Woman of Culture

Discover untold stories from the world of culture with the host and her distinguished guests. Mira T. Sundara Rajan is a Canadian author, musician, and renowned legal expert. She is a great-granddaughter of visionary Indian national poet, C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921), whose own, untold story inspired her passionate advocacy for art and artists. Executive Producer and Host: Mira T. Sundara Rajan Music Credits: Theme Song: "Melting Aura" is composed by Carnatic violinist, Sangeetha Kalanidhi A Kanyakumari, and arranged By Raghavasimhan Sankaranarayanan. Performed in Octaves by: Guru A Kanyakumari, Kalaimamani Embar S Kannan, V Sanjeev, Anuthama Murali, Raghavasimhan Sankaranarayanan, Sayee Rakshith Live Engineered, Mixed and Mastered by Raghavasimhan Sankaranarayanan Incidental music: Percussion by ghatam maestro V. Suresh tabla maestro Bickram Ghosh in a spectacular "jugalbandhi" brings together North and South Indian classical traditions, symbolizing Indian cultural unity. The full performance is available at Drums of India, Bickram Ghosh on Tabla and V. Suresh On Ghatam: https://youtu.be/7RwbLpI1Q4E?si=R97ZiKI-WoZtICau. Subscribe to Bickram Ghosh's YouTube channel.

"Who Fights with the Sword Dies with the Sword": An Artist's Perspective on AI - part 2, with Ela Orleans, audiovisual artist and composer 07/11/2025

"Who Fights with the Sword Dies with the Sword": An Artist's Perspective on AI - part 1, with Ela Orleans, audiovisual artist and composer 07/11/2025

Colors of India: India's Textile Heritage - with S. Ahalya, founder of Kanakavalli 10/14/2024

Subramania Bharati's 103rd Anniversary: Mahakavi Bharati as Musician and Composer - with Ghatam Maestro Suresh Vaidyanathan 09/12/2024

After Alice Munro: What Happens When Good Writers are Bad People? - Episode 2 with Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe 08/03/2024

"Predestined for Failure:" The Writing Life - Episode 1 of 2 with Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe 07/19/2024

"Predestined for Failure:" The Writing Life - Episode 1 of 2 with Canadian writer Guy Vanderhaeghe SUMMARY KEYWORDS writer, writing, write, work, thought, creative writing, story, point, good, people, reader, canada, attempt, literary, students, craft, person, kipling, literature, describing 00:00 Welcome to Woman of Culture, I'm Mira T Sundara Rajan. Join me and my distinguished guests to discover untold stories from the world of culture. 00:47 In recent years, writers from Canada have become increasingly prominent on the international literary scene. Not only are they winning literary awards, including the Booker and the Nobel Prizes, but they also create incredibly influential, and even prescient works like Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and 1985 novel that seems to predict the current direction of US politics. What's the secret? How did Canada become so good at making writers? My guest, writer Guy Vanderhaeghe, shares a wonderful and unique perspective on this history. One of the most prominent and celebrated Canadian authors today, Guy has been active in writing and publishing for more than 40 years. His first book, the short story collection, Man Descending, was published in 1984, and won the Governor General's Award for Fiction Canada's leading literary prize, an almost unheard of distinction for a first book. It was his first of three such awards so far. Guy’s latest book, the novel, August into Winter, was just published in 2021. In part one of this interview, I asked Guy if he would tell us about his experiences as a writer, what it meant to be an aspiring writer in and from Canada, and how he has seen Canadian literature evolve during his career so far, a period of dramatic social change in Canada and around the world. Not surprisingly, Guy had a wealth of ideas and stories to share about the challenges he faced as a young, aspiring writer, the changing face of literature in Canada, Canada's place in a post-colonial world order, and, of course, the impact of technology on the written word. Above all, Guy offers rich insights into the craft of writing that will be sure to fascinate writers and readers alike. Here is the inspiring and impressive Guy Vanderhaeghe, a writer and teacher of integrity on the world that made him and that he has helped to make. My profound thanks to you, Guy, for showing me how exciting, challenging, unpredictable, competitive, cynical, yet ultimately humane the world of literature can be, and how much hope, with a stubborn tenacity perhaps peculiar to the trade, writers continue to hold out for the future. 03:47 Well, Guy Vanderhaeghe, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you on the podcast today and to have this opportunity to interview you. And that is no exaggeration. I never thought that I would be speaking to you and having the opportunity to ask you some questions about your very interesting history as a writer and the times that you've lived through so far. So thank you so much for agreeing to do this, 04:12 You can't see me but I'm blushing right now. 04:19 Fantastic. Well, I'm going to cause you more reason for embarrassment here just by saying, but I absolutely have to point out that you've been a leading figure in Canadian literature for a long time for as long as I can remember. And again, it's a thrill for me, partly because I grew up with your books at home. So you've been a presence in my life for a long time, and you've won so many extraordinary honors as a writer. I'm not going to try to list them all here. But that does lead nicely into the icebreaker that I thought I would start with today, which is just to say that, you know when we're when we're having the opportunity to talk with some When as successful as yourself, there's a tendency to think that your career was predestined. And of course, it all started out. And it made perfect sense from the beginning. But I know that's often not the case. And I imagined, you must have faced some interesting challenges when you were first trying to get started as a writer. So would you like to tell us a little bit about that how you developed an interest in writing and maybe what role you feel your background as a Saskatchewan native has also played in your career development. Sure. 05:30 I did not grow up in a bookish or literate, particularly literate household. I was the first person in my family to get a university degree. But from the moment I went to school, I was obsessed with reading. And when I say that, I have to also say that there was no library in town. And the school burned down the year before I started, and with it, whatever library was in the school at that time, and when the school was rebuilt, any money that was left over after construction went to textbooks. So I was always attempting to find something to read, which was often things like comic books, or any book that I could get my hands on. So in that sense, I think probably my background is somewhat unusual for a writer. But I did have a passion for reading and even writing at a young age. My grandmother was the little town seamstress, and she did alterations for the menswear store. And she was my babysitter because my mother worked when I was a child and I would sit beside the sewing machine with a notebook and pester her as I was writing my stories asking her how to spell words. I think it's a really annoying, annoying child, particularly since you are probably too young to have ever been exposed to classics illustrated comic books. But they were… 07:20 Unfortunately… 07:22 …so called literature that teachers and some parents wanted children to read. But it appeared in a kind of digestible form with pictures and they had everything from Hamlet to John Taylor to cities to read your Kipling's Kim, all of these classic comic books. I read Caesar's commentaries in classic comic books as bizarre as that sounds. So I was driving. I remember driving my grandmother crazy, because I was inventing names that I thought sounded Roman, because I was writing a random story. So, you know, I was, say things to her like, how do you spell auditorium? Right? Or gymnasium? Or what? So that, I guess, that was the beginning, then that sat on the back burner for a long time, I remained a reader, but I didn't write. And when I went to university, and I became a graduate student, I was studying history. A local literary magazine began, it was the first literary magazine in Saskatchewan, it was called grain. I read the first issue, and I wrote a short story that I submitted for the second issue, which they accepted and published. And that got me writing again, not writing habitually. But I was writing and, and I had always harbored kind of a dream, I suppose to be a writer, I used to read the biography of the writers in the back of the classics, illustrated comic books, to detect whether I saw some sort of common feature in their backgrounds. And, you know, I've just 10, nine or 10 years old, and trying to figure out what I needed to do to become a writer. So I did have the ambition for a long time. And after I graduated from university, I had a period of unemployment. And I started writing virtually every day. faced a lot of rejection. Oh, gosh, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think writers nurture their rejections and what, like what people had said to them, 10:04 They’d almost need to. 10:05 So it was a time in Canada when even the last name Vanderhaeghe seemed unusual. And I remember someone writing to me and saying to me that they thought that perhaps, if I wanted to write, I should attempt to write in my mother tongue. So, I remembered that, obviously, because I've just recounted it to you. But to become a writer, takes a long time. And it takes a lot of effort. And it takes doggedness. I used to say to my creative writing students that when I was in my early 20s, I had two friends. And the three of us confess the dirty little secret that we wanted to be writers. Two of them, I think, were much more talented than I was. They were more natural writers than I was. But I was more dog and like, I kept on working at it, and I kept on working on craft. And I think that makes a huge difference. Just a sort of commitment to, to learning how to do this thing you want to do. I think many people who think about writing think that they term inspiration that somehow that's the propellant for all writing, at least in longer forms. I don't think inspiration carries you very far. It's doggedness and stick to it-iveness. And a willingness to accept your day to day failures. Right, and then get up the next morning and say, the mistakes I made yesterday, my duty is to attempt to fix them today. And if I can't fix them today, my duty is to attempt to fix them the day after. And just keep at it. 12:24 Yeah, this is, I'm just aware that I'm sort of receiving some pearls of wisdom from you here. So I'm just listening very carefully. You know, because it's incredible the perspective that you're offering, and also the advice for anyone who has any interest, I think, in doing a good piece of writing, you know, this is this is really valuable. 12:44 I mean, I think that in many ways, I was not predestined for success, I was predestined for failure. Why? By that, I mean, like, if anybody looked at my antecedents, my background, even what I studied at university, they would likely have thought, or at least suspected, that I didn't have what everybody thinks writers need to have, or what writers should be. 13:29 Yeah, listening to your narration of your background, I mean, it is really eye opening, I have to say, I find it both inspiring and very moving. Actually, that, you know, to think of you as a, as a child, you know, somehow you had this, this passion, as you quite rightly describe it that is almost inexplicable, in a way. 13:51 Well, for instance, my father was functionally illiterate. He could, you know, he could sort of pick his way through a newspaper, but he couldn't write a check. And so when I was a child, he would take me with him to write checks for him. But my father never, never read a word I wrote. And this is not a complaint. It's, that was just the circumstances. My mother on the other hand, she was incredibly sort of encouraging in terms of like school, and getting an education. And my mother had aspirations that she couldn't fulfill. And I was an only child, and a lot of them when I say pushed on to me, that that sounds harsh, right? It wasn't harsh, but she, she was my encouragement. You know, my father would have preferred if if I had had stayed home in Esther. Hey, See, worked at the mind. And maybe did a little bit of farming with him because he did both things he he farmed, and any work done in mind. I think he would have preferred that. But I knew I knew at a very early age, that was not for me. And I don't know why I knew that. 15:21 Well, that's the mystery. You know, and I hope, if you haven't already done so, I don't think you have, but I hope you'll consider writing your memoirs. At some point, 15:31 I don't think I'll ever write a memoir, though I have, in lectures and talks, actually talked about these things about my past, especially when I'm talking to other writers. Because people who want to write are often in search of the key that they think is going to unlock it for them. And I don't believe that that key exists. That what makes any writer is the desire to write, I used to tell my creative writing students, do you want to be a writer? Or do you want to write because many people think of writer as this being of some kind, that is surrounded by whatever word you want to apply, none of which are true, some sort of glamour, some sort of prestige, some sort of wisdom, or anything else. So a lot of people think of becoming a writer as becoming a figure of some kind. Right? Whereas I don't believe you get very far thinking that way. You'd be you actually, what gets you to where you might want to go is devoting yourself to the act of writing, and the craft of writing. 17:08 Yeah, I mean, you started out all of this by contrasting your situation with that of your roommates. And you said, you said some very interesting things there, you said that you thought they may have had more natural talent versus your own doggedness. That's a really interesting thing to say. And I'm not entirely sure what it means because I think, you know, from what you're describing, you had that, that spark in you, that kept you going. I mean, that's a form of, of talent, too. But your point is well taken about the kind of approach, one would need to take, you know, to make this a success. And I don't mean that in a career sense, but in terms of, to make the act of writing a success. 17:54 I mean, one of the things is that often, writing that looks effortless on the page is only won by great effort. Yeah, of course, writing and revising and rewriting and struggling to find not only what you want to say, but how to say it. And there are people who say that they want to be writers, but that doesn't interest them very much. What interests them is, is what they would call the idea. 18:32 This is so true about so many things, but perhaps especially this one, because that that work that you're describing, that involves, that's a kind of mining, I guess, an internal process of mining, and discovering and self-discovery, as well as, you know, actually conveying that discovery to your reader, to another person. 18:56 Like, what's a light to that? Unfortunately, I'm sort of like reviewing my past and working with other writers. And I always used to tell them don't, don't calculate. Right? What you need to do is write what interests you rather than what you think would interest somebody else. Because if you're actually not interested in what you're writing, it's going to show, it's going to be evident. And, and it tempts, you know, to, even at the simplest level, those people who decide that they are going to write something that is like something else that has been successful. By the time they've got that, that thing written, that is modeled on the thing that was successful, something new is successful. Right. So you're constantly chasing down something that you can't catch. It's like a dog chasing it, chasing a car. Dog;s not going to catch the car. 20:13 And maybe the worst part of that is that the dog doesn't know it. 20:19 Exactly. It's true, true of human beings, too, right? But the pursuit of things that you don't know, you ought not to be pursuing. And I understand that, I mean, that's part of ambition, right? And to do anything, you're going to make mistakes. I'm not saying that you rule out every possibility, and whatever you're doing. The only thing is, is that I think that, that what needs to be the focus of the work, or the meat in the nut is what you can really commit yourself to. And if you don't do that, wholeheartedly, and passionately, you're not going to get very far. When I first started writing, and this is the last example I'll give, I would say, at least in literary magazines, the ruling orthodoxy was post- modernism. And I would get rejections because I was writing something that looked to most literary editors, as old hat. And not actually, as they would have said, like, pushing literature forward, or attempting to engage with the newness of fiction, like making it new. But I read postmodern work, I could appreciate it. But I wasn't interested in writing it. What I was interested in doing was writing what I thought of as a kind of realism that on the surface, was, I mean, I used to make the argument that that of course, realism is not documentary. It's edited experience. And within the editing of that experience, what you attempt to do is reveal something of, of, of substance that transcends the dailiness of our life. I mean, even at the simplest level, dialogue is not really the way people speak, or choppy, no. Okay. So it's not reportage, good dialogue, operates as if you expect your characters to say interesting things, make interesting revelations, and to guide the reader to a place or a point of view, that will surprise them. That's your hope. Okay. And post modernism can do that, or magic realism can do that, and so can realism, all the different literary forms that you can imagine, have, in my opinion, basically the same potential. And that potential is some form of transcendence. 23:33 Absolutely. I mean, I am thinking about a couple of things as I'm listening to you, you know. One is that a lot of what you're describing to me does involve, you know, an important degree of internal clarity, which I think is, is probably not something that most of us are born with, it's something that we have to achieve also as a process of work. You know, that's, that's why I was saying you need to, you need to do the interior or the internal work in order to, to find out, you know, and I do think that I myself, think of life as a process of discovery. You know, that's, that's what keeps it interesting. And if we were sort of born and knew everything, I mean, I'm not even sure what that would look like. I think I think you're right and pretty boring. And a lot of other negative adjectives could come in there as well. But in terms of, of discovering that inner, that inner commitment, discovering the things that are important to you, that you really do want to write about and how you think you want to tell your story. What are the what are the words, what are the sentences that you want to use? I mean, I think all of these questions are are a key part of the process. But to me, what you're describing is very individual. You know, it's, it's, it's about the process of developing an individual vision. And I'm just curious about what that means in the, in the context of the environment that we're living where I think my own sense is we seem to be moving away from what is really individual, or honestly, for that matter really diverse. And towards sort of more homogenized visions of how things should be how even how things should be done. I mean, I'd love to hear your thoughts on creative writing programs, you know, which now are our, I think, by many people consider to be prerequisites for careers and writing. And I choose that phrase carefully. Yeah. So how can you? How can you talk about this very real, authentic process that you're describing, in the context that we live in today? 26:03 Well, I suppose that that I was always something of a renegade in terms of teaching creative writing. A bit of an outlier. Now, what I always granted was that the only thing that you can teach his craft, or at least it's the only thing that you can make people aware of his craft. 26:29 Can I interrupt you just momentarily to say that, I'd love for you to talk about that, too, whenever you're ready to, because you, you commented on that. And you said that, you know, we have to learn how to write and how to write well, but you didn't talk about too much about how we might do that. So I would very much like to hear your thoughts on that as well. 26:51 I can I can give an example perhaps. Perfect. What I used to get students to do was an exercise in point of view. And what I would say I want you to write the same scene, and the first person point of view, then I would like you to write the same scene from an omniscient point of view, the way a 19th century novelist would have written, I'd like you to write that scene also from a third person limited point of view, which is very close to a first person point of view. What are the changes that you can detect between all of these different versions of writing the same scene? That, you know, I used to tell students that the most important choice that you're likely to make at least in an... /episode/index/show/e91039c3-2a58-4780-896c-91c7ad725929/id/32220822

Was Shakespeare a woman – and does it matter? - with Elizabeth Winkler, journalist, book critic, and author of "Shakespeare Was A Woman and Other Heresies" 07/19/2024

Robert Burns and Clarinda: A Poet's Passion before the Courts of Law - Part II, with Hector MacQueen, Scottish historian and law professor 07/18/2024

Robert Burns and Clarinda: A Poet's Passion before the Courts of Law - Part I, with Hector MacQueen, Scottish historian and law professor 07/18/2024

The Ecstatic Sound World of Alexander Scriabin - with Simon Nicholls, pianist and translator of Skryabin's Notebooks 05/25/2024

Stolen Culture: A Rwandan Perspective on Colonialism, Culture, and the Repatriation of Cultural Heritage - with Juvenal Nsengimana, Legal Advisor at the Institute of National Museums of Rwanda 02/27/2024

The Trauma of Stolen Culture: Repatriation (or Rematriation) of Indigenous Artefacts to their Ancestral Peoples - with Métis Lawyer Myrna McCallum 02/27/2024

Is Artificial Intelligence Creative? Glenn Gould, pianist and technological visionary, and "Dear Glenn," the AI inspired by him - with Dr. Akira Maezawa of Yamaha 01/16/2024

Is Artificial Intelligence Creative? Glenn Gould, pianist and technological visionary, and "Dear Glenn," the AI inspired by him - with Dr. Akira Maezawa of Yamaha Transcript made by Otter.ai (limited editing) Mira 0:00 Welcome to Woman of Culture! I'm Mira T Sundara Rajan. Join me and my distinguished guests to discover untold stories from the world of culture. Mira 0:59 We met at the Grand Cafe of the Chinzan-so Hotel in Tokyo, which is set in an enormous historic garden visited by Basho, the acknowledged master of Haiku poetry, who lived in 17th century Edo as Tokyo was then known. Mira 1:15 I wanted to talk to Akira about Glenn Gould, the iconic Canadian pianist who made his last recording on a Yamaha piano in 1981. Revisiting the Goldberg Variations of Bach, which he had originally recorded for his debut album in 1955. Mira 1:42 When he re-recorded this work, Gould symbolically closed the circle of his life and work, a life spent in singular dedication to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, with whom he will always be indelibly associated as his premier modern interpreter. Mira 2:12 Although his training, of course, was as a classical pianist, his artistic activities extended far beyond classical piano, and even classical music. Mira 2:22 He wrote extensively on the topics that interested him - music, technology, and history - and he made extraordinarily entertaining programs on music for the CBC, while also trying his hand at radio documentaries, creating the experimental "Idea of North" documentary and the more conventional, but no less interesting, biographical radio program on composer Arnold Schoenberg. Mira 2:49 Gould also played the works of Schoenberg, and of other serial composers from the early part of the 20th century, with extraordinary insight - although no music could, at least on the surface, be more different from Bach. Mira 3:25 This was an incredibly risky professional move, but the bet paid off, as he enjoyed a spectacular career as a recording artist without ever appearing in a concert hall after this time. Mira 3:38 Indeed, Gould was fascinated by technology, learning about the recording process and all of its technicalities, to a very high standard. And he went so far as to argue that the concert hall as a setting for music performance and listening would become obsolete by the year 2000. He argued that listeners could have a much better experience at home, listening to recordings and being able to mediate their musical experiences through the technologies that brought music into the home in the first place, increasingly allowing listeners to moderate the way the music sounded through acoustic settings and equipment. Mira 4:18 Gould was an incredibly deep thinker, and his fascination with technology took his reflections into surprising areas, not only including the question of whether concert performance would become obsolete, but also, yet more radically, whether the concert artist would also disappear. Mira 4:38 The technological innovation that triggered this reflection was the Moog synthesizer, developed by Robert Moog in 1964 and used by Wendy Carlos in 1967 to record the album "Switched-on Bach," which featured musical works by Bach played by the synthesizer. Mira 4:58 Gould proclaimed that this was a remarkable musical achievement and a landmark in the interpretation of Bach Mira 5:06 Was Gould being a provocateur? Probably, but this assessment must be considered in context. He seems to have been, above all, an educator at heart, wanting to raise the level of listeners to meet his own, wishing for his audiences to be better informed, and to experience not only the joy of his artistry, but also the joy of learning. Provocation could serve this broader, ultimately ennobling goal. From a musical point of view, his statements about the Moog synthesizer are profoundly interesting. Mira 5:42 Was he really saying that a machine could best humans at that most human of all activities, music? Mira 5:52 September 25th, 2023, would have been Glenn Gould's 91st birthday. Mira 5:59 On this occasion, the Glenn Gould Foundation in Toronto held a special event on artificial intelligence, at which they released a newly designed artificial intelligence system called "Dear Glenn." Mira 6:12 Yamaha says that the project was "inspired by his unique creative style, and launched to explore the future of music through the use of artificial intelligence." Mira 6:25 Yamaha comments that "Glenn Gould was known for his devotion to recording with digital media, and an interest in rethinking the relationship between performer and audience. Mira 6:36 "The project to develop the system has been dubbed Dear Glenn as a tribute to the artists attitude, which was the inspiration for the idea behind the project. The work undertaken by the project is detailed by Yamaha as follows. Yamaha analyzed over 100 hours of Gould's performance recordings to develop an understanding of his playing style, and employ deep learning algorithms based on the data collected to create the AI system. In addition to ghouls audio recordings, AI learning data included human input in the form of performances by multiple pianists, who were admirers of Gould and intimately familiar with his performance style, raising the quality of reproduction to new levels." Mira 7:21 "Near instant performance analysis of fellow human players enables the AI to play predictively while interacting with human musicians, more than simply an automated performance. The AI reproduces the masterful touch of Glenn Gould to provide an inspiring and interactive experience of co creation between an AI pianist and human musicians." Mira 7:53 As a friend of mine commented, is this "dear" in the sense of expensive? It's the marketing of a human being as a commodity. Mira 8:03 When I had the chance to talk to Dr. Maezawa in Tokyo, I didn't hesitate to put my concerns forward. But I quickly learned something that made me feel differently. Akira himself is a musician. Our discussion was informed by his unmistakable love for music, and his profound respect for Glenn Gould's artistry. Mira 8:27 Here then, is Dr. Akira Maezawa. From Tokyo, with his take on "Dear Glenn," the AI based on Glenn Gould's inimitable piano playing, which Dr. Maezawa has helped Yamaha to memorialize, for better or for worse, in a truly unprecedented way. Mira 9:00 So yeah, so you said that you were keeping track of legal developments in Japan as compared to other places yet that already that's fascinating to me. So are you as a as a technologist interested in what's happening in the last GC that has been run? And so Akira 9:16 I am interested because, you know, our, my goal would be to deploy something for the, you know, our customers or people to use? Yeah, so, you know, it's very interesting for me, because it kind of, you know, one would have to think about some of these legal ramifications if there are legal ramifications, what can we do to make our to be able to deliver our, you know, my research access to the customer? So, it's up there practical problem for me Mira 9:43 Absolutely. Is your sense that the legal community understands well, the kinds of things that you're doing, especially let me preface that by saying like your work is particularly fascinating to me, because, as you said, I'm also a pianist, and I've done a lot of work on Glenn Gould. In fact, I'm not actually writing a book on clinical, and which is part of the reason I wanted to talk to you. And it's so interesting to me how what you're doing, it's kind of on the nexus between the technological development and also the creative side. So you have several communities that you're interacting with, you know, through your work. So yeah, so from that perspective, you know, what, what do you think about the legal? Akira 10:24 So I think that, you know, even though so as I said, No, I kind of go to conferences, you know, in music, tech, and even the researchers have very divided opinions, depending on their stance or what they think about, you know, for example, you know, how would I say, so, you know, some people might say, this is kind of, you know, sending a chap know what nobody, like the big corporations now have access to data, they have learned over the good models, now, they want to have restrictions so that other nodes whose job competitors from channels participating, or people might say, Oh, no, you're going to have new creativity and expand the creativity possibilities. So even in technological community, it's I think, you know, there isn't any consensus. And I think, you know, we are still kind of like, trying to figure out what is good and what is not good at knowing. And also in also in the artistic community, as well, I see lots of people who want to, you know, easily incorporate this as kind of like an enabler or to explore new possibilities of creation, whereas other people might be more reserved about, you know, the possibility of kind of having their creativity stolen. I think, you know, like, I think there's a leak in the recent judgment in the California regarding some civil suit against the jury. Oh, Mira 11:37 yes. Yes, actually, the attorney case was copyright registration. So they try to register this work that is essentially incorporating elements generated through Lea, you would know much better than me how that side of it works. But basically, she had images that were generated through AI and then text that they had written themselves. And so they tried to register the homework and the copyright office said, No, you could only register the parts that had human input. But that ended up being quite broad, because not only the text but also the overall compilation was deemed to be worthy of copyright protection. Akira 12:28 If there's a control inputs manipulated by humans, it's very difficult to identify like a boundary of what comprises this human inputs what compressed because No, this no a maybe until no prior systems, which know is rules that are clear cut is much easier. But with deep neural network, like these control inputs can propagate in very unexpected ways. Or since that can be foreseen, which is like a very great thing about, you know, I think the generation takes prompt, you know, propagates in unexpected ways to create the entire image, for example. So it's, I think it is, I can think, think from technological side, it will be very difficult as to find like a clear and non unambiguous way to define what constitutes creativity. Absolutely. Mira 13:14 Yeah, actually, I'm, I'm comforted in a way to hear you say that, because this is my sense as well, is that we're kind of barking up some of the wrong trees in terms of trying to regulate this. But I think the sense that I get is that in the artistic community, the stronger feeling right now is one fear, as you say, the creativity stolen in our CO opted, and also a lot of fear about being kind of replaced by machines. Which, again, I'd be curious to hear what you think. I mean, my own sense is that's more of a of a question of ethics, actually, in which is to approach this and there isn't anything inevitable about technology taking over? Yes. Akira 13:54 So it's like this whole LC issue, and that was like ethical, legal and societal issues on the east regarding technology, it's like, and I think it's half about creating, because, you know, whenever there's new technology to the vocal culture, there's always, you know, various forces involved. So I think, yes, that kind of I do not know how epic scope issues are resolved. But I think in general, from like, technical and technological perspective, we will have to know we really need to respect the artists and people who actually create these contents. No, it's an I think, you know, these no Glenwood projects or, you know, maybe, you know, we have no might have had very different a different ramped up again, for implications, you know, if we didn't know ask people for no, actually, no, as of no recording, listen at Glenwood, or maybe, you know, experts in Glenn Gould, know, to kind of get give us feedback on what you know, might have been useful. So this isn't anything ethical, but it's more like a personal personal to healing kind of thing to have a snuff defeat, have a feeling that this is something that if he were alive, might have been something interested in. And I think once you have that, no, then we can I think have that that's probably one way to deliver. And another very wrong way would be to leave scrape data from now in line and just know shuffling, the deep learning that model and we're much Oh, no. So I think that's No. So it's about know how to present and how to have mutual respect for different parties involved. At least I think that that's one way to start a mutual understanding and communication. Absolutely, Mira 15:41 I should, as I'm listening to you talk, I'm thinking that people like you, who are very creative on the technology side, actually have a lot more in common with the artists than perhaps some of the corporate entities. You know, not to speak about Yamaha. But I'm thinking about some of the technological companies and so on their outlook, Hollywood entertainment studios, their outlook tends to be a little bit different. But I like what you're saying in terms of connecting with the creativity on both sides. That mean, to me, that makes a lot of sense. And I want to ask you about the Glencoe project in particular, so I'm so curious, you said something very interesting, which is, you know, trying to try to understand what Glenn Gould himself might have thought about doing something like this, which of course, we can't do, because he's not here. But he does leave, you know, so much writing and, and so much discussion that he did about technology is enthusiasms one, so So can you tell me a little bit about how, how this project developed? How, how you think about Glenn Gould's place and all that because he is at the heart of it? Yes. 16:43 So as the kind of uncomfortable talking as like a podcast about how he might have thought, because this is kind of like, you know, you can have like a strawman argument, you know, but I think this, you know, this, but the project develops as kind of like, so I have been working on the way to model human performance to better understand performance. And to understand performance is through training a generative model. So I was in the channel, feeding a music score, and tried to play the style of a human performance, and see what the model has learned. It's a very nice way to, you know, kind of, it has no practical applications. But also, it's kind of interesting, because the model, sometimes in the model creates very musically, you know, something that sounds very unnatural. But if you think about it musically, you can kind of find out why, you know, for example, maybe a system has overfit on like a phrase ending or trying to slow down the phrase ending, for example, then you would kind of hear something, no, I would say for example, if you train a model that's been entirely trained on Japan, and he moves out, then you would kind of sound as if Mozart has taken too much whiskey or something. But it kind of has a very interesting learning experience, because they say, so I kind of more want to, you know, create things that understands human performance, and does something useful for performance. So that was very interesting. But so then I was working on this, and another people and guys in marketing, want to know, they wanted to know have to kind of like deliver a message about how AI and music should coexist. And we have been doing kind of like a brainstorming. And we want to say, you know, this really applying this technology might be something useful. And we were saying, you know, which, you know, performer might be appropriate. And, you know, and I think you know, Glenn Gould came almost unanimously Firstly, because he has experimented a lot with recording technology, which I think even today, you know, in some conservative pianists might find uncomfortable salutely But I think no, he has been experimenting and exploring new creativity is almost like a DJ. And, you know, cannabis. No, he has been I know from what I think and I believe in that he has been quite influenced by Manola kind of like a McLuhan's media theories you know, and I think you know, it you know, it's kind of like a no making these no media communication one level more abstract through AI because it's still like a compressed model. It's just not communicating different via different channels. So I think there was this implication I thought was quite interesting. And, you know, also new Glenn Gould has a rather distinct musical scoring style so it's very you know, from technical development aspect is very good. It's very good to decide no unknown. It's easy to assess if the model is learning about his style or not. And fortino though he he played on our CFP and in his no like their career so that was I had no struck with the Yamaha sides. Yeah, Mira 19:55 the famous the last over variations, recording of course, wisdom. That's Very slowly. So it's so interesting, I'm just listening to you, I'm just finding it so fascinating Mira 20:22 there was one aspect of the decline that I was especially curious about what I was reading about it, it said that one of the things you were interested in was having it play music that Glenn Gould have not played during his lifetime. So that was fascinating. Why did you make that choice? Well, I Akira 20:44 I think it's more I think, you know, having these machine we learn human patterns would be would be interested, you know, to create something that for the next generation of music, musicians and music pieces that, you know, that came up after. Is that, so, you know, that's, that's really interesting and silly. So my initial idea, so no, I'm kind of work to kind of backtrack even more. So I've been working on this thing called Music Ensemble, automatic ensemble system, which No, I actually am, I played violin. So when I played the violin, I have A complement system that will play piano, for example, with me. So maybe, at home, I can play like a Brahms violin sonata or something, you know, have a piano accompany me. And I also always had this dissatisfaction about, you know, these, creating the music that when I play with a very skilled musical accompanies the accompaniment gives you lots of musical ideas and insights, it's not just having something that simply tracks you. And I wasn't trying to see what know, if I can create these musical insights, you know, that, you know, can provide this system, but also provide me with musical insights. Know, which getting got me interested into experts with modeling, and how you did not express and kind of how you can interact. So, so basically, I wanted to basically make a system so that I can I'll be able to play like, you know, maybe Beethoven by sweater was going to Mira 22:21 stick Yes, amazing. Actually, I Mira 22:23 can really relate to what you're saying as well, because I'm also a singer. So I sing in jazz, in addition to being a classical pianist, so I don't play jazz. And I would sing a lot more if I had a nice accompaniment that I could, you know, literally turn on and practice different improvisations and so on. So, you know, there are these, I don't know what they're called, but they're apps that allow you to play, you know, the structure of a jazz, it'll give you the harmonic changes. It's extremely unsophisticated. So imagine, you know, something like... /episode/index/show/e91039c3-2a58-4780-896c-91c7ad725929/id/29504953

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