A Voice Without A Soul Warning: This post is a bit dramatic involving something I’m very passionate about! If you would like to read something more lighthearted, my episode review of Angelic Layer comes out every Friday. So last week when a coworker put on some music I was more than happy to hear it. I don’t have many days I have to come into the office, but when I do the rule is usually “No Music or Distracting Sounds!” but it was the weekend and the boss wasn’t in, so rules get flexible. Hee hee. At first the music sounded nice. It was sounded like some R&B music from the 90’s. I was kind of surprised that I didn’t recognize the song, I had an R&B faze and I was pretty well versed in 90’s music. But that pleasant confusion only lasted about 20 seconds. Then the chorus repeated itself for no reason. As I listened to the lyrics, they become more and more nonsensical. The verse of the song was structure right, but it never seemed to move on, it just kept repeating itself. That’s when it hit me. Oh, this isn’t a real song, it’s AI slop. Yeah, my coworker had put on an AI generated “Playlist”. Very quickly the nice music turned into annoying background noise, and it wasn’t too long before someone asked her to turn it off. At the time, I just shrugged. This was the way of the world now. We don’t get nice things like music. If you are a long time reader, it’s probably no surprise to you to hear that I really love music. I enjoy just about any kind of music. As long as it has a good beat, I’ll probably like it. I even enjoy learning to play music. I’ve studied piano, harp, recorder, and fife/Irish penny whistle. For a little while I even tried to write my own music. Lol, it didn’t sound very good. To me, there is just something special about hearing a song created by someone with a passion for music and with emotion wanting to express itself. To this day, the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard, was the sound of a human voice. Music is the voice of the soul. Even days later, the AI slop pretending to be music still bugged me. The idea that something so intrinsically human as a song, something that humans have been making since before there was the written word, before there was farming, before there was the wheel. Likely about the same time we were harnessing the wonders of fire, that’s how long humans have been making songs. And now that’s been taken away from us. This might seem a bit dramatic to some, but my intense passion when I was at university, and one of my degrees was in Humanities, the study of what makes humans, human. To think that humanity is being replaced with a lackluster computer program is kind of horrifying to me. With my spirits feeling pretty down about the whole situation, I of course, watched some anime. I was catching up on my seasonal series (I’ve been delighted by the anime this spring!) and I was watching a rather interesting spin of the tropey Villainess genre the anime, “An Observation Log of My Fiancée Who Calls Herself a Villainess“. It really is a fun anime from the point of view of the prince charming love interest of an otome game. The cute and fun anime episode lifted my spirits, but what really healed my heart was at the end of the episode when the closing song played. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KvtEhD2dOg Even if you can’t understand all of the words in the song, anyone could understand the emotions being expressed. This is what songs are supposed to do. They are not supposed to be background noise to be ignored, they are supposed to express someone’s feelings. A song is communication. It’s humans making connections through shared emotions, thoughts, and experiences. To have a computer do this for us, is to choose to silence our own voices, to devalue the voices of others, and to become deaf to the hearts of people.