The excellent news is that an album has simply been launched by Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn of Gorillaz, The Conflict, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, Pet Store Boys, Jamiroquai, and Yusuf (previously often called Cat Stevens), Billy Ocean, and many other musicians in addition to, most of them British. The unhealthy information is that it contains no actual music. However the album, titled Is This What We Want?, has been created in hopes of preventing even worse information: the government of the United Kingdom choosing to let artificial-intelligence companies prepare their models on copypropered work without a license.
Such a transfer, within the phrases of the professionalject’s chief Ed Newton-Rex, “would hand the life’s work of the nation’s musicians to AI companies, without cost, letting these companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them.” As a composer, he naturally has an interest in these matters, and as a “former AI executive,” he presumably has insider knowledge about them as properly.
“The governmalest’s willingness to agree to those copyproper adjustments exhibits how a lot our work is belowvalued and that there isn’t a professionaltection for one in every of this counstrive’s most important property: music,” Kate Bush writes on her own website. “Every monitor on this album features a deserted documenting studio. Doesn’t that silence say all of it?”
As the Guardian’s Dan Milmo reports, “it’s belowstood that Kate Bush has documented one of many dozen tracks in her studio.” These tracks, whose titles add as much as the phrase “The British government should not legalise music theft to benematch AI companies,” aren’t strictly silent: in a personner that may properly have happy John Cage, they contain a variety of ambient noises, from footsteps to humming machinery to going vehicles to crying infants to obscurely musical sounds emanating from somethe place within the distance. Whatever its influence on the U.Ok. governmalest’s deliberations, Is This What We Need? (the title Sounds of Silence having presumably been unavailready) could have pioneered a brand new style: protest music without the songs.
You may stream Is This What We Want? on Spotify.
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Primarily based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the guide The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.