Editor’s note: Besides following tech developments, our author is a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. This piece is called ‘Samba Choice.”
As a cultural mecca, the Berkshires is home, or second home, to a large population of practitioners and followers of creativity and culture eager to be informed about new developments. Since it opened in 2019, the Tanglewood Learning Institute (TLI) has served as an important source of information on this topic. Now, as the relationship between AI and music strengthens, what better place to learn about it than the TLI? And we here at The Berkshire Edge will also be following developments in this weekly Business Monday ‘Tech Talk’ column.
And who better to address this topic than David Pogue. Pogue will appear at Seiji Ozawa Hall at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 17, as part of the TLI Spotlight Series.
I was delighted that he graciously took time to talk with me last week for this column. I discovered that he is a completely accessible guy who manages to “perform” information with charm and wit, while also displaying an immense amount of musical talent. At his TLI presentation, he is likely to cover many facets of the intersection of technology and society, but in our conversation we talked primarily about how to define the intersection of technology and music.
Pogue was the weekly tech columnist at the New York Times from 2000 to 2013. He’s a six-time Emmy winner for his stories on “CBS Sunday Morning,” a bestselling author, a five-time TED speaker, host of 20 “NOVA” science specials on PBS, and creator/host of the CBS News/Simon & Schuster podcast “Unsung Science”
After graduating summa cum laude from Yale in 1985 with distinction in music, Pogue spent ten years conducting and arranging Broadway musicals in New York. He has won a Loeb Award for journalism, two Webby awards, and an honorary doctorate in music.
A consummate communicator, Pogue has written or cowritten more than 120 books including dozens in the Missing Manual tech series, which he created in 1999; six books in the For Dummies line (including “Macs”, “Magic”, “Opera”, and “Classical Music”); two novels (one for middle-schoolers); three bestselling Pogue’s Basics books of tips and shortcuts (“Tech”, “Money”, and “Life”); how-to guides “iPhone Unlocked” and his 2021 magnum opus “How to Prepare for Climate Change.”
Pogue and I have both worked at the intersection of music and technology, but we came at it from opposite directions, While he started in music and moved to tech, I moved from tech into music. Starting out as a physicist and electrical engineer, I then studied acoustics and image processing at MIT, and went to work at Bose where I created the first integrated electoacoustic piano, and then to Apple as the world’s first computer acoustician responsible for figuring out how to put speakers and microphones into Apple devices. And only after I retired from Silicon Valley did I finally get to study music at Juilliard.
As musical tech guys, Pogue and I both recognize that musicians and composers—as well as writers, photographers, and artists—are concerned about the effect of tech, and particularly AI, on their work. As I have written in previous Tech Talk columns, AI is powerful, important, and not going away. We all need to understand how it works.
Composing and delivering musical experiences to audiences require a lot of effort, and everyone involved in this process is impacted or will soon be impacted to some degree by advances in tech. Listeners, performers, and composers are all in an exploratory phase that will last a long time. David Pogue has a lot to say about this, and his will be the first of many presentations that TLI will offer year-round. As a full-time Berkshires resident, I am very excited about the ongoing programs that will be offered by the Tanglewood Learning Institute.
As a music technologist for decades at Bose, Apple, and other places, I have been creating and using technology musically for fifty years. During these decades, technology has been both invaluable and a distraction. Some of the time, it has been great, and other times,when I have tried to be emotionally relevant, I ended up being so intellectually engaged that I have been knocked out of my creative mode. We must understand which tools to use and how and when to use them. I have made friends with technology, but the contract has to be continually renewed to stay in rapport with it.
Over time, most of us accumulate multiple phones, tablets, computers, and other technical devices. They all eventually become obsolete, and keeping up with updates, new versions, and new categories of apps and devices takes a lot of time. Still, when entering Julliard a decade ago, I was told to pretend I knew nothing about technology and to use a pencil and paper just like Bach did hundreds of years ago. This may not be possible much longer because the advantages of the technology are too enormous to avoid. One significant example is that every time you write a piece of music and want other people to play it, a score alone rarely suffices.
Due to ever-changing business models, rehearsal times are ever-shrinking, forcing musicians and composers to augment the score with computer-synthesized renditions of the piece of music. Do the computer-generated versions sound as good as real instruments? Hardly ever, but not never! It depends a lot on which instruments you try to emulate; some of them are pretty convincing. And remember, not all music is fine art music. Living in the Berkshires with the Tanglewood Music Center tends to bias our view of music, but classical music represents only one percent of the music marketplace. By comparison, country music is ten percent.
There are many forms of music where technology is far more embedded. Revenue from popular music programs adds considerably to the sustainability of even Tanglewood. Not even acoustic instruments can dominate the world music market any more. Far more people on the planet play technology-based electric guitars and digital keyboards than all orchestra instruments combined.
Clearly, music and musicians have made friends with technology so far. What about AI? To find out more, buy a ticket to hear David Pogue speak on August 17.
