Voice without choice
Alexa, where’s my record collection?
Recently, in an attempt to convince myself that I am both relevant and aesthetically on point, I bought a Sonos One with Alexa voice recognition built-in. I probably know too much about this speaker; my last successful pitch in Australia was a campaign to launch it into an increasingly crowded market of voice-activated devices.
If you’re a longtime music lover like me, the growing influence of Sonos and Amazon (responsible for ruining the lifeof every woman called Alexa) presents itself as a kind of weird, double-edged sword.
On one hand, you have the speaker company from Santa Barbara that famously counts Rick Rubin, Hans Zimmer and Q-Tip as board members, is run by audiophiles and represents the first real challenge to listening to shitty mp3s out of your crappy laptop just in time for you to start hosting dinner parties with actual food.
On the other, there’s the Seattle monolith that’s perhaps even more notorious than Facebook or Apple for swallowing its competitors whole, driving down prices on intellectual property and eventually ridding us of the need to interact with another human in a retail context ever again.
Here’s what the proponents of voice-driven technology forgot, or maybe deliberately didn’t tell you; they’ve made your collection invisible. Not in the way mp3 files usurped CDs, or even Spotify and Apple Music eliminated hard drives. Artificial intelligence will destroy your collection, period. Streaming may have done the heavy lifting, wiping out catalogues and replacing them with playlists, but if you really want to, you can still save every Soundgarden album in full and access them without any trouble. The reference point in your mind still matches the skeuomorphic display on your device, even when reduced to tiny album art and track listings.
Voice takes that away. Most dramatically, it does not favour albums at all, or particular songs unless you can say it in a way your new bot overlord finds acceptable. The brogrammers behind Alexa, Siri and Google Home? They actively want you to stop thinking about music. It’s too much work for their burgeoning UX. They want you to say ‘Play Childish Gambino’ and just run through all of his songs at random. Better yet, they want you to be like Twigs in the Apple Homepod ad, collapsing onto the couch after a hard day and sighing ‘play me something I’d like.’
This lean-back approach to content has been brewing for years, as tech companies and futurists trumpet the inviolability of the algorithm over the glorious messiness of choice. Netflix and Spotify in particular have proven that there’s an entire generation that couldn’t give a shit about what constitutes a body of work. But Voice AI is where our smash and grab approach to music starts to backfire.
With no visual stimuli, we have to remember what we like. That’s a big ask when we’ve spent years slowly shifting from the physical to the digital to the ephemeral. It takes a remarkably long time to get Alexa to play that Wu-Tang album you love, unless you happen to know its exact title. On your phone, you’d recognise it in two seconds. Now you have to imagine it.
We buy technology to make our lives more streamlined, not less. This morning, it took me ten minutes to get Alexa to recognise and play Nick Drake’s Pink Moon — that is, the album, not the song. In that time I could have put the record on a turntable, or even ordered a new one from Amazon. Instead, I experienced the frustration we all have with tech that has teething problems, something which inevitably turns to apathy. We do this with iPhone software updates, new apps, whatever new shiny thing that isn’t immediately perfect. (Blame Steve Jobs.) If it stops working, we switch off and move on.
But here’s the thing; Alexa works. She can tell me the weather, my calendar for next Friday and read me the news. She can order me new underwear. But she won’t play SZA’s Control from the start without a fight, because it’s ultimately not what she’s made to do.
The perfect world imagined by designers of AI systems is voice without choice. When the possibilities are infinite, our brains can’t really comprehend what’s going on, which means more people opting for ‘Chilled Summer Beats’ playlist rather than trying to remember the name of a song or album by literally any band, ever. Those ahead of the curve will try and make things easy on our addled brains; Drake, arguably the High Priest of Streaming hasn’t released an album with more than two words in its title since 2015.
The music industry has weathered technological change for longer than any other creative discipline, having had its guts ripped out by Napster what seems like a lifetime ago. Recently, major labels posted their first year of profit after nearly a decade in the wilderness watching their product reduced to downloadable ones and zeroes.
No doubt someone in Jony Ive’s office is figuring out how to market something not only intangible, but invisible, rearranging the neural pathways in our brains in the same way we now swipe for paramours and use our thumbs as passwords. But there’s a long road to that point, and it requires active, rather than passive listening.
Perhaps in the age of too much choice, we’re just not up to the task anymore.
Hey Alexa, play me some chilled background music…
