“Your Voice In My Ear” is one of those songs —if song is even an appropriate description —that reminds us that if you push sonic creativity far enough, you move out of the realm of popular music, as most people would understand it, and into other, neighboring realms.
Here, Kat Kikta has created something that makes us think about many things, not least about where the boundaries of music and art blur; here, they seem to meet in a place that reminds me of the original Vangelis soundtrack to Blade Runner, futuristic, excerpts of a digital cinematic soundscape with disembodied voices left in.
But it also poses questions about so much more. As fantastic as the drifting ambiance and floating dreamscapes she creates as a platform for the song are (which can also be experienced as an instrumental track in its own right), it is the conversation literally taking place within it that is intriguing.
It speaks to where Artificial Intelligence and non-human personalities might take us, and here we are, eavesdropping on an intimate conversation between two beings, one clearly human, the other synthetic. But even knowing that, their conversation feels seductive and sensational, sensual and sexual, and we are almost embarrassed to be listening in on such a private moment. Perhaps the track asks us if love and lust and longing are real even when generated by something without an organic heart. Are our feelings real if we know they are in response to generated emotions and feelings born of zeros and ones!
We are only at the beginning of AI’s potential. Do human/non-human relationships have a place in our future? Where will the human experience and the digital world meet? What are the social ramifications of the meeting of these two worlds? These opposites that are so attractive?
No answers are given, but that is not the point of “Your Voice In My Ear.” It merely asks us to consider our future —the place where humanity and machine meet —offering a tantalizing, tangible glimpse of the future.