The uncanny muse Music, art, and machines from automata to AI

Review by Booklist Review

In Love for Sale (2016), music critic Hajdu examined how innovations like wax cylinders, sheet music, the microphone, and digital audio files impacted popular culture and society at large. Here, Hajdu outlines how technological innovations in the creation of art reverberate throughout society. Some purists see creativity as uniquely human, making the use of technology in art's creation a source of great anxiety. But using machines to make art is nothing new; what is a piano if not a machine? Cameras dictate how some artists see the world. Hajdu is full of insights and interesting observations. The introduction of player pianos to peoples' homes made piano lessons nonessential and exposed white listeners to Black music. Original compositions made by modifying piano rolls allowed player pianos to exceed the abilities of pianists. Hajdu covers the ILLIAC computer, which was programmed to create musical composition based on a set of rules; Warhol used commercial- and industrial-art techniques for his creations; TONTO, an offshoot of the Moog Synthesizer, allowed Stevie Wonder to introduce new sounds to pop music. Hajdu concludes with a discussion of artificial intelligence, the latest source of innovation and anxiety.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Machines have been inspiring human creativity ever since the technological advancements of the Enlightenment "transformed... the Western world," according to this hit-or-miss history. Exploring how machines have shaped "our communication through art," journalist Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street) discusses a Victorian-era automaton named Zoe that purported to draw people's portraits (it was actually operated by a man hidden under the stage on which it sat); a 1927 exhibition in Manhattan that showcased motorboat propellers, radio sets, and other devices at "the intersection of art and machines"; Andy Warhol's machine reproduction tools, including silk screens; and AI programs that churn out proficient if generic music and visual art. Running beneath this history, Hajdu finds a perpetual clash between reactionaries who view every innovation as a terrifying dehumanization of art and those who celebrate its creative potential. He's at his most convincing when exploring how technology helps humans channel their creativity in new ways, as when he explains that the radio brought performers "singing softly, naturally, with the tonalities and inflections of ordinary speech... to listeners alone in the privacy of their homes." Too often, however, the narrative gets mired in circular ruminations on the metaphysics of information technology ("How can a computer sound like itself?" wonders techno-theorist George Lewis. "How do human beings sound like themselves?"). It's an intermittently insightful treatment of a timely topic. (Feb.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Hadju (Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction), music editor at The Nation, asserts that technology has long assisted inventiveness rather than replaced or combatted it. He traces the interaction of machines--including cameras, drawing instruments, music boxes, player pianos, theremins, electronic drums, and Moog synthesizers--with the visual and auditory arts. Hajdu frames his survey within the historical framework of two women automatons--Zoe, a drawing doll from the 1880s, and the modern AI-DA, an artificial intelligence product. Although Western culture has highlighted the work of white men, Hajdu also points out the contributions of Black people, especially during the height of ragtime and jazz music. He rescues from relative obscurity Ada Lovelace for her work on Babbage's proposed computer and Vaughn De Leath, dubbed the "First Lady of the Radio," for helping to popularize that medium with her versatile singing during the 1920s. Modern industry's cultural influence often democratizes rigidly replicable products. Hajdu opines that, so far, AI shows that action devices operate within human-crafted rules and patterns with the too-frequent biases those origins leave. VERDICT This analytical, historical review should interest readers of pop culture analysis.--Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A study of the long, uneasy relationship between art and technology. The rise of ChatGPT and other AI-driven creation tools has spiked anxiety about machines cannibalizing, perhaps even overtaking, human creativity. But as longtime music historian Hajdu (Love for Sale: Pop Music in America, 2016, etc.) points out in this lively book, machinery and art have long been closely intertwined. In the late 1800s automata produced music and drawings, and throughout the 20th century devices emerged as experimental novelties and practical helpmates to artists: Bell Labs explored computer-generated drawing in the 1960s, the Moog synthesizer transformed the texture of rock music, and '80s techno reflected how people "were using machines to produce sounds to stir people to move like components in a machine--a machine of social transformation." Hajdu doesn't make a precise distinction between art created entirely by computers and cases in which humans leverage technology to create art--an AI-generated painting that sold for $432,500 at auction in 2018 is not the same thing as, say, the German synth-rock act Kraftwerk. But Hajdu thoughtfully explores how the arrival of new technology has prompted handwringing. (Though not always: The Hammond B3 keyboard was warmly embraced by Black soul and gospel acts for its efficient evocation of an organ.) "The fear of machines taking over for humans is one of the great constants in the history of technology, and it is equally easy to inflate or dismiss," he writes. A more cohesive thesis about the degree to which concerns are legitimate might offer a path for readers to think about potential and ethical risks of AI and other technologies. But Hajdu is at heart a humanist, and he suggests that the disruptive technologies themselves don't spell doomsday but are, in themselves, works of art. Wide-ranging, thought-provoking music history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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