The penultimate episode of AI & Me is out today, and it’s with none other than my friend Philip, who is one half of the Grammy-winning duo Arkai.
2018 was a banner year for me in many ways. I was finishing up my junior year at Scripps and it was about that time when I was supposed to start thinking of my “career” and what came next. So, like many of my peers, I got internships lined up and started looking into graduate programs. During the summer of 2018, I was doing an internship at NPR in Washington D.C., but by a stroke of good fortune, I was also accepted to a week-long conference called the Artist at Citizen, which was hosted at the Juilliard School in New York City.
I took the train in from D.C. and found myself in the Big Apple for the first time. In short, it was at this program where I met Philip (and his musical partner Jonathan), among other people that I am still fortunate to call friends nearly a decade later.
In this episode, Philip and I reflect on that conference and what was the beginning of a very fruitful relationship for him that ultimately led to the electroacoustic outfit Arkai.
I tap Philip’s brain about their creative process, how technology has enabled them to move beyond the original cello and violin sound they started with, and then we mosey into the “wild west” to discuss generative AI music platforms like Suno. We discuss the kinds of things in music that are made possible by these platforms, while Philip also acknowledges the larger forces and incentives such as “playlistification” that push musicians and artists toward making more generalized music.
We touch on larger philosophical questions like, “What is the value of a human?” and “Is a human just their economic output?” that this moment is calling on us to bear. The creative fields were maybe the last place that people might’ve expected generative AI to thrive—and yet there are AI-generated songs and melodies being put out into the world that people are swearing they’re moved by. What does this mean for cultivating the distinctly human fingerprint across creative works?
I appreciated this episode with Philip because it was ultimately an optimistic one—he thinks, similar to the way that we’ve gained wisdom around social media and how to interact with it—we, too, can come to grips with AI and learn to seek out the imperfections and idiosyncrasies in a world where we can seemingly have infinite perfection.
Check out this episode, check out Arkai’s Grammy-winning album Brightside, and let me know what you think.
-Len
