Tired of Listening to Old Music was not planned. It emerged spontaneously, like someone climbing a staircase without knowing what awaits at the top.
There is a vast cultural hiatus in literature, theater, cinema, and music. This phenomenon has been unfolding since the late 90s; creativity seems to have stagnated, giving way to mere technique and repetitive, common recipes.
It all began in 2024 when I decided to experiment with musical AI using poems I’ve kept in a diary since the 90s—texts recounting my personal experiences with shamanism.
Contrary to the ironic title of this site, I confess: I have been listening to old music. Little of what is new today has soul, and what is good remains hidden in small niches on the internet.
Some musicians say there is nothing left to create, that everything was already invented by those who came before, or they claim people like me are just nostalgic. Well, there has never been anything “new” to be created. Every piece of music conceived by humanity is a result of copying what came before—a grand “meme” traversing eras since the Paleolithic, when music was ritual. Every musician stands on the references of those who preceded them.
So, why did music stop? What happened to the legacy of generations of musicians who learned from and reinterpreted their predecessors in a personal, intimate way? Every musical revolution existed because someone chose to listen to an “old” musician and reinterpret them.
This isn’t nostalgia. Born in 1967, I witnessed the revolutions of every decade. I listened to—and still listen to—Son House, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Creedence, Beatles, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Soundgarden, Nirvana, and then… it seemed to end.
Great innovators always drank from the past to create the future; they used the synthesizer to translate the feeling of the blues while being criticized by purists, or Muddy Waters when he plugged in the electric guitar.
The trajectory of human evolution only exists because we repeat, in our own time, what our ancestors did in theirs, using the technology available to them.
The current mistake is not technology, but the abandonment of heritage. We stopped listening to the masters because we called them “old,” forgetting that without the root, the treetop has nowhere to grow. I chose not to stop. I use what the present gives me to honor what the past taught me.
I chose not to stop. I use what the present gives me to honor what the past has taught me. Despite having studied music three times throughout my life, I never became a musician. I only have my ears and some basic knowledge of music theory. If I, who am not a musician, obtained good results using musical AI, what about a musician?
On the contrary: I see AI as a showcase of infinite possibilities, a laboratory of references that challenges us to go further.
Music only becomes fully real when filtered through the soul and performed organically by human hands. Inspired by what I’ve created in these experiments, I feel the desire to resume my studies and, one day, play each of these songs myself. Technology gave me the vision; now, the instrument calls me back to reality.
Robson Seloti – 2026
