The Soul of Sound – Why Film Still Needs Human Creativity: A Conversation with Benjamin Kapit – Part 2
“There’s a quote from a famously terrible person, Thomas Jefferson, who said – I don’t particularly like him or a lot of the things he did, but I do agree with this, I do agree with this specific quote. ‘I will study war and strategy so that my children may study science and maths, so that their children may study art and poetry.’ I’m sure I’m butchering the exact quote, but the sentiment is there. Why are we creating robots to do art for us? Why do we not yet have something that can fold my laundry? Wouldn’t that be useful? That’s what I want. And at the end of the day, if I had to pick either having a robot to do my art for me so that I have time to fold my laundry, or having to do both, I’d rather do both. I’m fine living. I enjoy being alive and being a human. I don’t need a robot to take away what, to me, is the most human thing about us, which is that we can create.” – Benjamin Kapit
This episode, “The Soul of Sound – Why Film Still Needs Human Creativity” is the second half of my conversation with Benjamin Kapit of Second World Entertainment as he shares some of the more obscure sounds that he’s turned into cinematic effects, discusses the ethics of AI training and what it gets right and wrong about human creativity, and the message he’d most like to share with future generations about the power of sound.
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(0:00:00) – Exploring Sound in Film Production
As our discussion begins, Benjamin shares more of his hands-on experience with audio production, from the studio apps and audio plugins he prefers to the challenge of bringing it all together in the film’s final cut. “You have to record sound and work with the sound props make,” he says, “the way that people talk, or rather who’s mic’d up in certain shots. You have to work with the edit. You have to have that somehow in your mind because you, the director, are the only one who really knows what it’s going to look like when it’s done.” He tells us about some of his more inventive sound sources, such as a microphone specifically tuned to record static. “When it comes to post-production,” Benjamin says, “especially sound,” I hate rules. I don’t want to do things the way that everyone else does. I don’t want to sit down and say, okay, well, this sound sounds like this, so it has to be this thing.”
(0:11:06) – Exploring AI in the Sound Industry
Benjamin and I talk about the groundbreaking audio work in sci-fi movies like Dune and Interstellar, and how they’ve inspired his approach to sound design. “It never really occurred to me that, like, oh, you can just mess with a synth or with a sound so much that it becomes something else,” he says about Interstellar’s distinctive soundscape. “You can completely shift the tone and the meaning behind audio and make it yours and make people think, yeah, this is this other thing and it’s not.” Our conversation turns to AI’s transformative role in the industry, and his concern that the distinction between different forms of AI, and the question of whether any of them can truly be called artificial intelligence, is being lost in the hype. “Take a program that can look at an MRI and scan for cancer and detect it faster than humans can,” he explains. “That’s discriminative AI. It is separating and analyzing data sets. Then you get to generative AI, and what generative AI is doing is it’s taking these mass data sets and using a statistical model to create something that should look like what’s been requested of it.”
(0:16:01) – The Impact of AI on Creativity
As our conversation closes, Benjamin explains how generative AI works and what sets its algorithmic process apart from human thought. “ChatGPT doesn’t know what I’m saying,” he tells us. “It knows that, statistically, the most likely next thing to follow [hello] would be ‘hi,’ and then ‘how,’ and then ‘are,’ and then ‘you,’ and then a question mark. And that’s only because it’s trained on data.” We talk about whether AI-generated art can be called creative, what its evolution might mean for the industry, and his thoughts about the expanding role of machine learning in everyday tasks. “I’d rather spend hours upon hours going down YouTube rabbit holes,” he says, “on how to work a specific plugin to get a specific sound, using hours on Serum 2 in Ableton to make a specific sound, than to ask AI to do it, because then I didn’t do it and a human didn’t do it. And I want to work with people.”
Episode Summary
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Benjamin’s thoughts on ASMR, film production, and his favorite audio apps and plug-ins.
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AI’s evolving role in cinematography and the dangers of relying on generative AI.
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The ethics of generated content and Benjamin’s message for future generations of artists.
Connect with the Guest
Website: https://benjaminkapit.com/
Follow Benjamin Kapit on TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@benjaminkapit/
Subscribe to Benjamin Kapit on Instagram: http://instagram.com/benjaminkapitofficial
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This interview episode was very skillfully made to sound beautiful by the talented Humberto Franco.
** Transcript available upon request
