Have been swirling around this topic for quite some time in my current AI music project, of who gets to decide what world music is? There’s a good David Byrne essay from 1999 here, but the long and short of what I’ve been exploring through all this is that we all live on the “world,” so why is music from my country simply called “music” but music from your country is called “world music?” Do I not live in the world? What are my rights here? What are my obligations?

While I’ve seen a lot of talk about protecting artists’ rights (which I agree with, while also generally thinking training is Fair Use as long as its transformative), I’ve seen less about participating in and contributing to the common collective cultural inheritance of all humanity throughout history. The entirety of recorded human knowledge and experience and culture transformed through time and space, digitized, turned into an LLM/image/video generator, etc. (Which is more or less the plot of The Continuity Codex btw: a thumb-drive sized AI based on all human knowledge is hunted by authorities for… reasons) As a common cultural heritage of everyone who equally lives on “the world”… I guess I end up thinking about it a bit cosmically at a certain point, like the Akashic Record or something, but less New Age and more concrete like, This is Happening…

If it’s wrong to make “AI world music” (is it?) is there someone somewhere who has more of a right to make it than I do? Do certain cultures own words that describe certain instruments? What’s going to stop anybody from using any kind of sound or word or style, whether or not they are a “valid” member of any given identity group who has authority to act within that tradition? How do we decide who has that authority? These are just a few of the dozens of linked questions that swirled in my head the last couple of months working on this project. Not because I have answers to them, but because I’ve become obsessed with the variables that fall out when you shake the possibilitrees…

One other tangent I took in my sketches and explorations went something like this: Is it possible to make “world music” using AI where you don’t name any specific culture, geography, or specific known type of music? So you’re not potentially butting up against something you probably shouldn’t be using unless you’re certified? (I say that in jest, but also serious at the same time, because life is like that now) And I found the answer was yes, it is possible. But that was not the whole answer that I found. The real one was that it’s interesting to try to include all compatible possibilities, and not just those which are or aren’t approved or necessarily appropriate. Transgression, after all… it may be bad and wrong at times, but maybe there’s something to it also. Maybe sometimes we can forgive ourselves for being wrong and bad, and just be whatever it is that we are. Maybe there’s a way through folly that really does end in wisdom. It’s certainly a fool’s errand to try and find out…

Anyway, that turned into a really long digression that probably buried any real point I was trying to make, and this was just meant to be a short link post out to this 2019 Guardian article about how World Music as a term is fraught with colonial cultural baggage.

EDIT:

I remembered part of my buried point, that … oh wait no. Lost it again.

But I did find this essay about cultural appropriation which I thought had a few interesting points that I’m still digesting about how some of these questions risk a sort of over-commodification of culture, turning things into discrete units of “property” etc.

Oh wait no! I remember it again. It has to do with the Honor System. If certain things are off limits culturally, whether that has to do with cultural appropriation or with something like Sora 2 using peoples’ likeness or brands, etc without permission… but those things are at the same time not only technically feasible, and highly believable, but also widespread among the general populace, how can we expect any kind of “Honor System” to hold up if the technology allows it?

Anyway, another half-baked take. Gonna put these back in the oven for a while and hopefully come up with something better…

EDIT 2:

The related concept of Recuperation from the Situationists (as opposed to detournement) is I think interesting enough to warrant inclusion in this conversation also:

In the sociological sense, recuperation is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are twisted, co-opted, absorbed, defused, incorporated, annexed or commodified within media culture and bourgeois society, and thus become interpreted through a neutralized, innocuous or more socially conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the cultural appropriation of any subversive symbols or ideas by mainstream culture.

The concept of recuperation was formulated by members of the Situationist International, its first published instance in 1960. The term conveys a negative connotation because recuperation generally bears the intentional consequence (whether perceived or not) of fundamentally altering the meaning behind radical ideas due to their appropriation or being co-opted into the dominant discourse. It was originally conceived as the opposite of their concept of détournement, in which images and other cultural artifacts are appropriated from mainstream sources and repurposed with radical intentions.