Before Music: Cave Rituals and Ancient Instruments | Steve Pretty

SPEAKER_01 0:02 So many of us spend a lot of time with music blaring in our ears. Whether it's Spotify, YouTube, or the radio, we're used to having music constantly at our fingertips, perfectly curated for any mood.

SPEAKER_02 0:16 But for most of human history, this wasn't the case. So, what did we do before we had continuous access to music on demand? How did people experience music? What instruments did they play? And how important was it to their daily lives?

SPEAKER_01 0:38 Well, let's take a journey back through time and find out. I'm Molly.

SPEAKER_02 0:42 And I'm Matt, and this is What We Did Before, the podcast where we chart the history of modern inventions.

SPEAKER_01 0:48 Helping us explore what we did before music is Steve Pritty, band leader of the Hackney Collery Band and host of the Origin of the Pieces podcast.

SPEAKER_02 0:57 Steve takes us right back through time to learn about some of the first musical instruments invented by humans and how music may even predate language.

SPEAKER_01 1:09 And he brings us right up to the present where we discuss the first recorded music and the advent of AI songs. If you're enjoying what we're doing, please subscribe to the channel. It helps us out massively. Now on to Steve. Steve Pretty, it is an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. It's so great to have you here because I first uh heard about you from New Scientists podcast, which I produce. You came on and you briefly touched on the origins of music. And I say briefly because you were also playing a conch at the time, which took up quite a lot of the airtime, of course, as it as it should. But I just thought there's so much more to explore about the origins of music and how I guess humanity got introduced to it and why it's important to us. So what for you are some of the most fascinating and perhaps counterintuitive ancient instruments our ancestors played?

SPEAKER_00 2:04 It's a really good question. I think for what's so interesting, I think, about how uh music would have existed back in the day is actually it's got a lot in common with how it exists now, in that we would have used things that were around us, right? We would have used that the materials that were available to us now. So if you're watching the podcast, you can see I've got I'm in a studio full of toys, synths, and you know, recording stuff, and I'm a trumpet player, so trumpets and all sorts of electronics and and brass instruments and all sorts of things. But that we're able to do that now because we because over time we have uh we have worked on and learned ways of adapting metal, harnessing electricity to make noise, all those things. But really, it's the same story as our ancient ancestors would have had with with what they had around them. So, yeah, sure they couldn't work metal in the same way, but they could have that same concept you mentioned here. Uh they they could find a you know a shell uh on a beach, and then uh presumably that they would have eaten the contents, and then you know, they would pick it up, then you know, maybe they would hit it, they would they would play around with it, and then eventually over time they would find new ways of of playing with it. Maybe probably like many things in music, even today, it happened by happy accident that someone just you know picked it up and played it in a certain way. Because you can't just blow into well, first you have to you have to cut the end off a shell um to play it. Um you then need to to to blow it in a particular way. You can't just you can't just blow it, you know, you need to vibrate your lips in in a certain way to get that sound. I like to talk about the story of of um musical history as a as a as a story of human uh ingenuity and and creativity. Um and and the the the story of uh musical instruments really being the story of uh of musical of music technology, which sounds sounds quite quite niche, and you think, oh that's just about you know since or recording gear or whatever, but really it is about humans harnessing the natural world to create tools of expression, and the more uh the more ways we have of harnessing the natural world, the more uh different ways we have of expressing ourselves. And so I think that's you know that that kind of confluence of of things is really important. So, some in terms of some examples, of course, uh the shell is something I'm I'm very interested in, partly because as as a trumpet player, it's a kind of proto-trumpet. There, of course, there's all sorts of different uh instruments, and it's there's things like the flutes, the um Neolithic flutes, which have been found 40 to 50,000 years ago in caves, made from bird bones. The problem, of course, is a lot of things won't have uh survived, right? So, so we when we're talking about any of this stuff, most of the time when we're talking about prehistory, it's it's conjecture, especially when you're talking about a culture. Who knows how they would have been singing or you know how they would have um what they would they've been playing rocks or whatever that there's no evidence for anymore, or other things that would have degraded over time. So we have things like shells or or bone flutes or because they they last. So that doesn't necessarily mean that they're the earliest things. And you've got to imagine that particularly something like a a bone flute, which is a bit more sophisticated than a uh than a shell, because it's got holes in that would be a bit particularly particular places to create particular tones. So that would have taken like iteration and you know, that would have taken experimentation and um and work on on uh on one design and then thinking actually maybe that doesn't work, let's get another bone try that. So that's the thing you can only imagine that that would be quite an advanced stage of of uh musical experimentation. Surely there would have been a lot of stuff that happened before that that we can't necessarily know about. But those sorts of things uh certainly we do know about, and they they date back 40,000, 50,000 years. There are also things called aerophones, which are uh can be things that you whirl. So you um you may have seen uh Aboriginal people in uh Australia and other places still use some of those things um that create a kind of drone in the air by uh you know by swinging something around your head. So there's all sorts of uh of interesting ways that people have created sound and and for different purposes. And I and uh but again, I think I I like to think about the that as a progression and uh and and I'm still we're still doing that now, people making electronics now or making you know making making new violins or whatever it might be, a part of that story that uh has existed for as long as as we have pretty much. The fact that I love about um the the flute, even um as being one of the the oldest uh design musical instruments is that you know we've only been making bread, we've only been cultivating wheat for probably less than 5,000 years, and we've been making flutes, uh, you know, actually sort of complicated flutes, these tools of musical expression for probably 50,000 years. So it's it's sort of an extraordinary history in that sense.

SPEAKER_01 6:54 It does definitely demonstrate that music has been so important, not just a hobby for humans, but a really important part of culture for humans for a very, very long time, even more important than bread. And actually, when you talk about the ancient um instruments and what you can and can't find, you know, we see examples in the wild of chimps drumming on trees, which um hints at something musical or perhaps they have some sort of reverence or awe for nature, for the trees, whatever it is, they're using the environment as an instrument. And for that, you can't, you would never be able to tell whether humans had been banging on the bases of trees to try to make drumming sounds through the forest, because there's not going to be archaeological evidence of that. But that's not to say that we weren't doing things. I think of a band like pentatonics and the fact that they can produce incredible sounds, purely a cappella. And you can imagine ancient humans relying purely on their vocal cords as well for some of their musicality.

SPEAKER_00 7:52 Well, certainly, I think that would have that would have long predated um the design of instruments, would be uh using your voice or using percussion to to explore some of these things. Of course, you can't place when any of those things happened. But one of the important things I think, and where these where some of these uh questions I think can cross over and get it's just a very complicated picture, of course, because you're talking about something an enormously complex thing that happened all over the world. Firstly, it I think it probably happened very in lots of different places and at lots of different times. So there's not necessarily one story for for how it all happened. But you know, it's it's not like, for example, I know you you're doing an episode on chocolate and the cacao, like that is about a geographical region where that plant is grown. Music is something that can exist with or without instruments and can kind of spring up anywhere in the world. So the real question is why and how people adapted whatever their environment was to create that music. One of the important things to think about is the function of music, and I think um the or rather the different functions that music can play. So when we're talking about things like vocal, um uh vocal music or percussion music, chimps drumming on trees or whatever, that can that can function on several different levels. Maybe it was for communication, maybe then it started as a communicative tool that then kind of evolved into and and got adapted into something that was more uh more conventionally musical, that we would think of as uh you know more conventionally musical now. In other words, something that is done for expressive purposes. But music can play all these different roles. I think one of the one of the fault lines with how we think about music a lot of the time um in uh in today's culture is that it's music is there for entertainment, which it is. That's of course a very, very important role that music plays, but it plays all sorts of different roles, and it has throughout our history as a species, it's played many, many different roles. And one of those, an important one, but not the only one, is is entertainment. But I think it's important, but you know, before we kind of dig into some of the weeds of this stuff, that that we think about those different roles that music can play, uh, as well as the different tools that it plays, because things like even come back to things like shells, they would have been used as instruments of communication, um, of war, even, you know, um, like shell trumpets, um, uh and instruments of ritual, um, as well as probably instruments of entertainment. So, you know, that that they kind of there's not there's often not one answer to these things, I think.

SPEAKER_02 11:27 These days we have very good access to music, obviously. There's not a day that goes by where I think I'm not exposed to it in some way, whether it's sort of by choice on Spotify or just going into a shop or walking past somebody who's got a radio on or playing music in their car, and we're sort of all consuming it largely for entertainment. And I know that we've sort of already said that it can be quite sort of speculative, but for early humans, how was music kind of consumed? Do you think that it was entertainment was something that sprung up later and it was largely used kind of functionally, or what purposes do you think? How how was it different back then?

SPEAKER_00 12:11 I think I mean, really, often I imagine what we're talking about is something that's not really definable in the ways that we think of those different roles that music has now. So now, for example, we wouldn't necessarily think of um uh you know liturgical music in the church as entertainment, um, uh, but we think of that as a sort of ceremonial music as opposed to like, you know, going to a rave. Um, we we don't think of uh that as ceremonial, but I think the the lines are a lot more blurry than that. I mean, I I would argue even now, to be honest, I would argue without being too reductive, there is a case to be made for things like you know, raves or whatever about that that tap in taps into our ancient past trance music, for example. Uh I mean the we we know musical trance now, but like the trance state is a very, very important element of uh lots of musical cultures um dating back certainly thousands of years, if not much, much further. And so I think I think there would have been a lot of crossover between those those forms.

SPEAKER_01 13:11 Well, even the shared um musical experience of just going to a gig or going to a festival, uh joining in a mosh pit. Um, you know, if it really was the case that uh all we used music for was entertainment, we'd be happy just to listen to it uh in our headphones. But actually we have this yearning to go and experience it with other people. Exactly that.

SPEAKER_00 13:29 Yeah, exactly. And I think in answer to that question of how it would have been then compared to now, I think there's a lot of commonality with now, actually, but I think it's just that we think about it in quite a different way now because I think it would have been a much more collective experience, right? So the the separation that we have between audience and performer now is something that I think is a relatively modern invention. And it's something that on a uh as an aside, on a personal level, I'm very, very keen to to slightly break down and to sort of make the case that audiences are really, really important active part of what uh what any um uh interesting for me interesting musical performance should be. You know, that's not to say that everything every show needs like big audience interaction or whatever, but that audiences and there's a kind of synchronicity between audiences and performers at at their best that is makes for a very special thing that can only really happen live. And we can come on to recorded music later, but I think that live experience was very, very important now and certainly was back then, but also I think of of course it would have been tied very much to the natural world, um, it would have been tied to a sense of place. So, again, if you're thinking about coming back to the the shell again, or the flutes, these have been found in caves mainly. And the interesting thing about shells um is that they are they were and are used in um, for example, the Himalaya, and this is in very much inland, you know, in the Himalaya. So all these shells would have been brought from the coastline, hundreds or thousands of miles away, up into the mountains, into caves, into these very resonant spaces. I often talk about these the about the shells when I if I play them at festivals and things sometimes, I I I sort of run them through electronics and and create these. I have a project called Shell Electronica. But but I do that partly because I'm trying to tap into that ancient form of how people would have experienced music in very resonant spaces, right? So if I if I just pick up a shell and play it uh at an outdoor festival on an outdoor stage, then yeah, you'll hear it, you know, but even with a just a normal microphone on, you'll hear it. But then it's got not much hasn't got much sustain on it. So when I stop playing, it stops. The example I use is that I was lucky enough to record some of these shells in the Natural History Museum um overnight one night, uh, a couple of years ago, and just one note on one of these shells made uh the person I was uh with cry, just like one, you know, and whereas if I played that same note now, you'd just be like oh yeah, it's just like a loud note on the shell, fine. But because the the resonance of that space and the the kind of the quiet of the room and the you know the particular way that that that space picked up and resonated and amplified the note that I was playing on that shell, that sudden, you know, the the element of sort of sound design, the space that that was played in was really, really important. And I suspect that that would have been at least as important as it is now to um our ancient ancestors. So it's you know, perhaps we're not talking about such complex melodies or harmony or whatever, but that the sense of of place or occasion would have really changed that the notes that they were playing, would have really changed the feeling of them. There's there's some evidence, for example, in some caves um where there is a particularly unusual uh reflection, sound reflections. So in that one spot, you'd be playing, you'd be playing a flute or even a drum or whatever here, and because the the the reverb or the delay off the off the cave walls would come back at you, you could basically play a kind of duet with yourself, you know, by by standing here. And so that's kind of what I try and tap into with with my own stuff now. Yes, I'm using electronics, but I'm sort of trying to make the case that really this is it is something quite ancient because this is I'm essentially using electronics to do that, you know, to to try and tap into that that ancient experience that that we would have had, and that that feeling that yes, these these things were alive. There was something this is you know the house to a creature beforehand, but then you play you put them in a particular space, and that space creates something very different than if you just played them elsewhere. So I think the experience of music would have been much more tied to place and time and nature than it than it is now.

SPEAKER_01 17:46 When you're describing it, I can kind of feel um, in a way in my body, how that experience of listening to the music with the reverb in a cave may have been. Um it might sound a bit silly, but in a very different but sort of similar vein. Um the sound of silence recorded by Disturbed, for some reason that hits me like that. It's got like this um massive, like it's like a pressure builder, uh it's like a pressure cooker, sorry, building up. Um you get this really slow incline, and then his voice just cracks at the just as it's getting near to the end of the song. And something about it is quite moving, emotional, and you can imagine in a cave surrounded by your tribe, it's a way of connecting really deeply and really emotionally without ever having to say a word. I guess this sort of points to the fact that caves were a moment of awe, wonder, maybe even divine power for our ancient ancestors. Are there any other sort of sites of particular interest in regards to locations where uh music would have been played in this way?

SPEAKER_00 18:49 I I think something that is interesting to think about when we are talking about um where music would have been played is is how much people traveled as well, and the fact that you know these instruments were portable, and if we were a nomadic people, we would have the the the instruments and tools of ritual or expression would have been been they would needed to be portable. So people I'm sure would have been playing them wherever and then finding places that felt like they were particularly significant. Um again, there are a few sites of things like standing stones where there's some evidence that again the sound reflections were particularly interesting and that that that seems unlikely to be a coincidence. So, you know, there's a few there's a few things like that which either would have been made by either would have been constructed by our ancestors or would have they would have adapted existing um spaces wherever music would have been performed. I think it's this idea you you just tapped on something quite important there, I think, um, about that uh the sound of science where I think of these things as as ways of expressing our ourselves that we can't really do in other ways. There's something very kind of visceral and pure about music. I I love uh music with lyrics, but but I the thing that I'm particularly interested in is um what I call abstract music, like tools of abstract expression, in other words, musical instruments. Because I think the picture gets a bit muddier once you start talking about lyrics, just because obviously there's a sort of imposed meaning once lyrics are involved. But I think there's something about um uh music without lyrics that that just pure sound that can have that effect, so like the crack of a voice or or any of those things. And it's because human emotions are really complicated. You know, we we are sentient beings, we're as far as we know, um, we're the only species that can kind of understand in some way or other our own place in the world, our own mortality. We we need to be able to express that. The kind of human condition is extremely complex and isn't as happy, uh isn't as simple as happy or sad, or you know, uh what the way that words can sometimes describe things. So I think music has got that ability to really zero in on expressing something that is very, very hard to describe in other ways. And so I think that's again when when you're talking about where these instruments were played, as you as you were just saying, like that there would have been a moment where that would have felt like you were somehow in dialogue with nature because again, you're playing you're using the natural world. Whatever you're playing, probably something has died either because or incidentally to it. So whether it's a shell which had a you know a conchin or um an animal hide drum or string, you know, uh guts from a from an animal that are being used as strings, you know, this it's quite brutal, really, that when you're creating a lot of these instruments, it would have been really tied to our uh how integrated we were with with nature, and again, crossing that uh sort of slightly grey area between ritual and performance and enjoyment and entertainment, and you know, and gradually I think these things branched off, but probably it was a lot less definable back in the day.

SPEAKER_02 21:59 One thing that really interests me um that you just touched on is kind of um firstly, yeah, this ability to communicate without language. Um and secondly, the the link to to nature and animals. So, you know, birds sing. Um, I've seen videos where, you know, I've seen a video of like a blind elephant being played, uh, someone's playing piano and it's like captivated and swaying to the music, uh, people playing like trumpets to cows and they all come over and they genuinely look like they're just infatuated with this. And it seems quite clear that hum for humans at least, this predates language as like a form of communication.

SPEAKER_00 22:46 Well, there are a couple of schools of thought on this, and just again in my uh non academic way, it would try and summarize them, and uh one of which is Stephen Pinker, uh the sort of evolutionary biologist, uh, coined this. Term auditory cheesecake when he was talking about music, which essentially was like, you know, it's nice, cheesecake's nice, it's nice to have, but you don't need it, you know. So it's like it's it's a kind of nice thing that humans evolved, but it it's not it wasn't a kind of fundamental part of who we are. So that's like one and very, very uh prominent school of thought. Of course, many people, musicians and and music lovers, um, were were quite um offended by that. And not offended, but you know, we're we're a bit were a bit taken aback by that. And I'm very prepared if if the if the evidence is there for that, then you know, I I like I like scientific thinking, so fair enough. But I do think there's a very also a very strong case on the other side, um, which has been made a lot by a lot of other evolutionary biologists and others, which is the case that really music is as as you suggest, a kind of proto-language, is a is a is something that that either co-evolved with language or or predates um language. Again, if you think about what's called mother-ese, which is um the way the way um we talk to babies, a lot of people talk to babies, which is in a very musical way. You know, you're you you're using so you've of course, even when we're talking, I I could I if we stopped this interview now and and went back, uh I could transcribe this into music because the I there's my voice and all of our voices are pitched. So, you know, as I'm talking like this, I could write, you know, I'm this is a pitch, and as I go down here, it's you know, we're the it's all pitched. And so it's just that we're using it in a different way. We're like it's it's not anything fundamentally different between how we we talk and how we how we sing or or make music or in in a pitched way like that. So I think there's a lot to be said for that idea that mothers and babies and and and parents and babies like that that that bond that they have when they're talking to each other like like that is something that's quite ancient. And that um that that again that I think it's often a mistake to think of music and language as totally separate. You know, if you think of them as sort of branches of the same thing that only later got kind of codified into this is that, this is that. Um that's the way I t tend to try and think about music. And again, there's quite a lot of evidence for for that as around us, uh as far as I'm aware, that that they kind of the the branching off is a relatively modern concept, and actually there's a lot to be said for the fact that that our our musical brains are are in some in some sense more more primal than our than our linguistic brains because they tap into something more immediate. I mean, I recently in my podcast interviewed a um a music therapist who works with dementia patients, and of course, you know, people talk a lot about uh the use of music in those cases where tunes from that person's youth, they can hum these tunes and they can remember these tunes and it connects with them, just the tunes, not the words, even connects with them in a way that even nonverbal people can can kind of really engage with just a few notes on a piano. Um and so I think I think there there is something deep in our in our brain, I think in our in our evolutionary past that that has those musical roots. And as to as to other animals, again, I mean as far as we know, no other animals make um music in the way that we think of music, in other words, that is again, there's lots of different uses of music, one of them is communication, so birds obviously use music in that sense, but in the way that we we're talking about music mainly, so entertainment, um, you know, things like ritual, there's there's I don't think there's a lot of evidence, at least yet, for the fact that other animals use it like that. That's not to say that they haven't got the capacity to to want to hear it and and to be intrigued by it, because I think there is something interesting about it because it is ordered sound, basically, in in some some form that is that is just sets off the sets the neurons firing and gets whether it whether we're humans or you know or other animals can kind of lock into that and go, oh that's that's interesting. And you get that little burst of dopamine that you get from kind of hearing patterns, or I'm sure that different degrees of that exist in other animals.

SPEAKER_01 27:05 Yeah, you you don't get birds sitting around a campfire with one of them just whistling wonder wall for the tenth time. No, exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 27:14 And actually, yeah, I I can totally see that um this kind of boundary between, I guess, well, if if we just look at singing and and speaking, it's a pretty blurred line, actually, isn't it? Like you said, um, you can you can find pitch in in anything, right? So it's like where does the line from I'm talking to oh actually I'm singing now um where where is that line? And I'm kind of wondering, do we have any evidence as to sort of when humans gained the ability to sing wherever that sits on the this imaginary line and sort of control their voices in that way?

SPEAKER_00 27:54 I I mean I as far as I'm aware, we don't really. And the reason for that is that it's very hard to to do any archaeological work on that, I think, or or you know, any big and any evolutionary work even really, because we're talking about something that would have happened a very long time ago, you know, probably hundreds of thousands of years ago um in our in our history. So there's a an interesting book called The The Singing Neanderthal. It's been a while since I've uh read that, so I'm gonna I'm I'm I'm I'm not gonna be able to remember too much from it. But certainly one of the one of the cases it makes was that Neanderthals um was were singing and were were were making music, you know. So so we're talking back a really, really quite a long way back into our into our ancient past. And again, if you're talking about singing, there's lots of the it that's a bit more adaptive than a lot of other musical stuff, right? In other words, being able to control your voice, to be able to project it over long distances, probably quite helpful. Um, being able to um change the pitch of it to be able to either to be heard or to, you know, well for whatever reason as a as a kind of um evolutionary advantage to show off to mates or whatever might might be um there's probably kind of a strong case for that. I the reason I'm I'm particularly interested in the development of instruments and again these what I call tools of abstract expression is that that is something that is much more conscious, I think. That is if you excuse the pun, um that is something that is much more much more deliberate that you would have to pick something up to think, have the idea to think I'm going to make a nice sound out of this for a reason that I'm not sure I can't really articulate, but pick it up, go, oh okay, do that, fill with that, drill up, you know, bash a hole there, knock the end off there, blow it in, it's that way, it doesn't work, okay. You know, kind of keep trying like that. And of course, people would have been doing that with their voices, but A, we've got no way of really telling with with with uh voices, and but B, you're using your voice all the time, probably anyway, to communicate and so you know, so there's like a lot more of a blurred line between singing and um and speaking. Whereas the actual kind of construction of of a a musical instrument, this tool of expression is is a lot is a lot more sort of definite, if you like. It's a lot like someone someone's had the idea to do that, and that that is the kind of for me is the kind of birth of this idea that we're doing this for a reason, and that's where it's much unless clear as to what like the evolutionary reason behind that is. You know, what's the evolutionary reason behind spending probably many hours making a birdbone flute? Isn't you know that that's a lot more unclear, I think, whereas voice, because we're using it in all sorts of other ways, is a bit more defined, if you like.

SPEAKER_02 30:33 You said that you um spoke to somebody, I think, who um has been working with dementia patients, and I've seen some things like this before where there's a guy called Clive Waring who has um a very, very short, short-term memory, but you put him in front of a piano and he's just perfectly playing the things that he learnt sort of 30 or 40 years ago, even though he doesn't really remember. I've I've noticed uh just obviously totally different scale, but when I pick up a guitar and I haven't played for a while, I haven't played a song, my thing fingers seem to know what to do, but I don't consciously remember. Like I don't I I shouldn't remember how to play this song. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on why or how uh this kind of like unconscious part of our brain seems to be able to hold on to music in ways that maybe our conscious can't remember kind of things in life that have happened, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 31:33 I think it's partly coming back to what we were just saying, really, about the fact that you know that that our musical brains possibly predate our linguistic brains in some ways. And and there is something more uh there is something some somehow more ancient about that part part of our brain in the sense that um it it taps into the emotional centre that is not tied to language, right? So firstly, when it comes to um being moved by music that you hadn't thought about for years, um an example for me, slightly quirky example for me, right, is that I have a uh an I knew a strange car. I've got like a um sort of minivan that is a Japanese import, right? And it came it came uh with it, if it's from 2006, it came with a mini-disc player in it. And I'm a I'm of a vintage, um, where I was big into mini-discs as a as a teenager, right? It was a sort of late teenager, early 20s. So so I I'm still hoping the mini disc will come back one day. But um, but anyway, I still had loads of my old mini discs, right? Now, these are records I I was I haven't listened to for well, you know, 25 years, um, if not more. And I thought, oh, I'll put I'll put it in as I was doing it, going a long drive. Um, because that was the age, um, so again, I'm a trumpet player and uh um play a lot of jazz, and particularly then when I was at my late teens, I was getting really into playing jazz and you know, practicing a lot and stuff. And I could sing every note of some of these like you know, sack solos or trumpet solos that I haven't listened to or thought about in any way for at least 25 years. And uh I could literally sing every note of the the solo still, and you know that I think there's a couple of things there that that that is sort of in embedded in a different way than learning a speech or or whatever, which you know often uh um goes in one ear at the other. Uh and uh yeah, so that's kind of embedded in in a different part of my brain somehow than than than other other memories are. Um but also when it comes to actually doing on an instrument, what you're talking about, I think the process of actually making music, playing music or s or uh particularly playing music when you've got technique, it's it's a muscle memory thing there again, which is something that's slightly different, I think, from a from a kind of conscious memory, because it's you learn by doing. And I think I think again, something that's often underpriced when we're thinking thinking about conceptualizing music is how the importance of physicalising music, like how embodied music is, and that's that the fact that that's that's how we learn it, and that's how it's kind of encoded in that in our brains. And so one of the things I do when I'm doing things like masterclasses is I get people to like walk and and clap, right? Do things physical things, and often these are very you know, experienced musicians. Like, for example, I've done you know masterclasses with like the household cavalry band, you know, the army band, and they're getting a bit big bunch of big army folk doing that stuff can feel a bit a bit childish, but actually it's something teaches you something really, really important about rhythm and about and about understanding you know, your stumps are that's on on the beat and your claps are off, or and then you can start physicalizing it in that way. And so I think the same thing is true when you're playing a song on guitar, that the sort of muscle memory of it can be there without without it being conscious. And in fact, what happens quite a lot is the moment it goes wrong, if I'm like, for example, trying to remember a song, the moment it goes wrong is when I do try and think about it and I'm sort of on you've got this sort of yeah, you're like, what am I doing? And then it's gone, you know, because it's sort of overriding your instinctive musical brain with your and and and physical brain with your conscious brain, which is which is too bad at remembering things, whereas you uh the kind of musical brain is uh uh you know encodes things in a different way. It's one of the reasons, by the way, that I think we we often learn important bits of information um set to music, you know, the alphabet song, or uh that's when when people are trying to remember stuff, they use songs like that. But also the way that our uh that bards, for example, you know, Homer or these ancient bards back in in the ancient world would have uh been singing. You know, they call they call uh epic poetry songs a lot of the time, and it would have it would have been definitely accompanied by music, a lot of that stuff. Um, if not sung entirely, then certainly uh music would have played an important role in that. And there's a strong argument for the that being because it was a way of remembering, you know, a 50,000-line um piece of epic poetry was to was to remember it to music.

SPEAKER_01 36:04 Memory and music is actually it goes even deeper because there is research to show that if you learn and maintain your learning of a musical instrument as you age, you reduce your risk of getting dementia. So there's something incredible there about the link between memory and music, which is actually um has a physical effect on your brain as well and how it ages.

SPEAKER_00 36:26 Yeah, I mean I think it's because music, like the practice of actually playing a musical instrument is it works so many different aspects of of your brain. Uh it it works that, you know, the motor motor skills, fine motor skills. Um for for me, again, as a as a brass player, I it's really made me very conscious of things like breathing, breath control, um, you know, and so I there's there's aspects of that which I'm sure uh are related to to better health health outcomes, although I think being a trumpet player is probably not related to better health outcomes based on the longevity of most trumpet players, but still no. But um, but I think there is, you know, there's a lot of it's working lots of different parts of your brain, both consciously and uh subconsciously. Uh this is sort of slightly uh a slight tangent, but like over a couple of years, particularly over lockdown, um, I wanted to, I had a little electronic drum kit that I wanted to, I just wanted to you just use for like composing a bit. And I thought I sort of, right, I'm gonna I'm gonna play for like five, ten minutes every day just to try and get some basic skills. And you know, day one, it's embarrassing having been a professional musician for for many, many years, and you're trying to go dung, you know, like the most basic drum playing drum play. Yeah, um, and I just could it just wasn't working, there the coordination of the four limbs just wasn't there at all. Um it really I was just like, how is this possible that I'm this is I can't get this together? But then something really interesting happened. The next day, I come in and I can do it straight away. You know, I'm not I'm obviously I'm not saying I was immediately a great drummer, but I could do the thing that the simple thing I was trying to do the day before, I could then suddenly do. Um, and it's because yeah, you you practice, you stop, your brain sort of processes it, and then you come back and and you're able to do it. And that's how you progress, like you know, on an instrument. It's just that again, slowly, like iteratively practicing things.

SPEAKER_01 38:26 Well, I I think that's a it's a good connection actually to the past because it shows that you mentioned about the iterative process of designing an instrument and or even coming up with the fact that you could chop off a bit of the conch and start playing it with a funny sort of mouth shape. It speaks to um, I suppose the fortitude of our ancient ancestors that they were willing to put in time to something that seemed basically impossible at first. You know, the first time an ancient human would have tried playing a conch, it would have been like, oh, oh, that doesn'thing. And yet we there was this sort of drive to go, no, I do think that this could make a sound, which is which is pleasant. Um, so I think that does to kind of talk to how uh our ancient ancestors uh what we have to thank them for, really. And something you did mention was the bard, which I really wanted to pick up on because you know, my image of the bard is uh I don't know if you've seen The Witcher. Um I haven't, but I'm aware of it, yeah. Yeah, so it's like sort of traveling companion who just sings songs about your great feats to you, which I'm imagining uh wasn't necessarily how bards were uh in reality. But I kind of like this idea of uh a bard back in historic times being your version of Spotify that you sort of just took with you. Um, but you obviously you discussed how music would have been a collective uh activity a lot involving you know multiple members of a tribe. Um, but do you think you know the idea of a solo musician is quite a new invention? And and would people have had like bards in you know, frequently in different locations that were singing music a lot, or do you think experiencing music would have happened less frequently for our ancestors?

SPEAKER_00 40:05 I suspect that the experiencing music would have been very, very common for most people and and experiencing music, but not again, not in the way that we think of now, not necessarily in the way that you know, you obviously not in the way that you go to a concert or a gig, that but more in the way that it would be a part of everyday life in some in some way or other, right? Probably everyone would play a bit of music or sing a bit or you know, so I I think a lot about how the idea of a professional musician is a relatively modern concept and uh it sort of existed you know for the last few hundred years, uh, and maybe a bit longer, but you know, the I really musicians pretty much for the whole of human history have have uh have been not a professional class like that, you know. So there'll be people who do lots of things, and so it's it's interesting now. I think about it now when I when a lot of when I work with uh people who who are a bit bashful about the fact they they've got other jobs or whatever, they're like, oh, I'm not a real musician, you know, I do this, or I'm music teacher, but I do, you know, I do some gigs and things. Like, no, no, you're still a musician, like you just don't you you don't like earning a hundred percent of your living purely from playing or writing music. It is a relatively modern invention, and I think it would have been much more part of people's everyday life. And and in fact, in still still is in in cultures that are not so in in uh engaged in in if you like kind of the modern world and of of of you know capitalism and and uh commerce and everything. Or even to be fair, in in if even things like Irish pubs, you know, like jams like that. I I I'm really fascinated. I talk a lot on my podcast to people who are in those worlds as much as I do professional musicians. I hope that's certainly what I aspire to to try and talk to people who are you know who are doing like trad folk jams and and something like a tr a a traditional Irish or Scottish folk jam or uh also exists in places like Appalachia, that those are much more collective ideas. You know, you turn up with an instrument, someone has an idea, oh well, should we do this real? Yeah, and then you're playing, someone they start playing it, and maybe some, maybe everyone knows maybe everyone knows it, maybe they don't, they're working out as they go a bit, and then someone else has another idea, and you sort of follow that. Uh it's it's a lot more about a kind of community event, but also very importantly, my kind of uh again mission with the podcast and a lot of stuff that I'm doing is that it is as much about listening as it is about performing, and I think that is where even as non performers, if you like, as non-um instrumentalists or singers, we can really deepen our musicality. Something I'm like super passionate about is trying to help people um listen like a musician, hear like a musician, and by which I mean just like active listening and um this idea of knowing when to be on broadcast mode and when to be on receive mode. And I think something like a you know a trad jam or or to an extent a jazz jam or or you know an open mic or any of those things are are really interesting cultural examples of that that uh exist now. But I think I th I think uh that our earlier uh ancestors would it would have been much more like that. So yes, there might be maybe there's a shaman or someone who is is leading certain aspects of the ritual, maybe there's someone who is you know the kind of uh the main driver behind certain things or the person who's come up with certain rhythms or whatever it might be, but really it's a much more of a a group activity for the most part. And so I think the idea of like uh solo musicians uh uh is is relatively new as far as far as I'm aware, and by new I mean, you know, hundred many hundreds of years old um rather than tens or tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. Um so yeah, I think I think it's it's as music gets more delineated into its being its own thing, if you like, rather than just being a part of everyday life and society, that's where we start finding specialists basically. In a sense, that's been amazing because that's really driven the development of music. But I I think we are I do sometimes think we're in danger of having lost something if we focus too much on that bit and not enough on the rest of the history of music. And so I you know, I again I'm quite passionate about not losing that specialist. It's very important to have people who've dedicated their lives to to really you know making amazing music, but to try and bring people with you with you rather than just putting them on a pedestal and saying this musical genius who no one can ever touch or you know no one must ever compare themselves to. There are those people, the the you know, there are a few of those people, but really music for me is much more of a um a participatory thing, even as a listener.

SPEAKER_01 44:50 I feel like we say this at least once per episode, but damn capitalism, you know, that's that that's why you get superstars, isn't it?

SPEAKER_00 44:58 Yeah, yeah, exactly. you know and that's that's great and but uh uh that is again if we think about the different functions of music I think that's where that is music as entertainment that's music as commerce right um that's like that's the function of that music is to entertain a particular demographic in a particular way for that thing you know if you if you take like the kind of commercialised pop star model great um all power to them but like that's that's the function of that that doesn't mean that other music isn't successful or valid or whatever like that you know a successful pop star is someone who makes lots of money and makes songs that everyone streams and downloads and you know and dances to in their kitchen or whatever fine but you can be successful in music in in all sorts of ways that don't look like that so I think I think again this is a whole other discussion really but like you know music and commerce can very much coexist but depending on what the function of that music is and you know you've never commercialising Irish folk music in in in that that is there to be designed to be played in a pub is well actually that's a bad example because Ed Sheeran's basically done that as an EP well yeah I mean there but that but there is that's an example of someone who has taken a community tradition I don't mean this as a in any disrespect to Ed Sheeran but like he's he's observed that that thing and thought I can do the pop star version of that if you know what I mean. And fair play to him you know he's done that but like that the the the reason that that's interesting is that that this is a kind of community thing that isn't about professionalizing the the musical class it's about like people just turning up with their instruments and jamming some of whom by the way are absolutely amazing players so it's not about whether they're great or not that's not the point of it. The point is that it to be in the pub and he's kind of gone oh yeah people like that I'll I'll take that and do the commercial thing with it which he's done very well. Well but before you say music's for everyone you haven't heard uh the album albums that Matt and I recorded when we were 18 so yeah reserve judgment but but again it depends like it depends what the point of that is right is if the point of that of if you making albums when you're 18 was to have fun and learn a bit about music and like bonds as friends then like job done. You know it doesn't need to have you don't need to have had loads of downloads or you know sold loads of tickets to shows for that to have been a success.

SPEAKER_01 47:14 Well one of my most memorable experiences of of being that age is is just sitting in Matt's uh bedroom recording these ridiculous songs to be fair and and maybe that's enough.

SPEAKER_00 47:23 Well that's enough but sorry just just finally on that on that uh note like I I was talking on on my podcast recently about uh the fact that on uh our phones you know we've got we're always always messing around with cameras and you know filters and all those things but we're not messing around with sound in quite the same way and I think we've got the ability to do it like phones iPads whatever these things that everyone's got with them at all times um we're not doing that with sound because for some reason even though there's obviously there's hundreds of thousands of professional photographers in the world but yet everyone's a photographer now they've got a you know phone in their and a camera in their pocket but we've also got a really very good recording device in our pocket or a very good you know little a sound module or whatever it is but people aren't messing around with it in quite the same way um and and I I find that quite interesting uh and as to why that is and I think it is partly because we put musicians on a kind of pedestal that we don't we don't with with uh photographers or filmmakers in quite the same way.

SPEAKER_02 48:24 And one thing that you were saying before about sort of music being or encouraging it to be kind of like this group activity and kind of the benefits of that. So um it kind of got me thinking that one of the things actually as an amateur musician that puts me off about this is kind of like my lack of music theory knowledge. So you know with musical notation and scales and chords and things um I was wondering if you sort of happen to know at which point roughly music started to become sort of more sophisticated where we were applying these kind of rules to the music that we were playing.

SPEAKER_00 49:05 One of the first things to say is that music theory is a way of describing what music does and it's not a set of rules for what music must do. And it but it's also when often when people say oh you know I never studied theory um music theory what they mean is I didn't do you know in in in the West like grade five theory or whatever you know I didn't I didn't do I didn't study for my exams my musical exams um and so I don't know anything about theory and but really that is just a way of uh using language to describe what music does probably you do know a lot of the stuff that is contained in you do know a lot of music theory basically if you're able to like play guitar or sing or whatever you may not be able to label what some of those things are and you know what music theory is is a way of describing some of those things with some language some specific language that you need to know by the way I I I I think it's really a really good thing for for most people to do or like for people who want to take music seriously you know be able to read music and stuff is really really helpful. So I'm not absolutely not doing that down. And sometimes I think it can be in danger of being sort of over romanticized like when people can't do that you know it's like oh wow it's amazing he's a great musician even though he can't read music so well those things are different those those are different skills you know but it really music theory is also very very culturally culturally specific. So like um I if you're thinking about music the way that we're taught about music theory in the kind of exam system here that is very very different from how I for example I studied a bit of um uh tablet Indian you know Indian percussion in uh in India and there's a completely different system I've worked with Indian musicians quite a lot a completely different system of understanding rhythm and harmony and melody like totally different in all sorts of ways and then that's completely different again from like you know gamelan music from Indonesia or so there's this idea that that that music theory is something that governs all music and those are the laws it's not you know it's not the laws of physics it's something that the that it's not describing a physical reality for the most part it's describing what musicians have done over the ages in order to make music that we say is nice or that we like in certain ways. But most a lot of the the breakthroughs in music come when either people are consciously or unconsciously breaking some of those rules a classic case in point is like the blues or jazz have spent a lot of time in New Orleans and you know that's like kind of the iconic birthplace of jazz because you had these Western classical traditions coexisting with with the you know enslaved peoples traditions from the Caribbean and from Africa and and yeah and obviously those are all very distinct cultures Caribbean culture very different from from African culture West African culture very different from East African culture but all they're all there together learning from each other and that's where this new music is born because people have got their own their own kind of musical music theory western music Western classical music theory West African drumming um which doesn't have a kind of codified music theory in the way that we have it with textbooks here maybe but it's very much got its own structure but then they're all thrown together and they all kind of like go oh wait that's cool let's try that you know and that's when sorry that's when something new is born um so that's the first thing I'd say sorry um but then but then in terms of when it got more complicated I mean music's been again it's but it depends where you mean what you mean by complicated because um certain rhythmic things in different parts of the world are extremely complicated like much more complicated than the way we way we think of music in the West whereas like Western harmony you know chords and scales and things arguably um much more kind of complicated for better or worse than in other parts of the world so there's like complexity can look like lots of different things and those things happen at different times in different ways. There's a sort of simple answer to that which is you know things got codified in the kind of Western classical model relatively recently really you know in the last few hundred years Western music theory doesn't really have a a good way of describing for things like the blue scale for example hasn't got hasn't really got a good way of explaining what that is because it's just a different thing. It comes and so you can you can try you know you can kind of try and fit it into a box where it's this and this and this but it never quite fully describes it because music is a lot more nuanced than that and it actually it's not a set of rules that you go there you go that's that's music done properly. So yeah I think I think people've got a lot more musical theory knowledge than they than they realize basically.

SPEAKER_01 53:50 I always remember um hearing about how Simon and Garfunkel used the studio building that they were in to create some of the sounds on their track uh well I don't know if it was on all of the tracks but I I I particularly know it was on Bridge Over Troubled Water. You know, with the studio they were able to create like reverb using the stairwell things like that and and I think this sort of goes back to your idea that we don't experiment with music anymore or in the same way or as we do with photography. And I think this is an amazing story here of like using your environment like of musical ingenuity really before we had effects and before we had plugins. Do you think because we have all of these things now these sort of digitized versions that music or modern music tools have sort of flattened that older spirit of invention and also kept people from feeling that they can be experimenters themselves?

SPEAKER_00 54:46 So yeah it's a very interesting question. I think it it can do certainly I think there is an idea when you're making music on a computer where you can it's insane how much it's democratised music making you know for all the fact that I say people don't experiment with music in the way that they do with photos there are more people than ever making music on uh making like composing music and I think that's a great thing um and uh there you know there are statistics about people about like was it 40,000 songs a day or something um getting uploaded to Spotify um that and that's before AI you know that's like that's that's people just going oh there's there's a new song um and so whether or not they're getting listened to again I would say is beside the point people are making music and that's a great thing because it is more democratic than ever because you can just do it even just on a phone but you can certainly do it on a laptop and when you've got insane level of tools that no one in musical history has ever had just in in on even on your phone. But I yes I do think that there is a danger that it has it pushes you towards homogeneity it pushes you towards doing the kind of right thing or the you know using the same preset as everyone else or um when we're talking about things like what we call doors, digital audio work workstations so people might have heard of things like logic or garage band or um those sorts of things it there's a there's a grid right so that you know there's hit here's the bars and even just when you open it up it will open it up at a certain tempo a certain you know speed. The tempo most doors open up at um is 120 beats per minute so it's like two every second basically so the amount of songs that are written at 120 beat I mean it's a very common it was all even before these things existed it was a very common sort of tempo for a lot of songs to be written at but because it's now baked into where you open up your uh your music software and that's the tempo it starts at so your idea starts at that speed and you know and and I think is it pushes you into a certain direction which I think you have to work quite hard sometimes to break away from the thing that I find I as a uh as a composer and um producer and things is is to try and preserve that sense of play. You know it we call it playing music for a reason. It is it should be about play and about experimentation talking about Simon Guff uncle using the stairwell there's countless examples of that John Bonham on you know in Led Zeppelin Records playing in a big stone against stone stairwell another good example on drums is the the kind of 80s drum sound was discovered by accident with Phil Collins they left a channel up on a desk they left a particular like the the mic that the producer uses to talk to the musicians was left open during the recording and then they heard this mad drum sound they're like wow what's that and it was just because they accidentally left a mic open and like that suddenly is the drum sound of the 80s you know so there's all these sorts of things that happen by accident and I think it I whenever I'm working with people particularly less experienced people who I think are worried about not getting it right when you're first starting like I've got to do it all right and I've got to make sure that this is right. And for me a lot of the stuff that happens a lot of the best stuff I've written I think or that that the like choices of maybe I'm mixing a tune or something is sometimes they'll come from happy accidents to be able to leave a bit of space for things going slightly wrong but then go no let's go with that and the reason I think that's really important is that that's what happens in live music or it it should for me for me I've realized as I've got older that the thing that I that I the thing I don't respond to that much in like live entertainment is anything too shiny. So anything that is like is there is a set way of doing it and it should be exactly the same every night and if it's not that something's gone wrong you know like I whereas if I'm going to see live gig I uh I want I don't want it to go wrong but I want it I want there to be a feeling that this is a thing that can happen in the room tonight and it's going to be slightly different the next night. It doesn't need to be like a totally different show but it you know there's we people everyone's playing there's a sense of like energy in the air where people are trying things out and experimenting a little bit just at the edges of even something really polished you know you can you can kind of push it a little bit more one night or respond to the audience a bit in the next next night and I that's what makes live entertainment exciting and I think trying to carry that into um into when you're making music on a computer or whatever trying to carry that sense of just playing around seeing what happens and we've got this amazing power now where you can play around and see what happens and then if you want to you can fix it afterwards but what you can't do anywhere near as easily is inject that sense of experimentation and stuff afterwards.

SPEAKER_01 59:46 So you've got to get that to that point I I saw a a mum on Instagram the other day um playing prison system by system of a down um purely in her toddler's playroom with instruments from within the playroom and it was just that was the kind of musical ingenuity that I needed to see that day.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:03 It's great. Well it it's interesting I've just I've been working on a kid show actually and and I've done a theme theme for uh a thing called my friend Maisie which is the Maisie Mousebooks uh TV show and um and actually with that when I got the uh the pitch in for that I the first thing I did was go to my kids like uh preschool music toys and get them out and like lay them all out and record them and try and find ideas on them. And what's been interesting about that is that the theme tune I made for that um I made using some of those instruments and some other things but I used a particular scale that is called the pentatonic scale which is very very uh well known in uh across a lot of cultures but but is is the scale that you find for example on kids' instruments and in kids' playgrounds even so the whole theme is made from that and on kids' instruments and what's quite nice about that is that you can then go back and play that in a playground yeah you know because it's it was just made those through those instruments and again that that sense of playfulness I think is really important for people to understand whether they're writing music or whether they're just like listening to music as well even you know just trying to think well this no no one gets hurt if if we play you know play around I I do it with my band Hackney Collery band it's the thing I I like doing most of all with that band is surprising people in one direction or another. Yeah if it's too sort of locked down and like this is what it is then I think you can lo you are in danger of losing the kind of human aspect to to music making.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:31 Yeah I think you've perfectly vocalized uh a number of things that I've been feeling over the last few years. So I love that and and it's been the reason why I've been able to get into music in a lot of ways um is how accessible you know being able to have basically a recording studio in my room I love that I can have access to all these effects which maybe I wouldn't have been able to do I can record at a better quality without having to have a massive you know amp and mic setup that I couldn't afford maybe um but to that end um in my sort of genre of choice which is metal something that I've noticed uh as somebody going to gigs for the last sort of 15 years and listening to this music is this pursuit of sort of perfection and um you know you you can just go on YouTube and there are set ways of how to produce metal guitars how to produce metal drums like this is the correct way. And if something is produced a bit like differently now people pick up on it. And it's like you said in the doors you can uh perfectly have your drums uh on on the uh tempo exactly you know auto-tune things when you listen to them live they're playing to a click track they have backing tracks it all has to be very polished it seems a lot of the time and it does feel actually like there's something missing or that it's a little sterile or we're not having the fun that we used to have you know where there was this idea that you know you go into the studio and you pick the the worst microphone and the worst amp that they have to make it sound as horrible as you can uh and I feel like that's like the antithesis of what we're doing in a way.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:21 I was just going to say I think that's I think that's very very true and I and I even in a very kind of clean recording setup um I will normally try and give myself an option uh for having something a little bit crazier um even if I don't end up using it. But I mean nine times out of ten I do use it I do end up using it right so I sort of get make sure I've got the clean things that I need make sure I've got like the bases covered but um but then I will always do so I was working with the choir for example on on a hackney corre band thing um typically sing called Angelique kidjo and we had uh got the choir to do their their their stuff which was great what they did really good takes so I knew I had it but then instead a bit of time and like can we just do a pass? I I always basically we'll try and do a pass where everyone just goes a bit nuts and everyone loosens up. You're not trying to get it it's not like red light fever where you're just trying to get the perfect thing. But no just go crazy and then at the end like let's have a big whoa you know like a big cheer sort of whoop thing. And of course that's the one we end up using 90% of that rather than any of the other takes. But you know that you've once people once you know that you've got what you need um you know you can try that crazy stuff. And also then I wouldn't do this with Hackney Cotteryband but again if I was writing writing for Telly or something you you know that you can do you can fix it in the box or you can you can get the kind of really good sounding stuff um in with the software but you what you can't get is that is that that crazy thing. So like I will always put like what I call a like a crap mic on on a drum kit in a really mad place. And you can sometimes just dial a bit of that in if you want a bit of you know if you want a bit of vibe or a bit of craziness. I was talking to a drummer friend over the weekend I was working with and he puts a mic in his drums that are in storage on the shelf um like and so they're all resonating in a mad way and he puts just a one mic in that and he might not use much but he's got that option if he wants to be able to dial up the crazy.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:19 It does feel like as things have um as our ability to uh have access to sort of all these tools and things that have been great for allowing us to have access to produce and play with music so too has the potential for us to maybe lose uh some human aspect and I wanted to just touch on one of the things that has made creating music the most accessible that I think you could imagine which is the sort of AI tooling that exists now. And um I just wanted to get your thoughts on what this does for music what this does for kind of you know we've spoken about the benefits of producing and being mindful with it and now we're kind of able to produce it with a prompt.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:08 You mean AI slop Matt you're saying it in a very nice way AI slop yeah well I I think it's a very very interesting development like it's like so much of AI stuff it um it it is a real sea change in terms of like our our relationship with music because the last few years as we've been talking about has been a gradual democ dem uh democratisation of the ability to make music and record it and release it. Um but but but which has come at some you know some cost as we say in that maybe we've lost some of the the more more playful fun aspects of that uh of the music making process. But now we're in a situation where anyone can and does ru type into a uh a box exactly what they want. And it will spit out, you know, if you prompt it properly, some very credible stuff, right? So I'm I'm I don't I've in a way I don't want to talk about whether AI music sounds good or not because it's sort of irrelevant. I think it does a lot of the time it is pretty credible. Um and it's sort of irrelevant whether it sounds good or not because it's gonna get much better, right? So we it's not it's not an interesting debate to have about whether it it currently sounds uh uh you know good or not. Much much more important thing to to think about is like now that anyone can make music uh for free. I mean, again, I'm not gonna get into the the ethics and legality of how it's done in terms of the AI systems, you know, basically stealing everyone's music. Um but now that that is possible, is it is I think the absolute apex of the um uh of the commodification of music that we've kind of been moving towards over the last number of decades. And I mean it really, if you want to get highfalutin about it, you can sort of almost start that idea. The birth of that idea is really recorded music full stop. Um when people are talking about music now, they're mainly talking about recorded music, they're mainly talking about what they're streaming or whatever, and that's cool. But that what's happened is that that focus on uh the and the recorded sound being the kind of being what music is, is is meant that it's just it's got more and more commodified over time. And so for example, people people go and see live gigs, uh particularly of big commercial artists, they want they want to hear the as close as possible to what's on the record. So the record is the is the sort of uh text, is like that is what the song is. That process of starting out where you're able to record something and play it back, and now you know, now where it's got to that has changed the way that um that live music happens, coming right back to what we were talking about at the beginning, where it's you know started out as a kind of community thing in caves, we're all making, we're all participating in it, and you know, it's it's changed very fundamentally in in like you know, Western Catholicist culture has changed so far, it's so far removed from that. Now AI is the kind of ultimate extension of that because now you can just say, Well, I like this band, this band, this band, this band. Can you write me something that's a bit like that that's gonna make is that sad, you know, or that's about this subject that's got these lyrics. That is still people uploading music that they have made, even if they've just made it by typing in a prompt to to Spotify and then Spotify distributing it. What I think is gonna happen very, very soon is that these platforms are going to if you you say I've got people coming over for dinner, want some like background music, and here are the bands I like, so-and-so and so-and-so, you brief your AI about you know, it's it's got all this knowledge about you from your history or whatever, if you're listening to, and rather than giving you a kind of sample playlist of bat you might like this since you listen to this, it will create music that will exist in that moment for that dinner party or whatever, and that won't exist again. Um, and it will, you know, it will write the music, it will create the music there, and then based on your your on your AI chat history, uh, and you say, you know, put the dinner, the guests that you've got coming, one of them likes Radiohead, one of them likes whatever, you know, like it will curate some music that sounds enough like that as background music to be passable. And on one level, that's really depressing. Um but on another level, like if we're coming back to the thinking about the things of uh like the function of music, that background music like that, or like you know, those uses of music, because there's never been more mu uses of music in history than there have been now. You know, the music is everywhere that you go, it's in the lift and you're in hold, there's it's in it's in every shop you go in, it's on the radio all the time, it's used for ads, it's used for, but it's also still used for ceremony and for ritual. You know, it's still used for those things, and it's still used for entertainment, and people still go to see bands in pubs or you know, those sorts of things. And so my hope is that what we're talking about with the playfulness and the live experience will will have more of a premium on it, and that will feel like people I don't think live music is going to stop because of AI. I think you know, the people's relationship with recording music might be different, and that is something we can mourn or uh uh or not, but like it might might make the the live experience feel like something more special because it isn't it isn't it isn't commodified in that same way, it is people expressing themselves. There is a whole other debate we haven't got time for now, but about how those people doing the live shows afford to live, but that's also true of every other profession. So, you know, in a sense, the musicians aren't distinct in in that I never, for example, I never use it for creative work. So I might use it to to help me work through an idea, but I will never give it the thing and say, do the creative bit for me, because that is the fun bit. That's the bit I want to do. I don't want to, I don't want an AI to do the bit that I enjoy. I want it to do all the stuff I don't like in my accounts, and you know, I wanted to, you know, and or whatever, organise my diary, whatever, you know, those sorts of things. This is where I think that that you know, that interview with the chief executive Sune, I think it was uh saying, oh yeah, but making music's really hard. No one actually wants to make music. It's like, no, you fundamentally misunderstood music making music music is hard, but but people do want to make music, and they have done for the whole of human history, you absolute goon. So that is the bit that people want to do. People don't want to have to flog it and you know market it, and you know, that's the bit that's tedious. Any musician you talk to, no one wants to be doing that stuff, they have to, because otherwise it's not gonna get hurt, they're not gonna, you know, it's their career's gonna suffer. But but like the making music bit is the fun bit, and and I think that's what we've got to try and refocus on when it comes to things like AI Slop, not whether it's AI Slop's good or bad, because again, whether it's even if it you don't think it's good now, and actually I think a lot of it is surprisingly impressive, um, but it's gonna get better. I mean, sure, it's never gonna I don't think it can't create original music in quite the same way that uh that I would in my studio would necessarily uh b because it uh it's not gonna come up with the same ideas, maybe. My hope is that it will it will uh make things, particularly the kind of weirder end of things, feel m like something more special. So again, this stuff I do with shells and electronics, I mean what no AI is gonna be trained to put yet to produce uh you know a shells on electronics album because there's no market for it. So, you know, but but the but that's that's but as a live experience or as even uh on record, I'm I'm working on a record of that stuff now, like that that is something that is un is at least unusual, you know, and maybe there's a reason for that. But um but like at least it is something that exists in a way that even if you could get a computer to do that, you probably wouldn't because it there's not, you know, there's not the same commercial incentives for it as anything else. So my so my hope is that it but has a kind of a side effect of reconnecting us with music, and uh and it's why I've sort of made it my mission with things like the podcast to try and get people to engage with music, even as non-musicians, especially as non-musicians actually, or like non-players, um, is to try and reconnect with exactly that the the more communitarian aspect of how we we used to make music and and many people still do make music, it's not like that's gone away, it still exists in if you sing in a choir or if sing along in a pub or you know, go like it's the it's gonna exist, but it's trying to deepen people's understanding and appreciation for it because as the commoditization of it gets more extreme as it is day by day, we can't fight the fact that that's happening, but what we can do is kind of engage with the bits that are the bits that are human and are are aren't recreatable in that way.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:07 Well, Steve, pretty. Hopefully this conversation gets people to think about maybe taking a leaf out of the our ancestral roots, experimenting with music more, appreciating it perhaps in in a different way, in different settings, and just seeing it as something that you can be imperfect at. But it has been absolutely fascinating talking to you and thank you so much for joining us on what we did before.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:31 Thanks very much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:32 It's been my pleasure. A massive thank you to Steve Pretty for joining us on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:37 I'm Ollie and I'm Matt, and this has been What We Did Before. If you have any ideas for a future episode, please let us know in the comments below.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:45 And please do chuck us a subscribe if you can. It helps us out massively, and we will see you next time.