Speaker 1: It really is about sharing stories. But the question is,
as the listener of podcasts, what kind of story are
you willing to digest today in this moment of now.
That's why we give you a choice on Arrow dot
net A R r Oe dot net. Enjoy your exploration.
How are you doing, Lucas, I'm doing absolutely fantastic. Boy.
I'll tell you what you have been on a journey.
I can't be the only radio guy or somebody in
the art world that isn't sitting here going Thank God
for people like Lucas who are taking the time to
dig in where we really need to be.
Speaker 2: I just want to give you a heart what a
wonderful intro. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean for you to get this itch or
this urge to be able to grow forward with the
limited knowledge that we have of AI technology. So when
you say unfinished, do you mean we are unfinished with
tay you know, the learning process process of it or
the music is unfinished?
Speaker 2: Well yes to both. Errow.
Speaker 3: The the learning process, the process of iterating technology, and
the process of creating music as a as a species
and as a culture is never finished.
Speaker 2: The book is about my It's a little bit of auto.
Speaker 3: Biography of projects that I did a few years ago
where I finished Schubert on Finish Symphony with artificial intelligence,
and that project started being asking a lot of questions
about the nature of AI, and the nature of technology
and the nature of music.
Speaker 1: Now when you step into the world of Franz Schubert
for listeners that are just discovering music every day, because
they do, let us know who mister Schubert's is in
the way of understanding why you would dedicate so much
time into such a project, Because to me, I think
it's a beautiful project. But I'm also the one that
went in and did the research, and I've studied everything
inside Unfinished.
Speaker 3: Thank you, So you know you had more You had
more knowledge of friend Schubert than I did when I
started this project.
Speaker 2: Oh good bit of research. I've still done quite a
bit of research on him.
Speaker 3: But this was a you know, because the technology is
so amazing because of the ability one of one of
my one of the things that makes me stand out
as a as a composers that I'm able to work
very fast. And this project, the Unfinished Symphony, was required
someone who could write a symphony at a high level,
very quickly. So you know, I knew of Schubert from
my studies, but he was one of the most interesting composers.
Speaker 2: He was the last of the Vienna.
Speaker 3: School composers, so you know, from Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven,
Schubert was.
Speaker 2: The last one.
Speaker 3: He was taught by Antonio Salieri, who just to be
very clear, did not kill Mozart, despite what the movie
on the Days which I read. And he was of
that slow but he was really sort of the bridge
between those composers and the more romantic, the more modern
composers like Tchaikowsky. And he was incredibly prolific. He wrote
on more music in his eighteen active years than Jsbot
wrote in about fifty act of years, and pretty much
all of it is amazing.
Speaker 2: It seemed to just pour out of him.
Speaker 3: And he died at the age of I believe thirty
four of complication.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: What I find so inspiring is is that, first of all,
I love the idea of taking a seed from the
past and replanting it in this modern day generation, which
is what you've done. But now to make that collaboration
with modern day technology such as AI, to you know,
to create recreate this. What did you learn as a
student of music, Because in reality versus that AI technology,
you're the one with the emotion. You're the one with
everything that we brought to the party. It's just sitting
there reading numbers AI.
Speaker 2: Well errow, I actually would.
Speaker 3: I'm going to turn that around and say that you,
the audience, are the ones with the emotion.
Speaker 2: You know, I can.
Speaker 3: I can make all the plans that I want, I
can write all the music I want. I have a
pretty good idea of how certainly musical gestures and musical
colors and musical textures will affect an audience, But I
really don't know, and nobody knows us. Yeah, so you know,
we put out there whatever we think is going to get.
Speaker 2: The best results, and then we sit back and seeing
with the audience thinks.
Speaker 3: And you know, I guess my hot take is that
I think art is not art until someone else reacts
to it. And that's what makes it a piece of artist,
That it's a collaboration between any human who encounters it
and the person who created it.
Speaker 1: Now, Lucas, you know how it is when it comes
to music. You kind of dibby dabble in the very
beginning of it, thinking is this really what I'm supposed
to be doing now? Because I'm about ready to dedicate
my life to a whole, entire music project. How far
did you have to go into just testing the waters
before you decided inside your heart, Lucas that oh my god,
this is it. This is what I'm going to do.
I don't know it now, but I'm going to write
a book called Unfinished.
Speaker 3: Well, if you had asked me when I was in college,
you know, a lot of people don't know this about me,
but I actually went to school to play lacrosse one semester.
I switched over to music school after one semester of
majoring and you know, polysci and whatever, and.
Speaker 2: I didn't really I don't know.
Speaker 3: If you had asked me at that time, was I
going to write a symphony? I would have seemed very
foreign to me. I have always tried to write and play.
I'm a guitar player. I've always tried to play and
write the best music I can. I am a compulsive
practicer and have been since I was a teenager.
Speaker 2: And I don't know if.
Speaker 3: I'm particularly talented, but I have worked very hard to
become good and I have gained some skills that audiences
seem to react to. But yeah, there's no there was
no moment where I embarked on anything. I think I
sort of embarked on trying to get from the beginning
to the end of my day every single day for
the last twenty five years, and I've turned out to
be writing music most of those days.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Lucas Cantor Santiago
coming up next. Thank you so much for coming back
to our conversation with Lucas Cantor Satiago. The name of
his book Unfinished. So now just between the two of
us here, what was it like for you to make
that jump, because, I mean, the president wants to create
an ai zar right away. When I was reading and
studying your book Unfinished, I'm thinking, what happens if that
Czar looks at Lucas and says, ah nah, change of
the plans. Does Lucas then go underground?
Speaker 2: I'm not sure how to answer that question. What was
what would the czar be telling me?
Speaker 1: Well, basically, I mean, if they're trying to get if
they're trying to get control of AI technology, and now
there's an AI zar, what does that mean to great
artists like you that are that are in that mode
of not only recycling but bringing things forward in the
way of discovering new things about old things, such as Schubert. I,
you know, I don't know if it's I mean, if
that's not something I'm worried about.
Speaker 3: I don't know if the company is going to restrict
as artistic artificial intelligence. I'll cross that bridge when I
come to it. Luckily, without AI, I'm a perfectly functional
composer of that is. My My day job is to
write music for film and television and concerts, and you
really can't use AI in a professional context when you're
selling music on for broadcasts.
Speaker 2: So I'm not worried about that at all.
Speaker 3: And I think that there's you know, I think that
there's little danger of artificial intelligence supplanting musicality and musical
expression among humans because it's something we've been doing for
at least sixty thousand years, and a new piece of
technology is not going to estop us from doing that,
or arts say, it's very unlikely estopplished from doing that,
and artificial intelligence, you know, music made by AI doesn't
doesn't give us the same thing that music made by
humans is, and that thing is connection.
Speaker 2: To other persons.
Speaker 1: See, I love where your heart is because to me
right just what you just shared with me, I'm going, oh,
my god, Lucas, is Bob Dylan making that switch over
that to that electric guitar. He knew he had to
make that move. You knew you had to make this
move because in reality, when you study this book unfinished,
and then you go and you listen to the finished product,
or you listen to Franz Schubert, all of a sudden,
you're going, my god, if Lucas would not have taken
this chance, where would I be as a listener of
music or just a fan of creativity?
Speaker 2: Thank you?
Speaker 3: And I'm flattered by the comparison. I think that you know,
I'm I'm in a long line of composers who embrace
their current technology to make and use it that they
want to make. And you know, Quincy Jones would be
in that camp, John Phillips, Susan was in that camp,
Bondner was in that camp. Supert himself was in that camp.
And you know, we if I had to sum up
the history of music in one sentence, it would be
the search for new sounds. Anything that makes a new
sounds we want to play with. We want to see
what we can do with them. We want to see
how we can use those sounds to express something to
our audience.
Speaker 1: All right, when you talk like that, Lucas, right away,
I'm thinking, Okay, you and I are both trying to
figure out where the new sounds are, and we hear
things that other people don't. But what about the reality
of a moment of a conversation where people say, you're
never listening to me. Well, no, it's not that I'm
not listening to you. I'm discovering a new sound and
I'm hearing something in my head and heart.
Speaker 3: That's what I absolve you of daydreaming about amazing music
before you may do that.
Speaker 2: I encourage it. I heard all your listeners do it too.
Speaker 1: Has the role of the artists changed because of technology?
I think that people are becoming wiser and they're not
so you know, you know, adamant to step forward saying
I'm going to borrow that guitar riff and I'm not
going to let anybody know where I got it from.
I think people are pretty proud of a guitar riff
or just like you said, a symphony here to where
you can bring it forward, saying I was part of
this process. They didn't know it's, you know, all those
years ago, but they know it now.
Speaker 3: I think the role of the artists changed in the
thirteen hundreds when they started writing music down Oh my god,
and I and I think it's I think it's starting
to change back to what it was before.
Speaker 2: Then.
Speaker 3: Music has always been something that was collaborative, that was
made by the tribe, not necessarily made by an individual person.
And you know, of course, I, you know, appreciate attribution
of my work, and but it's a convention when I
when I write a piece of music, the fact that
someone says that I wrote it is a convention. That
the unfinished Symphony took sixty four people to perform, and
you know, about twice as many as that to produce.
I My name is on the top of the score,
next to Schubert's, but you know that's just because.
Speaker 2: I did one of those many jobs, all.
Speaker 3: Of which were essential to getting that music into the
eight years of listeners. So I think that the role
of the artist has is evolving for the better and
is tending towards the more the more natural state, which
is using all of the sounds that the tribe, and
by the tribe that I mean all of humanity, because
we're all connected today, using all of the sounds we
can make to tell the stories that we want to
see that we want to tell, the stories that our
listeners wanted to hear see.
Speaker 1: This is one of those moments in music history that
I would plant your book in every single music department
across the country, in middle schools as well as high schools,
because you know inside your heart, Lucas, that there are
people out there that have got their computer skills down
and they've also you know, they're they're tapping into their
music life. And those two can get married and they
can do exactly what you're doing with this symphony.
Speaker 3: From your mouth to the procurement departments of every college's years.
Speaker 1: Wow, where can people go to to listen to the
symphony itself that you've helped bring back to life? And
number two, the book, We've got to get that book
into people's hands.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you. So the book is actually is. You
can order it on Amazon.
Speaker 3: They it has been more successful than we had an anticipated,
and they have had to make a newe order, so
you might not get it for a few days, but
you can get it on Amazon. You can get it
at your local bookstores. You know, it's available wherever books
are sold. You can get it from Bloomsbery's website. The
symphony is there's a full recording of it on YouTube.
I have yet to release the full fully mastered version,
but I will someday probably release that. But you can
if you google Lucas Kntsoftiago and Finished Sympathy, you will
find it and you can listen to it, and then
you can go to my website and or go to
my Instagram and tell me what you think about it.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you what I chuckled when you said that
it's doing better than you projected. Of course it is.
Of course it is because you're doing something that the
rest of us wish we could do, and you're the
first one to step through to invite other people back.
It's almost like now you're turning around saying, grab my hand,
grab my hand, I got away, let's go, let's move only.
Speaker 2: Is my favorite interviewer of the day. Thank you so much.
And you know, when you do a piece of.
Speaker 3: Work, like I said earlier, and you're sort of you know,
it's up to the audience what it is. And so
I've been working on this book.
Speaker 2: For so long that I really had no idea how
it was going to be received.
Speaker 3: I just thought, well, this is you know, as one
of the things I'd write about is that mass three
is the ability to make something the way that you
want it.
Speaker 2: And so I got this book to the point where
I said, all right, well this is what I want
to say, and hopefully people will enjoy it.
Speaker 3: I you know, I don't know, but but I you know,
I said, I said my thing. I've put it out
in the world, and I hope that other people resonated
with and I'm flattered. I hope that other people resonate
with it. And I'm flattered that you see in jazz.
Speaker 2: So thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, You've got to come back to this
show any time in the future. And if you team
up with our Charlotte Symphony, you got to come to
town and let's get together and have a face to
face because you're onto something here that is really magnetic.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: I'd love to And you know, the Charlotte I know
some people play in the Charlotte symptons actually that live
in Los Angeles and has a reputation of.
Speaker 2: Being one of the onely great symphonies. So I'm one
with great orchestras. I would be happy to work with them.
Speaker 1: Flattered by the by the author, Wow, will you be
brilliant today?
Speaker 2: Okay, mister Lucas, thanks so much, Eric, it was great
talking to you.