It was 30 degrees and rising as we sat on the Airbus A220 at Faro airport. The air conditioning wasn’t working and the pilot told us there was something wrong with the auxiliary engine that powers the air con when on the ground, and also jump-starts the main engines. It was getting hot, even with the doors open, my wife had found a new use for the information card in the seat, she was using it as a fan. The engineer was 30 minutes away even before he started to try and fix the issue, at this heat it seemed like an age. In the end, the pilot decided to have them bring a mobile starter unit so we could get the main engines running, then they could also power the air con and get on our way.
About 30 minutes later we were on our way. We took off and then for two hours we cruised at around 35,000 feet until we started our descent to land at Dublin Airport. We had two highly trained people at the controls of the jet and yet for about 90% of the flight the plane was ‘flying itself’ on autopilot.
I’ve recently invested in a new EV, a VW ID4, hoping to make a tiny difference to the problem of global warming. It has more technology than my desktop computer and in many ways, it almost drives itself. It turns on the lights when it’s dark, the wipers when it rains and beeps when I’m parking to make sure I don’t hit anything. It tells me when I’m not in the centre of the road or crossing the line, it tells me when I’m approaching a junction and to slow down, and it tells me when I’m over the speed limit by reading the road signs. If I’m on cruise control it adjusts it based on road speed signs and vehicles around me. Soon I will be downloading an update for the car v3.0, yes just like my Apple Mac, and then it will park itself and also overtake on its own when in cruise control on motorways. It’s basically a computer with wheels.
Why these two stories? They both illustrate how technology is taking many tasks we used to have the think about and is doing them for us. Often better than us too!
I recently saw an audio engineer I respect greatly expressing concern over audio interfaces that have Smart Gain on them. He had two concerns, one, that the tech may not be as smart as the experienced engineer, and two, that technology like this meant that the person using it would never learn the skills he had acquired throughout his career. Both are valid concerns.
We are seeing more technology appearing in audio to make the lives of creatives easier. It’s not a new thing. If you were around during the 1980s then you’ll recall when samplers got auto-looping, this was instead of having to try and match the start and end of a loop to hide the join. We also got quantise, to make up for any deficiencies in our synth or drum programming. Or take the very simple task of Pro Tools applying fades to every edit in one go, another great feature found in most DAWs.
Look back through the entirety of audio and music production and you’ll see technologies that have helped to make things easier. In many ways, they take mind-numbing and annoying tasks off our hands.
We are starting to see interfaces from brands like Zoom that have NO gain controls and 32-bit floating point audio, which claims to make the idea of setting gain wrong, or at least clipping, impossible. We have plugins like iZotope Neutron that suggests settings on a mix. We have online automated mastering!
The end is nigh!!!! Some say, or if not, we’re dumbing stuff down. We all seem to have a line that we draw. We allow technology to give us hard disk recording, normalisation, editing in the box, Autotune, and a multitude of other helpful technologies but then we suddenly think, this far and no more.
In the world of robotics there’s a hypothesis called the Uncanny Valley. To summarise;
“In aesthetics, the uncanny valley (Japanese: 不気味の谷 bukimi no tani) is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid objects that imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of uneasiness and revulsion in observers. "Valley" denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica's human likeness.
Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations and lifelike dolls. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the "valley" has been cited in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.” Wikipedia
In other words, we don’t mind robots that look like vacuum cleaners, or even that look like C3PO, but we step back when they look like a human.
Perhaps technology that closely resembles the audio and creative tasks we undertake produces a similar visceral response in some of us? Is the computer becoming like me? Will it replace me?
Well yes and no. The plane we flew home on could fly itself for 90% of the journey, but some of the tasks require the skill and experience of a highly trained pilot. There’s no line of code for the moments that require judgment to take place. The aux engine is down, what do we do? What’s safe to do? What’s the wise thing to do? It’s the same thing when I’m driving my smart car.
There are certainly a lot of parts of the job of audio engineer that still require the skills and experience that no amount of code can replace. The moments of judgement and wisdom, the aha moments!
My attitude to all of these new technologies is one of joyful acceptance. There are a lot of tasks that are a pain in the ass, annoying, hard, and repetitive. If someone can write an algorithm to get it done for me then I’m all in. Will it do it as well as me? Possibly, possibly not. What about all the training and years of experience? I did geography at school, I can read a map and use a compass. However, I’m glad not to be turning pages on a road Atlas trying to find my way now I have satellite navigation.
So what if some people never have to know how to set gain, some of us have never had to line up a tape machine.
One valuable lesson I was given about leadership some years ago was this. When you trust someone with a task, let them get on with it. They may not complete the task in the way you would, but that doesn't make their way wrong, just different.
If you want to set the gain on an interface, just in case it’s going to get it wrong, or in some cases not do it like you, then be my guest. But isn’t it fantastic we now have a choice?
Discuss.
Photo by Techivation on Unsplash