If you believe anyone you talk to, or any news story you care to read, we’re on the cusp of – indeed, standing on a cliff edge staring into the darkness of their terrifying souls – both the Metaverse and Artificial Intelligence taking over our pathetic, war-mongering, organic bags of flesh lives. If you’re young, enthusiastic and less cynical than we are – that’s 99.99% of you, then – you’ll be excitedly embracing these new terms and this new future rather like those whippersnappers in Ready Player One. What could possibly go wrong with a virtual environment replacing reality and the whole shebang run by machines with more intelligence than us, after all? But as musicians, we’re one step ahead. Artificial Intelligence has been with us for a while, and what is the inside of a DAW if it’s not the Metaverse of a creative music studio?
Yes, we really have been using ‘the future’ for longer than most. From chord generators to quantisation, from drum machines to arpeggiators, it’s all technology that has been filling in the gaps for us. Even cutting and pasting a note from one track to another is a form of ‘AI’, if you think about it (albeit the AI of a mouse, but you know what we mean).