> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://musically-novel.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Babel Machine - URL: https://musically-novel.ghost.io/the-babel-machine/ - Published: 2026-06-26T19:20:58.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-02T17:06:10.000Z - Description: Let us make a name for ourselves. - Author: PETER SALTZMAN - Tags: The Tanakh Improvisations, improvisation, Tower of Babel, Hebrew Bible, Torah, Orchestral, solo piano, Newsletter, #Migrated-1788368492164, #Import 2026-09-02 17:05 > “Now all the earth had one language and the same words.” > > “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Blah, blah, blah. And I do mean **blah, blah, blah**, because that is not just a cheap joke. It is the point. We are, after all, living in an age of babble: chatty fools, content machines, brand architects, thought leaders, prompt geniuses, and self-naming mini-empires, all using whatever tools are available — including AI — to appear more intelligent, more skilled, more visionary, more important than they are. “Let us make a name for ourselves.” **There it is: the first press release.** One of the striking things about the Tanakh, when you come back to it after years away, is how brief so many of the famous stories are. They feel enormous in memory, but on the page they can be astonishingly compact. The Binding of Isaac. Jacob wrestling the angel. Eden. Cain and Abel. Noah. Babel. There is very little actual babbling in the Tanakh, though the genealogies can begin to feel that way if you hit them at the wrong hour. The Tower of Babel is only a few paragraphs, and yet everybody remembers it. Or thinks they do. Humanity has one language. Humanity migrates. Humanity builds with brick and bitumen. Humanity says, “Let us build us a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth.” Then God comes down, confounds their language, and scatters them. Which leaves a few questions. What exactly were they trying to do? Reach heaven? Become gods? Prevent dispersion? Build a monument to themselves? Establish the first totalizing empire of speech, architecture, and public relations? The story does not really say. That is part of its power. Richard Elliott Friedman points out that the story has ambiguity at its center: we are told that humanity is building a tower with its top in the sky, but we are not told what they plan to do when they finish it. It leaves the tower open. We get to fill in the blanks. It can be technological. It can be political. It can be imperial. It can be spiritual. It can be artistic. It can be all of those things, because human beings are very good at turning tools into idols and then congratulating themselves for their excellent craftsmanship. Friedman also notes the wordplay at the end of the story. Babel, or Babylon, becomes associated in Hebrew with confusion and babbling because YHWH confounds the language of the earth there. But to the Babylonians themselves, the name meant something closer to **bab-ilu** — the Gate of God. That is wonderful. Because maybe “babble” and “Gate of God” are not really opposites. Maybe the danger begins when we mistake our babble for a gate. Maybe the tower is what happens when human beings confuse vertical ambition with transcendence. Or, to put it in modern terms: maybe there is a very thin line between “I have built something that reaches toward heaven” and “I have created a LinkedIn post that enhances my personal brand.” [Subscribe](#/portal/signup) # Babbling Piano ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7a/4b/7a4bd768-ae74-4aac-8606-8859beafad44/content/images/2026/09/7ba92f8a-690f-4753-8145-934c68906fec_1672x941-1.png) As usual, this started with a free piano improvisation. Free, but with some thoughts governing the freedom. I wanted: 1. The sound of musical babbling. 2. The sound of musical ascension. 3. The sound of musical crashing down to earth. You can hear the babbling from the start: the piano mumbling, chattering, circling itself, trying to find an opening. Then the music starts climbing. There are a lot of ascending scales in this piece. That was not accidental. As I improvised, I had in mind babble, ascent, ego, construction, instability, and collapse. Then, because I cannot leave well enough alone — and because this is Babel, after all — I added more. And more. And more. Drums. Bass. Guitar. Winds. Brass. Effects. Finally harp. The rhythm section accompaniment was generated with the help of Moises — not Moses, though given the project I appreciate the confusion — an AI-assisted music tool that I use to follow and accompany a free improvisation full of tempo shifts, rhythmic swerves, and no sane time signature for very long. I suspect most people use it to follow a straight rock, hip-hop, or EDM groove. Not me. I wanted to see how it would follow instability in harmony, rhythm, and tempo. It did all of those things remarkably well. Maybe too well. It accompanies the piano almost like a certain kind of jazz musician: technically dazzling, stylistically fluent, deeply convinced that the solution to every problem is more notes. And the result, at moments, sounds a bit like jazz fusion, a genre I have never especially loved. Or liked. Not because fusion musicians lack skill. Quite the opposite. Fusion often requires obscene levels of skill. That is part of the problem. It can become a music of chops, athletic enthusiasm, metric gamesmanship, cleverness, and a certain elevated snootiness — music that keeps saying, “Did you hear that? Did you hear that? Did you effing hear that you three-chord simians?” Yes. I heard it. Now say something. Of course, classical pianists and violinists do this too. Liszt etudes. Paganini caprices. Concertos played as Olympic events. Rock guitarists do it. Jazz players do it. Composers do it. Writers do it. I am doing it right now. Blah, blah, blah. So why create a piece that flirts with a kind of musical babble I do not particularly like? Because that is the point. I am never really doing only what I am doing, am I? Is this an exercise in musical futility? Yes. And no. Because I am doing the thing and subverting the thing. The babbling brook is the setup. The show-off music is the setup. The climbing scales are the setup. The orchestration piling on top of the improvisation is the setup. The tower has to become tempting before it can fall. I am creating a musical description of that process. And if you listen to the piano improvisation by itself, which I am also posting here, I think you can hear the same basic story: muttering, climbing, reaching, insisting, tumbling, trying again. The added orchestration does not create the idea. It amplifies it. It turns the private thought into a public construction project. Listening back to the original solo piano improvisation, I realize something stranger happened than I first understood. The piano version, though built from the same ascending and descending figures, is fundamentally reflective. It has space. Silence. Hesitation. It is not triumphant. It is thinking. The orchestrated version, using the same material, becomes something else: public, bombastic, self-congratulatory, absurd, magnificent, and faintly grotesque. I cannot quite reconcile the two versions, except to say that maybe this is the point. The same musical impulse can remain a private meditation, or it can be built into a tower. *(solo piano version)* # Musical Midrash, Mechanical Tower ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7a/4b/7a4bd768-ae74-4aac-8606-8859beafad44/content/images/2026/09/f51b4ffd-bc3a-4b15-8c3f-4151c3cecbc2_1672x941.png) Which brings me to musical metaphor. Instrumental music is not “about nothing” just because nobody is singing words. Composers and improvisers think in narratives, images, colors, bodies, weather, argument, memory, and architecture. Beethoven did not need a libretto to make the *Pastoral Symphony* feel like a landscape, a dance, a storm, and a thanksgiving. Instrumental music has always carried images and stories, even when it refuses to explain itself. In this series, my first form of midrash is musical. I sit down with a text, a story, a phrase, an image, and I improvise. The music interprets before the prose does. Then, because most people do not hear musical metaphor directly — and because I love words, and because apparently I too am not immune to babbling — I write these commentaries. So yes, this project is a mélange: improvisation, orchestration, commentary, image-making, montage, verbal rant, theology, composition, technology, and whatever else I drag into the room. Good. Babel was also a mélange. Brick, language, architecture, ambition, fear, coordination, technology, publicity, theology, ego. The story is not anti-technology in some simple-minded way. The problem is not that they know how to build. The problem is what they think building will do for them. “Let us make a name for ourselves.” That is the poison in the brick. Which inevitably brings me to AI. I know, I know. Everyone is sick of hearing about AI, including me, and yet here we are, in the age of synthetic babble, surrounded by machine-generated essays, songs, images, brand campaigns, fake expertise, fake polish, fake productivity, fake intelligence, fake soul, fake fakery, all pouring endlessly from the new tower. Most of it is slop. Garbage. Smooth, fluent, competent-looking garbage. But the existence of garbage does not mean the tool is unusable. It means the tool is dangerous, seductive, and usually in the hands of people who should not be left alone with a toaster. So how do I use AI? I don’t use it. I abuse it. I fight with it. I revise it. I argue with it. I force it toward something it did not intend. (And it forces me toward choices I did not consider.) I do not take what it gives me and call that art. That would be stupid. I treat it like another resistant material — like a synthesizer, a sampler, a tape machine, a DAW, a loop that needs to be mangled, a bad band member that occasionally, accidentally has a brilliant idea, a machine that can be made expressive only when a human being with taste, training, intention, and a sufficiently bad attitude is willing to wrestle it into shape. And this is not actually new. Long before AI, modern recording technology already allowed for an insane amount of manipulation: loops, stretching, pitch correction, sampling, editing, layering, effects, quantization, fake reverb rooms, impossible instruments, impossible performances. Honestly, I’ve used just about all of these, except maybe the Humanize function, since I can play and I’m already human. I can make plenty of mistakes without the help of a computer program. The point is, if you’re going to complain about technology destroying music, then you need to go back a lot further than AI. But still: AI is stranger, more dangerous, and more seductive than most of the tools that came before it. It produces astonishing quantities of mediocrity. Absolutely. Which brings us back to Babel. Are you using the tool to build a tower? To make a name? To exceed human limitation for the sake of your own monument? To appear to know what you do not know, feel what you do not feel, make what you did not make? Or are you using the tool to express something that could not otherwise be expressed? A brick can build a home, a temple, a prison, or a tower of self-advertisement. An orchestra can reveal the heavens or bury an idea under expensive noise. A virtuoso passage can illuminate the soul or merely announce that someone practiced. AI can help make art, or it can help make babble. The tower is not the tool. The tower is the intention. [Subscribe now](#/portal/signup) # The Babel Question ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7a/4b/7a4bd768-ae74-4aac-8606-8859beafad44/content/images/2026/09/9bc7698f-c1d0-4a5f-a2c3-675c912b67a4_1672x941.png) Babel begins with a people saying, “Let us make a name for ourselves.” That temptation is still with us. In art, in politics, in technology, in religion, in social media, in every new platform where human beings discover yet another way to confuse volume with meaning. So here is my babbling tower: piano, drums, bass, guitar, winds, brass, effects, harp, improvisation, AI-assisted accompaniment, old training, new tools, sarcasm, reverence, irritation, ambition, collapse. I am pretty sure I am doing the latter: using the available tools to reach for something I could not otherwise say. Though, given the subject, I suppose the tower may have other ideas. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/7a/4b/7a4bd768-ae74-4aac-8606-8859beafad44/content/images/2026/09/ec351eab-dc6b-4fb4-b4b0-d6d1c68c37ae_1672x941.png) Thanks for reading Musically Novel! This post is public so feel free to share it.