A few weeks back, in a former bank building that’s now a music venue in Falmouth, Cornwall, Arjun Chauhan Surya was DJ-ing at a night he runs called Rave Machine. It was a noisy, high-energy, sweaty affair, just as a night’s dancing should be.
All of the elements – the crowd, performers, staff, music, the journey home – connected to create something special, a one-off. It was also completely human.
Something, in theory, well out of reach of what technology could possibly offer.
In the DJ world, though, technology has already changed the equation. In the 1990s, a DJ had to not only pick the tracks, but also thread them together armed only with vinyl records, a pair of turntables and a mixer. Now, much more assistance is on offer, including software that will sync beats on different tracks should you ask it to (he doesn’t). Apple Music and Spotify have an AI tune-mixing option too.
Left: Arjun Chauhan Surya at a turntable. Right: a crowd Arjun Chauhan Surya at his DJ night in Cornwall – a fundamentally human experience, he reflects.
If you were out dancing, would it matter to you if a DJ was, well, not really DJing? If you loved the music being played, would you care if technology was doing the work?
It’s a question that generative AI – the type of AI that creates content – is asking of us all. One of the thrills of that night in Falmouth was seeing the special guest, Andy Cato from Groove Armada, artfully weaving an array of tracks. How would Arjun feel if a DJ was just pressing play? (And that does happen).
He mentions all of this because that experience in Falmouth connects to a far broader question: whether we actually care if a piece of art has been created by a human, be that a painting, song, book, poem, or any other type of art.