September 15, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
by Nelson S. Thall
Former Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Center On Global Communications, Ross, Ca. and McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada
MEDIA SCIENCE 100
The Machine Below, The Breath Above: Why AI Retrieves Artie Shaw
STUDENT: Mr. Thall, you have said that artificial intelligence may retrieve Artie Shaw. That sounds backwards. Why would the most advanced technology of our time reach for a clarinet record cut in 1938, Begin the Beguine of all things?
THALL: Because retrieval is not nostalgia. Professor McLuhan taught us that when a technology pushes hard in one direction, it brings back whatever the new environment has made necessary again. Electronic media began separating human presence from the human body. AI carries that much further. It produces the semblance of voice, language, image, personality, even music, without the human performer being physically present.
So ask what a culture soaked in the bodiless starts to hunger for. The body. Breath. Touch. Dance. Human skill performed in real time at real risk. And the clarinet is breath made audible. There is no note from the instrument without lungs, lips, fingers, reed and air. Beneath Shaw sits the extraordinary machinery of the orchestra. Above it floats one man breathing. The machine below, the breath above.
STUDENT: So AI does not retrieve Artie Shaw because people get nostalgic for big-band music.
THALL: That would be revival, and revival is a costume. Somebody rents the arrangements, hires the players, puts everyone in the jackets, and the whole thing is over by Sunday. Retrieval is not something anyone decides to do. It is the ground shifting underneath you until an old form suddenly answers a question the new one cannot.
My proposition is narrower and more interesting than it first sounds. AI may not retrieve Artie Shaw at all. It may retrieve the sensory conditions in which Artie Shaw makes sense again. When machines can manufacture the appearance of human expression on demand, actual human presence stops being ordinary and becomes scarce. Scarcity is what confers value.
STUDENT: But AI can fake breath now. You can generate a clarinet line with the breath sounds built right into it and nobody hears the difference.
THALL: Good. You have found the interesting part. If the fake becomes perfect, then what gets retrieved is not the sound of presence. It is the knowledge of presence. The ear may be unable to distinguish them, but provenance still can. A recording you believe came from a machine and the identical recording you know came from a man are two different human experiences, even if no acoustic test can separate them.
Which is why the concert hall may grow more valuable as simulation improves, not less. We may pay less and less for the sound and more and more for the fact that someone stood in the room and did it once, able to fail. A man lifts a clarinet. He draws breath. The orchestra waits. And the beguine begins again.
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All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence, aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM), was not employed. We hired a stenographer. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
© 2026 Nelson S. Thall. All Rights Reserved.
I can be reached at: nelson@themediumisthemessage.com