Frankie S.
2022 December 4
Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University
Who would have thought that these two meaningless words could strike such a profound and poetic unity. I have spent
my entire life describing flavors as textures, colors as feelings, songs as shades, just to shake things up. I don’t
have synesthesia (I don’t think–though I always wanted it), but I have never come across research like that
mentioned in the creative writing / AI video. The unity and sameness of all humans to recognize a shape as a sonic
entity gave me chills. And what’s crazier is that it made sense to me. I looked at those meaningless shapes and
thought, yeah that sharp one is totally kiki. I was amazed.
This research reminds me of the project that I worked on last year. We built an app that asks users to upload a
visual representation of how audio makes them feel to supplement the experience of deaf and hard of hearing folks.
In this process, we assumed that you could convey something unspeakable in art that might give a taste of the audio
experience. And to our surprise the people we tested it on did have an experience of delight in trying to imagine
what the person on the other side of the screen had been thinking of.
Ideas like this give me hope that everything ties back together in some harmony. That we might all be a part of some
sameness that supersedes the details that are so easy to get caught up in. That so often tears us apart. This was
one of my realizations when watching the solar eclipse. Everything was one. The sun, the moon, the animals, the
people, the cheering. Everything felt united in that one spectacle that zoomed us out into the greater picture of
life and the cosmos.
Switching gears a bit to talk about humans in the loop and AI, I have become less afraid (to some extent) of the
replacing of humans as a result of AI–especially as tools for art making with AI become more available to the
general public. My friends and I have spent many hours typing in niche requests for generative AI visual and written
art, but the fun comes not from the beauty but rather the prompt generation and the surprise of it all. The art
feels somewhat dead–there was no lamenting artist with a conviction to share something with me, there was just a 10
second loading screen and four options of some strange sentence we had generated not a minute earlier. The value of
art comes from what we share with each other and how we feel while making it–I don’t suppose that AI can take that
away from us, in the loop or not. So that at least is good.
My one looming concern though, is that capitalism often has it’s own agenda for what is right and good, and I worry
that our commitment to what is good and true will not overpower the plug and chug nature of numbers, and profit
margins, and the rest of that. I try to hope regardless.