Pushing back on AI (and pushing back on that)

A composer I know is coming to terms with the inevitable appearance of online AIs that can compose music based on general parameters like mood, genre and length, somewhat similar to AI image generators that can create an image based on a prompt (someone I know tried "Willem Dafoe as Ronald McDonald" with ... intriguing ... results).  I haven't looked at any of these in depth, but from what I have seen it looks like they can produce arbitrary amounts of passable music with very little effort, and it's natural to wonder about the implications of that.

A common reaction is that this will sooner or later put actual human composers out of business, and my natural reaction to that is probably not.  Then I started thinking about my reasons for saying that and the picture got a bit more interesting.  Let me start with the hot takes, and then go on to the analysis.

• This type of AI is generally built by training a neural network against a large corpus of existing music.  Neural nets are now pretty good at extracting general features and patterns and extrapolating from them, which is why the AI-generated music sounds a lot like stuff you've already heard.  That's good because the results sound like "real music", but it's also a limitation.
• At least in its present form, using an AI still requires human intervention.  In theory, you could just set some parameters and go with whatever comes out, but if you wanted to provide, say, the soundtrack for a movie or video game, you'll need to actually listen to what's produced and decide what music goes well with what parts, and what sounds good after what, and so forth.  In other words, you'll still need to do some curation.

Along with this, I have a general opinion about the progress of AI as a whole: A few years back, there was a breakthrough as hardware got fast enough, thanks in part to special-purpose tensor-smashing chips, and new modeling techniques were developed, for the overall approach of neural network-based machine learning (ML) models to solve interesting problems that had so far resisted solution.  We're now in the phase of working out the possibilities, with new applications turning up left and right.

One way to look at is that there were a bunch of problem spaces out there that computers weren't well suited for before but are a good match for the new techniques, and we're in the process of identifying those.  Because there has been so much progress in applying the new ML, and because these models are based on the way actual brains work, it's tempting to thing that they can handle anything that the human brain can handle, and/or that we've created "general intelligence", but that's not necessarily the case.

My strong hunch is that before too long the limitations will become clear and the flood of new applications will slow.  There may or may not be a new round of "failed promise of AI" proclamations and amnesia about how much progress has been made.  Researchers will keep working away, as they always have, and at some point there will be another breakthrough and another burst of progress.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

That's all well and good, but honestly those bullet-pointed arguments above aren't that great, and the more general argument doesn't even try to say where the limits are.

The bullet points amount to two arguments that go back to the beginnings of AI, if not before, to the first time someone built an automaton that looked like it was doing something human, and they have a long history of looking compelling in the short run but failing in the long run.

• The first argument is basically that the automaton can only do what it was constructed or taught to do by its human creators, and therefore it cannot surpass them.  But just as a human-built machine can lift more than a human, a human-built AI can do things that no human can.  Chess players have known this for decades now (and I'm pretty sure chess wasn't the first such case).
• The second argument assumes that there's something about human curation that can't be emulated by computers (though I was careful to say "at least in its present form").  The oldest form of this argument is that a human has a soul, or a "human spark of creativity" or something similar, while a machine doesn't, so there will always be some need for humans in the system.

The problem with that one is that when you try to pin down that human spark, it basically amounts to "whatever we can do that the machines can't ... yet", and over and over again the machines have  eventually turned out to be able to do things they supposedly couldn't.  Chess players used to believe that computers could only play "tactical chess" and couldn't play "positional chess", until Deep Blue demonstrated that if you can calculate deeply enough, there isn't any real difference between the two.

As much as I would like to say that computers will never be able to compose music as well as humans, it's pretty certain that they eventually will, including composing pieces of sublime emotional intensity and inventing new paradigms of composition.  I don't expect that to happen very soon -- more likely there will be an extended period of computers cranking out reasonable facsimiles of popular genres -- but I do expect it to happen.

Where does that leave the composer?  I think a couple of points from the chess world are worth considering:

• Computer chess did not put chess masters out of business.  The current human world champion would lose badly to the best computer chess player, which has been the case for decades, and we can expect it to be the case from here on out, but people still like to play chess and to watch the best human players play (watching computers play can also be fun).  People will continue to like to make music and to hear music by good composers and players.
• Current human chess players spend a lot of time practicing with computers, working out variations and picking up new techniques.  I expect similar things will happen with music: at least some composers will get ideas from computer-generated music, or train models with music of their choosing and do creative things with the results, or do all sorts of other experiments.

There is also some relevant history from the music world

• Drum machines did not put drummers out of business.  People can now produce drum beats without hiring a drummer, including beats that no human drummer could play, and beats that sound like humans playing with "feel" on real instruments, but the effect of that has been more to expand the universe of people who can make music with drum beats than to reduce the need for drummers (I'm not saying that drummers haven't lost gigs, but there is still a whole lot of live performance going on with a drummer keeping the beat).
• Algorithms have been a part of composition for quite a while now.  Again, this goes back to before computers, including common-practice techniques like inversion, augmentation and diminution and 20th-century serialism.  An aleatoric composition arguably is an algorithm, and electronic music has made use of sequencers since early days.  From this point of view, model-generated music is just one more tool in the toolbox.

Humanity has had a complicated relationship with the machines it builds.  On the one hand, people generally build machines to enable them to do something they couldn't, or relieve them of burdensome tasks.  Computers are no different.  On the other hand, people have always been cautious about the potential for machines to disrupt their way of life, or their livelihood (John Henry comes to mind).  Both attitudes make sense.  Fixating on one at the expense of the other is generally a mistake.

Personally, having watched AI develop for decades now, I don't see any significant change in that dynamic.  We don't seem particularly closer to the Singularity than we ever were (and I argue in that post that's in part because the Singularity isn't really a well-defined concept).  But then, given the way these things are believed to work, we may not know different until it's too late.

If it does happen maybe someone, or something, will compose an epic piece to mark the event.

Is the piano a percussion instrument?

So is the piano a percussion instrument?

This is one of those questions that can easily devolve into "Well technically" ... "Oh yeah, well actually" and so forth.  I'm not aware of an official designator of instrument categories, but more to the point I'm not interested in a right or wrong answer here.  I'm interested in why the question should be tricky in the first place.

The answer I learned from high school orchestra or thereabouts was "Yes, it's a percussion instrument, because the strings are hit by hammers."  The answer I personally find more convincing is "No, because it's a piano, duh."

OK, maybe that's not particularly convincing.  Maybe a better way to phrase it would be "No, it's a keyboard instrument.  Keyboard instruments are their own class, separate from strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion."  By this reasoning, the pipe organ is a keyboard instrument, not a wind instrument, the harpsichord is a keyboard instrument, not a string instrument, and a synthesizer is a keyboard instrument, assuming it has a keyboard (not all do).

The intuition behind this is that being played by way of a keyboard is more relevant than the exact method for producing the sounds.  Even though a marimba, xylophone, vibraphone or glockenspiel has an arrangement of things to hit that looks a lot like a keyboard, the fact that you're limited to mallets in two hands has a big effect on what you can play.  Likewise, a harpsichord and a guitar or banjo produce somewhat similar sounds, but fretting a one or more of a few strings is different from pressing one or more of dozens of keys.

It's a lot easier to play a four-part fugue on a harpsichord than a marimba, and a seven-note chord is going to present real problems on a five-string banjo.  Different means of playing make different things easy and hard, and that affects what actually gets played.

At this point, I could put forth a thesis that how you play an instrument is more important in classifying it than how the sounds are ultimately produced and be done with it, but that's not what got me typing in the first place.  To be clear, I like the thesis.  It's easier to play a saxophone if you know how to play a clarinet, easier to play a viola or even a guitar if you can play violin, and so forth.  What got me thinking, though, was the idea of how any classification on the order of string/woodwind/brass/percussion or keyboard/bow/plectrum/mallet/etc. tends to break down on contact with real objects to classify.

For example, there are lots of ways to produce sound from a violin.  There are several different "ordinary" ways to bow, but you can also bounce the wooden part of the bow on the strings, or pluck the strings (with either hand).  Independently of what you do with the bow, you can put a mute on the bridge to get a kind of ethereal, spooky sound.  You can rest a finger lightly on the string to get a "harmonic" with a purer tone (and generally higher pitch) than if you pressed the string to the fingerboard.  Beyond all that, you can tap on the body of the violin with your finger, or the stick of the bow or the end of the bow.  You could even tap the violin on something else, or use its strings as a bow for another instrument.

Does tapping on a violin make it a percussion instrument?  I'd say it is when you're tapping on it, otherwise not.  But if you ask, "Is the violin a percussion instrument," I'd say "no" (or, if I'm feeling cagy, "not normally").

How about an electric guitar?  Obviously, it's a string instrument, except there's more to playing an electric guitar than picking and fretting the strings.  The effects and the amp make a big difference.  It's probably best to think of electric guitar plus amp and effects as both a string instrument and an electronic instrument, both in its construction and in how you play it.  The guitar, amp and effects together are one instrument -- that's certainly how guitarists tend to see it, and they can spend quite a bit of time telling you the details of their rigs.

There are plenty of other examples to pick from -- a morsing, a glass harp, a musical saw, a theremin ... if you had to pick, you could probably call a morsing or even a glass harp a percussion instrument -- I mean, if a piano is, why not?  A musical saw would be, um, a string instrument?  A theremin would be ... I don't know, let's say brass because there are metal parts?

But why pick?  Clearly the four sections of an orchestra work fine for the instruments they were originally intended to classify, and they provide useful information in that context.  If you're putting together an orchestra, you can expect a percussionist to handle the bass drum, snare drum and tympani but not a trumpet, oboe or cello.  If you're composing for orchestra, you should know that wind players need to breathe and that a string instrument can play more than one note at a time, but only within fairly strict limits.  In neither case do you really care that someone might consider a piano a percussion instrument.  For the purposes of hiring players and composing music, a piano is a keyboard instrument.

If your purpose is to classify instruments by common properties, there are much better systems.  Wikipedia likes the Hornbostel Sachs classification, which takes into account what produces the sound, how the sound is produced, the general form of the instrument and other factors.  For my money, it does a pretty good job of putting similar instruments together while making meaningful distinctions among them.  For example (based on this 2011 revision of the classification):

• violin 321.322-71 (Box lute sounded by a bow)
• cello 321.322-71 (Same)
• guitar 321.322-5 or -6 (Box lute sounded by bare fingers(5) or plectrum(6))
• French horn 423.232.12 (Valved horn with narrow bore and long air column)
• oboe 422.112-71 (Reedpipe with double reeds and conical bore, with keys)
• bass drum: 211.212.12 (Individual double-skin cylindrical drums, both heads played)
• piano 314.122-4-8 (Box zither sounded by hammers, with keyboard)
• harpsichord  314.122-6-8 (Box zither sounded by plectrum, with keyboard)
• morsing 121.2 (plucked idiophone with frame, using mouth cavity as resonator)
• glass harp 133.2 (set of friction idiophones)
• musical saw 151  (metal sheet played by friction)
• theremin 531.1 (Analogue synthesizers and other electronic instruments with electronic valve/vacuum tube based devices generating and/or processing electric sound signals)

There's certainly room for discussion here.  Playing a cello is significantly different from playing a violin -- the notes are much farther apart on the longer strings, the cello is held vertical, making the bowing much different, and as a consequence of both, the bow is much bigger and held differently.  Clearly the analogue synthesizer section could stand to be a bit more detailed, and there's a certain amount of latitude within the categories (Wikipedia has a musical saw as 132.22  -- idiophone with direct friction).

It's also interesting that a guitar is counted as a slightly different instrument depending on whether it's played with bare fingers or a plectrum, but that fits pretty well with common usage.  Fingerpicking and flatpicking require noticeably different skills and many guitarists specialize in one or the other.  The only sticking point is that a lot of fingerstyle guitarists use fingerpicks, at least when playing a steel-string acoustic ...

Nonetheless, I'd still say Hornbostel-Sachs does a decent job of classifying musical instruments.  Given the classification number, you have a pretty good idea of what form the instrument might take, who might be able to play it and, in many though not all cases, how it might sound.  There are even provisions for compound instruments like electric guitar plus effects, though I don't know how well-developed or effective those are.

For its part, the string/woodwind/brass/percussion system also provides a decent idea of form, sound and who might play, within the context of a classical orchestra, but if you're familiar with the classical orchestra you should already know what a french horn or oboe sounds like.

Which leads back to the underlying question of purpose.  Classification systems, by nature, are systems that we impose on the world for our own purposes.  A wide-ranging and detailed system like Hornbostel-Sachs is meant to be useful to people studying musical instruments in general, for example to compare instrumentation in folk music across the world's cultures.

There are a lot more local variations of the bass drum or box lute family than theremin variants -- or even musical saw variants -- so even if we knew nothing else we might have an objective reason to think that drums and box lutes are older, and we might use the number of varieties in particular places to guess where an instrument originated (places of origin, in general, tend to have more variants).  Or there might be an unexpected correlation between geographic latitude and the prevalence of this or that kind of instrument, and so forth.  Having a detailed classification system based on objective properties allows researchers to explore questions like this in a reasonably rigorous way.

The classification of instruments in the orchestra is more useful in the day-to-day running of an orchestra ("string section will rehearse tomorrow, full orchestra on Wednesday") and in writing classical music.  Smaller ensembles, for example, tend to fall within a particular section (string quartet, brass quintet) or provide a cross-section in order to provide a variety of timbral possibilities (the Brandenburg concertos use a harpsichord and a string section with various combinations of brass and woodwinds -- strictly speaking the harpsichord can be replaced by other instruments when it's acting as a basso continuo).

Both systems are useful for their own purposes, neither covers every possible instrument completely and unambiguously (though Hornbostel-Sachs comes fairly close) and neither is inherently "correct".   As far as I can tell, this is all true of any interesting classification system, and probably most uninteresting ones as well.

No one seems to care much whether a pipe organ or harpsichord is a percussion instrument.   I'm not sure why.  Both have been used in orchestral works together with the usual string/woodwind/brass/percussion sections.

Jockomo Jockomo

I've been listening to Our New Orleans, a post-Katrina benefit album of some of New Orleans' best musicians, which of course got me to pondering a venerable question.  Just what does Iko Iko mean?

A little poking around discovers that there are a great many versions of the song Iko Iko itself (no surprise) and that the first two were put out by James "Sugar Boy" Crawford (under the title Jock-o-mo) and the Dixie Cups (under the title Iko Iko). Neither of these makes any claim of originality.  Both Crawford and the Dixie Cups freely admit that they merely repeated what they'd heard, Crawford from Mardi Gras Indian chants, the Dixie Cups from their grandmother (who in turn probably heard it at Mardis Gras).  This much is pretty clear, but little else is.  In particular, what do the words mean and, prerequisite to that, what are the words?

The second question can only be answered approximately, since the song has been covered so many times, often (probably nearly always) by performers with little or no idea of its possible meaning.  This in turn has led to disputes on the order of "Is it chockomo, jockomo, jock-o-mo or what?" "Is it Iko or Aiko"  "Is it wa na ne or ah na ne?" and so forth.  Keeping in mind that individuals' accents and enunciation may vary and that language itself is fairly shifty, a reasonable rendition of the mystery lyrics is:

Hey now, Hey now
Iko, Iko, an day
Jockomo fee no wah na nay
Jockomo fee na nay

Interpretations vary. One is:

Code language!
God is watching
Jacouman causes it; we will be emancipated
Jacouman urges it; we will wait.

Another is

Hey now! Hey now!
Listen, listen at the back
Jocomo made our king be born
Jocomo made it happen.

What's to pick between them?

Explanations are also offered for pieces here and there. Who or what is "Jockomo"? No less an authority than Dr. John says Jockomo is a jester. A linguist familiar with Native American trade languages says that chockema feena means "very good" in a now-extinct jargon. What does Iko Iko mean? A Ghanaian linguist says that Ayeko Ayeko is found in a West African chant and means "Well done, congratulations".

Why would it be so difficult to track down the meaning of a song heard and sung by millions? For a start, New Orleans is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, let alone the United States. As Dr. John says, it's a place where "Nothing is purely itself but becomes part of one funky gumbo." Add to that the complex nature of the ingredients themselves — Creole culture, Hatian culture, French and other European cultures, hundreds of West African and Native American languages/dialects, and so forth, many lost or only recently recorded — it would seem almost inevitable that origins become hard to trace.

It's clear from even casual comparison that the song has deep and direct African musical roots. This again is hardly surprising for New Orleans, but some cases are more obvious than others (Louis Armstrong's classic What a Wonderful World seems less obviously African-influenced). It also pretty clear that the rhythms came to the Mardi Gras Indians by way of the Caribbean, in particular Haiti, whose Kata rhythms are clearly similar (compare this and this, for example). The origins of a tune aren't necessarily the same as the origins of its lyrics, but it's not implausible that the Mardi Gras Indians' chants are also Caribbean in origin.

The two translations given above, different though they are, both accord with that general backdrop. The first, based on notes unfortunately lost in the Storm along with so many other cultural treasures, uses a mixture of Yoruba (West African) and Creole French.

The second translation is better documented, at least, and is pure Louisiana Creole:

• akou(t) = French ecoute = listen
• an deye = French en derrière = in back
• Jockomo is a name, possibly Giacomo, possibly "little Jacques"
• fi = French fit = made
• no wa = French notre roi = our king
• ne = French né = born
• the particle na, being peculiar to Creole, makes it "to be born"

This all seems reasonable enough, particularly since the Creole words given all exist in other sources, the words are in the right order and the meaning, while a bit puzzling, is not a complete word salad.  But while the general drift seems reasonable, I'm not entirely convinced.

For example, while "Hey now, listen all the way in the back!" makes sense and fits with Mardi Gras chiefs facing off and taunting each other, wouldn't the accent on akout be on the last syllable, not the first?  More troubling, though, is the use of the phrase Jockomo feena nay in other places, such as the Wild Magnolias' Brother John is Gone/Herc Jolly John (which is what brought us here in the first place):

Jockomo feena nay, Jockomo feena nay
If you don't like what the Big Chief say
Then jockomo feena nay!

This fits better with another gloss that's been given: "Joker, kiss my ass" (or similar). The Magnolias also exhort the audience to "make Jockomo any way you want", which casts a little doubt on Jockomo being a personal name.

As to the Yoruba/Creole interpretation, I have no idea, except that "code language" is probably not meant as a literal interpretation, rather that "Hey now" (or "Ena" or whatever) is a code meant to call people together. Which seems, um, probable. Again, though, "Jocouman will emancipate us" doesn't seem a likely riposte to someone who doesn't like what the Big Chief says.  On the other hand, if the original meaning had been lost, more likely in the case of the Yoruba hypothesis, then perhaps a now-nonsensical string of syllables could be turned into a taunt simply by use as such.


So, what to make of all this?  Until someone can come up with something more definitive, like a written record from the 19th century, we're really reading tea leaves.  I find the Creole idea the best of the lot, but I wouldn't want to say it's "the" definitive meaning.

More interesting, though, is the way that the funky gumbo, where nothing is purely itself, leads us on a fascinating journey of guesswork with only a provisional, incomplete resolution.  That's New Orleans for you.



Sources:

• Wikipedia on Iko Iko, which also cites
• Mudcat Cafe post on the meaning of Iko Iko [now deleted, but see here]
• Offbeat article In Search of Jockomo
• an apparently anonymous PDF on Iko Iko