Guest
Philipp Grefer
Philipp Grefer is Founder at WISE, as introduced on the show.
Episodes (1)
WISE founder Philipp Grefer on bringing German and Chinese music scenes together since 2007, and this year's conference debate over AI-generated music.
Questions these episodes answer
How did Philipp Grefer's involvement in China's music scene begin?
Grefer first traveled to Beijing in 2007 to attend the Midi Festival, one of the first regularly held music festivals in China. That trip led to three years running a traveling government-backed music event across smaller Chinese cities, at a time when the country was gaining global attention ahead of the 2008 Olympics.
How did WISE keep running during the pandemic?
Grefer says WISE survived by connecting physical events still happening on the ground in China with parallel events in Berlin and Hamburg, even though he could not travel there himself. He coordinated with partners locally while linking the different time zones together online.
What is this year's WISE conference theme about?
This year's theme, Me Myself and AI, grew out of Grefer replacing his own promotional photos with AI-generated versions of his face. He describes it as pushing himself to see how far AI could take over parts of organizing and presenting the festival.
Has Philipp Grefer found a way to generate genuinely good full-length AI songs?
Grefer says his team recently discovered a structured process that produces full-length AI songs he considers genuinely good rather than generic prompt output, and they now have around ten finished tracks. He says the pace of progress is what makes the ethical conversation urgent.
Is Philipp Grefer worried his AI music experiments have gone too far?
Grefer admits he and his head of strategy openly debated whether their AI song experiments were pushing things too far, without a clear answer. He wants WISE to be a place where the industry can have that difficult conversation together rather than deciding alone.