Amplified Silence - AI won’t save us
This is the main article from the first issue from my monthly newsletter Amplified Silence.
AI won’t save us
Artificial Intelligence stands at a strange crossroads in 2025. It’s ubiquitous, yet still far from reaching its full potential. What’s clear is that it will profoundly impact our lives, even more than it already has - from how we work and communicate to how we think and create music. Creative professionals across all disciplines are understandably concerned. By offering a faster and cheaper way to generate creative works - whether text, images, or music - while simultaneously flooding the market with AI-generated content, there’s a genuine risk of devaluing creative work across the board.
Making music is an intricate and nuanced process, and AI faces distinct technical challenges when it comes to generating music and sound. These limitations, and the fact that music is a deeply personal and, at the same time, cultural experience, help explain why AI music generation currently lags behind text and image generation. But the question is no longer whether AI will be capable of creating music - be it as symbolic notation, like scores, or as audio files - that’s indistinguishable from compositions made by very talented artists. It’s a question of when it will be able to do so. And that is a terrifying thought, because we’ve grown used to thinking about music precisely as the product, that is, the score or the audio. But music is, in fact, much more than that.
Christopher Small’s Musicking has been one of the most transformative books in my musical journey. I remember I read it at a time when I was still studying contemporary classical music composition (the proper one, with paper and pencil). Back then, my goal was clear: to become a respected composer writing for European orchestras and ensembles, making a living through my scores. I didn’t know it at that time, but that was never going to happen in that way exactly.
Around 2012, I began leading workshops and focusing more on teaching, which led me to facilitate creative projects with an incredibly diverse range of people - from those with special needs to young children, from individuals experiencing homelessness to those from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as seasoned musicians. Through these experiences, I discovered that music-making serves as a vital cornerstone of most cultures, with an extraordinary power to unite people regardless of their skill level. I found profound beauty in the simplest musical expressions when played genuinely. Rather than seeing myself as a composer I became part of a community. Most significantly, I realized I found far more joy in this collaborative approach to music-making than in solitary composition for unnamed musicians. Small’s Musicking’ helped me organize my thoughts and to understand why I felt that way.
His central thesis is revolutionary yet intuitive: music is fundamentally a process and activity, not a product or object. When we engage in music-making, we forge new relationships - with our fellow musicians, with ourselves, and with music itself. Through this process, we explore our values, identities, and even our political views. Small argues that everyone involved plays a vital role, from composer to audience, performers to producers. The concept of musicking reveals music’s essential purpose: to affirm, challenge, or transform human connections. And that is something that AI, no matter how good it gets, cannot take away from us.
AI can’t replace the joy of learning or playing an instrument, though it can produce more virtuosic results than any human. It can’t replicate the feeling of connection when singing with others, despite its perfect intonation. It can’t capture the sense of belonging we feel in a concert hall, even if it can generate high-resolution images that place us virtually there. And it can’t match the empathy we feel watching a human performer on stage, though it can perfectly mimic the sounds they make.
Humans will keep on making music by themselves, and AI won’t silence us. But these are not, however, good news for the music business. Or, put another way, these are not good news for professional musicians. This subtle difference comes from the fact that people will continue to make money selling and licensing music, it’s just that musicians are making relatively less money when compared to the streaming platforms and, in the future, tech companies running the generative algorithms.
I believe that the fact that the human aspect of music-making is irreplaceable is already shaping the music industry and will do so even more. But in order for musicians to keep on making a living, we will need to democratize music, focusing on smaller and participatory projects, on the active involvement of different communities, and to have more time for leisure and for making music. I’m not sure that we are heading toward a more democratic and free society, however. And these changes also question traditional roles, such as those of the composer and the performer, and many professional musicians aren’t ready to accept that.
For me, the future of music lies not in perfection, but in participation. While AI continues to advance in its ability to generate flawless compositions and performances, it paradoxically reminds us of what makes human music-making truly valuable: our imperfections, our connections, and our shared experiences. The challenge ahead isn’t just about adapting to new technology, but about preserving and nurturing these spaces where music can continue to serve its most fundamental purpose - bringing people together in the act of creation, regardless of their technical prowess. Perhaps, in this way, AI isn’t just disrupting the music industry - it’s forcing us to rediscover what music means, by showing us - and flooding the market with - what it isn’t.
See you soon,
Óscar
