When Machines Play: Godard’s Surreal Fusion of Music & Technology

Godard has made over 120 films since his debut and became famous in the ‘60s as a Nouvelle Vague director with the film À bout de Souffle. Godard music and technology used in the film were slightly out of sync, with sometimes garish sound effects, to 2010’s Film Socialisme, all the sound was captured on mobile phones.

In his films, sound was never an afterthought. In the same way he pushed visual boundaries – such as his trademark jump shots – he consistently reconsidered what digital sound art means in cinema.

In the 2nd film Godard made, a topical film completed in 1960, he uses a nearly robotic voiceover narration.1968’s Un Film Comme Les Autres, a film consisting of the same 54-minute-long succession of images back-to-back, but with different soundtracks, emphasised that, for the director, sound is a structuring principle.

According to him, even small changes in sound could completely redefine a film, and Godard music and technology were based on work that combined hundreds of sounds and images collected from sources as diverse as Hollywood, European art cinema, modern and classical music, cartoons, paintings, computer graphics, and newsreels. Godard’s surreal music and technology offer a pathway to navigate digital distortions and uncertainties. 

Who Is Godard and Why His Work Matters Today 

Jean-Luc Godard introduced revolution in motion. He used sound differently, just as a sculptor working with surface and texture; he used sound as a tool, a force that invoked colours and intensity and stirred people's imagination. Godard music and technology treat soundtracks as standalone pieces of art, distinct from the films they accompany.

Godard used to treat sound as a force that could soothe one moment and trigger the next. Godard’s surreal music and technology adopted modern thought and advanced ideas; he used a caricature of freedom, as marketable junk, in place of the authentic. Godard music and technology combine mismatched sounds to create new styles.

Godard was born in Paris in 1930. Four years later, his father, a Swiss doctor, moved the family back to Switzerland, where they spent the Second World War. His interest in cinema was sparked by reading the magazine La Revue du Cinéma. In Paris at the age of 18, Godard attended Lycée Buffon.

Still, he failed his baccalauréat and drifted between France and Switzerland; he even enrolled in an anthropology course at the Sorbonne, though he never attended. Godard’s first film work dates to the 1950s, in the form of writing for the industry journal Cahiers du Cinéma.

He joined the film clubs in Paris and was associated with François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Agnès Varda; in 1955, he became a cameraman and made the short film Une femme coquette. Many of his ideas were abandoned due to a lack of funds, but after a trip to the Cannes Film Festival in 1959, Godard was ready to make his first full-length feature.

In 1960, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, À bout de souffle (Breathless) depicted Nouvelle Vague disaffection. It employed techniques such as jump cuts, natural lighting, and a script written by the director, and adopted a revolutionary approach that was recognised and awarded the Jean Vigo Prize.

He made many films after that: Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), Bande à part (1964), Alphaville (1965), Pierrot le Fou (1965), Masculin Féminin (1966) and Weekend (1967). By the end of the 20th century, he was widely recognised for his works. In 2010, Godard was awarded an honorary Oscar for his contribution to cinema. He died in Switzerland on September 13, 2022.

Today, we observe various forms of generative music art created using modern technology. In contrast, Godard music and technology were admired far beyond French borders and arthouse theatres in the 1950s and 1960s for his approach to narrative fragmentation and the use of sound and silence.

Why “When Machines Play” Resonates in Today’s Digital Era 

“The Machines Play,” or When Machines Play Chopin: musical spirit and automation by Katherine Hirt, examines aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Machines are already changing the way art is delivered, and they’re doing it in ways that both challenge and complement human creativity.

AI must be used as a tool for artists, but it is being used as a replacement. It offers ample scope for personalised and interactive experiences. Still, art evolves in response to viewers’ reactions, or in a concert where the next song is influenced by audience feedback in real time.

AI in music composition is reshaping the production of digital sound art, challenging notions of creativity and artistry. Modern digital sound art is based on vast amounts of data. It employs music and artificial intelligence to train networks and machines, learn styles, techniques, and aesthetics, and craft entire symphonies. 

How Machines Are Transforming Music Creation 

Nowadays, music and artificial intelligence are mimicking techniques and styles. It is not digital music production; it is software that generates new music by using AI algorithmic music composition and data-driven approaches to solve problems efficiently. 

It is like a painter who spends years learning patterns and creating music, and an artificial intelligence that absorbs thousands, even millions, of images to understand what art looks and feels like. Music and writing are changing as AI tools craft algorithmic music composition.

In 2025, AI in music composition handles genres ranging from pop to hip-hop to classical and features such as voice cloning, stem separation, and real-time collaboration. This shift is driven by generative AI, which mimics human creativity while scaling production efficiency.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Music 

Experimental electronic music draws on numerous compositions, employing diverse patterns to create pieces that fit specific genres or musical styles. 

AI uses natural language processing, a technique widely used in creative writing. For instance, OpenAI’s GPT series is used to generate poetry, create interactive stories, and write prose. Many personalised novels have been written using AI, offering a unique reading experience for audiences. 

Experimental electronic music uses sophisticated tools to integrate the creative workflows of writers, artists, and musicians, and it serves as a digital muse, generating new ideas and pushing creative boundaries and rules. While there are risks and modern digital sound art raises multiple legal complications, including copyright, intellectual property, and credit issues, the legal system must determine them.

Human Creativity vs Machine Intelligence 

Music and artificial intelligence are based on analysing data and identifying patterns, while humans employ lateral thinking, intuition, and experiential knowledge, leading to more creative and unconventional solutions.

Human creativity can be applied to deliver original and valuable ideas, solutions, or artistic expressions. AI in music composition cannot foster cultural growth, life experiences, human imagination, intuitive and problem-solving artistic ideas. 

AI solves well-defined problems and requires clear parameters and abundant data.  It can reproduce the provided data, but it cannot discover groundbreaking original concepts. 

AI in music composition may lack the depth in creativity and uniqueness that come from human intuition and imagination. 

Surrealism as a Bridge Between Art, Music, and Technology 

In the early 20th century, the revolutionary movement of surreal music and technology unlocked the unconscious mind, challenged conventional ideas of reality and logic and was used as a creative process that bypassed conscious thought. In October 1924, French poet André Breton, in his Surrealist Manifesto, mentioned automatism and its focus on the subconscious constituted the core of the movement. 

It attempts to break free and rely on intuition, which is often associated with jazz and musical improvisation. Modern surreal music and technology use digital sound art and music to combine the tangible and the intangible, changing perception and reality. Artists are using digital sound art, AI, VR, and various forms of experimental electronic music to create new art.

Surreal Audio Experiences in Contemporary Music

Experimental electronic music emerged from conceptual art and minimalism and took various trajectories, ranging from sound poetry and the spoken word to sound installation. The experimentation with sound and the origins of sound art can be traced to avant-garde experiments undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century.

In the Western art context, the Futurists were the first to employ such pieces, such as Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori, an instrument designed to perform the music described in his manifesto, The Art of Noises. Dadaists and Surrealists worked on experimental electronic music, and after WW II, sound art emerged within the Fluxus movement, especially through the work of John Cage.

Experiences in contemporary music capture the paradoxical effects of hyper-connectivity, exploring themes of isolation, self-image, and authenticity. Through automatism, the surrealist music-themed art tried to show how subconscious thought flows freely and without rigidity. In albums such as Magical Mystery Tour (1976), the Beatles sought to create work that reflected the subconscious, much as the Surrealists did.

However, contemporary surreal music and technology are criticised for distorting identity and reality; artificial sounds, glitches, and digital artefacts drive these distortions. In 2025, VR, AI, and digital sound art have expanded Surrealism, helping to reinterpret traditional themes through the lens of technology in the modern music era. 

Godard’s Influence on Experimental and Electronic Music 

Godard music and technology always embraced innovative, experimental approaches to alternative filmic experiences. His cinema and music were described as malleable and plastic. He fragmented, sampled, and reassembled sonic shards to create authentic, surrealist, music-themed art, using disruptions in narrative flow to compel the spectator to become aware of the soundtrack.

He created audio-visual aural interactions using recording equipment, a radio, a phonograph, and a sound mixing board. Sound in Godard’s films had to be “real, not 'realistic. He used video as a “laboratory tool” to study the use of sound and microphones to capture all sounds heard.

Godard splits synchronous sound and image, for instance, in a sequence in which Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) is about to reveal the deceased partner's last name; her voice is drowned out by external sounds – aeroplanes, bells, alarms, etc.

Godard’s Contribution to Digital Sound Art: Audience Reception and Cultural Impact 

Godardism is to forestall a situationist use of the cinema in which sounds and voices circulate rhythmically. The approach to writing music was more creative, offering greater freedom than standard scores. A great example of Godard music and technology is the artist Kurt Schwitters' score for Ursonate. The work was written as a series of syllables and sounds, which the performer then interpreted.  

One of the haunting Godard music and technology builds the base for the first track, ‘Lorsque la philosophie’ (‘When philosophy’), taken from the ‘owl of Minerva’ passage in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, cited in Godard’s Allemagne année 90 neuf zero (1991) and Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988).

The phrase comes from a nest of echoey electronic vibrations; it is part of the clapperboard, with Godard’s voice calling for another take, and one can hear rumbling spoken words backed by electronic synth music. Soundwalk Collective used the sparse phrases "luminous, recollected, and imagined," and then the light fades.

In What We Leave Behind, the gaps between words, melodies, phrases, and films enable the listener’s imagination to cultivate. It releases the sonic memories through their source as digital sound art, which can then travel and transform further.

In Godard’s cinema, the chaotic fragments of archival sound were brought to life by Soundwalk Collective, who used snippets of pre-existing material to make something new, in a tribute to Godard himself.  

Hazy gauze has been added to the fragments of sound, like a dream in our sleep. The experience is enhanced by the remix EP, which guides listeners on an underwater soundwalk. 

Another Petre Inspirescu’s remix invites listeners into the peaceful pulsing zone of Godard’s King Lear (1987). The soft voiceover behind lines from the film (“Am I in France?”, “In your own kingdom, Sir”, and the semi-computerised “You whom I ride now”, from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves) can be heard, along with the beat and rhythmic patterns.

The audience assumes it is something like dancing with many people to the psychedelic beats and sounds of Villalobos’s Jean-Luc Godard remix, or that you are participating in a sound installation.

The Role of Technology in the Future of Music AI, Machine Learning, and Music Innovation

The future of music technology is based on the complex amalgamation of AI and creative exploration that might not have been feasible for human composers alone. However, machine-made music lacks the emotional depth of human-created works. Earlier, composing required extensive training and a deep understanding of music.

In contrast, the future of music technology is based on AI that composes music and assists composers in generating melodies, harmonies, and entire compositions, thereby significantly accelerating the creative process.

Music AI platforms analyse existing music data to reconstruct patterns and chord progressions and to generate machine-made music that sounds like original tracks by selecting specific parameters such as mood, tempo, and instrumentation, thereby helping artists create custom-tailored music in minutes.

AI functions as a collaborator, synthesising related information for musicians to generate machine-generated music by applying new perspectives to traditional compositional techniques. 

FAQ: Godard’s Fusion of Music and Technology

What Does “When Machines Play” Mean in Music and Technology? 

When Machines Play Chopin is a book by Katherine Hirt that traces the transition to machine-made music, examining the history of experimental electronic music in 19th-century German literature, the various practices and styles, and the transition to modern AI in music composition. It discusses generative music art, automation, and the sublime.