Last November, at the Stockholm University of the Arts, a human and an AI made music together. The performance began with musician David Dolan playing a grand piano into a microphone. As he played, a computer system, designed and overseen by composer and Kingston University researcher Oded Ben-Tal, “listened” to the piece, extracting data on pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Then, it added its own accompaniment, improvising just like a person would. Some sounds were transformations of Dolan’s piano; some were new sounds synthesized on the fly. The performance was icy and ambient, eerie and textural. 

From ShutEye to SleepScore, several smartphone apps are available if you’re trying to better understand how snoring impacts your rest, allowing you to leave the microphone on overnight to record your raucous nasal grunts and rumbling throat reverberations. But while smartphone apps are helpful for tracking the presence of snores, their accuracy remains an issue when applied to real-world bedrooms with extraneous noises and multiple audible people.

Our phones rule our lives. We love them, we hate them. Somewhere deep down inside, we hope they never go away. But, if recent sales data is to be believed, we are also incredibly bored with smartphones—so bored in fact that we’re buying far fewer of them than we used to.

The rise of generative AI models has led to equal amounts of clapping and handwringing.  One worry is that, as Kevin Kelly put it, “artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans.” So where does that leave us?