Cyberman №1 — Nick Cave on AI and music, streaming made songs shorter, a new song from Nina Kraviz
Welcome fellow Cyber people.
Every week, this newsletter will bring you a few interesting articles about contemporary human beings, machines, and interactions between them.
It will be curated to bring different perspectives to these subjects, to ask important questions and maybe suggest a few possible answers.
You can find more articles on our Facebook Page or website.
Enjoy!
Loneliness is very dangerous for our health. Even though we are more connected than ever, these artificial connections can’t replace real human interaction.
“Like depression and anxiety, loneliness is a universal part of the human experience. Unlike depression and anxiety, loneliness has no recognized clinical form; there is no available diagnosis or treatment for feeling chronically isolated.”
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“In a dizzying number of ways, modern life is designed to disengage us from one another. And with such obvious barriers to connection, it may not seem worthwhile to pursue a pharmaceutical solution. “We are such a medicated, comfortably numb society,” Bainbridge says. In her own life, she sees loneliness not as a problem to be fixed, but a complicated, ambivalent state that adds depth to the experience of being a social creature in a fragmented world.”
Streaming is making songs shorter
Interesting article on the fact that, since streaming became the main way of consuming music, average song length has decreased for 20 seconds.
“Streaming services pay music rights holders per play. Spotify doesn’t say the exact amount it pays artists for each stream, but reports suggest it is somewhere between $0.004 and $0.008. Every song gets paid the same. Kanye West’s 2010 five-minute opus ‘All Of The Lights’ gets the same payment as West’s two-minute-long 2018 hit ‘I Love it’.”
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“Then again, music has always changed with technology. Early phonographs could only hold about two to three minutes of music, so as a result, that was the length of the typical song from 1920 to 1950s. The introduction of the LP record, and then the tape and the CD, made it possible to have longer songs, with each medium’s larger storage capacity. Now in the age of streaming, technology and economics seem to be sending us back towards brevity.”
Another one on music. Nick Cave discussing the possibility of AI making a good song. It can’t get any better than that.
“But, I don’t feel that when we listen to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen — a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation — a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation.”
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“What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a reason for this. A sense of awe is almost exclusively predicated on our limitations as human beings. It is entirely to do with our audacity as humans to reach beyond our potential.”
For the end of this issue listen to Dream Machine, a new song from Nina Kraviz:
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