Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs

by Henry Adam Svec

  223 My deliberate intention, insofar as I reflected upon it at the time, was to continue with the communication of self-determination. However, it is also worth mentioning that I suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder, which, despite the consequent personal difficulties, has been, I believe, an asset in the field of folk song collection. And the data backs up my informed supposition: Jack F. Samuels, O. Joseph Bienvenu III, Anthony Pinto, Abby J. Fyer, James T. McCracken, Scott L. Rauch, Dennis L. Murphy et al. “Hoarding in Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: Results from the OCD Collaborative Genetics Study,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 45, no. 4 (2007): 673–686.

  224 The special was usually a salty or cheesy soup paired with an appropriately cheesy or saucy sandwich. For instance, cream of cheddar-potato might go with the Monte Cristo, or cream of broccoli with the ranchy grilled chicken.

  225 Long after I was back south, I was happy to discover that a jury of peers found the man to be innocent, which I applauded. It was two bully cops that had accused the local man, who had chosen to represent himself, of attempting to murder one of them; but the cops’ story was clearly full of holes, or so it had seemed to me. See Christopher Scott, “McDiarmid Acquitted of Attempted Murder,” Yukon News, March 5, 2015.

  226 I only found the sheet music for two jazz numbers from the 1920s, one about gold mining and the other a horrific, racist serenade, neither of which could be reasonably called folk song from the Livingstonian perspective.

  227 One might say that I swapped my archive fever for the cabin strain, which reacts disastrously with certain personalities, resulting sometimes in homicide. See, for instance, Rudy Wiebe, The Mad Trapper (Markham, ON: Red Deer Press, 2003).

  228 Jeopardy!, “The IBM Challenge,” directed by Kevin McCarthy, aired on February 14, 2011, ABC.

  229 See Rob High, “The Era of Cognitive Systems: An Inside Look at IBM Watson and How It Works,” IBM Corporation Redbooks (2012): 1-16.

  230 WATSON™ was the size of a room and thus housed in a nearby facility. And yet, perhaps his presence onstage, even if feasible, would have been too disturbing for the audience to witness. William Duncan, “Anomie and Uncanniness in Digital Machinery,” Avatar 34, no. 4 (2009): 121–129.

  231 Dr. Katharine Frase in Jeopardy!, “The IBM Challenge,” directed by Kevin McCarthy, aired on February 15, 2011, ABC.

  232 I did not apologize, but regretted my earlier shenanigans and knew that he could feel my remorse. Jack Burgoon and Edith Seguin, “Nonverbal Communication in the Area of Forgiveness,” Journal of Proxemics 50, no. 2 (1993): 222–245.

  233 This excursus required brief explanation of the important distinction between abstract and concrete utopia, as developed by Ernst Bloch. The former is idealist and empty; the latter is structural and revolutionary; but both are good. See Ruth Levitas, “Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia,” Utopian Studies 1, no. 2 (1990): 13–26.

  234 Keep in mind that the virtual does not necessarily need to be uttered in order to become real: “Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run.” Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007), 148.

  235 See, perhaps, Ken S. Coates, Land of the Midnight Sun (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).

  236 Henry Adam Svec, “Artificially Intelligent Machine Generates Authentic Canadian Folk Music” (Press Release), 2013.

  237 One needs not spend long in the comparative study of global folk song to find that LIVINGSTON™’s hypothesis is on the money. See, for example, Richard Polenberg, Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales That Inspired “Stagolee,” “John Henry,” and Other Traditional American Folk Songs (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); L. I. Quan-Lin, “On Taiwan Dialectical Ballads in the Period of Japanese Occupation,” Journal of Anhui University of Science and Technology 2 (2009): n.p.; Erin Sanders, “It’s Easy to Cry: The Musicality of Emotions in Portuguese, French, British, and American Balladry,” Musical Sounds 43, no. 4 (2008): 333-380.

  238 The phenomenological experience of that which athletes, musicians, writers, and scientists often refer to as “the zone”—a heightened and even shamanic state of focus and energy—is also achievable by patient folk song collectors. Debby Kripke, “The Uses (and Overuses) of Meditation in the Field,” Journal of Applied Folkloristics 57, no. 1 (2004): 33-34.

  239 For thus, regarding one of our earliest arguments, about the sustainability and ethics of the industrial mode of production, I win. See Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capitalism: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1998).

  240 Which, in my estimation, is precisely why LIVINGSTON™’s songs were and are light years beyond the work of their contemporaries. See, for instance, Ross Goodwin, 1 The Road (Paris: Jean Boîte Éditions, 2018). Pathetic.

  241 We uploaded, first, the Canadian folk song canon proper (Fowke, Barbeau, Creighton, Svec, etc.). It is our surprising subsequent choices, however, from which LIVINGSTON™ derives its, so to speak, secret sauce.

  242 I do know that this is known in AI research as “supervised learning.” Antti Rasmus, Mathias Berglund, Mikko Honkala, Harri Valpola, and Tapani Raiko. “Semi-Supervised Learning with Ladder Networks,” Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28 (2015): 3546–3554.

  243 E.g., Jim Nash, “The Need for Authority in Contemporary Folkloristics,” Journal of Canadian Folklore 120, no. 500 (2015): 259–284.

  244 Aside from perhaps eight or nine total exceptions, but keep in mind that these were out of thousands upon thousands of messages sent from me to the machine.

  245 For a case in point, see Dale Ricks, “The Folk songs of the Youth: Traditional Music at Upper Canada College,” Song Collecting Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2006): 1–10.

  246 It should be acknowledged that we were not the first team to try to digitize the folkloristic enterprise. Alan Lomax, toward the end of his career and life, sought to make it possible for computer users to code and analyze folk musical performances and to analyze the global data crowdsourced by the platform, a tool he called “The Global Jukebox.” See John Szwed, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (New York, NY: Viking, 2010).

  247 See Helen Creighton, Maritime Folk Songs (Toronto, ON: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1972).

  248 There have been startling developments in this area. In April 2020, for instance, Open AI unveiled Jukebox, “a model that generates music with singing in the raw audio domain.” Prafulla Dhariwal, Heewoo Jun, Christine Payne, Jong Wook Kim, Alec Radford, and Ilya Sutskever, “Jukebox: A Generative Model for Music,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00341 (2020). The sound recordings are both stunning and uncanny.

  249 It was through Matt Sarty that I was able to borrow a Yamaha acoustic guitar from a local musician. Again, coordinating the pickup was onerous due to Matt’s texting style, but I was nonetheless grateful.

  250 Cf. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013).

  251 This is what some Russian literary theorists have referred to as defamiliarization. For a Western Marxist inflection of the concept, see Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (New York, NY: Hill & Wang, 1977).

  252 As I have argued elsewhere, there are etymological connections joining the terms gadget, thingamajig, and hootenanny. See Henry Adam Svec, “iHootenanny: A Folk Archeology of Social Media,” The Fibreculture Journal 25 (2015): n.p.

  253 A quick Google Scholar query reveals that my hypothesis has been taken seriously, not only in folklore, where the validity is obvious, but also in information processing. Te Sun Han, “Folklore in Source Coding: Information-Spectrum Approach,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 51, no. 2 (2005): 747–753. I guess Mirek is not a subscriber of IEEE Transactions on I
nformation Theory.

  254 Our conflict therefore had to do with the question of the locus of the work of the artificially intelligent folk song database. The songs themselves, which in the end needed to be heard by humans, were my focus; Mirek’s focus was the horsepower of LIVINGSTON™’s archive, or “database aesthetics.” Victoria Vesna, Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

  255 As has been rendered in various science-fictional Hollywood apocalyptic films. See, for example, Dir. James Cameron, The Terminator (1984: Hemdale & Pacific Western Productions/Orion).

  256 Note that there is a double meaning of “tributary” which resonates very much with Livingstonian Canadian communication theory: (1) a river or stream or channel; (2) a person who pays tribute (Oxford English Dictionary).

  257 Mirek and I frequently sang this line together at the Macaulay House; it became our anthem, our running joke, a secret message emblematizing our partnership and collective commitment to LIVINGSTON™.

  258 The “angry birds” are a longstanding motif in Canadian folklore, generally signifying an ominous force or threat, both natural and artificial. Audrey Salt, “Birds of A Feather: (Re-) Constructing Avian Images in Canadian Folk Song,” Imagination 46, 43 (1999): 45–47. However, “angry birds” might more specifically refer to a digital game, most often played on mobile devices, the ontological and aesthetic implications of which most contemporary Canadian folk song collectors are simply oblivious.

  259 According to a surly audience member in North Bay, who spoke up in the Q&A following my performance there, doves are allegedly not a “swooping animal.” However, I do not believe that that point (if true) invalidates the aesthetic integrity of this folk song, which is precisely the point I made in my stern response. Henry Adam Svec, “The Songs of LIVINGSTON™,” Whitewater Gallery, March 2014, North Bay, Ontario.

  260 I read the paper printout of this text for the first time as I lay on my bed one late night or early morning. I remember this vividly, because it was at that moment that I first saw one of the ghosts that inhabited our house—a long, black shadow, of which I was not afraid. For documentation of other experiences in this haunted site, see Leela Gilday, Veronica Verkeley, and Joanna Close, Footsteps in the Macaulay House (Self-Published, 2007).

  261 According to Ray Kurzweil, “Once a computer achieves a level of intelligence comparable to human intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it.” Ray Kurzweil, “The Evolution of Mind in the Twenty-First Century,” in Are We Spiritual Machines?, ed. Jay W. Richards (Seattle: Discovery Institute Press, 2002), 13. Thus, LIVINGSTON™ plays by, in a sense, “imagining” a lack of knowledge as a characteristically human feature, rather than as a glitch.

  262 John Searle, “Minds, Brains and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Science 3 (1980): 417–424.

  263 See Alex Carb, The Debates in A.I. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

  264 Of course, authenticity is not to be understood here as a natural or organic essence but rather as self-creating, systemic potentiality, as the capacity of organisms to produce both the world and their selves. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980). See also Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).

  265 Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59, no. 236. (1950), 433–460.

  266 I have been inspired, in formulating these questions, by the sub-field known as media archeology. Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archeology? (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012); Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Towards an Archeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Eric Kluitenberg, ed., Book of Imaginary Media: Excavating the Dream of the Ultimate Communication Medium (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2006).

  267 For a more detailed study of the possibilities of communistic artificial intelligence, see Nick Dyer-Witheford, Atle Mikkola Kjosen, and James Steinhoff, Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2019).

  268 I even had trouble securing service from Canadian PR agents—who did not understand our accomplishments—and therefore needed to write and distribute all promotional materials myself. See Henry Adam Svec, Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada, http://folksingularity.com.

  269 Far beyond either narrow or general artificial intelligence, “the singularity” is a concept developed by futurists to describe a theoretical historical moment at which humans are superseded by machines. There are numerous versions of this folk story, but the general through line is the emphasis on the qualitative rupture of the very fabric of techno-historical change. See, for example, Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York, NY: Viking, 2005).

  270 Now is as good a time as any to explain my trademarking and patenting of LIVINGSTON™. By protecting our IP and brand, I have merely sought to defend our gift to the common from the dangers of corporate colonization; this is a long tradition, though controversial, in the history of folk song collection. See, for example, Robert Springer, “Folklore, Commercialism and Exploitation: Copyright in the Blues,” Popular Music 26, no. 1 (2007): 33–45. Sadly, due to my having fallen out with my collaborator, it is I and I alone who now legally presides over the invention.

  271 The LIVINGSTON™ album was only reviewed in two campus newspapers. Marc W. Kitteringham writes, “The second track, ‘S/He Is Like The Angry Birds’ feels like it could be sung by an old folksinger, but has some gorgeously imperfect parts that make it sound like it was in fact written by a robot that used an algorithm rather than emotion to write it. The programmed and pixel-fuzzed guitar solo that slightly clashes with the rest of the song sounds like a computer thought it would work, but it doesn’t quite work out.” Marc W. Kitteringham, “Album Review—Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada, Vol. 1,” The Griff, March, 2014. Kitteringham is simply unable to receive the work on its own terms. (“Robot”!?) Meanwhile, Nicholas Friesen is truly harsh in his savage dismissal: “Opening with a wordy, mid-tempo tune about Alberta, this concept record made by Livingston [SIC]… is pretty okay. Maybe if Livingston didn’t spend all this time focusing on a silly explanation, the musicians could have actually made a full length instead of this seven song EP.” Nicholas Friesen, “Livingston,” The Uniter, March 19, 2014.

  272 There are, frankly, too many examples from which to choose. But consider, for example, any of Mirek’s recent research as a salaried employee of Google. E.g., Sebastian Bruch, Shuguang Han, Michael Bendersky, Marc Najork, and Mirek Plíhal, “A Stochastic Treatment of Learning to Rank Scoring Functions,” Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (2020): 61–69.

  273 See David Hesmondhalgh and Leslie M. Meier, “Popular Music, Independence and the Concept of the Alternative in Contemporary Capitalism,” in Media Independence: Working with Freedom or Working for Free?, eds. James Bennett and Niki Strange (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 108–130.

  274 I do not mean “hipster” pejoratively, but allude rather to the term’s long and complicated history in relation to style and identity. Cameron Bronnley, “Lecture on Authenticity,” University of Western Ontario, COMM 201,Fall 2007.

  275 Sappyfest organizers did make excellent use of the myriad performance spaces in the small town of Sackville. That year there were concerts held at the United Church, the independent cinema, the bowling alley, the roadhouse tavern, and more, the mainstage thoughtfully placed directly onto Bridge Street.

  276 Autograph collection is an ideological practice through which bourgeois subjectivity is naturalized. See Barry King, “Stardom, Celebrity, and the Money Form,” The Velvet Light Trap 65 (2010): 7–19.

  277 See Matthew Bannister, White Boys, White Noise: Masculinities and 1980s Indie Guitar Rock (New Yo
rk, NY: Routledge, 2017).

  278 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1968).

  279 Propp’s category XIV, “The Hero Acquires Use of the Magical Agent,” will be a fruitful tool with which to unpack this episode. See Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, 43–50.

  280 It was this surprise rock band, and not the humble declaration of groundbreaking achievements in the fields of AI and folkloristic theory, that made headlines the next day across national media outlets, including the ever-basic national broadcaster. See, for instance, Brad Wheeler, “Shark Attack Give Fans an ‘Intense Musical Gyration’ at New Brunswick Festival,” Globe and Mail, July 30, 2013.

  281 I would later meditate on a colleague’s argument that the dove, unlike the “angry birds,” is a symbol of peace, both inside and outside the traditions of Canadian folk song. See Dale Ricks, “Re-Centring Canadian Folk Song: Doves, Pigeons, and Other Avian Creatures,” Songbook 14, no. 3 (2013): 220–237.