This past Christmas, I went to the beach for the need to get away. I had experienced quite a bit of loss in the last six months. You see my grandmother, who was the light of my life, my best friend, and honestly a primary mother figure to me. Not just a grandma. She passed away. It was just me and her and the room together. And it was, incredibly profound because it was what she wanted and was ready to go. And in that moment, with such peace. But the grief that came after her is something that I still continue to work through about eight months later, and we'll always work through, at some level or capacity. It's incredibly profound to be with someone when they exhale that final breath. And in the weeks and months that followed her passing on June 21st, my my soul dog, that I'd had for almost 15 years began to decline rapidly with his health. And if you follow me online at all, especially via Instagram, I post a lot and I'm just kind of behind the scenes things. But I shared a lot about also that experience of his declining health and six months to the day after losing my grandmother, I had to make the decision that it was time for him, to go. And I was just racked with such grief, mourning gratitude for lives well spent. Gratitude that the two most critical, important beings in my life, and they had a unique bond as well, or together, a lot of anger around it as well, etc. all this to say, it's why I went to the beach on Christmas because I needed to be out of my house. I needed to be somewhere with a distraction. And when I got to the beach, I found, an album either like on my way down there or, you know, when I arrived. And I'm someone that likes to get an album, a CD, they're not called CDs anymore, and rarely, I guess, do people release, full length albums. You know, it used to be singles, but whatever. And the words to this album felt like they had been taken out of my soul. There was a variety of songs that just truly resonated with me, but this one song in particular was so powerful and kind of became a mantra for me, and music sat with me. They were again, it was exactly what I needed to hear, and I found myself similar to like a mantra right? Listening to it over and over and over. And I began to think like, who is this artist? I've never heard them sing before, like, where did they come from? And so I looked up the artist and I there was nothing on Spotify to necessarily identify them. And then I did a quick Google search and there wasn't really a lot. And then I found an article and the song was I generated the entire album was AI generated. And so sit with that for a second, because that's like I sat with this like uncertainty of what I truly felt like about it all, because it was quite bizarre and like, left this paradox of feelings. I am someone who believes deeply in AI and its potential. The last two years I've worked heavily within AI, the last six years, specifically within technology. I'm a proponent and a user of it while also acknowledging its limitations, concerns, and risks. But that's with any technology. And yet, I also believe in the power of live music and of human presence. I believe that what we create together when we sing in a room is unmeasurable, incredibly powerful, and there's nothing else like it in the world. Even as I talk about in the intro to this podcast. And yet here I was, grieving and comforted and genuinely moved, but by something that was machine made. In this moment, I don't have a tidy resolution for that story, but I want you to hold it for a time period throughout this entire episode, maybe even after, because it captures everything that I think is really important about this moment that we are in as choral musicians. So choral music has always been a late adopter of technology and AI is moving faster than any technological shift that has come before it. And paradoxically, and this is the part I really want you to hear that makes what we do more valuable, not less, but only if we are paying attention and only if we understand why. And that's what this episode is about. Welcome to the choir. Based on a podcast designed to engage with people and stories, ideas and inspiration stemming from choir. No other art form. No sport, no hobby, no business requires a group of people to execute a communal goal with just their voices. Join me, your host Beth Philemon, as I interview guests who are singers, teacher, conductors, instrumentalists, and community members. Together, we'll ask questions, seek understanding, and share insight from our experiences in life and in choir. Welcome back again to the Choir Baton Podcast. I am your host, Beth Philemon, and today we're talking about AI, what it is, where it came from, and why I so genuinely believe that it's one of the greatest opportunities our art form has had in a really long time. And so if you'll stick with me for the whole episode, I think you're going to leave with a different way of seeing both of these things. Choir. Batten started in 2018 as a social media outlet, a place for choir directors around the globe to share what was happening in choir spaces. And the reason I started it was because I'd been in a school early in my teaching career, where there was another choral musician on staff, and it was so special to have that camaraderie and to have someone who just, like, got it. But as I looked around and realized that most of us, unless you're like in Texas or some parts of the Midwest where schools sometimes have more than one choral director, most of us are the only choral music educator in our building. And I thought, what if we could kind of create that community online for people? And so I posted in the I'm a choir director at Facebook, or that I'm a CDA choir director at Facebook. Really. You know, this is again was like 2018, maybe even 2017, asking if anyone was interested in using social media to talk about choir and to connect with other choir directors and to share what we were doing, and only one person responded, one. And I would not trade that person for the entire world, Natalia Romero, because she's become one of my dear friends. And, she's been on the podcast. We've met now in person, and I'm just so grateful for her. But it is kind of wild to think about. One person in an active group responded to this idea of using social media to talk about choir. I also had professors, and colleagues at the time that were pretty doubtful people. I thought, like pulling out your phone to record a rehearsal was kind of strange. People didn't understand why you'd want to share what was happening in your choral program on the internet, but now we all get it right, like social media. Like. Also, I reached out to a CDA, the national CDA conference in Missouri and was like, hey, I run this account. This is after we'd already started and was like, I would love to do a takeover, or I would love to like, help with social media. During the during your for your Instagram during the national count. And I got like, like a rejection of some sort right now it's again, kudos to a CDA, for the growth that they continue to do and other arts organizations, but I can I use this as an example of our technological adoption. Because now we all get it right. Social media is just a completely normal part of how we communicate about our work. But it took us a long time to get there. And I'd argue, it really took the global pandemic to really accelerate it with virtual performances, rehearsals, the whole thing. But in that case, we were reactive and not proactive either. But that pattern of being late to adopt, of being reactive rather than proactive is the one I see us at risk of repeating right now when it comes to AI, and I think that it's time for us to choose to do it differently. This time. That's part of why I'm making this episode. So I want to walk you through a brief history of how technology has impacted music and choral music, specifically, and I think it helps us understand the moment that we're in with AI. And I promise this is going somewhere that's really important. But let's start with the printing press, right? We all should be familiar with the printing press. It was the first major technological advance with a direct impact on choral music. Because of the printing press and specifically even in 1501, we see one of the first serious mass productions of sheet music, the Petrucci Collection, which was the first major collection of polyphonic music printed with movable type. And that impact was massive. Think about what it meant to suddenly be able to print and distribute music, and democratized access to scores in a way that had never existed before. Music became portable, it became shareable, and it was standardized, and that standardization also began to accelerate how music theory was codified, taught, and spread across generations. But the cultural impacts were just as significant as the musical ones. The printing press accelerated. The Protestant Reformation disrupted the patronage systems that had supported the arts, primarily the church. And so we begin to see musicians and theater makers pushing towards secular courts, towards guilds, and eventually towards public audiences. We see a rising of literate middle class going to Shakespeare plays, going to the opera. We see that this middle class is like printing librettos that are being distributed before performances, building anticipation and cultural familiarity. We see playbills and we see programs that kind of give a textual identity to live events. That extends beyond the night itself, the night of the concert itself. That is right. And and so we begin to then see a public discourse about the arts, criticism, reviews, conversation in a way that just had not existed when music was primarily housed in religious institutions. And yes, of course, there was secular music. But if even during then. But it's just different in this era and it's because of the printing press. So I highlight all of this because it's not that different from social media and what it did for us. Right. Like the intent is pretty similar. Build excitement, build anticipation, create a literacy about what's coming. It's a different medium. It's a different era, but it's the same human impulse. Another example is the phonograph. So, you know, about 100 years later, we get recording. And if you've listened to the episode I did with Adam Patriots from Choral Clarity, we briefly touched on this, but I want to give a bit more full treatment here, because the implications are enormous and highly relevant. Music is suddenly no longer only experienced live. It's separated from the body that made it right from the room where it happened. From the time in which it occurred becomes something that you own. It's something that you can stockpile. It's something that you can consume privately. John Philip Sousa and we talked about this, with Adam. Right. He warned in 1906 that recorded music would be, it would just completely atrophy the nation's musical culture and that people would stop singing, people would stop playing music at home, and they would simply listen to machines. And he was partially right. Musical participation has largely become more passive where it had previously been largely active. People stopped making music at home the way previous generations had. But the story is much more complex than what Sousa predicted. Recording democratized access to music in an incredibly powerful way. More people could hear music than ever before. It created new forms of active engagement that hadn't existed deejays, remixers, producers, samplers. It created canonical performances that informed how people understood tempo, dynamics, and interpretation. It created entirely new art forms. Multitrack production. The studio album is like a primary artistic piece, where live performances became almost like an attempt to approximate the record, then the other way around. It also concentrated cultural power, right? So the people who could get recorded it was a smaller pool of people, and the labels controlling the recording controlled an enormous amount of what people heard. Performers then began to be measured against their own recordings. And there was this pressure right to be as good or better live than as you sounded in the studio. But for choral music specifically, recording created this incredible global spread and kind of cross-pollination of traditions. We gained access to rhythms and modalities and approaches from traditions that we might not have ever necessarily encountered otherwise. And that's quite awesome. But the piece I keep coming back to with this is that in a world where choral music celebrates presence, where the entire point is being in the room, being in your body, and making sound together. Recording also created a culture where we begin to struggle to value the present. So we are always experiencing something through another recorded experience and often alone. Then comes the computer and the internet and everything accelerates. So from a musical context, we see Midi in the early 1880s, right? The musical instrument digital interface, allowing computers to communicate with electric instruments. We see notation software like finale, Rest in peace, and several years pop up. We see digital audio work streams like ProTools, logic, Ableton, and this technical barrier between the amateur and the professional music production, ecosystem really begins to collapse. And then the internet just completely transforms distribution, right? Napster 99, YouTube in 2005. And that's huge because we're no longer just listening at scale, but we're also watching at scale. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Eric Whitaker's virtual choir project began to happen, and then social media, which we already talked about. But I want to pause here for a second, because I think about this a lot. When I was in grad school for music, and which was 2012 to 2014, about 15 years ago now. Crazy that it was that long ago. But Spotify was not a thing yet. Google workspace was just beginning. YouTube existed, but like we were just starting to be able to find recordings there. Maybe Spotify was around then actually, but like still very, very early stages. And in my undergrad there was none of that though. Like to complete listening logs as a music editor major of which was in the early 2000, you went to the library, you checked out CDs, and sometimes you couldn't even take those CDs out of the building. So you had to listen to them in the listening rooms. And and that was it. And, you know, a lot of our professors, a lot of them lived, you know, just before that where there's tapes and eight tracks or even records and they're like using record players to do listening assignments. So within the single lifetime, the ability to listen to music has changed so fundamentally that it's almost hard to wrap your head around and the speed at which that change has happened has massive implications for where we are now, because where we are now is this we are in a massive, deep cultural shift around attention, around presence and around depth. We are in a culture, organization that is a culture that is organized around a fragmentation and organized around immediacy. The attention economy. This is no surprise to you, but I'm just highlighting here the attention economy is real and it is working against everything that performing arts are built on, because the sheer nature of what we do asks people to be present, to have depth, and to spend extended time with others. And this is the exact opposite of what the attention economy rewards. But that brings us to AI. So a lot of people think that AI is a new thing and honestly, it's not. AI is really kind of been around since the earliest computers, but it's evolved into a series of distinct phases. And today we're going to talk about four of them, because I think understanding these phases is really important, both for understanding the cultural moment that we're in and for thinking about how we might use it in our work. So let me walk you through them, and I'm going to try to use some musical analogies, because I think it will help contextualize this. So, you know, classical AI is kind of the earliest form, and you've been using it without realizing it. It's essentially rule based decision making. So a programmer tells the system what to do in every scenario. So if X, then y, think of it like that. But it's also kind of like giving a singer a fully marked score with every single decision already written in every breath. Mark, every dynamic, every tempo shift. The singer executes the markings the system executes. There's no interpretation happening. You're just following explicit instructions. This is what also is happening in the world. Like when your credit card gets declined because you're in an unusual location, or when a spam filter catches an email. When a chess program makes a move, classical AI, then machine learning comes along and it totally inverts that. So instead of being told what to do, the system observes patterns and data and figures out what to do from that. So think of it like a singer who, instead of reading a marked score, they listen to like 10,000 recordings of a piece and they develop their own interpretation from everything that they observe absorbed. So Netflix recommending shows based on your watching history or Amazon learning your purchasing patterns, Google refining your search results. The model is studying what's happening, and it's updating continuously. That's machine learning. And again, this has been around for a long time, the most recently with ChatGPT and all of the other programs out, such as Claude or Jim and I. This is where we get into generative AI, and it's where things get really interesting because that's where the conversation begins to get really heated, right? This is where I doesn't just process and pattern match it outputs or it generates something new and it's something that looks, sounds or reads like a human made it. So think of it like a composer who, having absorbed all of these recordings and all of this musical knowledge, now produces an original work. It's ChatGPT writing you an email. This is, you know, something generating an image from you. It's an AI generated song like I found on the beach around Christmas. And this is where we really have to start asking hard questions about what is real, who made this, and what do we want from creative work. Now, remember I talked about speed because this is really a great reflection of speed. We've still have generative AI. We're still learning and understanding generative AI. Now we also have a genetic AI. And that's really what's happening right now. And it's that we're the biggest cultural impacts I believe are going to come from for the performing arts and specifically choral music. So a genetic AI is when an AI agent, thus a genetic doesn't just generate a thing, it takes an action. It operates autonomously on your behalf. Completing tasks, making decisions, managing workflows. So think of it like having an entire production team, a scheduler, a researcher, a communicator, an administrator all operating together without you having to direct every step. The speed with which we have moved from classical to AI, to machine learning to generative to agent, is faster than any technological shift that has come before. And again, this is going to have an already having massive cultural implications. But here's the piece I want you to hold on to. Every previous communications technology the printing press, the phonograph, the internet, these are just to name a few, right? They left the human creator as the irreplaceable source. The human was always where it started. But with AI and especially with a genetic AI, the human is still a part of the process. Or when in tech, a lot of times we'll say the human is still in the loop and healthy ethical. I will always have a human in the loop, but the human is no longer necessarily the originator. The human is a participant in the process. And so that makes us ask what then are the performing arts for what makes choir meaningful? Because the answers to these questions begin to shape where we decide we sit in that loop. I believe that as choral musicians, as choral artists, we are in the business of creating unrepeatable human moments. I'll say it again as choral artists, we are in the business of creating unrepeatable human moments. That's not like a slogan, but it is actually the differentiator. Technology can generate music. It cannot generate presence cannot generate the experience of 50 people breathing together of sound, resonating in a shared physical space, of being seen and heard and held by a community of other human beings who also choose to show up. You cannot send an AI agent to a concert to experience that concert for you, in the same way that you can go and feel it in your body, with your energy and the energy of everyone else in that room, whether you're on stage or whether you're in the audience. It's something unrepeatable that's happening, and this is what we make. But here's the thing. We've been here before, but in a different form. I'm reading this book by Celeste Headlee called Do Nothing, and she's an author, speaker, and PR host. And also, as it turns out, a classically trained vocalist who also studied, at the same place. I did my graduate work and with the same voice teacher, which was kind of a a full circle moment, a fun discovery. But she talks about the impact of the industrial revolution on daily life. And that really struck me within this context. You see, when the Industrial Revolution shifted people's time from seasonal agricultural work to factory schedules, from the rhythms of nature to the rhythms of the clock, it also created something new. These short time people were no longer getting physical activity in the fields. They needed stimulation. So what happened? Well, we see a rise in sports and athletic pursuits. We also see a rise in choral societies of music, making opportunities of participatory arts, because people had the time and they wanted to do something meaningful with other people and choral music that need not. Were there other negative implications? Absolutely. But we're not going to focus on on that. We're going to focus on that opportunity. And seeing here that a genetic AI is going to create the same conditions. When cognitive and administrative work get increasingly handled by agents, that means people's mental labor is offloaded in ways that we can barely even imagine. Right now, society is going to have to renegotiate what human activity is for what we do with our time, what we do with our bodies and what we do together. And that that, my friends, that is our moment. That is the opportunity that we are sitting in front of right now. If we are paying attention and if we are prepared. Because in a world where more and more of life is mediated and managed and optimized by technology, the experience of standing in a room and making sound together with other human beings is going to become more precious, not less. More countercultural, more sought after. And the fragmentation of the intimate age has already made people hungry for real community as well as the pandemic. I mean, you can feel it anywhere and everywhere. A genetic AI is only going to deepen that hunger. The question is, if we are ready to meet it. The question is whether we're talking about what we do in a language that makes people understand why they need it, whether we're lowering the barriers for people to participate or we're positioning choral music not as a niche interest for a certain kind of person, but as one of the most profoundly human experiences available to us in an increasingly unhuman world. In human world, I think the answer to all of these questions kind of starts with us understanding again, this moment that we're in, which is why I'm here making this episode and continuing to talk about this, share about this, and really curious as to your thoughts on this topic as well. Please let me know. Let's continue this conversation. But in closing, I want to come back to the beach story with you. It's Christmas Day, I'm at the beach. I'm listening to this AI generated song called Peace Come Slow. I'm walking. I'm grieving my grandmother. I'm grieving Connor. And this song just found me. The words were exactly what I needed. And I listened to it on repeat, coming back to it. And like, I have this core memory of just laying in a hammock, listening and letting it just wash over me. What I found was I generated though, and I sat with that, and I kept coming back to like, if I were to take that song and do, say, a choral transcription of it to give it breath and bodies and a room full of human voices, or if I were to even just do a solo version of it myself, is it delegitimized? Because it started in a computer? If it moved me, if it caused me to have a genuine human spiritual moment, if it made me want to sing, to create, to make music through my own body, what does that mean if I don't have a clean answer? But I do think that the question itself is exactly where we need to be sitting right now as choral musicians. Not defensive, not dismissive, not anxious, but curious, open and willing to hold this paradox because technology cannot replicate what we do. At the same time, the world is changing and in ways that are going to make what we do more necessary, more meaningful, more urgent than ever. We are in the business of unrepeatable human moments, and that business has never had a bigger market. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so glad you're thinking about this. And in the next episode, I'm going to get really practical and give you five specific areas that I think you can start using AI in your choral work right now with some examples and a couple prompts. But if you're interested in going even deeper, I am putting together a short masterclass called From Basics to Breakthroughs AI for Choral Artists. We'll go through some foundations, practical applications, ethics, and advanced implications for your work in your community. There's a link to that in the show notes, but for now, thank you for listening.