Research
"A psychological experiment conducted at Kettle's Yard suggests that actively considering the beauty of art increases abstract thinking and “transformative” emotion – helping us escape the “mental trappings” of day-to-day living."
Around the web
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”- WB Yeats (1865-1939)
“Make no mistake about it: it is not simply as technicians that we are being called, but as adjutants to the moralist. My antic sense rises in self-defense. My advice, in the midst of the seriousness, is to keep an eye for the tinker shuffle, the flying of kites, and kindred sources of surprised amusement.” - Jerome Bruner
Also from Jerome Bruner: Six essential conditions of creativity
Detachment and commitment - Forget the obvious, commit to constructing a replacement
Passion and decorum - Allow your impulses to express themselves through the work, respect the creative act
Freedom to be dominated by the object - We serve the creation
Deferral and immediacy - Follow the impulse and have patience with the process
The internal drama - Surprising combinations are found in conflict and coalition
The dilemma of abilities - We all create, but at different levels
Podcast: Interview with Samuel w. Franklin, author of The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History
New models for music streaming:
DIY isn’t just for artists: “build your own opportunity”
“That company, 10K Projects, was born from hearing ‘no’ – again and again. I bet on myself. I bet on the artists I believed in. And I was right, not always, but I was right more often than I was wrong.” - Elliot Grange, CEO, Atlantic Music
G Herbo releases two mixtapes exclusively through his G Herbo app - powered by MySeat Media - and clocks 13M direct to fan streams
“A song’s reach is increasingly determined by its ability to soundtrack a 15-second clip, not its capacity to engage for three minutes, not its depth or sentiment, just a fleeting, repeatable, forgettable hook. No wonder artists are rebelling. You would have to ask yourself, what's the point?… Because the question should not be ‘will this be viral’ but ‘will this matter in five years?’ If we fail to collectively start valuing the latter, we risk losing music’s essence entirely. Do we settle for disposable content or make space for something that truly lasts?” - Laura Fisher
Neil Young wasn’t so out of touch after all… compressed music may be harmful to the ears: “Tests of the cochlea, damage to which is the leading cause of hearing loss, showed some mild temporary impairment in both groups immediately after the tests, as would be expected. But compression caused more lasting damage to the middle ear’s stapedius muscle, which contracts to protect the inner ear from loud noises. At just 1mm long it is the smallest skeletal muscle in the body. Both normal and compressed music reduced the strength with which this muscle reflexively contracts to 40% of its pre-Adele state. Though the animals who heard the standard track recovered fully within a day or so, those that endured the compressed version did not.” [Archived link]
Outstanding! “Music Venue Properties was conceived and set up by Music Venue Trust… We have created a Charitable Community Benefit Society to remove venues from commercial ownership, purchasing buildings and renting them back to their current operators. Utilising a friendly lease, we aim to reduce rents, make contributions to insurance/repairs and offer rent breaks in the face of adverse conditions.”
Listening and watching
Things we’re interested in
Sound of the Year Awards, 2024
Rick Rubin and Anthropic launch The Way of Code: “I’m the record producer who doesn’t know anything about music. So the idea that there could be a coder who doesn’t know anything about coding—that’s vibe coding”
The manner in which AI is presented (by AI executives and business leaders) as an unstoppable phenomenon is really quite puzzling. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, suggests unemployment could hit 20% in the next five years. As noted in N + N 127, AI could wipe out as many as half of all entry-level jobs in sectors like finance, law, and consulting. Amodei believes fellow AI CEOs are ‘sugar-coating’ the mass layoffs. Again, the jobs most vulnerable to AI displacement aren't manufacturing or service roles—they're the supposedly "prestigious" knowledge work positions. However, “AI first” may not be going so well and MIT’s Daron Acemoglu points out the industry has yet to produce a critical application. More generally, AI manifestos are wrapped in uncertainty.
“The AI jobs crisis does not, as I’ve written before, look like sentient programs arising all around us, inexorably replacing human jobs en masse. It’s a series of management decisions being made by executives seeking to cut labor costs and consolidate control in their organizations.” - Brian Merchant
“I do not fear mere disruptions to our lives, like AI taking jobs. There will be more jobs to be done. I am afraid that it will replace our identities and our judgment. It will be the last authority we ever appeal to as we fully integrate with the machine… We must agree on a moral framework that guides our economic and social decisions. This doesn't mean reviving exclusionary dogmas or enforcing uniformity. It means recovering moral seriousness—something rooted in the understanding that humans are imperfect, and that the project of living well is one of continual failure, forgiveness, and growth.” - Matt Duffy
AI’s real threat to education: “Learning results from what the student does and thinks… and only as a result of what the student does and thinks.” Related: “I have never seen any form of create generative model output (be that image, text, audio, or video) which I would rather see than the original prompt.” - Clayton Ramsey
Ya think?! AI responses may include mistakes
👉 AI Hallucination Cases: This database tracks legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments
“I recently was involved in reviewing hundreds of applications for something. Over the course of reviewing, I was struck by the nearly-identical phrasing that threaded through dozens of the applications. It was eerie at first, like seeing a shadow in the distance, then frustrating, and ultimately completely disheartening: It was AI. For whatever their reasons, a bunch of people had used a chatbot to help write their answers to questions that asked them to draw from their own, unique, personal experience. They had fed their resumes or their personal websites or their actual stories and experiences into the machine, and it had filled in the blanks, Mad Libs-style. I felt crushed.” - Dan Sinker
"Before the rise of LLMs, learning was a prerequisite for output… I’m not okay with being unable to think for myself” - Vincent Cheng
👉 Hype as infrastructure: “Hype is a mechanism for strategic misdirection… Hype, when used skilfully, becomes a coordination device. It aligns incentives across actors… narrative hype acts as a functional substitute for formal coordination mechanisms. It organizes attention. It aligns expectations… Hype doesn’t just amplify upside. It socializes risk and privatizes reward. In this environment, the cost of progress, especially R&D waste and early-stage infrastructure buildout, is increasingly externalized… Hype paints a plausible vision of the future, even if it won’t fully materialize. This fiction helps solve coordination problems. But if the fiction breaks before the system locks in, it can collapse the whole effort. In that sense, hype creates self-fulfilling and self-defeating loops, depending on whether the underlying system can catch up fast enough.”
Some signs of AI model collapse: “Welcome to Garbage In/Garbage Out (GIGO). Formally, in AI circles, this is known as AI model collapse. In an AI model collapse, AI systems, which are trained on their own outputs, gradually lose accuracy, diversity, and reliability. This occurs because errors compound across successive model generations, leading to distorted data distributions and "irreversible defects" in performance. The final result? A Nature 2024 paper stated, "The model becomes poisoned with its own projection of reality."
“Intrinsic value is not the same as economic value” - Sangeet Paul Choudary
“Believe in magic. Nourish your imagination. Use your head, even if it means going out of your mind. Learn, like the lemon and the tomato learned, the laws of the sun. Become aware, like the jungle became aware, of your own perfume. Remember that life is much too serious to take seriously – so never forget how to play.” - Tom Robbins
Question
What are the greatest karaoke songs of all time?
Closing notes
You are reaching the end of the newsletter. Thanks so much for reading!
I hope it’s not been too much of an intrusion and if you liked this issue of the newsletter, please share or recommend to a friend or colleague.
There may be an occasional typo. Woops! There isn’t much I can do once the email has sent, but I do try to correct and update the web version.
Until next week…