Music machine

‘Shared music': Here’s a thought experiment that might be of interest to music therapists. The intention is to facilitate thought and discussion about what ‘shared music’ really is. It’s something I’ve often pondered, both from a music therapy perspective and as a jazz player. I also suspect that ‘shared music’ is a concept that is often used by music therapists as if everyone knows what it means. I’m not sure that I do. When we play music with other people, we often have the experience of feeling connected, as though we are inhabiting an alternative reality together. But could this be illusory? Music is after all a subjective experience. ‘Shared music’ sounds suspiciously like an objective concept. Look at it this way…

Imagine there was a machine that could improvise music. It could not only improvise, but respond sensitively and interestingly to other music. Now imagine that you were in a room playing music with a partition between you and the machine. Nobody told you about the machine, you simply heard the music it produced. Would you be able to tell that it wasn’t a real person making the music with you?

"This is moot point as such a machine is impossible anyway." Perhaps, but let’s pretend it is possible. The point of the exercise is to think about what it is about musical interaction that is human and which parts are ‘merely musical sound’. This is an important question for music therapists. Also there are lots of musical machines around now (auto-tune, samplers, loop pedals), even cheap and widely available ones, that would have been hard to imagine some years ago.

"Even if such a machine could be invented, it would be so complex that it would be easier for a real person to do the job anyway." This is an interesting one. In fact this is an issue that has been around for a while with regard to recorded music. The fact is that a lot of records which people enjoy are, to some degree, created by machines. The musical content may have been invented by a human, but the performance is electronic. Is this music necessarily ‘worse’ than music played on ‘real instruments’? The issue of improvisation and responsiveness complicates the issue, as a machine that can respond musically has to be a lot cleverer than one that simply follows a set of instructions, but it’s not impossible to imagine. However it is a valid objection in the ‘real world’. Studios still employ live musicians today, despite all of the advanced technology available, because there are some things that humans can still do better than machines. But this is a thought experiment and doesn’t have to take place in the real world.

"A machine, no matter how clever, could never achieve the subtlety of a live musician." This is perhaps getting near the crux of the matter. Maybe there are aspects of performance that are so subtle that we are not even fully conscious of hearing them, but which are nevertheless crucial to the ‘humanity’ of the music. Perhaps the tiniest of imperfections, perhaps subtle events that could never be anticipated are what differentiates human from machine. Perhaps there are musical things that only a real live person could ever produce which a machine, because of its essential ‘machine-ness’, could not. But then if this is the case, what are they? Because this is another important question for music therapists. It may be that the real question is ‘What frame of mind do we have to be in so that these essential human characteristics will happen as a matter of course?’ This is probably the approach that most music therapists, and indeed improvising musicians of any kind, take. Perhaps there might be a danger of being machine-like if we don’t get into this frame of mind. It’s also possible that a really great musician will always musically out-empathise a machine, just as a great chess grand master might beat the most powerful computer (though the machines have triumphed in that particular battle). However this might allow for a grey area where a lesser, even very good musician, or a great musician on an off-day, might not make the grade. Might they then be hard to tell from the machine? Or is it actually something essential that any musician, even an average one, possesses that differentiates them? Still we’re allowing for an imperfect machine with this reply. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend the machine is as responsive and inventive as the greatest musician who ever lived.

"There is something about the presence of a real person in the room, even if unseen, that is crucial to the musical interaction, some sense of another presence that, although not overtly part of the music, is vital to the experience of shared improvisation." This may well be true. Instinctively, I like this response. It allows for the possibility of this wonder-machine, but side-steps the issue. Basically, this is saying that there may be something almost mystical about the presence of another person in the room. Is this something that can be heard in the music? If not, how can you really tell whether the music is human or machine? Perhaps you can ‘feel’ the person’s ‘aura’. This answer is both irrefutable and also impossible to prove (unless we really had the machine to do the experiment).

"If you could invent such a machine, you couldn’t really tell the difference, but this is missing the point as shared music making involves other modes of simultaneous communication in order to be a fulfilling experience. The partition is the problem, as to be able to feel the musical connection you also need other ingredients such as eye contact, awareness of facial expressions and body movements, even extraneous noises like key rattles or intakes of breath." So perhaps musical connection cannot really be separated, particularly in a therapeutic context, from the whole experience of being in a room with someone else doing stuff. Maybe such a machine would be musically indistinguishable from a real person, but so what? It’s not just the music we’re interested in here, it’s the ‘whole experience’, which could mean many different things. Music itself is perhaps only part of the experience of making music with a person.

"When you improvise music with another person, you can just feel it. It’s a shared experience and that’s something that can’t be explained." Maybe this is the most honest answer. Unfortunately it doesn’t identify the essential musical ingredient(s) that separate this shared experience from the machine experience.

"Well maybe they’ll have been conned someone into believing they’ve been playing with a real person. They’ll be disappointed when the truth is revealed." So could there be something retrospective about shared musical experience? Could the reaction of the other musician, however small (jazz musicians getting together to play will often just nod after a tune, but that can be enough to say ‘I heard you’), be vital to the ‘shared-ness’. Anyone who’s ever done a background piano gig will testify to how dispiriting it can be to play to zero audience reaction. Even a single punter applauding out of pity can lift the spirits immeasurably, take it from me! So again we come back to the non-musical ingredients which can hold up a mirror to the shared music.

"If such a machine existed, it would be as good as a real musician. Let me know when you’ve invented one." Is this machine like ‘zombies’ in consciousness theory (hypothetical beings who behave exactly as we do, but have no self awareness)? You can imagine it, but even if it did exist, what’s the difference? The experience of the person playing would be the same with the machine as it would be with another person, but so what? The machine is emulating human characteristics perfectly, so the question we should really be asking is ‘what are those human musical characteristics?’ The question about ‘shared musical experience’ remains. Does it really exist, or can we only look at two separate experiences? Does ‘shared musical experience’ seem to imply an imaginary third party who is witnessing the sharing?

Afterthought: In my actual practice as a music therapist I believe I do experience connection to most clients through the music, but there remains something mysterious about this, and there are some who cause me to doubt the connection. We never know for sure what this ‘shared musical experience’ is like for the client. We work with at best partial knowledge, our own instincts and suppositions. Some clients tell us about the experience, but this is never really enough, and of course some can’t. Nothing is certain.