Recently, I stumbled across a video of Charlie Puth making a beat in real-time on The Tonight Show. (For those unaware of the video, they can see it here.) It has seemed to get the attention and awe of many who see the clip. Puth’s talent is undeniable—that’s not what is being called into question here—but I feel the awe may be slightly misplaced.
As Puth is going through the process of making the beat, he says words like “quantize” and phrases like “pitch down” or “pitch up.” Basically, he took a voice memo, slapped it through the computer’s programming (probably GarageBand or Logic Pro), and made a beat using the machine’s algorithms to determine and correct the melody and rhythm. It’s a cool party trick; but it’s not necessarily that innovative or inherently musical. I’d argue it’s more creative.
True, Puth needs to understand harmony, and know what is in and out of time (as well as what sibilant sounds might equal different drum parts), but did he actually create . . . anything in this clip? (I’m aware he wrote the song, and Fallon was singing the melody in the voice memo).
The question posed points at a larger overall question: What is the line between having creativity and having AI tools (quantization and pitch shifting in this case) assist you in production? How much assistance does it take for something to not really be musically creative, but instead be technologically creative?
Then again, it is Charlie Puth. Puth has frequently discussed his trait of having perfect pitch. This trait, along with his clearly vast knowledge of songwriting, harmony, and arrangement has led to him making some pretty remarkable bangers. Take for instance, the song “Changes” (this was the same song featured on the beat-making clip). Puth went on at another time to perform this song with a band and I gotta say, it’s pretty fantastic.
I found that performance way more compelling of a video than the one of him using Fallon and a computer to recreate a simple beat and sing the chorus of said song. But I don’t think people will remember the performance video nearly as much; I feel they’re going to remember the party trick one instead.
This hypothesis is arguably supported by YouTube analytics. As I’m writing this post, the performance video of “Changes” has under 270,000 views, while the beat-making video of “Changes” has nearly 4,000,000 views. At the end of the day, in my view, the viral video is nothing more than a gimmick, breaking attention away from Puth’s sublime performance.
What’s more, the gimmick of the video and the technology leveraged traces its roots back to synthesizers and samplings of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’m reminded of Peter Gabriel’s record, Peter Gabriel IV, and how his team went around junkyards breaking and recording various things breaking. Then, when they had their sounds recorded, they played the keyboard parts using these effects. At the time, that was a pretty badass thing to do. It still is, in my opinion.
What are your thoughts? Is musical creativity being hindered by technology?