Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage

Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage

To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between "high brow" and "low brow" music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. Imitation and repetition deaden musical culture—and he should know, since he listens to 3 hours of new music per day and over 1,000 newly released recordings in a year. His latest book covers the evolution of music from its origins in hunter-gatherer societies, to ancient Greece, to jazz, to its role in modern-day political protests such as those in Hong Kong.

He joined Tyler to discuss the history and industry of music, including the reasons AI will never create the perfect songs, the strange relationship between outbreaks of disease and innovation, how the shift from record companies to Silicon Valley transformed incentive structures within the industry–and why that's cause for concern, the vocal polyphony of Pygmy music, Bob Dylan's Nobel prize, why input is underrated, his advice to aspiring music writers, the unsung female innovators of music history, how the Blues anticipated the sexual revolution, what Rene Girard's mimetic theory can tell us about noisy restaurants, the reason he calls Sinatra the "Derrida of pop singing," how to cultivate an excellent music taste, and why he loves Side B of Abbey Road.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded October 23rd, 2019

Other ways to connect

Jaksot(283)

Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read Machiavelli as decisively as Harvey Mansfield. His new ...

18 Maalis 49min

Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's co...

4 Maalis 59min

Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires

Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires

When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential treatments of industrial policy e...

18 Helmi 53min

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders: maybe those sky-high 1929 prices were actually justified given America's remark...

4 Helmi 56min

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christiani...

21 Tammi 59min

Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets g...

7 Tammi 1h 1min

Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective

Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year on CWT and mo...

23 Joulu 202559min

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of t...

17 Joulu 20251h 1min

Suosittua kategoriassa Koulutus

rss-murhan-anatomia
voi-hyvin-meditaatiot-2
rss-narsisti
psykopodiaa-podcast
adhd-podi
rss-rahamania
rss-valo-minussa-2
rss-vapaudu-voimaasi
rss-niinku-asia-on
mielipaivakirja
rss-uskonto-on-tylsaa
aamukahvilla
rss-duodecim-lehti
ilona-rauhala
kesken
psykologia
rss-eron-alkemiaa
rss-koira-haudattuna
rss-arkea-ja-aurinkoa-podcast-espanjasta
ihminen-tavattavissa-tommy-hellsten-instituutti