Communication in the Presence of Noise

“Communication in the Presence of Noise” is a new album from my critical-data-studies-dance-punk band, The Organizing Committee.

It’s out today on Bandcamp thanks to the wonderful David Turgeon’s No Type label, with support from the amazing Polydoris PR.

The Organizing Committee is an ongoing project I started in 2020 while I was living across the street from the largest supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere, on the Australian National University campus which was mostly empty because of Covid restrictions. I made the first album as a way to experiment with an AI workflow: training my own text dataset with GPT2, generating samples with GANs, synthesizing a singer with an outdated copy of Vocaloid.

As the project has gone on I’ve found myself moving away from the sonic AI experimental angle and more toward centering lyrics in AI critique. That critique was always present, though. The first record riffed on anti-computational maxims from Godard’s Alphaville; and denounced TESCREAL ideologies before they had a name. It has always aimed to be an antifascist view of AI. Even before Dan McQuillan’s far more eloquent articulation of the concept, the second mini album put it right in the title.

The new album, “Communication in the Presence of Noise,” follows suit. I’ve aimed to use generative AI is less formative ways: a riff, but not a song, for example. I’ve been more active in writing the lyrics myself. It’s inspired by things like Data Feminism, the cybernetics of Annetta Pedretti, the writings of the late David Golumbia and Bruno Latour (both of whom died after the songs were written). There are two pop songs built around GPT3’s one-sentence summaries of passages by Gilles Deleuze. There is a song that nods to the only folk song I could find from Project Cybersyn, “Litany for a computer and a child about to be born” by Angel Parra and Stafford Beer. There are nods to Disco Elysium, Gary Numan, Tektology, the Situationist Internationale, and a song I wrote when I was 17 that samples the song I wrote when I was 17 — a concept album called “Songs from the Watergun Revolution” where synthesizer drones and computer synthesized speech narrated a story of children in a doomed plot to take over the world armed only with waterguns and a revolutionary imagination.

With all that said I hope you enjoy the record, or at least the idea that the record exists. I see The Organizing Committee as a genuine music project, but it’s also uncomfortably situated amongst a visual and conceptual artistic practice that leaves a lot of people, I think, unsure of how to make sense of it.

There is some strong ironic tension in this project. It’s meant to be music I would like. It is also extremely accessible, as far as art-punk computer music goes, for reasons. The experimentation in this form of experimental music is constrained by more conceptual aims. The aims were to create music that served as a gesture: to get a song written by AI and sung by machines on the radio and not have anybody notice, until they actually paid attention.

That goal was achieved when the title track from “The Day Computers Became Obsolete” charted in a number of cities — including on one of my all-time favorite radio stations, WFMU in New Jersey. It also charted on KALX in Berkeley, California, and in Guelph Canada and on the Simon Frasier University radio station. (The video for it was also well recieved and played at a number of film and music festivals). I think there have been a few songs written and performed by machines out in the ether, but I am glad to be among them. Of course, the meaning of this particular gesture isn’t just “AI can get on the radio,” it was designed to get people to realize that the music they were listening to wasn’t entirely human — and to think about what that meant.

This was just before the generative AI explosion, when everyone started thinking and talking about these things.

The goal of the project wasn’t to normalize AI, but to start conversations and start them early. The problem, though, is that Vocaloid was not uncanny enough — I’ve read blog reviews where the reviewer mistook the voice for human. And blurring the lines between my own writing and the text outputs probably didn’t help (“cyborg pop” probably wasn’t as specific as it could have been).

The reception to The Organizing Committee prepared me, though, for the way people reacted to the wave of AI that followed: AI that took on the role of a human conversationalist, by situating itself in a context where you would expect to be talking to a human being. The expectation of how a chat window behaves shapes our interactions with AI — much as our expectations of a song on the radio being sung by a human shapes our perception of a robotic voice. Expectation bias at work.

I have always been hesitant to write about The Organizing Committee in the context of my other AI work. So many people approach music through a lens of “do I like this?” in ways they don’t approach visual or conceptual art, or even proper “experimental” music. You engage with those things with a different kind of experience in mind. We can appreciate an ugly piece of art for what it says, challenges, or produces. We ask about the context in which it was produced and how it prods at that context.

A pop song? You ask if you can dance to it. I tried to make the answer a yes. But The Organizing Committee is a deeply weird band, and part of that is the relative lack of its weirdness, in the broad spectrum of “weird music.” Every record is meant for you to find the weirdness, the joke, the point, buried in 4/4 rhythms and standard melodies and synth work.

The ironic tension of the project is that it’s an absurd idea for a band but also a very neccessary one! We do genuinely need an aesthetic of resistance against nonsense like Marc Andreeson’s “Techno-Optimistic Manifesto,” where optimism means identifying me as an enemy of the future, embracing unregulated and unquestioned technological extractivisn, and getting out of the way of massive social experimentation by tech companies.

My alternative imaginary is The Organizing Committee. Albums made with experimental AI processes and outdated vocal synthesizers, influenced by disco, krautrock and synthwave, where every song applies a critical data studies framework to subvert the ideologies of computation it relies on to exist. Bite the hand that trains you.

And hey, it charted on radio stations in two major US cities. That’s at least kind of fun, right?

So today, right now, there’s a new record. The first single premiered at the AI Village at DEFCON, and who knows where this album will go. I hope somewhere even more fun than the last one.

The musician in me hopes you like The Organizing Committee for what it sounds like. The conceptual artist in me hopes you enjoy the oddness of its existence.

Both of us hope you’ll buy a copy. If you get the CD, you even get a limited edition Norbert Weiner / Guy Debord glitter sticker — thank David Turgeon for honoring that ridiculous request. (The album art was inspired by our shared love for 1980s computer manuals and floppy disk sleeves).

Anyway, here’s the button again. Hope you dig it.