The excellent news is that an album has simply been launched by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Conflict, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Store Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously referred to as Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians moreover, most of them British. The dangerous information is that it contains no actual music. However the album, titled Is This What We Need?, has been created in hopes of preventing even worse information: the government of the United Kingdom choosing to let artificial-intelligence companies prepare their models on copypropered work without a license.
Such a transfer, within the phrases of the professionalject’s chief Ed Newton-Rex, “would hand the life’s work of the nation’s musicians to AI companies, totally free, letting these companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them.” As a composer, he naturally has an interest in these matters, and as a “former AI executive,” he presumably has insider knowledge about them as properly.
“The governmalest’s willingness to agree to those copyproper adjustments reveals how a lot our work is belowvalued and that there isn’t a professionaltection for one among this counstrive’s most important belongings: music,” Kate Bush writes on her personal internetwebsite. “Every observe on this album features a deserted documenting studio. Doesn’t that silence say all of it?”
As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo experiences, “it’s belowstood that Kate Bush has documented one of many dozen tracks in her studio.” These tracks, whose titles add as much as the phrase “The British government should not legalise music theft to benematch AI companies,” aren’t strictly silent: in a personner which may properly have happy John Cage, they contain a variety of ambient noises, from footsteps to humming machinery to moveing vehicles to crying infants to obscurely musical sounds emanating from somethe place within the distance. Whatever its influence on the U.Ok. governmalest’s deliberations, Is This What We Need? (the title Sounds of Silence having presumably been unavailin a position) might have pioneered a brand new style: protest music without the songs.
You possibly can stream Is This What We Need? on Spotify.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly referred to as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
