Roger Horrocks. Photo:
Having already published a book about appreciating the visual arts, the writer and thinker Roger Horrocks has turned his attention to the sonic.
Music Without End is a guide, a musical memoir, a history and a collection of philosophies woven around our human attempts to turn noise into expression.
The former professor of English at Auckland University spoke with RNZ Concert's Bryan Crump following the book's launch.
It follows his 2022 A Book of Seeing.
Photo: Supplied
Born in 1941, Horrocks was at an impressionable age when rock and roll reached New Zealand.
He still is, and continues to seek out new music to this day.
He talked about early memories sneaking snatches of Little Richard and Bill Haley on the radio, discovering Aaron Copland's "Piano Variations" when listening to the forerunner of RNZ Concert late at night, and being blown away by an LP of jazz genius Thelonius Monk.
Horrocks says technology has profoundly changed the way people listen to music.
When new music only arrived in the form of vinyl in record stores or during late night radio shows, listeners devoured it.
Now, thanks to the internet, music is everywhere and available all the time online; maybe listeners don't cherish the moment as much as they used to, Horrocks suggests.
"Boy, if you only had one chance to hear it, you really had your ears, you really had them focused."
Horrocks himself tries to avoid using an algorithm to find new music. But what will happen when the algorithm starts writing a lot of the music?
Horrocks doubts AI can match it with the best of human creativity.
"Music is physical, we have bodies. The fact that we can sing... the fact that somebody plays the clarinet, the fact that somebody plays the violin, it's an extremely physical process and when we also attach thinking and feeling, we get music."
"That's human music, and I can not see how AI, which is not embodied can ever ultimately give us the same kind of feeling that (human) music does."
AI can imitate, but can it create something new? Even if it can't hear? Photo: Boston Public Library
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