THOUGHTS 

I decided that as I start on a sabbatical, it was time to restart some type of blog thing. I’ll call it Thoughts.

THE DEATH OF FINALE

Aug 27, 2024

On Monday morning, the company MakeMusic announced the end of Finale, their legendary app that a sprawling, worldwide community of musicians have used for 35 years to compose, arrange and publish music. If you’re not a musician or perhaps don’t quite understand the magnitude of this change, perhaps a fictional scenario can help illustrate.

Imagine walking into an office building of a large company where thousands of people work.  Employees in this office use the ubiquitous MS Office every day. They’ve been word processing with Word and spreadsheeting with Excel for decades — creating, editing, posting, managing, organizing, storing, archiving, printing, sharing, signing, publishing, accounting… dedicated people do so many INGs silently at companies and often we don’t even know anything about them.

Now, out of the blue, imagine that Microsoft announces that they are ENDING the entire Office suite. One year from today, nobody will be able to install Microsoft Office on their computers anymore. With this announcement, Microsoft recommends all their customers start using Apple’s office apps like Pages and Numbers instead (you may need to suspend your disbelief, but try to stick with me on this). Everybody, worldwide, will need to purchase and learn to use this other software. Workers at the company will only be able to access the company’s petabytes of data by first using Office itself to export the files into a middleware format, and then import all *those* transitional documents into Pages and Numbers in a third format. The middleware will theoterically allow employees to keep all the content of their Word documents, but the formatting will be different. The pagination, layout, fonts, sizes will be maybe 75% right. In their spreadsheets, the numbers should all be there but the formulas might not translate fully. They’ll need to check each one to make sure everything adds up. Daunting, right?

Let’s go further with this scenario. Imagine a random 55-year old employee at the company who’s forged their whole career there, working for 35 years, their entire adult life. By now, this employee so thoroughly knows the functionality of MS Office that they used Word home at to compose their annual Christmas letters, and documented family stories and history. By now, they’ve got several thousand of their own personal MS Office files, too. So, if they don’t export and re-import all their existing letters and documents, those family heirlooms will be gone forever.

Does that sound crazy? This is exactly what the end of Finale means to musicians. This is why their announcement is causing us to mourn like we had a death in the family. Losing Finale IS a death in the family.

I don't think this is hyperbole. I’ve used Finale since 1991. That means the app has been an integral part of my music-making for 2/3 of my life. Doing a quick Finder search on my current Mac, I have about 5000 Finale documents. These are comprised of my own compositions and arrangements I’ve written professionally, and for my own performing situations or for student ensembles at Ithaca College. But many of them are for my own family. I revisit my pieces often. Sometimes I need to rejigger the instrumentation, re-edit a part, or change the flow of the piece for a new situation. It feels like a crushing blow to even contemplate being forced (pushed…? coerced…?) into having to redo all the tiniest details of a piece, using software I don’t yet know how to use, EVERY time I open an old piece to revisit it. I have to push down a sinking knot in my stomach just to re-read that last sentence.

Here’s another tragic element of this news. My recently passed father-in-law Jack Gale was a tremendous trombonist, composer and arranger. Like me, he began using Finale in the 1990s. Catherine and I have been trying our best to identify and catalogue his treasure trove of music. I quick search of his files showed 10,000 Finale files among his various computers, but that 10k figure is low. Many of his Finale files are so old they predate the modern versions of Mac OS X that use file extensions like “.MUS” or “.MUSX” so MacOS doesn’t even recognize them as Finale files. I can currently open these files in Finale, but the conversion process for these older files will be even more fraught. We won’t be able to deal with all of them; some pieces will be lost forever.

The loss of Finale feels like a death in the family because it IS a death. Finale was someone I spent hours a day with, grew up with, created music with, and loved. Like any beloved family member, I didn’t always LIKE Finale. It could frustrate me to fits of tears, screaming, and gnashing of teeth. But I’ve used Finale every day, more often than any other app on my computer.

I think toughest part is that Finale’s demise reminds me that all life is finite. We all know that everybody dies eventually, but it’s still a shock when it happens so suddenly to someone we love. Before too long, I will be no more. As a musician, my legacy is my music and I want that legacy to outlive me. But the death of Finale reminds me that nothing lasts forever. Not my music. Not me.

As I grieve, I am going to try my hardest to remember that grief can ultimately turn into joy.  What else can I do? I’m going to hold my family and friends close, and try to keep making music every day.

-Mike Titlebaum

AI SUCKS

July 27, 2024

Let me start by saying I neither hate nor fear technology. Almost everything we touch in our world is technological on some level. I think it’s fair to say that we humans got to where we are in the world by some combination of having opposable thumbs and the brainpower to fashion tools to help us survive. Technology is in our nature.

As a musician, I also recognize that all our musical instruments — perhaps other than the human voice — are technological. They’re glorious examples of the melding of art and science. The Selmer Mark VI saxophones I play are marvels of achievement in mechanical design and metal work, created for the purpose of allowing us wind blowers to express our musicality with something other than our less-than-entirely-beautiful singing voices. So, technology is not inherently the antithesis of music.

So, why do does AI suck?

The companies developing AI systems have spent billions of dollars on “generative AI” systems that are entirely based on generating AI products — AI “conversation,” AI “art,” and now AI “music.” But what’s entirely clear is that none of them currently comprehend the creative process of making art at all.

Tech companies seem to think AI can generate “music.” I’m sure you’ve heard some AI-generated noise but I can’t call that music. The only way to accurately describe it is to call it Music-Adjacent Audio Product (for brevity, I’ll use the acronym MAAP from now on). MAAP is as close to music as Velveeta (dairy adjacent calorie delivery product) is to cheese.

The AI companies seem to think if they hoover up enough raw material, their systems could “learn” to “create” actual music.  “After all,” these companies rationalize, “that’s the same thing all artists do; they hear all the music in the world, absorb it, and synthesize it into something new!”

Uhhhh, nope. That entire premise is fundamentally flawed, doomed from the start.

Music is, and has always been, the process of making music. It is not any of the products that people normally think of as music. Music is about the process of making the product, not the product of the process.

To elaborate, the process of making music requires learning to make music. And learning to make music requires interaction with other human beings. The process of becoming a musician, regardless of whether we’re talking about a young child, an amateur or a full-time professional, never happens in isolation. As youngsters, we hear music around us, and we strive to emulate who we hear. Mentors, teachers, older musicians, peers, and celebrities can all inspire us. We suck at first, but we begin to improve. Sometimes the people we hear are on recordings, sometimes they’re live in person. Sometimes we argue with them, sometimes they’re parental, caring and sweet. Sometimes we’re in the close quarters, sometimes we hear them from afar. Sometimes they’re in a classroom or teaching studio, sometimes they’re online. Some of their lessons are formal, sometimes their teaching just happens on the bandstand. But we always learn to make music from other humans, with other humans, for other humans.

The tech firms are also wrong about how we musicians listen. We don’t absorb everything that exists. We’re selective and build our sense of taste gradually. Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau had a great take on the process of becoming a jazz musician in his amazing essay “Ideology, Burgers and Beer.” In the piece he writes:

“You can’t love everything, all the time … When you build your identity as a player, you do so in part by excluding a bunch of other identities, at least temporarily.”

AI-obsessed tech companies seem to think if their systems devour enough data, they would be able to generate MAAP that sounds close enough to synth-pop-rock-country-rap-bluegrass that it could “fool” people into believing it was actual music made by humans. Who knows, maybe they’re right about that. I’m sure there are enough of us “foolish” humans who couldn’t tell the difference and wouldn’t care. I admit that I could easily fail that particular Turing test.

But what tech companies don’t understand is that little test does not matter. That test is just a cute game driven by curiosity about whether humans can tell whether the end product was made humans or machine. Who gives a flying f$%& about that? That’s a test that only cares about product, not about process.

I can give you a much more efficient test of musical process. Put me into a room with three people: (1) the lead programmer for an AI system that generates MAAP, (2) the person who that types “prompts” into the AI system to create MAAP and (3) a musician. I promise you I can tell you which one is a musician, every time. How? I’ll sit in a chair facing each one of those people and say: “Look me in the eyes and make music.”

Any person who is a musician has followed a process which is recognizable to other musicians which will allow them to pass that test. The music they choose to make during that test may not be the style of music I like, or a song I like. It might not even be any good. But it will be recognizable as part of a musical process.

[Side note to any programmers who are also musicians: I’m certainly not saying you can’t be two things. I was both. I’m just saying whomever is currently running the show at AI-obsessed tech companies are most certainly not artists.]

Maybe part of tech companies challenge in understanding that music all about process is that we musicians don’t all follow the exact same process. On the surface, our processes seem vastly different. The type of music we make will influence -- and will be influenced by -- the process we use. Even among musicians within the same genre, the process can vary considerably. For example, I am a jazz musician. I know many other jazz musicians, and our processes can vary depending on who we listened to growing up, where we grew up, who our family and friends are, and how long we’ve been on their path. But me or any other jazz musician can absolutely recognize the process of other jazz musicians when we encounter one.

[Side note: Whether or not jazz musicians actually acknowledge the jazz process among the others they encounter is a different question. There’s plenty of sexism, racism, and general hoity-toity-ness among our ranks. But isn’t that true for everybody?]

When people come to experience jazz live, they are actually responding to the process, not the product. Our process involves improvisation and spontaneous interplay. There’s nothing else like it. We often take a familiar song, and improvise almost every aspect of it — the contour, the form, the melody, and the colors of the chords are all fair game. And everything that we improvise is influenced by the other musicians around us & how they respond — improvisationaly — to what we just improvised. Our process is best described as an improvised musical dialogue, and the audience gets to be a witness. Sometimes, a whole song gets totally screwed up. Highly improvised music can go that way because we’re making it up on the spot. That’s an inevitable and even desireable part of the process, so we don’t mind. Because of that, I’m 100% more interested in hearing middle school students trying and failing to improvise over any piece of AI-generated MAAP.

I love learning about other jazz musicians’ processes. Drummer Dave Grohl speaks eloquently about becoming a musician:

“Musicians should go to a yard sale and buy an old f****** drum set and get in their garage and just suck. And get their friends to come in and they'll suck, too. And then they'll f******* start playing and they'll have the best time they've ever had in their lives and then all of a sudden they'll become Nirvana.”

Any human being on the planet who watches Taylor Swift’s SNL Monologue Song for 4½ minutes would recognize how her process brought her to a place of superior musicianship.

When I was young, I pored over books about Charlie Parker’s painful process, getting booted from jam sessions because he sounded terrible, which caused him to recede into a literal woodshed to practice until he could play. I remember reading that John Coltrane was so dedicated to practicing he would go to the back of an airplane and play the C scale for 12 hours. I got to meet saxophonist Grace Kelly as a guest artist here at Ithaca College and enjoyed hearing about how she got to be mentored by jazz jazz legend Lee Konitz, who must have recognized how deeply she cared about the improvisational process.

Nowadays, as a jazz professor, I have discovered I have to remain vigilant about protecting the process. I am the Director of Jazz Studies at Ithaca College, which is a truly wonderful school. Among my faculty colleagues are all manner of amazing musical specialists, yet I am the lone professor devoted to jazz full time. In order to offer a robust quantity of jazz ensembles and courses every year, I have to rely on both part-time faculty and full-timers who mostly specialize in other areas to also teach jazz. From time to time, an administrator or department head will approach and request that [NEW FACULTY MEMBER X, Y or Z] teach a jazz course or jazz lessons. “Hey Mike, of course they could coach a jazz combo…??”

Hmmmm.

I have a reliable little test that to answer that question. Put me in the room with that faculty member for about, oh, maybe two minutes. Even though I’m a saxophonist, I’ll sit at the piano to accompany with some chords. I will tell that person “Let’s do a song together. What song would you like to do?” If they are a jazz musician, we will easily find at least one song we have in common, and we will have fun making music together. It could even be a simple 12-bar blues. Easy peasy. But if they’re not a jazz musician, the entire idea of this exercise will freak them the f*$% out.

Of course, no admin has yet to take me up on this test. The funny thing is that I wouldn’t actually need that person to be a great jazz musician to be an effective teacher; they just need to be *a* jazz musician. This little test shows quite effectively who is a jazz musician, and who isn’t.

[Side note for students auditioning for jazz studies at Ithaca: This is essentially the same thing I do with prospective students. And similarly, I do not expect you to be great. You just have to demonstrate that you love the process.]

I mentioned that I don’t fear technology. Before my current job at Ithaca College, I worked in tech for several years. I was a programmer at two companies, and I really enjoyed it. I was fairly decent at writing code, but it turned out that the aspect of the job I really excelled at was creative problem solving. I could sit in a room with clients, dig into their process, understand what problem they were having, and then help to design a solution. I really liked getting to understand how our technology could improve their workflow to be more efficient, accurate, or helpful to their customers. I would ultimately turn that plan into a software solution. Later I became a team leader and would oversee other programmers who were creating these systems together.

So: Do I think it possible that AI could ultimately help musicians?

Sure. Consider that point stipulated. Not all AI is “generative” in the same way. Some AI is the kind of machine learning that is supposed to help us answer emails faster so we can get back to actually being creative. Sure, whatever.

I’m even willing to admit that it might be possible someday that AI could actually help us be creative. Musicians who have already learned the process of music-making are perpetually seeking new inspirations, so I can understand how introducing elements of randomness or unpredictability found in AI could jog cobwebs from their artistic mind, coaxing out some new creativity. I remember years ago when I heard about a program called “Max” that could provide a function like that for creative musicians.

However, tech companies are certainly not heading in this direction with their AI products now. I had always thought that Apple, a company who’s made tools that artists and musicians have used for decades, understood something at the core of the creative process.

But whoo-eee, Apple has really gone off the rails here. True, they may not be any worse than Google, Microsoft or Meta, but I had always considered them way better than the others. For example, I had assumed Apple Music’s suggestions were largely curated by humans, but in just the last few weeks, Apple Music fed me some MAAP after I finished listening to an album (considering it “similar” or “related” music…?), and later suggested I listen to another piece of garbage it claimed it had been recorded by jazz trombonist JJ Johnson. Uh, no. Apple’s recent “Crush” ad touting it’s new iPad is also entirely tone deaf. It imagines a massive hydraulic press that obliterates a trumpet, piano and other instruments as well as a slate of other artistic tools, ultimately revealing that when mashed together it makes a new iPad. Ugh, watching it is just painful. This ad proved just how disconnected they have become and how far they’ve strayed from their ideals as a tool to help artist’s processes.

It’s actually painful for me to have come to this conclusion about Apple. Their products have been a big part of my family since the 1970s. My dad loved Apple computers from the beginning. He got me an Apple II as a kid and taught me to program (a skill which helped me get those programming jobs years later). He was a professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Rochester, and in 1983 he was invited to an event called the “Apple University Consortium.” At that event Apple co-founder Steve Jobs himself wooed him and bunch of other collegiate computing leaders into going all in with the soon-to-be released Macintosh computer. Soon thereafter, the U of R was awash with Macs, and I’ve been using them ever since. Apple’s tools have helped my creative process immeasurably throughout my entire adult life.

Last year, the writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe how platforms develop, progress then ultimately die:

“First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Perhaps Apple’s enshittification was inevitable. I’m not saying Apple’s business model is at all like Amazon.com’s, but Wall Street and other “experts” have been warning them that they have no choice but to start sprinkling magic AI dust over their platform or they’d — I dunno — “fall behind their competitors” or whatever. To their credit, Apple’s WWDC keynote did seem to focus more on assistive AI than on generative AI. But really? Am I supposed to believe that Apple’s customers are demanding AI-generated pictures or an intrusive and omnipresent search box a la “Ask Meta AI” that sits above everything on their screen? Man, I really hope that’s not what we get in the next few rounds of iOS and MacOS releases.

Maybe it’s not too late for Apple to be saved from themselves. I’d like to think they could still find the way back if enough of us customers stay vigilant, make our art, write, and compose while protecting the creative process. The public’s visceral reaction to “Crush” and Apple’s rapid apology was a hopeful sign.

Regardless of what Apple and other firms do with AI, I am not worried at all about any of it ruining music or taking our jobs. It’s just not what we do. At the moment, none of the tech companies show any signs whatsoever of being able to replace our process.

So, here’s my recommendation: Have fun and make music with each other. Make it about the process and not the product, and you’ll be just fine.

-Mike Titlebaum

Professor & Director of Jazz Studies, Ithaca College
(For accuracy’s sake, my upgrade from Associate Professor to full Professor doesn’t officially begin until fall 2024)