Light Box, from sound designer Mark Henry Phillips
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What sparked Mark Henry Phillips’ existential crisis with AI music generators?
Hey there, it's Robin from PRX. I'm excited to tell you about Lightbox, the newest show in the Radiotopia family. Mark Henry Phillips spent 20 years composing music for a living. Then one night he typed a few words into an AI music generator and it did his job better, way better. In just 10 seconds, basically for free. In Lightbox, Mark investigates what AI is doing to music and the people who make it. Over nine months and with more than 40 interviews, he talked to CEOs building these tools, Grammy award-winning producers secretly using them, and legendary musicians trying to stop them. From PRX's Radiotopia, Lightbox. It's not just a story about music. It's about what we lose when machines start doing the things we thought made us human.
Out now wherever you get your podcasts.
From Windhill Studios, this is Lightbox. The first time I played around with an AI music generator, it caused an existential crisis. I literally lost sleep, staring at my ceiling in the middle of the night, wondering, will this be my last year making money as a musician? So what happened? I was scoring a project that was Alfred Hitchcock-esque. Hitchcockian? I was supposed to write a dozen tracks that sounded like they could have been written by Bernard Herrmann, one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and a frequent collaborator of Alfred Hitchcock. Great, I thought. This'll be easy. Before I sat down at the piano for my impossible task, I thought I'd do a little experiment. So I logged on to an AI music generator called Udio.
There was a little box that said, describe your song. I typed in Bernard Herrmann, theme, Alfred Hitchcock, film, mysterious, and then clicked create. About a minute later, I got this.
My mind was blown. The composition, the orchestration, the recording quality, it was all spot on. A million times better than anything I could do. That's stunning. This is Michael Spitzer, author of The Musical Human, a renowned musicologist and Beethoven expert. I played him this track to see what he thought. So that's AI? That's AI. And it creates the actual sound? Yeah.
All I typed in was words, and it produced that in about a minute.
I'm still trying to process it. It's mind-blowing, isn't it? And yeah.
My name's Mark Henry Phillips. For the past dozen years, I made a living as a composer. Music for commercials, for clients like Google, Nike, and Ford. Scoring indie films, making music for podcasts, podcasts like Serial, Startup, This American Life, and Homecoming. It isn't exactly what I dreamed of when I was a kid and I decided I wanted to be a musician, but on most days, I counted myself lucky. I was making a decent living by playing music. But now, it felt like the jig was up. This whole crisis started about a year and a half ago, when I logged on to Oudio for the first time. I was there just to see what it could do, and I stumbled across a track by a user named ManOrMonster. He was trying to recreate a Toots and the Mädels track, and I typed in some lyrics along with soulful, reggae, ska, 1969, Hammond organ, and out popped this.
Girl, you know I'm loving you. Why don't you love me too?
I didn't want to admit it, but it's good. Really good. It doesn't feel like it was created inside a data center. It feels like it was made in a makeshift studio in Jamaica on a hot summer night in 1969. It brings up all sorts of copyright issues because this sounds a lot like Toots, aka Frederick Toots Hibbert, aka a real live human being. And I would wager to bet that's because Toots' entire catalog was used in Udio's training data. But let's ignore that for now. We'll get to it in future episodes. For now, let's just focus on how good this sounds.
it
might not be perfect but it feels like real music and if it feels real that has big implications Like what, you ask?
How did the first AI‑generated Bernard Herrmann‑style track change Mark’s perception of AI?
Let me give you a hypothetical. You're an ad exec making a beer commercial. You want a track that sounds like it was recorded in Jamaica in 1969, but you don't want to deal with the money and legal back and forth that comes with licensing a vintage track.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What sparked Mark Henry Phillips’ existential crisis with AI music generators?
0:01–5:12
2
How did the first AI‑generated Bernard Herrmann‑style track change Mark’s perception of AI?
5:12–19:35
3
Why does Mark compare AI music tools to performance‑enhancing drugs for professionals?
19:35–26:14
4
What did the industry‑wide survey reveal about AI adoption among top musicians and producers?
26:14–50:27