"AI Music" Isn't New: Raymond Scott Invented It 60 Years Ago
Scott and His Electronium Give Us Clues to How Things Will Work Out This Time (& DEVO's Mark Mothersbaugh, Who Owns It, Shares His Perspectives)
Raymond Scott – a name you likely don’t know. I didn’t until recently. Yet he is one of the most important and successful composers and bandleaders of the 20th Century. He was also a deeply entrepreneurial inventor who built elaborate machines that created some of the first electronic sounds and music.
One of Scott’s machines, called the “Electronium,” created music on its own simply via prompts. Sounds familiar? It certainly sounds eerily like our generative AI discussions today. But Scott did this well over 60 years ago, and music legends like Motown founder Berry Gordy – a “formula man,” according to Motown’s head of operations, Guy Costa - courted Scott and his Electronium to generate new musical cues to more predictably create new hit songs.
Scott from his youngest days, in the words of his Electronium patent application, was obsessed with the “Artistic Collaboration Between Man and Machine.” Yes, he worked with, and led, top singers and musicians of the day and hosted his own major shows on radio and television. But his real love was electronics – and the precision and exactitude they could bring to music. Whereas jazz celebrates improvisation that makes each experience utterly bespoke, Scott celebrated absolute perfection in what he called “descriptive jazz” – the goal of replicating musical performances completely without error. He built his Electronium with that perfection in mind - with the lofty goal of taking human “work” out of the hit-making process.
Scott didn’t seek to eliminate the human element entirely. But he certainly sought to bring certainty to hit songwriting ideation, which is otherwise a “hit or miss” human craft of inspiration. And here’s the thing – his Electronium worked! Gordy was so enamored with it that he bought it from Scott to raise the “hit rate” of his hit-making factory (he named Scott director of Motown’s electronic music research and development department at the time).
Yet despite making a fortune over the course of his life – and being the toast of the entertainment town throughout much of it – Scott died in relative squalor and obscurity, with his Electronium literally destined for the trash heap. Songs were made (although there is no firm evidence that Motown used any of them), but something was missing – just as it was in Scott’s own life, as told in the fascinating “The Last Archive” podcast that introduced me to Scott. That something seemed to be the ingredient of humanity - the “mess” of it all (human creativity). There simply is something of the human craft of artistry – no matter how imperfect it can be – that generates the most impactful creative works and makes them transcendent.
I’ve tackled this subject myself several times in TheWrap in the context of AI, and Scott’s lessons have relevance to today’s discussions of generative AI and the Arts. “To Err Is Human” was the title of one of my recent pieces, where I write that it is AI’s precision that makes it decidedly non-human. “Human creativity will never be completely overtaken by AI precisely because of its flaws. It’s mistakes. Those ‘incorrect’ elements that give human works their soul, their connection to us all who are flawed and fallible.” Master music producer and legend Rick Rubin agrees. His recently published book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” tells that same story. AI can replicate. But can AI really originate (as in creating something that is truly “new”)? Without knocking the power and potential usefulness of AI as a tool with the Arts (about which I have also written frequently), I think not.
Scott remains a beloved figure in the music world. Tech-forward superstar group Gorillaz based their song “Man Research (Clapper)” on an Electronium-created hook, and electronic pioneers like Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO count themselves devotees. That pull is so strong, in fact, that Mothersbaugh owns Scott’s Electronium. He purchased it from Scott’s wife shortly after his death in 1994. I asked Mothersbaugh what motivated him to buy it, and he told me that he felt an almost existential need to save it from otherwise “going into the dump.” He couldn’t let that happen to something that represented so much to him in terms of what he holds dear – being “a conceptualist,” inventor and pioneer in music experimentation. “That’s why I identify with him. I could see the same thing happening to my archives.”
Mothersbaugh has yet to find a way to make the Electronium work again, at least not yet, so we’ll never know the “music writing machine’s” ultimate promise to achieve Scott’s goals. But Mothersbaugh definitely sees parallels with Scott’s quest and generative AI music discussions of today. In that light, I asked Mothersbaugh whether he believes AI generated music threatens the human act of creativity. He answered it this way. “I think AI will match or surpass humans eventually. It’s not even interesting to guess. But it will be fun to see what happens. I’m not afraid of it.”
For me, I’m not so sure. I don’t fear AI. But I choose to believe that only we fallible humans carry the special ingredient necessary to make music and art truly original and transcendent. In other words, I take solace from the story of Raymond Scott and his Electronium.