A couple of days ago, I had a constructive talk with Annie where we discussed the direction I might take my essay. We talked about how I could take the ideas presented in ‘Stockhausen Serves Imperialism’ and develop on them more into something that’s more relevant today. I do a lot of session work that can be low-paid (and often times unpaid), and this is often quite frustrating as it means I have to work a part-time bar job to supplement the earnings I get from playing music (London also being a very expensive city to live in doesn’t help much either). Together with going to university, I often find it can be very difficult to divide my time between these commitments. A lot of the time it can prove unwise to ask for more money from these session jobs as there is always someone willing to undercut your price or do it for free, so you have to accept not really being compensated very much at all. Annie and I discussed how I could talk about the struggle of musicians under capitalism in my essay, and look at examples of artists trying to fight this – she showed me Terre Thaemlitz’s project ‘Soulessness’, which is a case study I could potentially use.

I’d like the sound piece I make for this unit to reflect the ideas presented in the essay, and Annie suggested I could maybe make something that involves me reading or singing out messages from people I work with asking me to do bits of work for free, or just generally asking too much of me.

This would be an interesting route to go down, although I may want to use AI text-to-speech generators as well as, or instead of, my human voice. This for 2 reasons:

1. Although I am used to singing in a more conventional musical context, I still don’t know how confident I would feel using my voice to read out these messages – I’m not a great actor. Maybe this sounds like a silly reason, but this is partly behind my choice
2. Conceptually, I think the idea of a robotised voice taking the place of my own human voice relates quite nicely to the ideas presented in Rod Eley’s essay, when he talks about “machines and their machine-minders” taking over the jobs of musicians. This is also a discussion that is very relevant today due to recent developments in AI technology and the popularisation of sights such as ChatGPT.

So, I may use these robotised voices to read out the messages. It’s certainly an interesting concept, and maybe I will try and merge it with an underlying soundscape of chaos created by the self-oscillating pedals I discussed in a previous blog, and other sound files, to represent the cluttered nature of the way I live life at the moment as a working musician/student in London during the cost of living crisis.