Answers to Two Pressing Questions
Or, Is Lance Bass and the Frosted Tips a Real Band?
I posted this photo for no other reason than to acknowledge my adjacency to Lance Bass and his Frosted Tips. A moniker which is, I suspect you'll agree, as good a name for a band as a podcast. For all I know he fronts a wedding band on the weekends under Lance Bass and the Frosted Tips specializing in Backstreet Boys' covers for surprise and irony—NSYNC too on the nose.
My reason for popping in with this Substack post is to respond to the current podcast episode from Music & Meaning—"Chatbots and Sexy Synth Saxophones."
Some answers:
The original title was "Is AI the New Tower of Babel?"
Two days before release, my co-producer Mike Cosper ("The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill") made an off-hand remark: "The name, Chatbots and Sexy Synth Saxophones came to me." I responded, "Don't tempt me." Since CT Media, as in Christianity Today, the magazine that Billy Graham founded in 1956 is the sponsor, I wondered out loud: "Has CT done sexy before?" Of course. As Merriam-Webster points out, sexy is not only the realm of eros but of appeal—to be generally attractive or interesting. What 67-year-old magazine doesn't want that? Besides eros has been covered often enough between the covers.
So we changed the name. An associate producer didn't get the memo and it was uploaded to podcast land as "Is AI the New Tower of Babel?" By 7:30AM Tuesday morning the error had been spotted and fixed. Unfortunately, not before some of you downloaded or listened to the mistitled episode.
On behalf of all of us on the M&M team at CT Media we apologize for one name too many. If this is the biggest bump we hit on the road to launching Music & Meaning, I think we'll all be fine. I love my team. We promise 100% effort of imagination and creativity and proximate results!
Next, what about the sexy synth saxophone? I mean "specifically," one person asked. What was "the instrument and the sample bank or library?" Here's where I insert nerd alert.
It is a reference to what could've been late 1985 or early '86. Brent Bourgeois and I in the studio with others including John Weber and Daryl Zachman helping out with engineering and MIDI sequence programming. Producer Nigel Gray may have been there or had already left for home in England (we were scheduled to circle up again after the first the year at his studio in Leatherhead, called Surrey Sound). We are working on a song titled "It's No Surprise" from my second solo album on Island Records.
Brent has a fantastic new synthesizer/digital sampler made by the German company PPG. The instrument is the PPG WAVE 2.3. The stock library comes with a soprano sax sound which Brent proceeds to play quite realistically (PPG pictured below with the LinnDrum—the drum machine heard ‘round the world).
We become so enthralled with the new tech advancement, we immediately feature the synth/sample soprano sax as a solo which you can hear at approximately 2:45 on the recording.
What I want to know is: What are you all thinking about the potential, good and bad, for AI and music? Mostly I'm hearing from those of you who think it's bollocks. Several agree with my imagination thesis—which I suspected/hoped for. Any advocates of AI's good potential for the arts? Or is it all dung and danger? Speak your mind people!
If you haven't listened yet, please do. Let's mull this over together. I have more to address on this topic and would love as much feedback as I can get before the next AI and music episode early next year. Thanks friends!