In this episode, host Mack Hagood dives into the world of AI-generated music and art with digital artist and theorist Eryk Salvaggio. The conversation explores technical and philosophical aspects of AI art, its impact on culture, and the ‘age of noise’ it has ushered in. AI dissolves sounds and images into literal noise, subsequently reversing the process to create new “hypothetical” sounds and images. The kinds of cultural specificities that archivists struggle to preserve are stripped away when we treat human culture as data in this way. 

Eryk also shares insights into his works like ‘Swim’ and ‘Sounds Like Music,’ which test AI’s limitations and forces the machine to reflect on itself in revealing ways. Finally, the episode contemplates how to find meaning and context in an overwhelming sea of information. 

Eryk Salvaggio is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training: a practice designed to expose ideologies of tech and to confront the gaps between datasets and the worlds they claim to represent. A blend of hacker, researcher, designer and artist, he has been published in academic journals, spoken at music and film festivals, and consulted on tech policy at the national level. He is a researcher on AI, art and education at the metaLab (at) Harvard University, the Emerging Technology Research Advisor to the Siegel Family Endowment, and a top contributor to Tech Policy Press. He holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and an MSc in Applied Cybernetics from the Australian National University.

Works discussed in this podcast: 

The Age of Noise (2024)

SWIM (2024): A meditation on training data, memory, and archives.

Sounds Like Music: Toward a Multi-Modal Media Theory of Gaussian Pop (2024)

How to Read an AI Image (2023)

You can learn more about Eryk Salvaggio at cyberneticforests.com

Learn more about Phantom Power at phantompod.org 

Join our Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower

Transcription by Katelyn Phan

00:00 Introduction and Podcast News 03:24 Introducing Eryk Salvaggio, AI Artist and Theorist 05:33 Understanding the Information Age and Noise 09:14 The Diffusion Process and AI Bias 33:35 Ethics of AI and Data Curation 39:09 Exploring the Artwork ‘Swim’ 45:16 AI in Music: Platforms and Experiments 01:00:04 Embracing Noise and Context

Eryk Salvaggio: I think as consumers of the music generated by AI, that’s the thing that I want to think about is as a listener, what am I hearing and how do I listen like meaningfully to a piece of AI music that essentially has no meaning. 

Introduction: This is Phantom Power.

Mack Hagood: Welcome to another episode of Phantom Power, the show where we dive deep into sound studies, acoustic ecology, sound art, experimental music, all things sonic. I’m Mack Hagood. Today we’re talking to the digital artist and theorist, Eryk Salvaggio. We’ll be diving into the question of what is AI art and AI music? And we’re going to attack this question on both the technical and the philosophical level.

We’re also going to talk about how to live in what Eryk calls, “the age of noise”. It’s a really interesting conversation, so stick around. But first I want to just go over a few quick show notes. For those of you listening in your podcast feed, you will have noticed that after something of a hiatus, We’re back.

I am looking forward to bringing you this podcast, once a month in 2025. We have a lot of fascinating interviews on tap next month. Journalist Liz Pelly will be with us to discuss her new book on Spotify. I could not be more excited about that. For those of you joining us on YouTube or maybe Spotify, you’ll notice that you can see me.

So it’s taken a lot of work, but we have officially jumped on the video podcast bandwagon. I think today’s episode is going to show the power of that, because we’re going to be talking not only about music, but also about video art made by AI. And it’s going to be helpful to actually see it with your eyes. But no worries to all of our dedicated audio listeners and visually impaired folks.

We’re going to be sure to describe anything relevant that’s seen on the screen. So audio or video, feel free to enjoy Phantom Power in the modality of your choice. And if you’re watching or listening for the first time, please do subscribe wherever you’re encountering this flow of waveforms and pixels.

And finally for longtime listeners who have been following along with my epic saga of trying to pivot from writing academic works to writing for the public, I’m thrilled to announce that I got a book deal. My next book will be coming out on Penguin Press. And for those of you who have been following along with this saga, you’ll know that I’ve done episodes and Patreon posts about how I found an agent, what it’s like to work with an agent, writing a proposal.

and so I’m going to have more bonus content in my Patreon feed where I talk about the final stages of how we crafted the proposal and shopped it to publishers and had meetings and had an auction and all that kind of stuff. So if you want the inside scoop. Just join our Patreon at patreon.com/phantompower.

Okay. Onto today’s guest. My guest today is Eryk Salvaggio. Eryk is a researcher and new media artist interested in the social and cultural impacts of artificial intelligence. His work explores the creative misuse of AI and the transformation of archives into datasets for AI training. Eryk is a researcher at the Meta Lab at Harvard.

He has advanced degrees in media communications, and applied cybernetics from the London School of Economics and the Australian National University. And you may know Salvaggio from his widely read newsletter on AI, Cybernetic Forests. I met Eryk last year at the Unsound Festival in Cracow, Poland, where we were both speaking and Eryk gave this dynamite performance lecture called the age of noise, which incorporated some of his video experiments with artificial intelligence.

And this talk just blew me away. I knew I wanted to bring him to you. So today we’re discussing how AI systems literally dissolve human culture, images, video. ,music, they dissolve them into noise and then use that noise as a starting point to create new objects that look and sound like cultural objects, yet lack human characteristics.

So welcome to the age of noise.

Here’s my interview with Eryk salvaggio All right, Eryk welcome to the show. 

Eryk Salvaggio: Thanks so much. I’m really excited to be here. 

Mack Hagood: So I had the pleasure hearing you speak at the Unsound Festival in Krakow. And I was just blown away by your talk, which concerned the role of noise in generative AI. And it also made a larger point about noise and contemporary digital life. And the central claim of that talk was that we have basically finished the information age and we’ve entered this, what you call, “age of noise”. 

I think we’ll eventually make our way to AI and the age of noise, but I was thinking maybe we could start off by how would you characterize the information age? It’s certainly a term we’ve heard a lot, but how are you thinking about it? Say in the talk that, you gave. 

Eryk Salvaggio: If you look at the early age of computing, if you look at the early age of communication, there was this belief and it’s not necessarily a wrong belief, that the more information we have access to, the more knowledge we have about the world and the more agency we have in the world, the more informed our decisions could be.

And so much of technology in that century, starting in the cybernetic era of the forties and the fifties even was around., “How do you get information? And make sense of that information?” And then when we started moving closer to the communication networks, it was more about , “How do you distribute this information so that everybody has access to this information?”

And all of it was around this idea that information is super valuable and that if we have information, we could become in a way, better people, better citizens.

And then with the internet. It becomes this weird mirror where everyone’s able to access information, but they’re also able to produce it. And the production of information is, measured and it’s weighed and it’s distributed by this sort of other worldly power that we’ve come to call the algorithm.

And so everything’s being sorted and we don’t necessarily have access to the information that we need to understand the world. Instead, we have information that is a mess, right? And it’s a fire hose. It’s overwhelming. And so my argument in the age of noise is that this information age piece that was just this access to information has become so overwhelming and so hard to process that it has become essentially noise.

Mack Hagood: Yeah. And I loved like there, there’s a point in the talk where you’re talking about the role of noise in the information age. And you’re basically talking about information theory and we should probably have a drinking game for this podcast at t