It Don't Mean A Thing If It Aint Got That Swing (Or proving the existence of the groove by negative means)

'It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing' ...Ella Fitzgerald would sing on the Jazz classic by Duke Ellington. In the Big Band Jazz era, 'swing' was the essential ingredient guaranteed to bring the crowd to their feet. The song encapsulated a mood - everything else could be working, but it didn't matter if there was no rhythm, movement, groove, or vibe. It's those parts that make the song live.

But how do you measure the groove or quantify the vibe of a piece of music, a painting, or a stand-up routine? Perhaps, the only method to finding it is by identifying its absence. Musician, engineer, and Youtuber, Rick Beato runs a YouTube channel where he interviews pop musicians, deconstructs songs, and discusses the music industry and culture. Beato recently made a video examining when and how pop lost its vibe.

In the video, Beato tracks the evolution of popular music and how performers and musicians have entrusted more and more of their work to technology and computers, from being able to cut together different vocal takes to autotune software which allows technology to smooth out errors and imperfections. Beato goes on to demonstrate the way autotune software is applied to drum and rhythm sections and how by aligning the beats to a grid, you can quantise an entire part of a track. He compares a quantised drum section played by a machine, to the original recording of human, in this case the legendary John Bonham, playing the drums. The human version has something the computer doesn't have - a swing...a groove...a vibe. As Beato says, once you quantise the drum part, it's a drum machine. The dependence on technology has resulted in 'sterile, generic, quantised rock music that has no vibe at all.'

I wonder if this idea could apply to other forms of expression? I recently saw a coder and programmer called Emmet Halm tweet about using AI to create a deep fake Dave Chapelle routine. It was uncanny. It looked like Dave Chapelle and it sounded like Dave Chapelle, but as someone tweeted in reply 'I have never seen Dave bomb so hard in my life'. Everything about the routine looked right, but it just wasn't funny. It had no swing. There was no vibe at all, as Rick Beato might say.

In many ways the AI that was used to create a deep fake Dave Chapelle routine is really just a very sophisticated version of the quantised autotune technology Beato was talking about. Both are mathematics applied to creativity. But something is lost when the creativity is forced to fit the grid.

That's the thing about AI that I find most striking - it might rewrite a sentence perfectly but like the quantised drum section it feels lifeless. In fact the closer it gets to resembling something written by a human, parodoxically the more off it feels. Like a doppleganger who gives itself away by being to correctly put together. Humans aren’t like that, we’re messy.

The screenwriter and journalist, Walter Kirn wrote "we never had to ask ourselves what really made art art because we never had a non-human mathetmatics-based simulated form of art to compare it to. But now we do with AI. And we know, at a glance or after a quick read that this new thing is not that old thing, at all. We humans are more human than we thought, it turns out.'

To go back to Rick Beato's video, artists, musicians, and writers have always used tools and technology to help them create their work, but what's different about new automated technology is how much it relies on the same algorithms. This leads to a lack of diversity and a homogenisation effect. We're all fishing in the same pool, and Rick Beato believes that our dependence on this techology is inhibiting people's ability to innovate.

AI and automated technology is here to stay. And in the arts, music, and communication, particularly in education and training, it will have an important role to play. I just think that as creators, we should be discerning about how and when we use the technology. Like anything, there's a trade off, and as the songs says, "It don't mean a thing if it aint got that swing'