Song of the Day #260 - Frog Pocket - Carac Cyls

In the ancient, a glimpse of infinity...!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqQmEyW7tNo

So uhh in our new album hype train news, a single from Painting With was released via an iOS app? It looks kinda fun but I don't have an iPhone or anything. Someone ripped the wav file out of it, but I feel like I'd lose the "full experience", maybe? And at this point I kinda want to just wait for the whole album with no more "spoilers", cause it's only a month or so away...

The other news is WAY more exciting. It might seem unassuming at first, but then you start thinking of the implications, your mind starts racing ahead of yourself, your heart starts beating, you start to doubt - could this really be as insane as it seems to be? And you take a second and confirm that, yeah, yeah it is. It's not guaranteed by any stretch, but you know there's a chance, there's a definite chance, that this could be something that you look back upon like... the first time you heard about the internet, the first time you understood just how powerful it was, if you can remember such a thing. I can remember as a young kid, maybe 8 or 9, realizing that you could download Dragon Ball Z episodes from the internet, and just being utterly flabbergasted. It was so much more powerful than I could have imagined. And now, here, with this news, a revolution of a similar scale is lurking...

I refer to, of course, Kanye West and Young Thug recording 40 tracks together. No, no. I'm kidding. I'm referring to Google's AlphaGo deeplearning algorithm beating a professional player, marking the first time in history an AI has beaten a player anywhere near that level. Moreover, this is a general deeplearning algorithm, one not provided with any specific external evaluation metrics as chess AIs historically have been. It has instead learned Go simply by being told what options each player has and being allowed to watch and play millions of games, much in the same way a very similar general algorithm has learned to recognize dogs, or learned to tag images, or play Atari games, or whatever. And the sky is basically the limit now, or at least our hardware is... it seems any sort of creative optimization problem, so long as we can give it a sense of what we want, is within reach. Including, perhaps, the task of optimizing itself?

Now, I've always been pretty far from the LessWrong tier of singularity belief (or cultism?), but I find it interesting to think about beyond all questions of plausibility or logistics. I'm not about to weigh in on any of that, or any specifics, but when I read about AlphaGo I felt excited, because it felt like, even if just for a second, I could really imagine it, I could really see it happening. It was fun and exciting, so why would I try to quash that feeling with "facts" or "logic"? I mean, I don't want to end up downplaying the undeniable significance of what's already been achieved... a general AI beating a professional at Go is something that even the most optimistic experts would have placed at decades away; this is in every way a historic triumph already... but in light of this monumental occasion, where distant horizons have fallen into our grasp, why not dream even further?

I remember one of the first conversations I had about singularity-type topics was with a good friend of mine who is a bit more devoted to the idea than me (e.g., he goes on Lesswrong, or at least used to)... at the time, I didn't really understand the full potential of generalized superintelligences. I didn't see how they could do anything "creative", I figured it would be mostly "math". And I remember my friend explaining how superintelligent AIs could make music way beyond my understanding, something completely unimaginable to me now. The idea really interested me, and I spent a long time thinking about what that could be...

On one level, it could be like, systematically finding all permutations of precisely different frequencies, making super dense chords that have "fractal" harmonies beyond harmonies... or intricate fugues involving so many systems of counterpoint that one is instantly overwhelmed... or even taking simple pieces like the Gymnopédies or "Avril 14th" and "optimizing" them in some way... teaching it the aesthetic relationship between music and music videos, then giving it videos and having it produce a soundtrack... or even text... being able to start from any base of sounds or field recordings, and having it work them into a masterpiece... finally being able to break down and understand Young Thug's flow...

But the style I always return to is that of songs like "Carac Cyls", which already feel well beyond what I thought a human would be capable of. Frog Pocket's unique "splatterfolk" sensibilities give it this swampy, druidic atmosphere, but the core structure is one that I look for in many electronic artists, usually in their "masterpiece" tracks. 8+ minutes, multifaceted, growing, expanding... There's a sense of growing "complexity" all through the track, something that results from the drum patterns and the chords and the samples all changing and evolving, but even more than the sum of their parts... it's a really overwhelming feeling where both recognition and surprise are firing on overdrive, and it feels like your brain might turn into something new. The aforementioned atmosphere thus feels both like distant point of origin and ultimate destination, a feeling I also associated with the aesthetics of AlphaGo bringing us the first glimpse of a far-off future through such an old game.