Cuba, what's in the black box?

Edu O'Bourke
01.03.2023
7 minutes Reading

A long time ago, some scientists came to the conclusion that it would be impossible to study what lives and happens inside the brain, that which makes it possible for the psyche to exist. They called "the black box" everything that, in theory, would be impossible for us to study.

After some time, they began to shed light on the dark cube and it took many forms. The interesting thing was that each large group dedicated to psychology used different lenses for their glasses. Each school saw and described (with relative success) seemingly distinct and distant things that were located in the same space. One interesting theory to me was the one that went so far as to say that the black box was always like a computer.

Energy stimuli enter (you touch the power button), which are transformed into energies understandable to the system (electricity flows inside the PC), which is then transformed into data (programs are loaded). These, in turn, are transformed into information (they open the system), which gives way to responses (you have successfully logged in). Each transduction process in itself is relatively mysterious (we know they happen; but not always how). There are still unexplainable points; but this time within a whole open to understanding (they are little black boxes and not one very big and impossible one).

They explained the psyche by comparing it to computers (the ones they knew then are quite old for us). The funny thing is that recently I understood a little bit what computers can do, comparing them with our brains.

At the end of the day, we are becoming less and less distant from artificial intelligences. Humans are capable of learning, making calculations, designs, paintings, adapting our responses to the demands of the environment and becoming efficient in various contexts. We are also sentient. News: AIs (Artificial Intelligences) seem to be too.

In my own home I had the opportunity to be amazed by its magic. The work of a few minutes would be done in seconds after a click. I'm talking about robots capable of working with music according to what you ask them to do. The working logics behind these advances turned out to be, at that time, a black box for me.

When my dad discovered Band in a Box (software specialized in midi music production) I didn't think it would have such a great potential (it sounded very bad). One day he found a function that claimed to be able to reharmonize whatever was requested and another one to extract the ciphers of a piece. It was a rustic program, but a clever one. That was many years ago.

We are saying that, for example, you choose an audio and ask it to tell you how to play it on the guitar. Then, if you want, you can add more or less chords or simply change them. But it doesn't end there. While it is true that these functions did not arise with the program itself, the interesting thing is that the program emerged in 1988 and all this has only evolved. To illustrate the distances we will see that: at that time it was recorded with magnetic tapes in the most advanced studios. Silvio sang in that year Oh Melancholywhile Nirvana was just getting started and Guns and Roses was getting the world's spirits up with Sweet child O'Mine. The state-of-the-art digital technology looked like this:

From its earliest versions, Band in a Box could offer you an "intelligent" service. It is worth noting that the main difference between these tools and the AI tools is that the old tools did not learn by using them. You tell it the chords, the style, adjust a nut and it starts playing the song with the musicians and the style you want (Richard Clayderman on piano and Pastorius on bass).

Obviously these synthetic generations did not strictly resemble today's AIs, nor did they generate high quality sounds. Those results were midi-like, like an old-fashioned karaoke. You take everything this software generates and take it to another program, change the sounds and you have a lot of work ahead of you. My dad still uses Frutty Loops for the latter.

The Fruity Loop Studio, so popular with a certain part of the music community in Cuba, is full of little gadgets. This program is more recent in its appearance. It was first launched in 1997. The urban movement in Puerto Rico turned to this tool and made it very popular among us. Eliel!

There are a thousand things that this program does on its own. All those that have come after it are full of black boxes. There are highly sensitive and labor-intensive processes today that are simpler and more intuitive than they were for the old producers and sound engineers: quantizing, fine-tuning, randomizecreate riffswave spectra analysis, dynamics correction, among many others. All this is easily done with plugin (very specialized programs that can often be nested within more general ones) such as Ozone, Fabs Filtter, Waves, Autotune, Real Guitar and an endless list that do use AI tools in many cases.

To non-experts, it may sound like a lot of difficult talk, because that's how difficult every process necessary to get a song out the door becomes. A person with a powerful computer at home and the right programs can do almost anything with music. There is plenty of experience of that here. Even Cuban producers sometimes skip the powerful computer part.

The magic is that this person doesn't have to know what happened behind each click. He simply introduced stimuli and collected responses. Exactly like what those scientists once dreamed of and explained.

Not even programmers know for sure what happens to the codes once they are deposited in the matrix on which they act. Nor can neuroscientists, as far as I know, explain the way in which an electrical impulse is converted into psychic energy. Likewise, the producer has no reason to know what happens on the front side of a button of a Play.

Behind all of this lies an elementary, basic and universal knowledge that is escaping us. Even so, we are highly efficient musicians, scientists and programmers, who work by modifying and making use of things we do not yet fully understand. What will happen once we understand all this?

By making use of these technological resources, of AIs and all their predecessors and current relatives, we will be reducing time, leaving more space for creativity to emerge, expanding ranges, blurring boundaries, moving forward. The problem with walking forward is that we will not know for sure what we are leaving behind; and with so much speed, we may lose sight of the landscapes on the sides of the road.

We agree that some of those who have made intelligent, critical and active use of these black boxes have been able to offer artistic products, tremendous songs, valuable arrangements, novel sounds, aesthetics and advanced socio-cultural movements in different contexts. The artists of 1988 used more time and resources, those of today with a PC at home can achieve much more. Less and less is being done in terms of human effort vs. results.

So, I throw my doubts into the air:

Will those who come in the future be less artists because they will have to make less effort than we do today?

Will it be the end of art?

In the meantime, feel free to remain part of a big black box that we don't know enough about; but it's taking us somewhere.