this is her voice Come on Fitzgerald who sings this song, and yet this song was never written by anyone and never sung by her great diva jazz. Under her performance, a strange melody is heard. It sounds like it was produced by a classic jazz trio: drums, double bass and piano. But this piano sounds haunted. This is a piano that, as if having heard it in a strange nightmare, has woken up and wants to play itself. A piano that envied something human and yearned to take something from the flame that it felt in the fingertips of the great musicians who touched its keys.

And yet, however impressive, beautiful and incredible this attempt at his autonomy may be, there is something otherworldly in the harmony of his music, and something shaky in its timbre. As for Ella, once you think it’s really her, when you hear her playful vibrato, her celestial octaves, there is something vague, something fleeting to betray her, to make her look like a high-tech “car”. » is a robot in human clothes.

“Ella Fitzgerald Jazz” is the title of an AI-written track. We found it in the list of music samples in the “Jukebox” app by Open AI, a leading company in the field. “I will love you forever and one day,” the artificial Ela sings, trying to make us think that there is something human in her.

Something similar happens when we listen to a Nirvana track on YouTube made by the same app. “It’s like someone used a radio frequency to record the ghost of Kurt Cobain singing in the afterlife,” wrote one user in the comments to the post. The machine tries its best to recreate the sound of the Seattle trio, but it fails to replicate the main element that made it so influential: the wide, authentic emotions of its soloist, already immersed in the context of his era.

How do you explain to a machine – no matter how advanced it is – the chaotic interface that gives rise to unique and inimitable musical minds like Greg Sage of the Wipers?

It’s the same feeling that Kurt Cobain heard in the work of his artistic “father”, Greg Sage of the Wipers, a pioneer of the “grunge” sound that originated in the late 70s in Portland, Oregon. A feeling that, combined with an ingenious approach to guitar playing and recording technology, created pieces of music so frighteningly innovative, so idiosyncratic, that not only a machine could not imitate, but even a person. How do you explain to a machine, no matter how advanced it may be, the chaotic mix that gives rise to unique and inimitable musical minds like his? What digital synapses could produce the thunder that his black Gibson SG sowed? How to fake the elements of nature?

At the same time, there is something man-made, similar to Jukebox AI digital shards, the ghostly achievements of the last century, which today’s young musicians indulge in. In a deft fusion of musical styles and sounds from the recent past, the Canadian producer, who goes by the stage name “Record Loss”, is now writing a track he calls “Under the Knife” that mixes Ned Doheny’s blue-eyed soul. bastardly with Pink Floyd’s progressive rock and Rain Parade’s neo-psychedelia, and while it all looks charming, some of it feels cheesy – like the part Ella never sang.

The same goes for the California allah-las, who in the video for the track “Tell Me What’s on Your Mind” seems to have put more emphasis on sounding (and dressing) like the Yardbirds than creating authentic music of his own. Their tracks are great, but they don’t have that sense of danger, that life-threatening element that was in songs like “For your Love” or “Heart Full of Soul”.

However, in today’s plethora of new music there is an edge that feels “synthetic,” a crack in the curtain that reveals a musical landscape filled with the authenticity of old “masters” like Greg Sage. In the same place we meet English veteran of electronic music Mark Prichard. In the music video for one of his 2016 tracks “Sad Alron”, we see an evocative combination of sound and image that, while purely digital, is filled with human suffering. The images created there by aspiring Australian artist Jonathan Jawada are like Rene Magritte resurrected in the digital age, while for Pritchard’s music they seem to be trying to depict scenes from the unconscious.

“This is not nostalgia, but I feel something that I have not felt since childhood,” the comment under the video says. The same risky, bold and explosive creative union of emotions, distant memories and visions of the future, which can only give birth to human art.