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What Does The Internet Sound Like? [Archive Pull] · Never Post

• 0:05
  Jason Oberholtzer: Friends, hello and welcome to Never Post,
• 0:09
  a podcast for and about the Internet. I am your executive
• 0:13
  producer, Jason Oberholzer, here with a poll from the archives.
• 0:19
  The year, 2024. The month, April. The day, the tenth.
• 0:28
  We released into the unsuspecting world an episode of
• 0:31
  devastating import, including our first contributing producer
• 0:35
  piece by Marie Kolaru and Georgia reading for any choice
• 0:40
  unrequited love song for the Panopticon. And yet, none of
• 0:46
  those things is what I'm bringing you today. I am
• 0:48
  bringing you something fun because if there's one thing you
• 0:51
  know about me, I love fun. And on that fateful day in 2024, I
• 0:58
  had fun with our pal, Charlie Harding. You know him, you love
• 1:02
  him.
• 1:03
  He switched on pop. Music journalist professor all around
• 1:06
  great hang. Charlie and I talked about what sounds like the
• 1:11
  Internet. Like, what music sounds like the Internet.
• 1:17
  Historically speaking, the kinds of sounds that when you hear
• 1:20
  them, you say, ah, that That's the Internet.
• 1:24
  And why am I bringing this to you now? Well, I think it's
• 1:28
  nothing more than the perhaps misguided hope that you too
• 1:33
  might like fun. And that in this month of all months, it might
• 1:37
  feel good to have some fun. So without further ado, on the
• 1:41
  other side of these commercials which I suppose is a do you will
• 1:45
  have to deal with if you are not on the member feed, I bring you
• 1:49
  back in time to Charlie Harding and I talking noise. So a couple
• 2:26
  weeks ago, the Never Post editorial crew was trying to
• 2:30
  answer for ourselves a question.
• 2:33
  What does the internet sound like? And the first band that
• 2:39
  came to mind was one hundred Gex. I think in some part
• 2:43
  because of a conversation that we remembered our guest having
• 2:46
  on his podcast, Switched On Pop. Charlie Harding is a singer
• 2:58
  songwriter music producer, co author of the book Switched On
• 3:00
  Pop, How Popular Music Works and Why It Matters, and a co host of
• 3:04
  the podcast already named Switched on Pop. Charlie,
• 3:07
  welcome.
• 3:08
  Charlie Harding: Thanks for having me.
• 3:09
  Jason Oberholtzer: So a year ago, and change, you said in
• 3:13
  talking about 100 that they were the sound of the Internet. Yeah.
• 3:18
  It seems to be immediately, obviously, spinal cord level
• 3:22
  true, and I wonder why.
• 3:26
  Charlie Harding: My reaction to a hundred Gex sounding like the
• 3:28
  Internet was a off the cuff honest reaction. It was not a
• 3:31
  particularly thought out one. It just is sounds like the accurate
• 3:36
  word to describe it. You have the bad cheap samples of guitars
• 3:41
  on a song like Money Machine. Weird fomented, shifted vocals
• 3:45
  that feel like they've gone through some bad kazaw and
• 3:50
  compression and lossiness.
• 3:53
  There's this capitalist obsession with wealth and their
• 3:56
  music feels like a mash up of everything. Country, dubstep,
• 4:00
  trap, nu metal, SoundCloud rap, beeps and bloops everywhere in
• 4:03
  the background.
• 4:04
  Jason Oberholtzer: Completely unprocessed sine waves. Things
• 4:08
  that
• 4:09
  Charlie Harding: are distorted and and and pushed beyond the
• 4:12
  clipping stage of limiters Yeah. Just to like grate you and be
• 4:15
  abrasive. I mean, the abrasiveness of it feels like
• 4:19
  it's the sound of the Internet. Like it sounds like it's the
• 4:21
  sound of QAnon. It's interwoven, it's messy, it's complex, it's
• 4:26
  stupid.
• 4:27
  Yeah. Like they they are good at taking things that are
• 4:30
  aesthetically low culture and making it high culture in much
• 4:34
  the way that the Internet functions. Yeah. That is just
• 4:37
  that's the sound. I think that though we've heard the sounds of
• 4:41
  the Internet since really the dawn of at least the consumer
• 4:45
  Internet.
• 4:46
  Jason Oberholtzer: And so where do we wanna peg that? The World
• 4:48
  Wide Web of the nineties or like DARPA? Or where do we think
• 4:52
  there was a sound?
• 4:53
  Charlie Harding: You You know, I'm sure there was a DARPA
• 4:55
  sound, like some like humming, like server room running the
• 4:59
  Internet.
• 4:59
  Jason Oberholtzer: Sure.
• 5:00
  Charlie Harding: Some very clacky keys on some old
• 5:02
  machines. But I honestly think that you could say that the AOL
• 5:08
  dial up tone isn't just the sound of the Internet. It is the
• 5:12
  sound that inspires glitch music, hyper pop. I think it is
• 5:18
  the or text of the sound of the Internet. You have harsh,
• 5:25
  unpleasant, unexpected sounds.
• 5:27
  They are brash. They happen in an unexpected order. There are
• 5:32
  insertions of all kinds of different colors of noise, all
• 5:36
  controlled by monopolistic telecommunications company.
• 5:38
  Like, the sound of AOL metaphorizes the entire
• 5:41
  experience of being on the Internet.
• 5:44
  Jason Oberholtzer: So what's really interesting to me about
• 5:46
  that is when I try to envision what the earliest sounds are
• 5:50
  that we could all agree, yes, that sounds like the Internet.
• 5:53
  It is technology focused. So Yeah. I think you could make
• 5:56
  arguments for going back as far as like the nineteen sixties and
• 6:00
  like Morton Subotnick and music made by computers that clacked
• 6:04
  and glitched and was kind of almost an AOL dial up
• 6:08
  experience. After that, I think the technology of computers
• 6:17
  meshes with the technology of like synthesized music in a way.
• 6:21
  And the weirdest part of that timeline, whenever I try to
• 6:23
  think about it, is where do you put craft work? And does craft
• 6:28
  work sound like the Internet?
• 6:29
  Charlie Harding: Definitely. I mean, I feel like they're
• 6:31
  evoking all this idea of robotics and post humanism. The
• 6:41
  old synthesizers that people would have to patch together
• 6:44
  used various patch cables that might have been used in like a
• 6:47
  telephone operating set. In fact, Sure. Know, the images of
• 6:50
  like Wendy Carlos operating her early modular synthesizer Yeah.
• 6:54
  Feels like it could be a telephone operator. So there is
• 6:57
  this interwovenness between the sounds of those machines, how
• 7:00
  they're how they're actually patched together, what they even
• 7:03
  look like. And the fact that I mean, if we wanna go way way way
• 7:06
  way way way way back to the nineteenth century, the
• 7:09
  Tellaharmonium was one of the first synthesizers ever created.
• 7:12
  It was this like giant multi 100 ton machine, and its goal was to
• 7:18
  generate, I think like sine waves that would make music that
• 7:21
  would be played over telecommunication networks,
• 7:24
  really early phone networks. Yeah.
• 7:25
  So there's there's an interwoven history between I think all
• 7:28
  synthesized music and things that make bleep bloops and our
• 7:32
  our relationship to digital technology and communications.
• 7:34
  Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. Totally. And other synthesized
• 7:36
  elements like the eight zero eight. The eight zero eight is
• 7:39
  like the most important thing in modern music probably Yeah.
• 7:42
  Developed in the eighties alongside synthesizers.
• 7:45
  And you think planet rock, which is actually referencing craft
• 7:48
  work
• 7:49
  Charlie Harding: Yeah.
• 7:49
  Jason Oberholtzer: Early example of using an eight zero eight.
• 7:54
  And in some ways, influences the sound of like the future. Yeah.
• 8:01
  I think it's very hard to parse what is supposed to sound like
• 8:04
  quote, the future Mhmm. And what is supposed to sound like the
• 8:08
  Internet.
• 8:08
  Because for a while, they were kind of the same vision.
• 8:11
  Charlie Harding: So many of the essential sounds of contemporary
• 8:15
  popular music were failed hardware devices that were made
• 8:19
  by the Roland Corporation in Japan. And the height of Japan
• 8:21
  and sort of all the vision of technology in the future that
• 8:24
  Japan represented. And they would make these devices like
• 8:26
  the eight zero eight or the three zero three base machine.
• 8:29
  These devices were failures when they came out and were later
• 8:32
  rediscovered in pawn shops by hip hop producers and other, you
• 8:36
  know, trans and house producers and repurposed and made in very
• 8:41
  sort of DIY environments, there is something also about the
• 8:44
  sound of the Internet, which is that DIY piece it together kind
• 8:48
  of aesthetic.
• 8:49
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Okay. So, you know, we start with sine
• 8:53
  wave experiments at the turn of the century. Apparently, we have
• 8:56
  computers in the nineteen fifties and sixties and craft
• 9:00
  work in the seventies.
• 9:01
  Charlie Harding: Mhmm.
• 9:01
  Jason Oberholtzer: We have in the eighties, a new wave of
• 9:03
  synthesizers and drum machines and Mhmm. We emerge into the
• 9:08
  nineties, which is kind of where we started this conversation
• 9:09
  with Yeah. The world wide web as a place where a lot of the
• 9:13
  aesthetic was DIY, repurpose. I think the other thing was like
• 9:18
  academia and colleges. Certainly, the people who would
• 9:21
  be listening to a Morton Subotnick and like having ideas
• 9:23
  about it, meets like people who would be sharing files on Usenet
• 9:27
  and the kinds of things they would be interested in.
• 9:29
  Charlie Harding: Right. Right.
• 9:29
  Jason Oberholtzer: And to me, that all wraps up into what I
• 9:32
  call like the snow crash era of how we think about what the
• 9:36
  Internet should sound like.
• 9:37
  Charlie Harding: Right.
• 9:38
  Jason Oberholtzer: Virtual reality ninjas doing weird
• 9:40
  hacker stuff.
• 9:42
  Charlie Harding: The music that we start to download at that
• 9:45
  time also I think influences the sound of the Internet. As the m
• 9:49
  p three is developed, those really bad quality, lossy sounds
• 9:55
  I feel like a lot of trance music was being distributed to
• 9:58
  be listened to on Winamp. Like, I think of bad quality versions
• 10:01
  of De Rude's Sandstorm. But it sounds even like grainier and
• 10:05
  more more sandy because the quality is so bad, such that now
• 10:09
  we're in a time where we're actually nostalgic for that
• 10:12
  lossy sound. And there are now plug ins that emulate that
• 10:15
  lossiness that helped famously make the entire Phoebe Bridgers
• 10:19
  record sound so kind of nostalgic.
• 10:21
  Yeah. So the actual sounds that we're hearing also, I think,
• 10:24
  contribute to the feeling of the aesthetic of the Internet at
• 10:26
  that time.
• 10:27
  Jason Oberholtzer: That makes sense to me a lot. I mean, so m
• 10:28
  p three arrived in 1991. Yeah. So that certainly lines up. At
• 10:33
  this point, it becomes interesting that the tech
• 10:35
  component of the sound converts from more hardware based Mhmm.
• 10:40
  To sort of more software or platform based. Limewire Right.
• 10:44
  Napster.
• 10:45
  Charlie Harding: Right. I think it's also worth pointing out
• 10:47
  that some of the music that's being distributed in more into
• 10:50
  the late nineties is often reflecting the anxieties about
• 10:56
  the Internet. I think about especially Radiohead's Okay
• 10:59
  Computer and probably I think of all songs that best represent
• 11:02
  that that work would be like fitter happier. Productive.
• 11:08
  Okay.
• 11:09
  And I can't on antibiotics. But probably I think like the sound
• 11:13
  that captures it at that time for me is is Aphex Twin.
• 11:17
  Jason Oberholtzer: Okay.
• 11:17
  Charlie Harding: Like a song like Peak eight two four five
• 11:20
  four two zero one. The way that he's using these titles that
• 11:25
  might actually sound like usernames and a user forum, the
• 11:29
  images behind his albums look like cheap digital art. Like
• 11:33
  it's it's all in the digital culture of that time. And the
• 11:38
  sounds are I mean, they sound kinda like the AOL dial up
• 11:41
  tones. Right?
• 11:42
  It's just like Yeah. Glitch, scratch, noise, unexpected,
• 11:45
  constantly changing.
• 11:46
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. I think even of I had Ottecra on my list
• 11:49
  for this period. Mhmm. So something like garbage m x. I
• 11:55
  think you play anyone Ottecra and they're like, yeah, that's
• 11:57
  computers or something.
• 11:59
  But there was also this thing around like The Prodigy. Yeah.
• 12:03
  And like Right. European synth kind of dangerous music like
• 12:07
  Firestarter that you would put behind people when they're
• 12:11
  hacking in the movies and they're the cool dangerous ones
• 12:14
  and that is the Internet.
• 12:15
  Charlie Harding: Yeah. This is like the movie, The Net, or
• 12:18
  better would be the soundtrack to The Matrix. The Matrix is
• 12:20
  basically soundtracked by Prodigy like tones. It's acid
• 12:25
  house, it's trance, it's the sound of a dark Berlin club with
• 12:30
  green strobe lights.
• 12:36
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. I I think this is probably the last
• 12:38
  time where the Internet felt like a subculture enough. Yes.
• 12:42
  Something dangerous and foreign and subculture y could be a
• 12:45
  shorthand for what are they doing out there?
• 12:47
  Charlie Harding: Yeah. I mean, to your point, that sound of the
• 12:50
  Internet evolves from hardware to software because the Internet
• 12:55
  moves from being something technical to something seamless.
• 12:58
  Like, we are talking over the Internet now and it doesn't feel
• 13:02
  like a digital experience. It tries to be more human, more
• 13:06
  frictionless, doesn't require you to have any programming
• 13:08
  skills. You don't have to log into the net.
• 13:10
  Yeah. It's just seamless now.
• 13:12
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Okay. Well, I think this takes us sort
• 13:15
  of elegantly into the social web of the arts. Mhmm.
• 13:19
  Charlie Harding: I think
• 13:19
  Jason Oberholtzer: it's sort of the next very definite Right.
• 13:21
  Period here. And this is when our mash up DIY culture starts
• 13:24
  to bloom. Right. People are making things on YouTube.
• 13:28
  People are accustomed enough to pulling things off of Limewire
• 13:31
  Napster and Kazaa to get all of their references in one place
• 13:34
  and
• 13:35
  Charlie Harding: Sure.
• 13:35
  Jason Oberholtzer: The quality has improved somewhat on what
• 13:37
  you can find and so I think about Girl Talk.
• 13:47
  Charlie Harding: This is the time as even before Google as a
• 13:51
  motto was talking about the open web. They're like, we are an
• 13:55
  open company while other companies are closed. Like,
• 13:57
  there's still very much this open source culture that exists
• 14:00
  on the Internet, which does not exist.
• 14:01
  Jason Oberholtzer: And that also covers like mix tapes. Like, is
• 14:04
  the middle Lil Wayne's famous run becoming the best alive on
• 14:09
  the back of easy sampling and mix tapes and a general sense in
• 14:12
  culture that you no longer had to show up with your own studio
• 14:16
  album of your own beats in order to be a participant. You could
• 14:19
  just use other people's beats better. Mhmm.
• 14:22
  Charlie Harding: And you brought up the social web. I think this
• 14:24
  is a time when the sound of the Internet actually becomes more
• 14:27
  community niche and platform based. Charlie x c x comes from
• 14:31
  MySpace. Yeah. SoundCloud rap.
• 14:33
  Carly Rae Jepsen is in many ways owes her career to Justin Bieber
• 14:35
  tweeting about her. Yeah. Justin Bieber himself was made on
• 14:38
  YouTube. And contemporary artists like Rina Sallayama or
• 14:41
  Jacob Collier are YouTube first. And so these these platforms
• 14:44
  sort of start developing their own subcultures that make their
• 14:48
  own sounds and communities.
• 14:50
  I think there's less of a monoculture sound of the
• 14:53
  Internet as different platforms develop.
• 14:56
  Jason Oberholtzer: One of the people I had in my list here
• 14:57
  that I think is very interesting is Sonny John Moore. He was
• 15:02
  originally first to last, which I think is the sound of the
• 15:05
  MySpace emo Internet of this era.
• 15:08
  Charlie Harding: And
• 15:10
  Jason Oberholtzer: then was Skrillex. Even the name
• 15:13
  Charlie Harding: Skrillex sounds like the sound of AOL dial up
• 15:16
  against Skrillex. And the song like Bangarang. Not only did it
• 15:24
  help propel dubstep to become the predominant genre for a few
• 15:29
  years, it was the most jarring Internet y sounding Yeah.
• 15:34
  Timbres. The tones are so unpleasant and so unexpected and
• 15:40
  over the top.
• 15:41
  Like, those sounds feel like the experience of being on the
• 15:45
  Internet. Like, the Internet is this jarring unpleasant place.
• 15:48
  And by the way, it's also fun and exhilarating and you can't
• 15:51
  get off of it.
• 15:52
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Yeah. And I think it has so many of
• 15:54
  the signifiers of, Tamberly, what you described. It's an
• 15:58
  abrasive technology. It's courting of unpleasantness and
• 16:01
  joy at the same time.
• 16:03
  And like humorous sampling. It's it's kind
• 16:06
  Charlie Harding: of Right. Right. Just a perfect Oh my god.
• 16:08
  Yeah. Right.
• 16:09
  That silly YouTube clip which turns into this like horror
• 16:11
  moment, but it's actually some girl stacking cups that she's
• 16:14
  just done faster than any other person in the history. Yes. Oh
• 16:17
  my god.
• 16:20
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. Somewhere in the middle of this
• 16:22
  run, Kanye started sampling YouTube clips. And that feels to
• 16:25
  me like a wildly important moment for what it means to
• 16:28
  sound like the Internet.
• 16:30
  Charlie Harding: That there's a way of claiming authority by
• 16:32
  referencing user generated content.
• 16:35
  Jason Oberholtzer: Right.
• 16:35
  Charlie Harding: What a shift of power dynamics.
• 16:37
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yes. Absolutely. The other thing that
• 16:39
  jumped out to me when you were talking there is humor. There's
• 16:42
  humor and frivolity, which we haven't kind of like got into
• 16:45
  Charlie Harding: that much. Paranoid Android was not funny.
• 16:47
  Yeah. Apex Twin No. Is not that funny.
• 16:49
  Jason Oberholtzer: Is there funny music that's just funny
• 16:53
  that sounds like the Internet? So like early Lonely Island
• 16:57
  before they were SNL was 100%. An Internet viral phenomenon.
• 17:00
  But if you heard like dick in a box, out of context, would you
• 17:04
  be like, that sounds like the Internet. It's my dick in a box.
• 17:07
  The jokes are kinda Internet y, like where does that fall?
• 17:11
  Charlie Harding: This is the thing of the Internet becoming
• 17:12
  more software. Actually, the Internet just becomes culture.
• 17:15
  And so Yeah. I think as the Internet becomes a more seamless
• 17:18
  consumer experience, it has less of its own distinct sound that
• 17:22
  is tied to technology. We're no longer making films about the
• 17:26
  net.
• 17:27
  What's it gonna be? We gotta hack into these systems. Now
• 17:29
  we're making films about the future of AI and the
• 17:33
  interconnection between technology and and human spaces
• 17:36
  and cognition, things that we're fearing far off into the future.
• 17:39
  The Internet's kind of this, like, tame background thing
• 17:40
  that, like, maybe China stealing all of our data on TikTok. But
• 17:44
  yeah, we'll just live with it.
• 17:45
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. I think the final player here before we
• 17:48
  get back to the contemporary moment is Twee ness. The thing
• 17:54
  that always jumps to my mind is Zoe Deschanel
• 17:56
  Charlie Harding: Sure.
• 17:57
  Jason Oberholtzer: And Joseph Gordon Levitt in the early
• 17:59
  twenty tens. And something about that is YouTube based, is user
• 18:14
  generated, is vulnerable, is self produced, optimism of an
• 18:18
  Obama era, which is
• 18:20
  Charlie Harding: sort of
• 18:20
  Jason Oberholtzer: that sound feels like it came from the
• 18:23
  Internet. Does it sound like the Internet?
• 18:26
  Charlie Harding: Not anymore because Tweet at one point looks
• 18:29
  DIY. It looks like the signs that everybody hung in their
• 18:33
  homes from Etsy for a while before they became mass market
• 18:37
  in every Airbnb. The problem is that sound becomes the sound of
• 18:41
  corporate America. Basically, these sounds become safe. The
• 18:43
  sort of Twi ukulele music is akin to like Canva taking over
• 18:48
  Instagram, where all of a sudden everybody has access to these
• 18:52
  like kind of good design crafty tools and can make social
• 18:56
  movements into slide decks.
• 18:58
  And I I think I think that the corporatization of that sound
• 19:02
  really sort of neutered it of any power.
• 19:10
  Jason Oberholtzer: I wanna take you to hyperpop now. I wanna go
• 19:13
  by way of Vine and I wanna talk about Bill Wertz. And I wanna
• 19:17
  get us to hyperpop from there.
• 19:19
  Charlie Harding: I'm very curious because I my brain
• 19:20
  didn't go that direction.
• 19:21
  Jason Oberholtzer: The thing that I think is important about
• 19:23
  Vine is that it proved that you could make a community formed
• 19:29
  around snippets of primarily sound. And there's something
• 19:33
  important about developing a sonic shorthand that was very
• 19:37
  self referential and directly talking about Internet culture.
• 19:41
  Yeah. And especially, think Bill Wertz is like the apotheosis of
• 19:45
  self referential Internet music that is also pointing towards
• 19:51
  the harmonic intricacies that hyperpop is about to pick up and
• 19:55
  mainstream. Hello.
• 19:56
  I'm a piece of garbage. You know, if harmonies change every
• 20:00
  six seconds, like a vine changes every six seconds, can we keep
• 20:03
  your attention on the form of this song? To me, that's kind of
• 20:06
  like the hyper pop endeavor. What is love? Fruit.
• 20:09
  Charlie Harding: No. Bread. No.
• 20:10
  Jason Oberholtzer: Fruit and bread. Probably not. Is it a
• 20:11
  conversation?
• 20:17
  Charlie Harding: Yeah. I I I did not know this lineage. Thank you
• 20:20
  for educating me. But the sound is spot on. It's also got those
• 20:23
  sort of cheap, like, MIDI sampler tones.
• 20:27
  It's not trying to do the recreate the sounds of the
• 20:31
  perfect 1980 studio in the home. This is like acknowledging the
• 20:35
  limitations of the tools at hand.
• 20:37
  Jason Oberholtzer: And this is where I start to feel like video
• 20:40
  game culture matters and Yeah. Of course. Inserts itself as one
• 20:45
  of the languages you have to know to say that you know the
• 20:47
  Internet.
• 20:48
  Charlie Harding: That's because the development of video game
• 20:51
  music is intertwined with the development of digital
• 20:54
  synthesis. Right? Each system as they developed from Atari to NES
• 20:59
  to the Sega Genesis, you have these new chips that are able to
• 21:05
  go from like making like really ugly only square waves to maybe
• 21:09
  they can make like three different tones and eventually
• 21:10
  get FM synthesis. And so the music program for those games
• 21:15
  really sort of mimic the experience of the synthesis
• 21:17
  techniques that your Apex twins are are playing with.
• 21:25
  Jason Oberholtzer: Okay. So I passed us through Vine because
• 21:28
  I'm obsessed with Vine. But you you said, Charlie, that your
• 21:31
  brain took a different path to get to the present now. There's
• 21:34
  something you wanted to step back to. What path was that?
• 21:38
  Charlie Harding: For me, it all begins ten years ago in the
• 21:40
  creation of hyperpop, and specifically the label PC Music
• 21:46
  built by AG Cook and his larger community. With this really
• 21:49
  cheap looking digital artwork that could have been made as a
• 21:53
  MS Paint artwork. Yeah. And not solely the works of the sort of
• 21:58
  larger PC music label and community, but, you know, other
• 22:03
  extended artists like Arca, Sophie who's associated with
• 22:12
  this crew, start making music that is a nostalgic examining
• 22:18
  what the Internet has sounded like. And then not going to
• 22:21
  eleven, but going to like 11,000 Yeah.
• 22:23
  To be at the speed of the the Internet today. And so the video
• 22:28
  game sounds, the AOL dial up tones, all that Vine stuff
• 22:31
  you're just talking about. Unpleasant clangorous Yeah.
• 22:35
  Confusing.
• 22:36
  Jason Oberholtzer: So I think that about circles where we are.
• 22:40
  Who is the sound? What is the sound of the Internet next?
• 22:45
  Charlie Harding: I feel concerned about the future sound
• 22:47
  of the Internet.
• 22:48
  Jason Oberholtzer: Okay.
• 22:49
  Charlie Harding: Like, we we have been so distorted and
• 22:51
  disoriented. Can we go any further down that route? I don't
• 22:56
  know. I don't think so. I hope not.
• 22:58
  Jason Oberholtzer: I mean, what normally happens after these
• 23:00
  moments of excess? Isn't Pendulums. Order reestablished?
• 23:03
  Charlie Harding: Isn't that traditionalism? Like, and aren't
• 23:05
  we already hearing that? Like, the rise of country music that's
• 23:08
  happening right now? That's gonna be the next vibe. Just
• 23:11
  return to traditionalism.
• 23:12
  Jason Oberholtzer: Yeah. I'm struck with some irony. As I try
• 23:14
  to think about the extent to which I care about bringing AI
• 23:17
  music into this conversation, I'm struck by an irony that it
• 23:20
  seems like our progress in music that sounds like the Internet
• 23:23
  has been the human concern with making computerized music sound
• 23:28
  more and more like a computerized space, and continue
• 23:31
  to exceed the capabilities of an individual human's ability to
• 23:36
  achieve something, and to more and more fractured, and fractal,
• 23:39
  and wild, and painful dynamics. And then we are now introducing
• 23:43
  AI music
• 23:44
  Charlie Harding: Mhmm.
• 23:45
  Jason Oberholtzer: That is attempting to do the absolute
• 23:47
  opposite. Mhmm. Trying to simulate a traditional human
• 23:52
  output if possible.
• 23:53
  Charlie Harding: We've entered a moment where I just did a four
• 23:57
  part miniseries about Daft Punk on Switched on Pop. And I
• 24:00
  realized, of course, Daft Punk had to blow themselves up
• 24:03
  because the whole image of the robot and their vocoder voice
• 24:08
  was about the fears and anxieties of technology from the
• 24:11
  nineteen seventies. And our fears of anxieties about music
• 24:14
  and art and our place in this world have so transformed that
• 24:20
  the image of these two robots kind of just turns into a joke.
• 24:24
  Now, it's like, does this AI become sentient and make better
• 24:27
  music than any human ever has? Does it become our overlord at
• 24:30
  the same time?
• 24:30
  It's a whole new set of fears and worries and how are we going
• 24:33
  to respond to that? Yeah. Once it starts really playing in
• 24:37
  commerce and messing with cultural expectations much more
• 24:40
  significantly on scale, then I think we'll see some very
• 24:43
  interesting art being created as a response.
• 24:52
  Jason Oberholtzer: Charlie, thank you so much. This was an
• 24:54
  absolute blast.
• 24:55
  Charlie Harding: It was a joy. Thank you for inviting me.
• 24:56
  Goodbye.
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: That is the archival episode we have for you today.
• 25:05
  If you'd like to listen to the original upload with news and
• 25:09
  interstitials, you can find the link in the show notes. Never
• 25:13
  Post is primarily listener funded. So if you enjoyed this
• 25:17
  segment, please consider becoming a member at neverpo.st.
• 25:20
  You can gain access to an ad free member feed while helping
• 25:24
  us keep the show going.
• 25:26
  Never Post's producers are Audrey Evans, Georgia Hampton,
• 25:29
  and the mysterious doctor first name last name. Our senior
• 25:32
  producer is Hans Buto. Our executive producer is Jason
• 25:35
  Oberholzer, and the show's host, that's me, is Mike Rugnetta.
• 25:39
  Never Post is a production of Charts and Leisure and is
• 25:42
  distributed by Radiotopia.