November 2019

The iconic movie Blade Runner (1982) takes place in a dystopian future set in November 2019. And here we are! To celebrate the fact that synthetic humans, known as replicants, have not taken over the world as of November 2019, myNoise releases a tribute to Blade Runner and its cult soundtrack composed by Vangelis.

The original movie assumed that by now, replicants would not only have existed, but be difficult to distinguish from humans. The plot relies on the Voight-Kampff test to distinguish one from the other with a series of questions related to empathy—or the lack thereof. If replicants were superior to humans in many ways, they would indeed be incapable of human traits such as emotions and empathy.

While the replicants don—t rule our world yet, we humans share the same planet with companies that are just as powerful and frightening as the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner. Rather than building replicants in the real world, these companies quietly harvest information from our digital world instead. All of this is done invisibly, behind the scenes, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and psychographics in an attempt to alter our behavior in the real world. They even succeed.

AI has made huge progress over the last decade, supplanting humans in many areas. This soundscape, for example, could have been the outcome of an algorithm trained on the music of Vangelis and the sounds of the Blade Runner soundtrack. Would you be able to tell the difference between AI and a human composer? Unlikely. And now, we realize how visionary the Voight-Kampff test was... because the answer to the question is: look for the emotions. It is, after all, one of the defining characteristics that make us human.

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