Consciousness, AI & Creativity with DUSTIN O’HALLORAN - Emmy Award-winning Composer

MUSIC & DANCE - The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast

What will happen when Artificial General Intelligence arrives? What is the nature of consciousness? How are music and creativity pathways for reconnecting us to our humanity and the natural world?

Dustin O’Halloran is a pianist and composer and member of the band A Winged Victory for the Sullen. Winner of a 2015 Emmy Award for his main title theme to Amazon's comedy drama Transparent, he was also nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a BAFTA for his score for Lion, written in collaboration with Volker Bertelmann (aka Hauschka). He has composed for Wayne McGregor (The Royal Ballet, London), Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Ammonite starring Kate Winslet, and The Essex Serpent starring Claire Danes. He produced Katy Perry’s “Into Me You See” from her album Witness and appears on Leonard Cohen’s 2019 posthumous album Thanks For The Dance. With six solo albums under his name, his latest album 1 0 0 1, which explores ideas of technology, humanity and mind-body dualism, is available on Deutsche Grammophon.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

Your album 1 0 0 1 is a thematic exploration of nature, consciousness, technology, and artificial intelligence, implied in the title that suggests a binary code. Can you just discuss the organizing principle of the four parts of the album?

DUSTIN O'HALLORAN

It's really like a journey from our connection with nature to where we are now, in this moment where we're playing with technology. We're almost in this hybrid space, not fully understanding where it's going. And it's very deep in our subconscious and probably much greater than we realize. And it sort of ends in this space where the consciousness of what we're creating, it's going to be very separate from us. And I believe that's kind of where it's heading – the idea of losing humanity, losing touch with nature and becoming outside of something that we have created.

It started as a dance piece with choreographer dancer Fukiko Takase. And we had met when I was doing a dance piece with Wayne McGregor with another project that I do called the Winged Victory for the Sullen. We did a piece called Atomos, and Fukiko was one of Wayne's principal dancers. And I just loved how she was able to express in movement. It was a very profound experience to realize how connected music is to dance, this sense of communication without words, and how it gets elevated when you bring dance and movement into music.

Human-made Perspectives on AI

In making this record and with the dance, I didn't use any AI in the creation of this. This idea was to create just a perspective that's very human. And I feel that's something that is unique to us. And this idea of being reflective and even critical of itself. I think that it's trying to find the magic that I think exists in human creativity, and I wanted it to be very, very much human-made. So, every element is very analog in a sense. I use electronics, but I also use them in a very analog way

Knowledge, Wisdom & Quantum Physics

I think it's really a crossroads between knowledge and wisdom. And I think that wisdom for me is so connected to nature and the information that we get from nature. We ultimately are part of the natural world. And the knowledge of knowing things and facts and these kinds of bits of information doesn't necessarily mean that we are going in the right direction that we know things. In this space, a lot of wisdom is being lost. I find that, going back to what you were saying about being connected to an earlier time. I feel that that's true. Language is being diminished. There's so many things that are being diminished in this moment. And yet, we're creating something that is going to have vastly more knowledge. But this is where it splits. And what is the idea of consciousness? Is wisdom something that's external? Is it something that is more related to quantum physics and the quantum world, more than just the physical body and the physical brain?

What is the value of our consciousness and creativity?

And I think when all of a sudden music and art started to come out, it was a wake up call to what is our purpose. Like, what are we? What are we bringing to humanity, to the human story? And I think it's interesting because a lot of artists now are concerned about it. What is the value of our consciousness? Consciousness has been something that I've been reading about. It's a vastly understudied part of science, and it's going to become very, very relative very quickly. And I think that it's getting to the core of creativity. What is creativity and ultimately where do we want to go? How are we going to connect with each other?

Creating Spaces for the Human Imagination to Flourish

People want human stories, and people want to connect. And I think that it's such a powerful thing, and it's moving so quickly. Just in my lifespan, it's happened. My generation is the last generation to remember a world without the internet and what that was like. What did we do with our time? What did we do with the in-between times? And I think a lot about people growing up now. They have no idea there were moments when you could be bored and your mind would wander. And what you actually access in those times and how important it is. There's so much happening right now. I think that it's a very interesting time, even if there are a lot of concerns.

Iceland has been really great in that sense that there's so much going on and things are speeding up so quickly. And Iceland is very connected to nature and you can't really escape it here. It's just around you constantly and it doesn't take that long to get into just a vast open space. And for me, I really appreciate that, just the space I feel in my mind. And I feel like there's a lot less noise. And that's really good creatively. I think that having these huge natural occurrences like volcanoes and this incredible wind that happens during the winter, all of these very elemental properties.

The Way Sound Moves Underwater

My father had a scuba dive business in Kauai. So I grew up scuba diving since I was about eight years old, and that was a pretty big impact on just my early years of experiencing nature and especially being under the water. The way sound moves underwater, sound waves move much faster in water. So whenever you hear something, it sounds like it's all around you. And I've been lucky enough to hear whales sing and dolphins. So, that was a great way to grow up and experience this whole part of the natural world that most people don't get to.

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The thing that with nature that I think is most profound is that it's always truthful. And I think that that's something that always resonates with me. Whenever I'm in raw nature, there's just an undeniable truth and a sense of how it's supposed to be. And I think that that's something that I reach for in my own music where I try to take myself out of my own single being and try to be in touch with all of it. And that's just something that's so resonating in nature, the sense of wholeness and connectedness.

When I'm writing music, I don't think I'm ever specifically trying to capture any of these moments specifically. I think it's just the way your mind works when you're in nature and the way you're able to hear yourself and peace, really. So, for me, there's always this very strong connection to creativity in nature.

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Creativity is the core of consciousness. It's such an important part to understand, that relationship to ourselves. And where do those sparks come from? I think there's a kind of universal consciousness of creativity. I think our best moments are when we find silence and those are the moments where we're able to tune in to grabbing these ideas that are bigger than us. I always find that those are the moments where you really connect with other people because people I think people internally feel that universal connection.

Exploring Creative Freedom

I was lucky. My mother was very open-minded and didn't really get in the way of how I wanted to express myself. She was just encouraging and helped make sure that I was around the tools and the things that I needed to do it, but gave me a lot of space. And so that was my experience. I don't have the conservatory experience, which is a much more analytical, mathematical way of approaching technique. I've had to do a lot of work on my own with tech, trying to catch up with some of the technique that I didn't get in the early years. But ultimately, with education, I think the idea of being graded on art gets really conceptual because, ultimately, it's when you feel unjudged and you feel free, then I think that's when you can really get in touch with interesting things

Synesthesia & Music

It's funny, I didn't really think synesthesia was strange until I got older and I realized that I was always thinking of colors when I'm writing music. I was always seeing colors and wanting to put colors and textures together. And that was something that I've always followed, rather than thinking of music in a mathematical way. And so when I started learning about it, I didn't realize it was unusual. I just thought everybody experienced music that way.

The Collaborative Process
Bryan Senti has been a great collaborator. He collaborated with me on some of the last seasons of Transparent. We've done some series together, a series called Save Me. The first part of 1 0 0 1 was born out of a moment when I was in Los Angeles, and we were just working in a kind of improvisational way, and we just hit a space that I just felt was very special. And so we sort of took this long improvised piece and slowly carved it out into an actual form. He's an incredible composer and amazing violinist.

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When I was in Italy, I connected with an engineer named Francesco Donnadello. And he ended up being one of my lifelong collaborators. He's just an incredible engineer and the way he thinks about sound and recording... Since we met, he's touched everything that I've done, all the records, and helped me record them and mix. When I moved to Berlin, he eventually moved to Berlin as well and opened a studio. Then he started working with Jóhann Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir, and he's just an incredibly special human. I learned so much about recording from him. When you're translating music, ultimately, it has to be in a format to be listened to, and how much care you put into it can really help create depth for the listener.

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I had the band Dévics for many years with the singer Sara Lov, and we did five records. And we did a lot of touring in Europe. And that's basically how I ended up staying in Italy. We were recording a record at the time, and then I decided to stay. For me, those were my formative years in music. I didn't do conservatory or go to music school.

The Art of Film Composing

The film Lion, when we got involved, there was a pretty early cut. So it was about trying to get into the picture and what would really work with the scenes, but also to sometimes just put it away and just really get to the heart of the film, too, because there was a big overarching feeling to the film. The feeling of home and the feeling of being connected to your mother and this cosmic connection that was calling him to find her. So there was a moment of getting into really taking these bits that we'd been working on outside of looking at the picture and then making them work inside the picture, which is a lot of work. It's actually hard to kind of take something, and then you have to fit it into a box. Because film is a bit of a box. It has limitations, and there's time. It has to hit marks. When you're making music for yourself, you don't have to worry about that.

Is the Human Experience More than a Series of Data Points?

Just knowing things as a series of data that can be processed, I don't think that really quantifies the human experience. And I think that that's for me, maybe that's the good side of this advancement of AI. It's going to make us look human consciousness and realize that we're capable of so much more. And we're capable of connecting on a much, much deeper level. So I think that this is, you know, it's going to be a moment of reckoning.

Music has the power to create a strong sense of empathy. And I think that that's probably what we need more of. Music can really help foster that and I think it helps that music is a universal language. I think that there needs to be a point in time when we need to recognize that we're all living on this tiny planet, which is a speck of dust in the universe, and we need to feel that. That's what I hope.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk and Hannah Lumi with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producers on this episode were Sophie Garnier and Hannah Lumi. The Creative Process is produced by Mia Funk. Additional production support by Katie Foster.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).
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