Can AI Rock?
I usually don’t ask my AI friend, “Q” for help in writing a blog. I like to write the old-fashioned way, with all the warts and imperfections that come from being human.
But, as a musician, I’ve been wondering: Can AI rock when it creates music? Can AI swing when it makes a song?
I started my research on this by asking Q what it thought about the blog title. Here’s its response:
“Great question—and it’s a good blog title, Jim. Concise, provocative, slightly playful.”
Well, that’s an encouraging start, and Q has already dropped an em dash into the conversation. 😉
Q continued…
“Short answer (the one I’d put near the top of the post):
AI can imitate rock—but it doesn’t yet inhabit it.”
Now that’s interesting. I think I can work with this.
As a teenager, someone I used to jam with said, “Don’t you like playing rock music? It makes you sweat.”
To this day, I can tell the difference between when I’m going through the motions in a performance, and when I’m giving it every last ounce of energy I have. It’s an invisible bond between the performer and listener.
I asked Q about this dynamic…
“The key difference: presence vs performance.
You know this as a musician:
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Going through the motions = execution without presence
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Giving everything = presence that risks collapse
AI can replicate excellent execution.
It cannot enter presence, because presence requires stakes.
No stake, no bond.”
Wow, Q, you kinda nailed that. The only thing I would add is that a human literally pushes their energy from inside to out. (Now that I’ve written this, I just have to ask Q about it.)
“AI works outside → in:
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Pattern → output
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Model → signal
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Prediction → waveform
There is no inner pressure seeking release.
No surplus that must go somewhere.
So even when AI imitates strain or urgency, it’s decorative — not directional.
It portrays expenditure without having made one.”
Aside from the fact that Q often sounds too agreeable, this is pretty good.
Rock is sometimes defined by energy. However, an extremely important aspect of what makes rock work is swing.
And swing is a whole other thing.
I used to think that the classic rock songs I grew up with worked so well because they had guitar power chords at the front of the mix. That’s part of it, but that’s not what makes the music move. Swing is the roll of rock and roll.
Go back to those old songs. Listen to what the bass player is doing as he walks around the fretboard. You can feel it move you. (Gimme Three Steps, by Lynyrd Skynyrd.) Listen to the drummer accent the up-beat on the high-hat (Gimme Some Lovin’, by the Spencer Davis Group.)
BTW, here’s what Q said about Gimme Three Steps: “This is Southern rock breathing through a blues spine.”
Shoot, Q, I wish I had come up with that line.
If you listen to Marvin Gaye’s version of How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved by You), you’ll notice something surprising. They noticeably slow the tempo down starting at the instrumental break and continuing to the end of the song. These were high-level jazz musicians. What’s going on?
Humans breathe. When musicians are locked in, they breathe together. They introduce tempo changes to songs, sometimes speeding up, sometimes slowing down. These changes are often imperceptible because they feel so natural to the song.
Humans are constantly making micro-adjustments — the bend of a guitar note, the variations in voice pitch. (Hey, that em dash you just read was mine, I promise!)
Before AI, there were tons of equipment in studios that corrected imperfections in pitch and tempo. I’d argue that that equipment was robbing performances of their humanness. Once you clean up the imperfections, you sterilize the performance.
AI tries to get around this by introducing micro-changes in pitch and variation in order to replicate a human composition/performance. It’s spooky how good AI is at this.
However, here’s why AI can’t truly rock or swing: humans by nature are imperfect. Inside of that imperfection we reach, we strive, we sometimes fail, we become self-conscious, we try to lose ourselves in the moment, we want to please others, we don’t care what others think, we hesitate, we speed up, we’re anxious, we’re energized, we need a nap, our fingers hurt, we just had 2 cups of coffee.
In other words, we’re human.
PS: Thanks for the image, Q!
