will mean much long term if it is not attached to a compelling narrative (brand) with a sharp perspective (taste). Above all, art will continue its spiritual role as a communicative medium, connecting communities big and small through the meaning of creation. If we can accept that notion, we can, perhaps, build less extractive IP machines and healthier businesses around creative people.

Perhaps the infrastructure for this collaborative future already exists in embryonic form. Metalabel founder (and Where Do We Go From Here? guest) Yancey Strickler's proposed A Corp model suggests how creative networks might organize economically. Short for “Artist Corporation,” Strickler recently introduced the idea that a better corporate structure can and should exist for creators looking to collaborate. The nuance of difference from current corporate forms comes in five stated pillars:

01 - Share ownership among collaborators, investors, and supporters.

02 - Access economic tools typically reserved for conventional businesses, like investment capital.

03 - Build equity and long-term stability, not just project-to-project income.

04 - Maintain creative control with legal protections for your intellectual property and creative vision.

05 - Pool resources to access better health insurance, group benefits, and shared infrastructure.

If A-Corps can legally enshrine an escape route from the extractive IP machines that dominate today, they might offer a glimpse of how the Generator/Synthesizer spectrum could reshape not just how we understand creativity, but how we structure and sustain it.

The Generator/Synthesizer spectrum frees us from the strict rubric of individual genius, providing a more nuanced view that acknowledges human inspiration in the process of even the most original thinkers. It allows creators to relinquish the need to be endlessly original, encouraging them instead to practice what feels best to them in a time of limitless recombination. In this moment, we must pride collaboration over individual genius. Collaboration and network building will be the only ways in which ideas connect on deeper levels and creative people sustain themselves in a literal sense.