The Transparent Artist: Music in the Age of AI Disassembly
Why generative AI and modular musical stems threaten the very essence of artistic expression.
Why generative AI and modular musical stems threaten the very essence of artistic expression.
I vividly remember the first time a song truly touched me. I had just lowered the needle on the record player, I sat down cross-legged, I must have been 7, maybe 8, I stared at the spinning black circle, and then I was suddenly enveloped with a sense of awe; a profound, all-encompassing sense of wonder — I was transformed.
That moment was so profound that it set me on a lifelong expedition, to excavate the very essence of that instant. I yearned to plunge my hands into the depths of that singular point, to grasp it tightly and pull with all my might; I needed to enlarge that point into a space large enough so I could share this with everyone, this remarkable realm of wonder, beauty, serenity, passion, fire, inexplicability — life. It was primal, it was everything. It is everything.
So, I did what most people do who get bitten like this, I studied music. For me it was the drums. I played every single day, I listened to everything I could get my hands on, I went to college for music, I learned everything there was to learn about music and more; I toured the world, I played on hundreds of records, I landed in the Bay Area, I worked in music-tech, then my arms got tired of holding that space open, there were forces much larger than my primal urge pushing back to close that space.
So, I retired from music when the pandemic hit. Well, there is no real ‘retiring from music,’ and when I tell people this, I usually accompany this statement with air quotes a la Austin Powers; but music is no longer the central defining activity of my identity. What has changed though in the 4 short years since my ‘retirement’ from music, is the rapid rise of generative AI, a set of AI music tools along with the nascent yet increasingly capable, text-prompt-to-music-generation platforms.
The Disassembled Artist: Music as Modular Resource
I recently listened to a podcast interview with Jessica Powell the CEO and Co-Founder of audioshake.ai. Powell challenged the prevailing media narrative that AI music represents the next Napster moment. While her pushback against this idea is spot on, it was Powell’s specific vision of the future of music in light of new technologies that truly captured my attention. In an article that formed the basis of the interview, Powell painted a vivid picture of what this new landscape might look like:
“On these platforms, fans will be able to edit the track–taking the guitar out of one rock track and replacing it with a ukelele (sic); they’ll be able to easily remix, transforming a country track into a reggaeton mix; and they’ll collaborate with other users to build something entirely new. Perhaps they will add in their own singing vocals, transform those vocals into something that’s funnier, wilder, or simply better-sounding; and they will be able to build, mash-up, edit, and splice, with the same simplicity as happens today with image and video.
[…] In other words, while much of the debate around generative music focuses on topics like artist displacement, 100% AI-generated tracks, or whether a system has trained on Taylor Swift to then output a Taylor Swift-esque song, what fans really want is not to replace Taylor Swift, it’s to engage, recreate, duet, and build on top of Taylor’s music, expressing themselves and their love for her music. Because creation–interesting and engaging creation–has always been a conversation between the artist and the world they inhabit, it doesn’t happen at the push of a button or the single nod of a bot.”
I spliced two sections of this article together for the sake of clarity as I see her argument encompassing these two main arguments. I highly recommend reading the entire piece, as what Powell says is vitally important for understanding how AI and music is currently being envisioned in the industry.
Powell articulates a vision of the future where the ontological positioning of the artist and their music is flipped, turning the artist into a transparent medium through which others, particularly others embedded within a culture of immediacy, gain primacy over the artist and the artwork. This is accomplished by disassembling the artist’s work into modular components that can be freely manipulated, rearranged, and repurposed by the audience. In this vision, music is no longer a coherent, self-contained expression of the artist’s unique perspective and creative intent, but rather a malleable resource for others to project their own desires and impulses onto.
Powell validates her argument for this ontology of disassembly and modularity by suggesting that artists will be able to maintain control and monetize their work if they choose to participate on these platforms. Powell argues “because creation will be happening on the same platform where distribution and tracking occur, rightsholders and artists will have more control than they currently do and will be able to benefit monetarily if they choose to participate.” She envisions a future where “the winners here will be the platforms that let people unleash their creativity, figuring out the right knobs, filters, and buttons that let them create playfully and in a collaborative way with software.”
I’d like to call attention to a particular tension, or disconnect even, in Powell’s argument that is present in this short piece — Powell is arguing both for the ‘right’ knobs and ‘buttons’ to allow for playful collaboration, but also states that “it doesn’t happen at the push of a button or the single nod of a bot.” I think this tension is telling.
This argument only gains legibility within our present culture of immediacy and the relentless circulation of capital. The severing of music from its socio-political roots, reducing it to a modular, disassembled mélange of suggestions, where “transforming a country track into a reggaeton mix” becomes a celebrated act of creative engagement, represents a pernicious ontological inversion. This violent flattening of meaning, under the guise of playful collaboration, spawns an infinite space of isolated, culturally incoherent affective points of capital formation, flickering in and out of existence like ephemeral commodities in a frenetic market. These decontextualized musical fragments now serve only to provide fleeting signals to attention-capturing algorithms, monetizing brief moments of engagement while eroding the deeper significance and cohesion of the art form itself.
Or maybe I am too close to being an artist to acknowledge the benefits of this transformed relationship between an artist’s vision and the immediate disassembling of that vision into incoherent atomized fragments. It is possible that this deconstruction of an artist’s vision into its constituent parts, freely available for ‘authentic’ recombination and playful reinterpretation by ‘fans’, could lead to new forms of expression and collaboration. However, this transformation could also reduce music to something more akin to a language where words themselves carry no intrinsic meaning, and music — the finalized mixed song as an artistic expression of an artist — carries no intrinsic meaning except as a vessel of suggestions for ‘fans’ to enable the monetization of musical stems for an increasingly irrelevant artist. This could portend a revolutionary reimagining of music.
Disenchantment and Dislocation: The Cultural Consequences of AI-Mediated Music
The concept of the ‘artist’ has been the focus of my research over the last four years. I never gave this idea — what is an artist — much thought while I was actively engaged in the labor of producing music! A few months ago I read Thomas Mann’s ‘Doctor Faustus.’ I came to this book through my usual process these days — it was cited across multiple other books I am reading on the modern subject and art, so I had to read it.
Doctor Faustus is a haunting novel, that profoundly shook me. Mann situates music and the archetype of the artistic genius within the logics of Modernity, a world shaped by relentless rationalization born from Enlightenment thinkers — a force that has unleashed both wonders and horrors upon our age. The protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, is the embodiment of the archetypal artistic genius, who serves as a conduit for exposing the Faustian bargain we moderns have struck in this era of disenchanted reason. Through Leverkühn’s increasingly abstract musical compositions, divorced from their cultural roots and exalted as pure technical triumphs, Mann illuminates the perils of pursuing artistic brilliance at the expense of human connection and moral grounding. As Leverkühn’s music becomes ever more technical — beautifully rational — it mirrors the wider societal fraying that ultimately leads to the horrors of World War II.
I read this as a stark warning against the deification of the artist as a singular genius and the elevation of art as an autonomous, self-justifying realm, separate from the ethical and social fabric of an engaged, vibrant sociality. The danger lies not in the pursuit of artistic innovation per se, but in the dehumanizing manner of that pursuit, which Mann unnervingly lays out. The metaphor for this ultimate teleology is portrayed by Mann through his temporal switching, from his retelling the minutiae of Leverkühn’s story, to shifting to the present as he sits at his desk, which is being shaken by the dropping of Allied bombs.
The parallels between Mann’s portrayal of Leverkühn’s artistic journey and the disassembly of music advocated by Powell are remarkably striking to me. In both cases, there is a fundamental shift in the relationship between the artist, the artwork, and the audience. And lurking beneath all of this, is an ontology of action guided by the logics of ‘progress’ — an ever more reductive, efficient and instrumentally rationalized world.
Powell’s framing of where she sees the future of music belies the unspoken counter narrative of the ‘inefficiencies’ inherent in the process of a single human being laboring for decades to master a craft to eventually, hopefully, produce a singular piece of work for cultural reflection. This entire laborious process is nullified in the inversion of the the artist-artwork-audience relationship so that now we have a transparent artist upon which AI disassembled musical stems can facilitate a culture feeding on its own self-image.
Is this really empowering fans to foster new forms of creative engagement while simultaneously offering more opportunities for artist to monetize? A win-win for everyone?
When viewed through the lens of ‘Doctor Faustus,’ a different interpretation emerges where the disassembly process actually achieves the opposite intention of empowerment and genuine engagement with music. It is important to note that this critique does not necessarily preclude the possibility of significant profits being made during this transitional period. Rather, the focus of my argument is not on the short-term financial viability of these new models, but on their long-term implications for our culture and the future of our relationship to music. In other words, I am arguing for the prioritization of cultural value and meaning over quarterly revenue forecasts and the endless pursuit of ‘monetization.’
I think it is important at this point to call out a presumption I am making in this argument. The artists I am envisioning here are not the type of artist that Mann creates through his archetypal character Leverkühn. The artist in my above framework is rooted in the social fabric of their milieu, and their music is an authentic representation of that social milieu which serve many purposes: providing a space for reflection, a space for enjoyment, to laugh, to dance, to flirt, to zone out too, or — a profound socio-political argument for revolution. In this particular conception, the artist is not a Leverkühn, they are a Tracy Chapman, a Joan Baez, a Johnny Cash, A Woody Guthrie, a Nina Simone. They are artists who have that mystical ability to transform our lived experiences and say something profound, light, exhilarating, intoxicating, sublime. The idea of disassembling and tearing that apart is a violence that makes me shudder to the very core of my being.
So where does AI-generated music and AI-tools that separate the component parts of music for capital circulation fit into this entire argument?
These AI tools are Leverkühn.
It is only rational and logical to take the very tools and techniques that have driven the Enlightenment project of ever-increasing efficiency, rationalization, and abstraction from the messy lived experiences of our lives and apply them to the realm of music. AI tools that separate an artistic statement into its component parts provide hollow vessels for fans to project their anxiety-ridden affects into circulation, representing the apotheosis of rational Enlightenment technical mastery. This process, unrooted from the physical and mental labor of an individual human uncovering their own techniques for individual mastery that births these singular, whole, complete works of art, renders such labor obsolete. The time and effort required for this traditional approach to artistic creation are inefficient, quaint, and lacking the modularity of poly-monetizable immediacy.
The rapid rise of generative AI-generated music takes this process of abstraction and rationalization to its logical conclusion. AI engines are essentially style engines, devoid of particularity or haecceity, as I explained in an earlier article. They produce pure, abstracted, hyper-efficient, and rationalized datums of quiddity, embodying the ultimate realization of the Leverkühn archetype: the artist as a rational, calculating genius, divorced from the social and cultural context of their work, pumping out perfectly constructed styles of perfectly rationalized music for inattentive, unreflective consumption and circulation.
The combination of these two forces — the disassembly of music into its component parts and the rise of AI-generated music — represents a force that no artists, no culture, can possibly withstand. While we stare into our flat black screens, trying to find any semblance of resonance amid the potpourri of incoherent affective points of capital formation, we reach for another virtual knob, smudging it with the tip of our raw finger. The only discernible outcome another bump up in anxiety, another pound per square inch of pressure on our chest, as we sink deeper into the abyss of our own dislocation.
The Primordial Resonance: Reclaiming the Intimate Auditory Experience in the Age of AI
You know Mother’s Day is just around the corner, May 12th (you’re welcome). And this brings me to the concept of primordial resonance — the pre-individuated bond of mother and child. As one of the earliest organs to form and function, the ear provides us with our first contact with the outer world. A sonic resonance that begins with the constant, comforting rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat and the vibrations of her melodic voice.
In his book ‘The Aesthetic Imperative,’ philosopher Peter Sloterdijk explores these early auditory experiences. He paints a compelling scenario where children make a ‘trivial but incredible discovery: the world is a still, hollow place in which the heartbeat and the primal soprano are catastrophically silenced.’ This profound insight reveals that being in the world is connected to a terrible loss and an acceptance that we must learn to live without the ‘sonic continuity’ of that initial primordial resonant bond between child and mother.
Sloterdijk argues that this moment of realization, when the child first experiences the world as a silent and hollow place, is a fundamental rupture in our being. From this point onwards, “silence transmits the alarm signal of being,” and initially it’s only the mother’s voice that sustains the initial bridge between that primordial state of serenity and the ever-present, precarious now. Music exists, according to Sloterdijk, because human beings insist on wanting to have ‘the best once again’ — to reconnect with that lost sense of wholeness and continuity.
I interpret this insight as the fundamental driving force behind all social formations and their diverse expressions. From the moment of this primal breach, our ears seek to repair the broken link to our first bond with the outer world. Just as we were nurtured and made whole by our intimate connection with our mother, we can only recover the essence of this relationship in the present through the public sphere, where we gather in cultural expressions to listen together to the sounds that attempt to maintain that fragile bridge.
According to Sloterdijk, the connection between our primal need for sonic resonance and the shared soundscapes we create together in public is where we discover and sustain freedom. I find this conception of freedom particularly compelling. Freedom manifests through our shared inheritance — the absence of the sonic continuity and initial intimacy of the fetal embrace that we all must endure. It is here, in the present moment, together in towns, cities, and nations, where we productively construct ever-emerging forms of new bridges between each other, driven by the desire to return home. Immersed within a ‘public hearing,’ this public sonoric landscape allows for what Sloterdijk calls a ‘homeland effect.’
Sloterdijk makes sure to reiterate that this sonic milieu cannot have direct musical meaning, as “authentic music only begins where the mere hearing of sounds ends.” Music, then, according to Sloterdijk, serves as a profound response to the silent alarm sounded by our existential detachment; it is an attempt to construct, anew, the lost resonances within the public sphere. In this way, we can understand that participation in the public sonic realm — whether through music, speech, or communal listening — becomes a crucial endeavor for crafting not just a sense of place, but a shared existential journey toward reclaiming the primordial acoustic embrace. Thus, authentic music, Sloterdijk argues, is an active re-engagement with the world, a form of sonic architecture that attempts to re-assemble the sonic embrace of our individual, yet collectively shared beginnings.
Sloterdijk calls the modern music industry a ‘pure sound industry.’ He argues that music produced through this modality is not aligned with the authentic music of active re-engagement with the world. To the contrary its primary goal is the appropriation of your attention, to remove you from the sonic architecture of your time and place that threatens to erode the intimate, individualized experience of hearing through the public engagement of music that is so essential to our well-being. The instrumentalization of music weakens and threatens to sever that link I mentioned earlier.
The disassembling of music into modular components for capital circulation situates it within a ‘pure sound industry’ on steroids, exacerbating what Sloterdijk calls a ‘sonic plague.’ This process further decontextualizes music from its sonic sphere, stripping it of all political and cultural power. Sloterdijk argues that:
If we accept these conclusions, we realize immediately why the way to music is inseparably linked to reclaiming the individuality and intimacy of hearing. As we have noted, this restitution can only happen in a roundabout way through public sound events and at the level of technical methods. In this sense we can say that participation in civilization means being on the path to individuated music.
The path to a more humane, coherent, and fulfilling engagement with music lies in striking a balance between innovation and tradition, abstraction and embodiment, and individual expression and collective resonance. This reclamation can only happen through a “roundabout way,” involving both the mastery of technical methods and public sound events. These two poles — the isolated technical genius on one end, obsessively refining their craft in solitude, and on the other, the incoherent affectual displays of disassembled music, stripped of context and meaning — represent the competing nightmare ontologies that undermine the transformative power of music and a resonant society today.
This dystopian vision can be averted, but only if we name the growing threat and rise to meet it. We must demand contextualized music, embedded in the temporally and physically bounded relations of community. Whether these boundaries encompass a nation, a state, a city, or a backyard rave, it is only through direct, embodied, and temporally situated participation in shared sonic environments that we can hope to maintain the vital link between our primal musical enchantments and the public sphere. This connectedness, so essential to Sloterdijk’s conception of freedom, emerges from our shared need to bridge that initial sonic loss. We must protect these spaces where freedom takes root and build defenses against the liquefying of boundaries that give shape and meaning to our lives. Just as the rhythm of our mother’s heart and the melody of her soothing voice lay the foundation for the formation of societies and culture, compelling us to build connections and a sense of belonging, it is only through nurturing genuine, embodied musical communities that we can hope to recapture that sacred space of primal resonance — our mother’s gift — and remain free.