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Stories of Emotional Granularity

Stories of Emotional Granularity

Written by: Jonathan Cook
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Emotions are the last stronghold of our humanity. Each episode of Stories of Emotional Granularity explores one emotion from multiple perspectives.

Jonathan Cook Hygiene & Healthy Living Philosophy Psychology Psychology & Mental Health Self-Help Social Sciences Success
Episodes
  • There Is No One Singing This Song

    There Is No One Singing This Song
    Jun 23 2025
    I can’t think of any expression that is more emotionally powerful than the voice of a singer. When a person writes an effective song with lyrics that are matched by a rhythm and melody that enhance the feeling of the words, the songwriter digs down deep to reflect something real, an emotion that other people can identify with.Sure, there is bad music, and there are superficial jingles, but when a skilled singer is given an emotionally evocative song, the effect is unrivaled by anything else in human experience.Instrumental music can be powerful too, but people especially love to hear a singer, because there’s something special in hearing another person express the feeling of a song in such a personal way, in a kind of emotional athleticism, using their own bodies as instruments of something heartfelt. People go to see live music because the impact of watching a person embodying a bold expression of emotion in real time to a crowd of people who are striving to share in the feeling of the moment together brings about what the sociologist Emile Durkheim referred to as collective effervescence, a communal ebullience. The audience boils over with the singer.Not all music is live anymore. It’s been generations now that we have possessed the technology of recorded music. Music fans still enjoy listening to recorded music, though most of them will argue that there’s something missing when the performance isn’t live. Some of them seek out a touch of the experience of live music with recordings of live performances.Music is now taking another big step away from its roots in human-to-human expression with the deployment of generative artificial intelligence tools that can imitate the sound of human musicians, replicating even the voice of a singer.Generative AI is now capable of composing and creating performances of entire songs in a matter of seconds, a shorter amount of time than what it takes to listen to the audio files that they create. We cannot even call these songs recordings, because they do not record any actual musicians performing. They are pure imitations of musical performance, going straight into an audio file without any physically real performance.For the first time, we can hear songs that no one has ever performed. We can listen to these songs over and over again without any person ever performing them.What does it mean for there to be songs that no one has ever sung, songs that no one will ever sing?Is this an emotional song if there is no person singing it? What is a feeling that no one ever felt? Is emotion just an output, an analytic category with no humanity required? There is no feeling in this voice because there is nobody here. There is no one singing this song.It's far more easy to fake an emotion than to make a heartfelt creation human to human. What will this do? What will this do to us? There is no feeling in this voice because there is nobody here. There is no one singing this song. There is no one here. There is no one. No one.I wrote the lyrics to this song, but I did not perform it. I cut and pasted the lyrics into a generative AI tool that creates audio recordings that imitate the sound of professional musicians, including a voice that sings the words that have been typed into its user interface. This particular song sounds somewhat artificial in its tone, but that’s because it was created with a free version of a generative AI service. Paid memberships in the service create much more realistic sounding songs, including voices that sound like real human singers.And yet, is the song real, simply because it sounds real? Is it truly a song?This existence of this song is not just a challenge to the survival of an ancient, uniquely human form of art. It is a challenge to the survival of meaningful emotion itself. What happens to a society in which computers can create plausible imitations of emotional songs?The mimicry of emotion is a manipulation.There is no one singing the song. There is no personality behind the voice. There is nothing but a computer with a sophisticate program that has scanned stolen recordings of actual musical performances, and has analyzed them mathematically in order to reproduce patterns that create the impression of music where no musical performance exists.That is not the same thing as what happens when a person sings a song.It is a calculated, emotionless mimicry of emotion. That is the definition of sociopathy.Music is an emotionally manipulative medium. We agree to listen to it, and we enjoy listening to it, because we appreciate the sincere emotional work that goes into its composition and its performance. A musical performance is an act of devotion to an emotion, and a strenuous sharing of a feeling that comes from lived experience. It’s a meaning that is shared by those who create it with those who listen.This technology is currently being offered at a low price, to be tested by the public at large. Behind its current low price, ...
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    15 mins
  • Guilt and Shame

    Guilt and Shame
    Jun 17 2025
    We’re living in a remarkably complex society, and that sometimes makes it extremely difficult to tell the difference between selfishness and selflessness. Gone are the days when people could follow straightforward, predictable paths in their professional or personal lives. Social structures such as places of work are becoming less stable, year after year, as Silicon Valley’s tactic of gaining power by “moving fast and breaking things” continues to smash the pillars of trust in social organizations.Essence Pierce has been dealing with the consequences of the spreading chaos in the working world, although she has solid education and experience.Essence Pierce:My name is Essence Pierce. I am a mother of a brilliant seven year-old.I am a strategic insights leader and I had someone on LinkedIn ask me what that means before. So, what it means is whether you are looking for messaging strategy, for a marketing campaign, sales enablement strategy, or road map planning, this is something that I've worked on in my career for over a decade, as well as, yeah, I love marketing.I have a master's in integrated marketing, and so I've learned before that I'm more than just insights. I've also done tactical things.I've always felt like I was one of the rare people who, once I figured out what I wanted to do, that genuinely loved it. The part about the insights that I love is being able to put, I'm very analytical, so I like solving problems.Collecting a bunch of data from different sources, whether it's competitive intelligence, market intelligence, performance metrics, putting all of, getting things from these disparate places, and putting it together to build a narrative and a strategic direction to me is very powerful.Jonathan Cook:Essence is skilled at using data to help businesses to find the strategic direction to build successful marketing programs. Over the last couple of years, however, employment for insights professionals in business has been devastated by the introduction of generative AI tools that provide quick and inexpensive imitations of insights work that are attractive to executives eager to cut costs. As a result, Essence is now having to use her problem solving abilities to find a new home for her family. Essence is moving with her daughter away from their home in Florida in order to find work in Chicago.Essence knows that making this change is in the interest of her daughter in the long term. Nonetheless, Essence feels guilty about taking her daughter away from the community she knows and loves. Essence Pierce:I don't like change. I say it all the time. People are like, that's crazy because you, you handle it well, but no. Inside, I'm always freaking out about change. I love our house, you know, I was very proud to become a homeowner when I bought my home, particularly doing it as a single mother. But also, my daughter is going to be sad and she's going to miss her friends, and her school actually had their award ceremony, and I got emotional last night because I was like, oh my gosh, she goes to a very small school. That's one thing, and I'm going to have to put her in public school because I just really don't feel like paying private school up there, at least I want to see what the public school looks like where we're going.I'm stripping her away from everything that she knows, and so, there's guilt, a lot of guilt with that one. With that one, that's where the guilt comes in as opposed to the shame because it's like, am I being selfish? I know I'm not. I also know that the job market is better out there. I'll have more support. You know, I can travel for work, when I move there.But, there's still a lot of guilt where it's like, I'm stripping her away from everything that she knows. She's had the same three girls in her class for the last three years since kindergarten. She's been at that school since preschool as well. So, it's just really, it's the mom guilt. That's really the biggest negative feeling in the change, and the change is scary.Jonathan Cook:Essence is taking care of her daughter by moving up to Chicago, where she has extended family connections. In the short term, however, the decision to move is causing pain for her daughter. So, Essence is feeling guilty about making the move.On top of the guilt, Essence feels shame for relying on family to help her navigate the disruption of professional networks caused by the unregulated, unrestrained deployment of generative AI. Essence feels shame for accepting help from family at the very same time she feels guilty for not being able to help her own daughter more. Essence Pierce:I think from the broader society, the shame message is really just that you're an adult. Your friends are not your therapist, right? Your family, they're not your therapist. So, you need to figure it out on your own. That’s kind of what I feel that's that society has or the other concept of we all have problems. You know what I mean? You're, why come to me ...
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Grounded

    Grounded
    Jun 3 2025

    The emotion of grounding is a reminder that emotion isn’t an isolated cognitive experience that can be assessed through a linguistic analysis of someone’s online chats or a digital scan of their facial expression. As with all emotion, a feeling of being grounded is formed in relationship to a person’s past experiences and future expectations, and in reaction to personal and cultural traditions and interpretations of social events.

    Grounding is grounded in physical reality. It can’t be operationalized to a quantitative measurement or a checkbox in a database. If an emotion of feeling grounded is separated from its context in human life, it is no longer grounded.

    Feeling grounded is about gaining awareness of the context around you, which aligns well with the focus of this podcast, an awareness of the richness of human emotional life.
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    46 mins
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