Creativity Jijiji

Why Human Rhythm Outruns AI Every Time

• Chris Mchale • Episode 24

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Ever felt a room change when the band locks in and the audience leans forward at the same time? That’s the moment we chase today—where pulse becomes conversation, risk becomes texture, and four people in a room make something no algorithm has learned to feel. We open with the pull of the orchestra’s shared breath, then trace that energy through jazz, theater pits, and the grit of writing a song the slow way.

Chris lays out what the trained ear hears in seconds: microtiming, phrasing, and the subtle drift that turns rhythm into story. We point to A Love Supreme as a compass for interplay—how shifting centers and unexpected turns make a recording feel alive decades later. From 942 performances of Jesus Christ Superstar to late‑night lyric notebooks, we unpack how process, not just outcome, shapes meaning. The room always matters; the audience is not a backdrop but a co‑author in the loop.

We also zoom out to the tools. AI can predict chords, follow tempo, and trade motifs, and that can be useful for drafts or experiments. But anticipation is not intention. Music is a sacred exchange built on empathy mapped onto time, and that exchange resists being boxed into neat probabilities. We question the rush to monetize human knowledge, ask who benefits when models are trained on our collective past, and argue for the irreplaceable value of collaboration—the invisible trust and timing that make teams, bands, and studios greater than any one contributor.

If you care about feel, about why some nights fly and others don’t, and about what we stand to lose when we trade presence for prediction, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a friend who loves live music, and leave a review with your take: can AI ever have “feel,” or does the beat’s real intelligence only emerge between us?

Thanks for listening.


RITA:

Welcome to Creativity GGG, the place where music isn't measured, it's conjured. Today, Chris McHale takes us inside the oldest mystery in the arts. Why four humans in a room can create something no algorithm, no circuitry, no neatly optimized workflow has ever managed to fake. It's the pulse, the breath, the risk, the glorious unrepeatability of it all.

CHRIS :

Being in a band is magic. Mostly I've been in bands with four or five people, and I've sung in choirs, and I've had a duo and a trio, and all sorts of combos. You know, my secret ambition has always been to play in an orchestra. I sit in concert halls, and I I imagine what it's like to play with 80 other musicians in some sort of unity, some sort of unified like uh musical expression of the symphony. I mean, I sit there on the stage, you know, with twelve other violins and ten cellos and five trumpets and timpanies. I mean, just imagine the buzz of it. Uh I'm not good enough to be on that orchestral stage, but I'm I can sit in the audience and imagine. And uh I I see energy flowing between those players, and each individual is kind of lifted up into a hole. It's off the charts. It's powerful, it's invisible, it's profoundly moving. Profoundly moving. I'm talking today about AI because I've been dipping my toes into, sorry, okay, I've been dipping my ears, right? Not my toes, but I've been dipping my ears into some of these AI music-making platforms. Listen, I mean, I try them out and I've gotten some really cool results uh for a certain kind of music, but for real music, I I don't know. I don't know. It it feels a little sterile to me. Uh I've been thinking, like, why is that? Why is it like that? Um It's predictable. That's the main thing. I get, I get, I get that it's seductive to the untrained ear, but it's almost insulting to a trained ear. Not because we are musicians and you are not, nothing like that. It's just like if you if you train your ear, if you listen to music obsessively. My parents, you know, thank you, parents, started taking me to concerts, symphony concerts, when I was still a kid. So I grew up around the great orchestras. I grew up in London, so the London Symphony and all those orchestras. And uh, you know, as I got to be a teenager, I I followed um those players myself. You know, I would go off to those pla those concerts. All c all sorts of music, but I don't know if my ear is trained or I I've just listened and played a lot of music. But uh, you know, I listen to these AI grooves and listen, they're intriguing. I'm not saying they're not, but they leave you wanting. They leave you wanting something, right? And that's that's kind of like what I'm looking at here. Put on the album A Love Supreme by John Coulter. Oh wait, just go over and put it on. Listen to the shifting pulses, you know, the subtle dynamic, the unexpected turn, the mystery of the beat. Yeah? The sheer originality of that recording. If I remember the story right, those guys went across the river, across the George Washington Bridge, um, and there was a, oh man, I uh a house that had a studio, and it and I don't know what it was. If you know what it was, you can reach out to me and tell me, but I always imagine those four guys going into that studio, culture and putting the music in front of them. They press record and they play a love supreme, which can drop you to your knees today, and they recorded it 60 years ago. And the interplay in those parts between the players, the shifting pulse. That's what I mean by AI can't really approach that in my mind. Will it get there? Uh maybe. Should we bother? I have no idea why we should bother at all. You know, is it a threat to the communication between players? Between the cosmic interplay between players and a band of humans? No. No, it's no threat to that at all. And that interplay will always beat AI and make the music unique. So the question is, why are we bothering with all this? I mean, I'm a traditionally trained musician. I went to music school, I sat in practice rooms and played scales for hours, you know. I went on stage and made an idiot of myself sometimes and a hero other times, but you know, that whole journey was a process. I recently wrote a song. It took me two weeks to write this song. I could have uploaded the lyrics to uh an AI music platform and had a song in five seconds, but it wouldn't have had the grit of me traveling around with my notebook, sketching out, trying ideas, seeing, you know, what works, thinking about it. A band isn't just uh four signal processors on a sterile stage reacting to each other. It's much more complex than that. It's like a living feedback loop. Um four separate consciousness, hearing, anticipating, adjusting, emotionally resonating in real time. Each player brings history, right? Their personal history, and then translate that history into intent. And there's this subtle, very, very subtle micro timing, what musicians call feel. The feel, the interplay between the drummer and the bass and the piano. Somebody once said that every player on the stage is responsible for the rhythm. So when you have an orchestra of 80 people, well, that's 80 different interpretations of the rhythm, all sort of agreeing this is what the rhythm is. And when they reach that place, that that place where they they start to play together. That's magic. That is magic. Feel. The feel is rhythmic deviation, subtle, going on. It has to do with the interplay between the players and the audience, the way people dance, the way they lean forward in their seats. It's empathy mapped onto time. Can you do that with machines? Time is a living pulse. It's not steady, but it's responsive and it's unexpected. It's tied to the blood, the heart. It's the connection between us. Rhythm is the connection, and it cannot be truly mapped. It doesn't fit in a box. It never repeats. It's unique every time the player speaks with their instruments, every time the band plugs into play, every time the conductor lists a baton at the ictus and says, Here it is. This is where my heartbeat is. Let's follow this. I once worked on the musical Jesus Christ Superstar. Alright? Great musical. Um, powerful, energetic. I did that show 942 times. 942 times. I mean, that's that's the way the road shows work. You get into a groove, you show up at 4:30, you do the show, you uh clean up the stage, you go home, you come back the next day, you do it again. 942 unique rhythms and pulses and melodic shapes and harmonic lifts. Unique every show. The performance responded to the night, to the energy in the air. The audience synced their pulses with the performers, forming this kind of feedback loop, both powerful and limitless. There were no limits to how this show would go. I mean, we would start the show, and I would know within 30 seconds what kind of show it was going to be. Was it going to be a magical show or not? Some shows were magical, you know, others were less so. But when we broke through into that upper level of energy between us and the audience, it became a completely unique thing. People would walk out of that theater three feet above the ground. AI can simulate aspects of that interaction, you know, pattern recognition, call and response, adaptive tempo following, harmonic prediction. Sure, sure, sure, sure. It can even sound convincing. We're already seeing AI jam systems in uh which listen in respond to live musicians using machine learning to anticipate chord changes or rhythmic cues. Anticipate, not feel, but go back into their learning system and go, like, well, after this C is gonna come an F, and after this F is gonna come a G, because it often does. But that doesn't really work, does it? It's not reactive, really, and it's not truly uh relational. And it's mostly unnecessary. I mean, why would we invite robots into our sacred music loop? Music is a sacred experience, it's a prayer. It might be fun to do AI music. I can see performance artists playing with the AI. I can see uh multimedia applications and enhance performance, but ultimately a musician walking onto a bear stage and sitting down at a piano can never be digitally duplicated. AI is limited, music is not. And AI will always be limited, and music will never be limited. AI is kind of trapped in sort of petrified digital amber. Music is not. Music goes out into the universe and never dies. It's evolving as a conscious structure. Nothing ever stops the music. What's missing, I think, in AI music is intent. A human basis doesn't just land on the one because the algorithm predicts that's where the one is. They do it because they mean it. They feel it. They feel it in the singer's breath, the drummer's urgency, the audience's pulse, that shared awareness, that invisible, invisible feel between players. It's sort of like uh not an artificial intelligence, but uh an emergent intelligence. An intelligence that wasn't there a beat before. An intelligence that just created something new. There is something born in the beat. It's an intelligence that is emotional, and it's an intelligence that is never computational, right? Actually, and simply, it's never computational. It can't be computed, it can't be predicted, it can't be learned, it has to be felt and created in the moment. So let's say you you have a stage and you put four AIs, you know, on the stage, you know, four desktops with four different AIs. So each one has its own intelligence and we'll respond to the other one. Uh are we gonna get meaning beyond data in that scenario? Is that gonna happen? I'm gonna keep saying this again and again. The question is not, is that gonna happen? The question to me is like, why? Why do we do that? As an experiment, yeah, as a thought process for AI to learn things, yeah, but that's not music. That's not what music is here for. That's not why we created music. Silicone thinkers have excellent vision, you know, but it mostly falls off a cliff when they get carried away by their sci-fi-ness, by their sci-fi promise, by their sci-fi dreams. Reality drops on the silicone thinkers like a ton of bricks. It always does. It always says, I'm always reading like this is going to lead us here, and this is gonna lead us there, but we never quite get there, do we? The history of the valley is a history of monetization of low-hanging fruit, and that's really where I'm hung up. You know, that's really where I get my uh overalls into a knot. The rush to monetize human knowledge and sell it back to us. Come on. What is that? What is that? They're gonna take, they're learning every piece of human knowledge, all the books that have been written, all the symphonies that have been written, they're learning it all. And then they're trying to sell it back to us. Like human knowledge, human music belongs to all of us. It was created by us. In my opinion, there should be one AI, just one, one machine, all right, that feeds everything, is owned by everybody. Human knowledge should not be monetized by six people. It just shouldn't happen. It should be a communal experience, all of us. I'm already seeing it. Competing AI machines, grok versus Meta versus whatever. We need to question these systems. I mean, look, they're expensive and they're not sustainable. Fusion drive energy would be a serious problem for AI to solve. If they could do that, it would be very helpful, thank you. Performing musical calculations is a nifty trick, but buying AI systems turned on human knowledge and selling it back to us? Is that necessary? Is that is that what we're here for? Is that using a coint word ethical? I mean, is it helpful to humanity? It's a legitimate question. It really is. And it's it's sort of like my thinking on this whole AI debate revolves around that. It doesn't revolve around uh is the music real music or there's music not real music or what music. It just comes down to that thing, like monetization of human knowledge and the interaction between humans. Like it's not only it's not only bands, it's also like video game studios, you know, where there's 200 artists working on a game. The interaction between those artists is what elevates the game. That's it. I mean, yeah, theoretically, one artist with all 200 people sampled and put into the AI base can create the work of 200 people, but not the feeling between 200 people. Not the invisible nature of the work. And so we're on a path to like soulless reproductions, is the way I see it. I've been reading a lot about how there's silicone thinkers are thinking, like, you know, I'm gonna beat out immortality. I'm gonna upload my consciousness to a machine and live forever. Wow. I mean, wow. Wow. Can you imagine trapping yourself for all eternity into a machine? You know what that sounds like to me? Doesn't sound like a dream. That sounds like madness. That sounds like complete madness. That sounds like an eternity in mechanical hell, is what that sounds like. That sounds like as far away from humanity and your human consciousness as you can possibly get. I'm a spiritual person, you know. I go to church every week, I pray. All right, and my goal is to join the pure energy of the human consciousness in a spiritual form, not to upload this particular manifestation of my consciousness into a machine and live a million years. Can you imagine the hell of that? Oh my god. So I can walk into an art gallery and see a painting by Monet and it will stalk me in my tracks. Right? Stop me. I can go into a theater and watch two actors do a scene and it it will cause me to cry. You know. And more importantly, I don't need it to.

RITA:

This has been Creativity GGG. Remember, humans invented the backbeat, the blues, and the bad decision to start bands with their roommates. AI is still catching up. Follow the song lines. And if your drummer shows up late, cherish them. That's called feel. Follow the song lines. Stay human. Stay beautifully unpredictable. Hit the subscribe button. Be generous. And if anyone tries to upload your consciousness into a chip, tell them Rita said absolutely not. Creativity GGG is written and produced by Studio GGG. Visit us at studiog.io. Rita is an artificial voice. Chris is a flawed human. It's in the floors. Loop closed.

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Chris Mchale

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