A couple of years ago, the digital artist Nimrod Shapira collaborated with a team from the digital technology company Oracle to compose a song using artificial intelligence algorithms. The technical process actually was a hybrid of sorts, requiring separate AI systems for melody and lyrics. What’s more, although the resulting song, called Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears, was described as “created by Artificial Intelligence”, the AI tools actually only produced disconnected snippets of text and melody. Humans were required to stitch these bits together to create something that could pass for music.
The result, even with extensive human doctoring, was musically unpleasant and conceptually incoherent. “Tears will always have wet eyes”, the song babbles. “There’s no life without your life in misery.”
What does this mean? It means nothing, of course. The song is just random bits of syntax and patterns of noise belched out by a rule-following machine, edited together by people with no goal in mind other than to create the illusion of an artificial intelligence that is capable of music creation.
The AI routines had never experienced anything at all. They hadn’t paid their dues. They had no right to sing the blues.
Was this creation even music? Not according to the emotional perspective of the Arab concept of tarab.
The word tarab refers to a style of Arabic music, but also to the feeling that is stirred within a person who is listening to emotionally evocative music. “Tarab isn’t just a form of music, but a state of being,” writes Yasmin El-Beih.
Part of what makes tarab special is that it doesn’t refer to a static experience, but creation and sensation that is moving and changing in a purposeful way. Michael Ibrahim of the National Arab Orchestra describes the feeling of tarab as the “uplifting the listener from his or her current state” to “take them somewhere else on an emotional journey.”
An authentic song is the communication of a transformation. Lyrics and tones each have grammars that only make sense with a particular direction. Play a good song backwards, and it will usually sound like garbage. A poem read backwards evokes only puzzlement.
The musical journey of tarab that Ibrahim refers to is an emotional pilgrimage, from one state of feeling to another. It’s a purposeful movement, telling the story of how a person can shift from one emotional truth into another.
Tarab is the emotion that comes when we feel that purposeful transformation of our hearts in song. “Isn’t moving the listener why we make music, after all?” Ibrahim asks.
Yes, that’s why music is made, and that’s why Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears is not music. Only when artificial intelligence becomes capable of feeling suffering rather than merely imitating it will a computer be able to craft a true song.
Perhaps the emotion of tarab is about something more than just what happens in music. Perhaps tarab shows us the difference between genuine human experience and the digital imitation game, in all aspects of life.
