Jean-Michel Jarre: 'With immersive reality, music takes back the spatial dimension'
"It's a great time for creatives, within a few years we have had so many tools available to express our creativity as it had never happened in the past." Jean-Michel Jarre is an optim. We met the composer, performer and producer, one of the fathers of electronic music, at the OnMetaverse Summit, an international conference organized by AnotheReality and Fiera Milano, dedicated to digital transformation and the future of innovation, in which he talked about new creative models and immersive technologies, but also (the lack) of European innovation policy, control, emotions.
"The emotions, the sensations have not changed over the centuries, the tools have changed, and a lot. But an artist still has to arouse and share these emotions, whatever tool he uses." And now the 'equipment' is the immersive reality, the metaverse, the artificial intelligence.
Optimistic, therefore, not techno-optimistic though: "Technology is neutral, rules are needed to govern it. They are the rules that give access to freedom."
And Europe is ahead from this point of view. The world looks at Europeans as those who set the rules. The same will have to happen for generative AI. In the case of copyright, for example, "You need an algorithm that is able to trace the sources used by the AI, and then a new system that gives the authors of those sources fair compensation. The concept of intellectual property comes from continental Europe and authors from all over the world look to us in defence of their rights."
"Without being naive [nive, ed]: every technology is somehow disruptive, creativity is also a little 'stealed' from others. A somewhat provocative example? Picasso drew heavily on primitive African art."
But to the Lyon musician the role of controller is tight, "Europe must regain possession of technology, in areas such as the web 3.0. we must create a European tech ecosystem, we cannot be tow of the USA and Asia, and we must also take control of the music distribution tools. Impossible? I wouldn't say, let's think of Airbus: when it was born 40 years ago no one thought it could compete with the American Boeing, and now American Airlines uses Airbus. Why couldn't you do the same in some areas of tech? There are the resources, the skills, the market. I am surprised that few European rulers and politicians think so."
Aren't you afraid of new technologies? Many fear that they will take our work away from us, when they may not, even, that they may endanger humanity itself.
"You don't have to be afraid, it's not because I use the laptop or the synthesizer that the violin has disappeared, in fact there are more people playing the violin today than 200 years ago. At the same time we must not be naive, we must be aware of what we are doing, the tools we use and why we use them. And - I say again - we need the rules."
"Don't be naive" is a phrase that recurs several times in our interview, "I mean it doesn't make sense to see everything beautiful or everything ugly, you also have to be aware of reality, we don't live in a fairy tale, we have to document ourselves."
Jarre, a pioneer of electronics since 1976, when his album Oxygene was released, which sold over 85 million copies worldwide, is an optimist pour cause: his enthusiasm for the possibilities of musical art today is the result of a deep knowledge of music but also of new instruments (from the recorder with which music was once processed, "as my masters Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer did", to the metaverse and immersive reality.
"I believe that the latter is a real revolution in the field of music, it allows us to break the barrier of space. Although almost everyone who deals with the metaverse mainly talk about vision, in reality the really immersive sense is hearing. The sound is all around us, always, at 360 degrees. But so far the music has been enjoyed in a frontal way, even stereophony is. In the concerts the orchestra, the interpreter are in front of us. And this is a handicap, which we have also somehow self-imposed: very few have tried to break this spatial limit, even from a compositional point of view. The real change given by virtual and immersive reality technology is the breaking of this barrier. Finally we can play 360 degrees, as is the case in reality: in a city or a forest the sound comes from all sides."
Doesn't it seem like a paradox that with all these incredible technological advances the quality of music has actually deteriorated compared to 15-20 years ago? The use is increasingly done via TV, computer or smartphone, which have a really poor musical performance.
“I think the day the MP3 was unveiled was a black day in the history of music. However, I think that the new generations will have access to better quality music. In music festivals, the playback systems are now very sophisticated, electric cars are becoming pocket auditoriums, headphones and earphones are getting better and better: we are returning to give importance to the quality of the sound, which has been a bit neglected in recent years".
Speaking of cars, how is the experience with Renault for producing the sounds of their electric cars?
“Extremely interesting, there's a double challenge, to go from the noise emitted by the physical movement of the engine to a digital sound emitted by a small speaker. And then create an audible sound, for safety reasons, but that does not contribute to increasing the noise pollution in which we are all immersed. And then there's the psychological side, for example for us the power of a car is intrinsically linked to the noise it makes."
In short, these are really exciting times for an 'optimist of reason' like Jean-Michel Jarre.
Source:
https://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/20 ... 16456/amp/