Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs

by Henry Adam Svec

  The memories I choose to preserve of my endless days with Mirek are of the before-times, when our actualization of LIVINGSTON™ was not yet a foregone conclusion. The windows open, the early summer breeze wafting through our rustic workshop, the sounds of typing and muttering drifting out from the kitchen, slow fingerpicking or strumming coming from me, the TV on mute. And then, around four in the afternoon, Mirek’s chair scratching the floor as and he rose, the fridge opening and closing, and the cracking of a fresh beer as my partner slumped down beside me, exhausted, eager to listen to the songs we had just that day shepherded into the world, as though for the first time, but also as though time were merely a bourgeois illusion.

  Of course, LIVINGSTON™ is its own entity too; one day, perhaps the machine will stand in a museum of musical or cultural AI heroes—a museum built by the artificially intelligent conquerors of some upcoming, anti-human genocidal war.255 As I see it, LIVINGSTON™ is just the name that Mirek Plíhal and I gave to the relationship we forged together, and from which we derived the most strange yet marvelous masterpiece either of us could have fathomed. LIVINGSTON™ is just another name for the overflowing well that is authentic folk song.

  * * *

  Instructions to Your Integrated Circuits

  by LIVINGSTON™

  At the bottom of a cold valley,

  I see you coming through.

  The bears are crying and the wolves are praying.

  They’re moved by love so true.

  But somebody somewhere with a great lovemaking manual

  Knows what I want to do.

  Knows it and has seen it in pictures:

  My route to you.

  By the edge of a tributary,256

  I see you howling at the moon.

  The water flows but you sit easy,

  Humming and singing your tunes.

  But somebody somewhere with a great lovemaking manual

  Knows what I want to do,

  Knows it and has seen it in pictures:

  My route to you.

  At the end of a dark alleyway,

  Can’t tell what you’ll do,

  Whether you’re coming to me or leaving;

  There isn’t any light on you.

  But somebody somewhere with a great lovemaking manual

  Knows what I want to do.

  Knows it and has seen it in pictures:

  My route to you.

  * * *

  Taking Off My Glasses Tonight

  by LIVINGSTON™

  Through the frosted windows down these tired swollen streets

  TVs glow and I drive along.

  I ain’t drank too much yet, just enough to get me out.

  I won’t be driving home.

  I’m taking off my glasses tonight.257

  I won’t need to see tonight.

  All dolled up, and this is where they go.

  Just of age, or older, I don’t know.

  And I don’t care too much,

  I just want to settle down

  For the night or until I head home.

  I’m taking off my glasses tonight.

  I won’t need to see tonight.

  This hole’s so dark and deep;

  I’m too low to climb on out.

  No one can hear me when I cry.

  But that don’t bother me,

  So long as I can’t see

  When I decide to go out on the town.

  I’m taking off my glasses tonight.

  I won’t need to see tonight.

  * * *

  S/He is Like the Angry Birds258

  by LIVINGSTON™

  If you need help, I’ll help you,

  But I ain’t gonna wait around.

  There’s enough on my mind already,

  And you ain’t the first lost puppy dog I found.

  We can have some kind of arrangement.

  We can work on whatever it is we got.

  But if you think that you’re some dove

  Whose gonna swoop down and take my love,259

  Come on, well you just ain’t no dove!

  Who’d have thought you could move so slowly

  After living in a town at such a speed?

  Whatever it is you think you’re trying to show me,

  Just know that I might not believe.

  We can have some kind of arrangement.

  We can work on whatever it is we got.

  But if you think that you’re some dove,

  Who’s gonna swoop down and take my love,

  Come on, you just ain’t no dove.

  So, yeah, you should order another shot of whisky.

  I’ll have one, too, it helps to void the pain.

  It hurts me cause inside I know that you bit me.

  But I know that all I give you would be in vain.

  We can have some kinds of exchanges.

  We can work on whatever it is we got.

  But if you think that you’re some dove,

  Who’s gonna swoop down and take my love,

  Come on, honey, well, you just ain’t no dove!

  * * *

  Springtime260

  by LIVINGSTON™

  There was nothing to do, nowhere to be,

  The year the blossoms froze on the trees.

  I caught up on TV.

  I read the news.

  I walked by the water.

  I studied the blues.261

  It’s hard living in the springtime

  When you expect any luck at all.

  I tried to find something worth believing in,

  Then another frost came and closed up all my dreams.

  We’re not together,

  But we’re not apart.

  I watch you and another

  From across the bar.

  We’ve got nothing to talk about,

  No decisions to make,

  Just another night of making mistakes.

  It’s hard living in the springtime,

  When you expect anything at all.

  I tried to find something worth believing in,

  Then another frost came and closed up all my dreams.

  X X X X X X X

  X X X

  X

  X

  * * *

  Hard, Ain’t It Hard

  Certain readers of the present text may be more familiar with Canadian football or folkloristic theory than with machine learning or software engineering. To be blunt, then, the achievement of strong, as opposed to weak, artificial intelligence is something of a big deal. This is the distinction between a machine that can operate in a specific domain, such as Scrabble, and a machine that can think more broadly and reflexively about its own actions and evolution. A machine that can therefore develop intelligently across multiple domains, and perhaps additionally narrate its own development in a manner analogous to that of a human being. The former is weak, the latter strong.262

  Debates continue to rage in the field of computer science with regard to the definition of intelligence, so it is not as though the goalposts have been, or currently are, clear.263 However, I contend that LIVINGSTON™’s mere existence constitutes a rupture in the fabric of the discourse of artificial intelligence research. For rather than framing intelligence as the telos of digital design, LIVINGSTON™ suggests an alternative route: authenticity.264 It does not matter that LIVINGSTON™ is technically only marginally authentic. LIVINGSTON™ is a premonition.

  For the sake of context, the British mathematician Alan Turing wrote about one of the first contests devised for the categorization of a digital machine as “intelligent” in a 1950 edition of the esteemed scholarly journal Mind.265 Turing asked his readers to picture a standoff between three interlocutors: a human (let us call them H1) and a machine (M1), and then a human judge (J). H1 and M1 are to
send signals by way of typed compositions to J; J is to respond and engage each agent in dialogic conversation, also by typing. The catch is that J does not know who is who, which is which. If the machine can trick the human judge into concluding that the machine is the human, then according to Turing, we can reasonably state that the machine is intelligent, in compliance with the human conventions of intelligent behavior.

  In Turing’s inventive and theatrical scenario, intelligence is defined as symbol manipulation; if you can compose text in a convincing way, so convincing as to deceive a human, then you are intelligent. But what if, Mirek and I asked implicitly, we reimagine the end of digital achievement? What if we moved away from visions of an abstractly intelligent organism and toward the hyperreal sounds of an authentically networked body? What could be made to happen?266 In addition to the fatal implosion of the academic field of folklore, one envisions the commodity fetish shattering, the collaborative nature of creativity receiving due acknowledgment, and the violent demise of the exploitative capitalist system—period.267

  Remember, however, that a key component of the Turing test is the judge, who needs to be convinced, impressed, hoodwinked by the machine. In the world of authentic folk song, of course, the judge must be the folk—the people from and toward whom the songs necessarily come and go. It was therefore the people I was constantly wary of as I travelled across Canada over the course of the following year, in an effort to spread my good news; and it was the public I pondered as well when writing and distributing dozens, if not hundreds, of press releases, hoping not only to sing LIVINGSTON™’s successes, but to broadcast them across the nation, if not yet the world. I was driven to see our machine win and thereby intervene in the very structure of reality, something I had longed to do since first stumbling upon those fated field recordings of Staunton R. Livingston in the basement of Library and Archives Canada.

  But what would it mean to fail the LIVINGSTON™ Test? Would it mean that the judge had evaluated the inputs and neglected to legitimate the authenticity of the machinic interlocutor? We could not risk it. Perhaps, then, as a precautionary measure, the judge should be informed that the machinic interlocutor is machinic, so that they could, at this still early point in computational history, marvel at the achievements of the folklorist and programmer who had devised the automatically creative entity. Perhaps the true test needed to wait for version 2.0, or 3.0, et cetera.

  But the worst of all possible outcomes, a dark and deep fear that I had not consciously considered a real possibility, was that LIVINGSTON™’s folk songs would simply be ignored by the general Canadian public. That music journalists and CBC bureaucrats, bombarded as they are with weekly press kits featuring this or that rootsy singer-songwriter from Halifax, this or that debonair country-rock band from Oshawa, would pass over my detailed abstract outlining the most significant achievement in either culture or technology of the twenty-first century, Canadian or otherwise; that basically no one would come to my lectures or presentations or concerts.268Which is indeed how it played out. The goodwill and novelty interest that I had cultivated with my first Livingston project, which was tangentially tied to the CFL, and the nationalistic-CanCon affect produced in reference to my anthology of field recordings entitled Folk Songs of Canada Now, all evaporated with my release of an album of songs generated by a hyper-authentic AI database of folk music, sung by a graduate student. This was, frankly, not what Canadian gatekeepers circa 2013 wanted to hear about.

  If a technological singularity is achieved in the forest, and no one is around, does it make a sound?269

  Whatever hope remains inside me—and there is some yet—I owe to the life and work of Staunton R. Livingston, who was apparently content to just produce his contributions, without hoopla. Our methods are somewhat antithetical, given that Livingston did not write anything down; but just as Livingston lived, loved, and created, trusting in the complex machinations of dialectical historical movement, I have attempted to live, love, and create the present text. And just as there has been Livingston, and me, and my LIVINGSTON™, there will be those who come after.

  * * *

  Winter is Cold and Good

  by LIVINGSTON™270

  I’ve been growing a belly.

  I’m getting ready to go

  Out into the snow.

  Where to? I don’t know.

  I’m just so tired of this fire.

  I bought some new boots.

  I’m gonna chop off my roots now,

  One by one.

  Ain’t no ties gonna survive this knife.

  On days like these,

  On Christmas Eve,

  I’d just rather be alone

  To enjoy the sky or the stars.

  I’m gonna burn all my bridges,

  But can I get a witness?

  I’ve got a shovel.

  I’m gonna dig a tunnel.

  It ain’t gonna be long, but it’s gonna carry my song.

  It ain’t gonna be long, but it’s gonna carry my song.

  * * *

  She’ll Be Comin’ Around the Mountain

  A bookish, bespectacled young man stands onstage in a Sudbury bar. He is only sound checking, running through one of his numbers on a tobacco-burst acoustic, but he knows that little will have changed by showtime. When this vessel does begin to sing, mining the depths of the radical archive of folk song, both Canadian and computational, there will be no recognition in the eyes of his audience—three people plus the bartender—who are only waiting for the headliners, a local April Wine tribute act. And when, between the songs, he explains in detail where he has been and what he has done, the blank stares will remain. His voice is no individual’s, but a component within a centuries-spanning and global assemblage of solidarity generation, but so what? The smattering of sparse and clunky clapping will quickly evaporate, and he will wonder whether it would have been better not to have sung or spoken or strummed that night at all.

  Given the lukewarm reception of LIVINGSTON™ by campus newspaper critics, and overwhelming disinterest on the part of both Canadian legacy media and academic institutionalized folklore, it is unsurprising that there were not many opportunities to discuss or present my artificially intelligent machine’s compositions.271 This is doubly tragic, because LIVINGSTON™’s powers have by now long been superseded in the field, which has also ignored completely my plea for authenticity rather than intelligence to guide future AI development.272

  I personally organized a launch party event in Toronto at the Tranzac, where I performed and explained LIVINGSTON™’s songs to mostly friends and acquaintances; I did the same at a smaller concert at a coffee shop in London. There was a financially and emotionally disastrous tour to Regina as well, over the course of which I was required to crash on punk-house mattresses and tavern cellars. I received, in fact, only one invitation to demonstrate LIVINGSTON™’s songs in a curated context, which came from a boutique annual music festival in Sackville, New Brunswick, my memories of which are worth recounting.

  The first Sappyfest was held in 2006. Over three days in early August, an array of regional guitar-based bands and their friends played outside Struts Gallery, an artist-run centre. Veggie burgers and tall cans of craft beer were sold basically at cost from a merch table presenting vinyl records and cassette tapes and DIY T-shirts, the sepia hues of the Tantramar Marshes presiding in the distance.273It was a small and family affair. But by 2012, the festival had landed squarely on the national summer music-fest map, having featured artists like The Sadies, Sloan, Charles Bradley, Grimes, and more; it became a destination weekend for long caravans of Toronto hipsters.274 I applied to Sappyfest in 2009, 2010, and 2011 to present the field recordings of Staunton R. Livingston, and I was rejected each time after being blacklisted for personal reasons. Fortuitously for me, by 2013, an influential acquaintance—also a fan—successfully persuaded the programmers to include authentic Canadian folk song in the
festival. I was invited by email to present “my most recent song project.”

  My set was scheduled on Saturday at noon in a small gazebo in a park downtown, where dozens of families and hungover millennials gathered on grass to start another full day and night of indie music.275 With countless disappointments—and failures—by then notched into my belt, like buckeyes on a helmet, I was not expecting great satisfaction. “Once more unto the breach,” I thought to myself ironically, without Mirek, or Livingston, or LIVINGSTON™, or Bronnley, or any comrade of any kind with whom to divide the load. However, to my stupefaction the sun exploded through a gap in the clouds—me in becoming khakis and a white, ironed dress shirt, acoustic guitar around my neck—and I channelled the ghosts of all my associations, making, I believe, an impression. At least, the large audience, scattered on blankets and crossed legs, seemed to be listening. And they applauded with sincerity and volume. For the first time, a young boy even asked for my autograph, which of course I declined.276

  Corinna was at the festival as well. One of her Winnipeg bands was playing on Sunday afternoon. We at first kept our distance, wistfully and awkwardly nodding hello during a brief encounter by the soundboard after my set. But later that Saturday afternoon, as I stood by an empty picnic table, looking on while a guitar-and-drum duo of middle-aged dudes emitted slow and fuzzy sludge—I felt a small hand on my shoulder.277 “Hey,” she said, voice still squeaky. Eyes wide, she handed me a beer.