Jazz and Robots

I quite like watching sci-fi. I’ve watched a couple of things recently where the narrative is centred around robots or synths. Specifically, the idea that technology progresses (as it is doing) so quickly that we end up with machines that look like, sound like, and act like humans. This always brings up the central philosophical question of ‘what it is to be human’?

Better known as the genius mind integral to the codebreaking at Bletchley Park in WWII, Alan Turing proposed a way of dealing with the question of whether machines can think. 

The phrase “The Turing Test” is sometimes used more generally to refer to some kinds of behavioural tests for the presence of mind, or thought, or intelligence in putatively minded entities

Taken from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test

You may be thinking, what does any of this have to do with Jazz? 

I had a revelation recently when watching a gig. How do we know that the people we are watching are not musical robots? Can we distinguish between performers who have been programmed to sound like the greats, and those that are genuinely in the moment, genuinely interacting and conversing with one another?

To take another tangential approach to this subject, we often discuss improvisation in terms of language. Sometimes people refer to ‘licks’, preformed shapes and lines that can be translated from one chord to another within different sequences. There’s a great deal of codification going on in the way that this improvisatory language has developed, and especially in the way that it has been packaged within educational settings. To be blunt, sometimes jazz educators are as direct in this approach as ‘learn this lick’. In this context, the educator becomes almost like a computer programmer, inputting the correct lines of musical code and setting the various parameters required to guide the actions and behaviour of the performer. 

But is it jazz?! Are we really improvising if we have been programmed thus? 

There’s a lot to this. Firstly, it’s not necessarily possible to be permanently in the moment and to avoid all licks and established language when playing. Imagine trying to speak without ever relying on a well-known phrase or stumbling across a cliché. It’d make communication very difficult, and it’d be mentally exhausting. 

Which is why what we ask of true improvisers is such a big ask. It’s as if they are meant to be executing the genius of Shakespeare on the spot, but never repeating a single line or even alluding to a similar piece of imagery. The musical stories that improvisers tell are meant to be raw and yet simultaneously refined, a lump of fresh clay that also looks like a fully glazed piece of porcelain pottery. It’s a big ask. 

Back to Robots. Maybe we are more robotic than we realise? We need our routines to get through the everyday, but we also have the ability to step outside the usual, to embrace the unusual and indulge in the unpredictable. 

We have the capacity to listen to each other, to genuinely listen, without an agenda and to respond with empathy. This, sadly, must be one of the least practiced and understood things about the way we interact as humans. Are we really listening? Are we really considering what we are being told and examining the meanings therein, or are we just looking for cues to respond in the way we expect we are supposed to respond, or looking for ways to put forward our own thoughts, opinions or anecdotes? I know I can be guilty of listening with an agenda, even though I know I can also, with some effort quash this sense of ego and lazy approach to communication. 

The same is true of playing. When I play, I have the capacity to go onto autopilot. I can play lines and make all the right noises in all the right places without really engaging in what is going on around me - but I really don’t want to, and I try specifically not to! 

Improvisation should be a conversation. Either with the silence and the audience, or with the other performers (or all of the above). Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with having a whole load of preprogramed code in our system, but it should not become a default setting. The worry is, that in deviating from these routines we might make a mistake. But then, to err is human. Maybe we shouldn’t expect so much of our improvisers? And maybe they shouldn’t expect so much of themselves? If we really want to tap into the humanity of the performer and to hear something that doesn’t sound robotic, maybe it needs to be flawed? 

Another subject that comes up a lot in TV and films about robots is the idea of ‘the singularity’. Which is a moment when, in essence the genie is out of the bottle (there’s another cliché). The technology becomes so fast and so intelligent, that humans are no longer in charge. The computers become smarter and more brilliant than we can ever be, and in a large number of sci-fi contexts this leads to the end of the world as we know it. 

Which made me wonder about what the singularity might be in Jazz education? Or more generally in music education.

What if, music education had all the resources and all the best practices in place to develop genuine creative thinking in every young musician? If educators didn’t have to default to quick fix programming solutions in order to get students through a series of assessments, if students were allowed to grow at exactly the right pace they needed to and with the perfect conditions to thrive. 

Imagine a world then where it was the norm that musicians (in general, not just in Jazz) could improvise. A world without all the back-breaking baggage that comes with genre classifications, a world in which every performer was a genuine musician, with amazing musicianship, the ability and desire to write their own music, their own ideas with a distinctive musical voice to express their beliefs. 

This utopia sounds rather nice to me. It’s a musical world that I would love to inhabit or maybe visit one day if I ever get the chance.