Transmission Four: Artificial Intelligence & Emotional Intelligence

Abbey Road has always been a place where artistry and technology meet. From wax discs and tape to multitrack and digital, creative tools are changing constantly. The question we’ve asked has remained the same since the days EMI’s Record Engineering Development Department (REDD) responded to artists and producers’ needs by developing some of the first mixing desks as well as speakers, tape machines and outboard gear - does the technology serve the artist?

Creativity is not something to rush. It is not designed to be endlessly scalable, optimised, reduced to a data point or output. Creative work at its best is derived from craft, lived experience, patience, and its ability to meet people wherever they are in life.

AI can be useful, provocative, efficient, even surprising. But the tool is not the artist. The work still needs intention behind it. It needs a point of view. It needs someone making choices, taking risks, and caring about whether the result actually lands.

Through the varied perspectives and creative disciplines explored at this year’s Abbey Road: Studio Four, we’ll be looking at how artificial intelligence & emotional intelligence meet:

• Through the art of photography with Rankin, Platon and Dennis Morris
• The art of mastering with engineer Christian Wright
• ElevenLabs’ generative music tools
• Responsible adoption with leaders in music, tech, video games and visual media
• And the mission of Abbey Road REDD

In an era where generative algorithms can recreate iconic artistic styles in seconds, the creative community is engaged in a profound debate over the true purpose of visual art and music. At this year’s Abbey Road: Studio Four, Anny Shaw from The Art Newspaper asked legendary photographers Rankin and Platon, Can a Photograph Still Change Culture?

Rather than shying away from generative technology, Rankin’s immersed himself in it - working with AI extensively to test its visual and practical boundaries. Rankin says, "I don’t love AI; in fact, I hate most of what it represents. My work with it is an attempt to confront that discomfort: to explore its seductive creative possibilities while questioning what it might do to originality, memory, sensitivity and our sense of reality. For me, the contradiction is the point. I don’t want to tell people what to think about AI. I want the work to make them feel that tension for themselves."

From feeding decades of his own archive into AI systems to generating portraits of figures like Prince, Muhammad Ali, Winston Churchill, Mark Zuckerberg, and even "God" in his signature style, he’s explored both the light and the dark sides of synthetic media. Rankin even single-handedly produced an entire magazine using AI for both image creation and writing, while leveraging the technology for strategy and PR campaigns for charities like Dignity in Dying. He's currently working on a new book called The Absurdity about his experiments and has his first show of generative work in France this month, called La F.AI.M.

Despite finding the technology "limitless”, his hands-on experience has brought him to a realisation about the vital necessity of real human exchange: "Sitting in front of a computer and talking to a machine - after four hours, you do need to go for a walk. You do need culture, exchange, interaction." For Rankin, extensive experimentation ultimately proved that as synthetic media floods the landscape, the term and label “Made by Human” is going to have huge importance in the future.

This perspective is reinforced by the enduring value of portrait photography, where a camera serves as a bridge between people. Reflecting on his iconic photographs of world leaders and cultural figures, Platon highlighted how traditional photography captures an unrepeatable truth: "Many of our subjects have passed away. And so, you have this bizarre real human moment that we were privileged to capture, and that person is no longer there, yet in our picture, it's frozen." While an algorithm can generate a visually convincing image in seconds, it lacks the shared vulnerability, trust, and physical presence that give a portrait its true emotional weight.

This craving for raw, unscripted craft extends across music and documentary culture as well. In Punk at 50, a talk with photographer Dennis Morris hosted by Dylan Jones, Dennis emphasised that both visual and sonic media must resist sterile, automated perfection if they want to resonate with audiences: "I think music can shock again if it goes back to basics - real instruments, live bands playing with soul, rather than flat computer-generated tracks." For Morris, whether in front of a live stage or behind a camera lens, art loses its spirit when it becomes purely computerised; the true power comes from real people creating in real time and, importantly, copywriting your work and maintaining those rights.

Nurturing and empowering new generations of creators as they navigate this technological shift is critical for keeping visual history grounded in reality. Programmes like the Abbey Road Music Photography Accelerator play a vital role in this evolving landscape - championing emerging talent, offering mentorship, and celebrating artists who capture authentic music culture. By equipping creators to document genuine human energy and manage the business side of their craft, we hope to keep the discipline, the talent and the storytelling at the heart of visual culture.

AI mastering is the automated creation of a track's final release-ready master using artificial intelligence algorithms - such as supervised machine learning and deep learning - to analyse auditory features and apply processing without human oversight. While automated platforms rely on data and user-selected presets to fix frequencies and balance sound across formats, traditional mastering depends on human emotional intelligence and artistry.

Explaining this distinction, Abbey Road mastering engineer Alex Gordon points out, “With an actual human engineer, you get someone who has spent their career listening to pretty much every different style of music. We can contextualise and have a genuine emotional response to what we’re hearing”, while making decisions based on feel rather than what is technically correct. He then emphasises the value of human collaboration, adding, “Every mastering engineer is different. We all have different ways of working and we all approach a piece of music differently”, and “when you find an engineer that really gets your music and is happy to work their guts out to help you realise the potential of your music, then that’s invaluable”. Reinforcing this contrast, fellow engineer Geoff Pesche concludes that “when it comes to AI mastering the most important thing that is missing is human interaction.”

The mastering process is, at its core, built from the knowledge of how little or how much to do. That knowledge isn’t always able to be pinned down to a certain “correct” frequency, tool, or musical choice. Mastering as a creative process seeks to respect and understand the artist’s vision, and therefore a dialogue is key to understand not only the intention but also the process that went into making something. Certain tracks or albums may only need the tiniest of tweaks, where others may call for a lot more work. As default, automatic mastering doesn’t take these things into consideration and as a service does not encompass other mastering processes like sequencing, cutting to vinyl, working in Atmos or from stems.

In a recent conversation with producer Rob Cass for dopeYEAH talk, Abbey Road mastering engineer Christian Wright notes there are scenarios where automatic mastering may be better than nothing, but even with very little resource, there are other options: “We’re here on one side – you know, human in a room, all this experience, amazing gear, outboard, digital… and then on the other side you have AI or automatic mastering. In the middle, just use some plugins, choose some presets and do it yourself! I think it’s more exciting for you to grow that knowledge and try it out.”

At Abbey Road: Studio Four during this year’s SXSW London, Patrick Darling and the Ceili House Band took the stage and premiered Polish Girl with the Irish Heart in front of a packed audience. Patrick lives with ALS/MND, which has taken both his speaking and singing voice, but an ElevenLabs singing voice built from his own voice enabled him to perform live again and participate in an on-stage performance using Eleven Music, ElevenLabs’ fully licensed generative music model, trained on licensed stems and music and developed with artists, labels and publishers.

Richard Cave, speech therapist and a member of the ElevenLabs Impact team, described Patrick’s performance as remarkable and said: “People should be able to showcase their talent and creativity without being defined by their condition.” As the audience danced, sang and applauded, Patrick described feeling physically connected to the voice and like a performer again, despite not physically singing. The performance reflects ElevenLabs’ wider 1 Million Voices commitment, a $1 billion in-kind initiative providing free voice-restoration technology to one million people living with permanent voice loss.

Its significance highlights what the technology could enable, in this case, Patrick’s connection to his voice, his identity as an artist and his ability to communicate directly with an audience.

Later at Abbey Road: Studio Four, our MD Sally Davies and Anthony Achille from Abbey Road REDD widened the conversation to consider what AI means for culture more broadly, discussing what happens to authorship, identity, value and creative work as it becomes more widely adopted.

The panel deliberately avoided the usual extremes. AI is often presented either as a revolutionary force that will transform creativity for the better, or as something that will destroy it altogether. The more useful discussion sits between those positions, how these tools are actually being used, what responsible implementation looks like, who is shaping them, and whether creators will continue to be recognised and rewarded for their work.

One tension ran through the hour. Technology is generally built to optimise for efficiency, scale and output. Art does not always work that way.

Dr. Rebecca Swift of Getty Images noted that while image processing has accelerated dramatically, for example images from a football match now uploading within seconds, speed is no measure of artistic worth, warning that "because you can do something quickly doesn’t necessarily mean you should do it". Real value, she argued, comes from the “proof of life” - the backstory, waiting, revisions, and human effort behind the work.

Ankur Patel of Splice and Spitfire Audio extended this idea, observing that skipping the creative process dilutes the artistic point of view it is meant to sharpen. Sally then pointed to The Beatles’ early two-track recordings at Abbey Road, highlighting how enduring music emerged from severe technical constraints, questioning whether unlimited choice actually yields better output. Rather than removing the need for decisions, an abundance of tools makes judgment, taste, and artistic intention more essential than ever.

Rachel Young, founder of Nuovo, turned the conversation toward the economic realities of creative technology. She outlined the friction between rapid digital product development and slow music rights clearing, which risks excluding artists from new revenue streams unless tech teams build alongside creators from the start. Addressing the economic challenge facing young artists, she captured the core contradiction succinctly: "If it’s all free, how do you pay rent on free?". Warning that while the UK currently exports culture to great effect, it still imports many of its tools - risking dependence on commercial values defined elsewhere - she called for targeted pre-seed investment so private wealth does not dictate who shapes future tools. Considering AI development morally, she recommended tech leaders read Pope Leo’s recent text on AI (translated in English as Magnificent Humans) to protect human creative expression.

The clearest message from the panel was not resistance, but judgement. Adoption requires care rather than panic; Jamie Sefton, MD of Game Republic, cautioned against rushing into short-term AI fixes, urging companies to collaborate with internal creative teams to identify genuine uses.

Does the tool solve a real creative problem? Were creators involved in shaping it? Does it preserve consent and authorship? Does value return to the people whose work makes it possible? Does it help someone express something, or does it simply add more material to an already crowded world?

It is not enough to demonstrate a new tool and ask whether it works. Artists, technologists, rights holders and cultural leaders need space to ask what it is for, who it serves and what might be lost if it is adopted without care.

That is the purpose of bringing these conversations into Abbey Road REDD Labs, an incubator that exists to seek out and nurture the best innovations in how we create, capture, and connect music today.

The act of creation is instinctual to every human being, creativity expresses itself in various ways, and sometimes within that expression it has the ability to move somebody, to entertain them, to scare them, to make them laugh, to make them feel seen, unsettled, comforted, challenged, or less alone. The goal is to push the person past the point of indifference.

In Abbey Road: Studio Four Transmission Four we've learned the ability to do that comes from lived experience, from a person who has lost something, experienced something, wanted something, and tried to translate that into form. AI is capable of many things, but it cannot replace the human need to make meaning from being alive. The next time you interact with AI, remember that it does not think, or have taste, a sense of humour, fear, or desire inside it, and it is not capable of creating something original.