The Presence Test

What a night of music taught me about art, AI, and the unrepeatable

A Longing for Presence

With a deadline looming and my mind flooded with equations, I drove to Albany in April 2025—tired, behind, unsure what I was hoping to find. A restlessness—or maybe just a longing to feel something real—had taken the wheel.

At the center of it all was Kaushiki Chakraborty, a leading voice in Hindustani classical music. Steeped in the tradition of her father, Ajoy Chakrabarty, Kaushiki has emerged as a voice both rooted and radiant—faithful to her lineage, yet unmistakably her own. That evening, she was performing at The Egg, a curved structure nestled within Albany’s vertical concrete complex.

Inside, the hall was already wrapped in the low hum of a tanpura. A hush had settled over the audience like a shawl. The concert began with my aunt, Veena Chandra, on sitar, and her son, Devesh Chandra, on tabla. Billed as A Musical Odyssey: Mother and Son in Harmony, their duet featured Raag Hemant—a raga of early spring, evoking gentle renewal and lengthening light. The mood they created lingered, opening the door for what was to come.

In the second act, Kaushiki entered without ceremony, carrying the quiet confidence of someone who knows that music begins long before the first note. She opened with a brief guru vandana—a traditional invocation honoring her teachers—before beginning the raga. On stage with her were her teenage son and a small ensemble—tabla, harmonium, sarangi, tanpura. But what emerged wasn’t just a layering of instruments—it was a layering of people. Six distinct pulses, leaning in, adjusting, listening as one.

---

An Unmistakably Alive Performance

She sang several pieces that night, each with its own character. But one raga stayed with me—perhaps it was Miyan ki Malhar. Legend holds that Malhar, attributed to Tansen in Emperor Akbar’s 16th-century court, can summon rain. What it stirred that night was something else: a loosening of the tight coils of intellect.

The first note didn’t come right away. She waited—for the air to settle, for the room to exhale, or maybe for the storm within her to gather force. Then came a meend, a sliding phrase, that cut through the silence like distant thunder. It wasn’t dramatic, not yet. Just a gesture—but one that carried weight, history, and intent. We were inside it before we knew.

She stayed in the alap—the slow, unmetered exploration—for a full fifteen minutes. Each phrase felt like it was reaching for something just out of reach. The komal ga—the flattened third, like E♭—hovered in the air like an unfinished thought. When the tabla finally entered, it didn’t ground the music; it joined the conversation. A reply that had been listening the whole time. There were no flourishes meant to impress. Just breath, trust, and time. At one point, her voice caught slightly—just a trace of rawness. She didn’t smooth it over. She didn’t cover it up. She carried it into the next phrase like it belonged there.

I’d heard her many times online. But never live. And that night wasn’t about mastery or form—it was about attention. The way she let silence speak. How each phrase answered not just the grammar of the raga, but the feeling in the room, in her body, in that moment. The music wasn’t performed—it was becoming.

What we heard that night wasn’t just shaped by raag or rhythm. It was shaped by her: how much sleep she’d gotten, what she ate that day, the warmth of the room, the bottle of hot water she kept by her side. The tabla’s skin breathed with the humidity; the sarangi echoed the tension or ease in each phrase. Every element responded to her attention, her breath. Even the way this particular audience inhaled and stilled shaped what followed. And there I was, in the sixth or seventh row—not sure why I’d come, but certain I wouldn’t forget. A raga is never the same twice. When rendered with awareness, it becomes unrepeatable.

Toward the end of the concert, she sang a thumri—“Yaad Piya Ki Aaye”—and at one moment, her voice echoed the call of a koyal, the Indian cuckoo. It was unmistakable: a bird’s voice, rendered through hers. But what emerged wasn’t mimicry—it was something more layered: a memory, a mood, a longing carried through a human body. What struck me wasn’t the accuracy, but the way it heightened emotion—what V.S. Ramachandran might call a “peak shift”: a distilled exaggeration that bypasses analysis and goes straight to feeling.

I remember thinking how ironic it was: on a night devoted to presence, the most striking moment of imitation felt the most alive.

---

The Presence Test

A friend recently sent me an article. It claimed that AI had passed the “aesthetic Turing Test”—that machines could now generate songs, paintings, and performances so convincing, most people couldn’t tell a human hadn’t made them.

The author posed a thoughtful question: if a machine creates a song that moves someone to tears, does it matter that the machine felt nothing? It’s a clever framing. But perhaps it starts too late.

As someone who studies the diffusion models behind these systems—the mathematical engines of today’s AI art—I am aware of their power. They can generate music that sounds polished, even moving. I admire the mathematics and the engineering that makes them possible. But sitting in that hall in Albany, I was reminded that what moved me wasn’t polish. It was presence. Presence as computation—but of a different kind.

As I discussed in this essay, the human body is also a type of computer. Not a digital one, but a continuous, embodied, recursive system. When Kaushiki sang that night, her body was computing in real time: ears adjusting to the tabla, voice shaped by the acoustics of the hall, muscles responding to the sarangi’s vibration. Every note was a result of feedback—internal, interpersonal, and environmental. What emerged wasn’t sampled from a trained model. It was chosen, in dialogue with what had just happened.

Could we formalize this? Maybe. A “Presence Test” wouldn’t look for imitation. It would look for response. Not just: Can the machine convince us it’s human? But: Can it be moved? Can it move with us?

That’s what I heard in that meend: a phrase that slid not just between notes, but between two worlds. The music wasn’t meaningful because it fooled me. It was meaningful because it met me.

This is not a new idea. Walter Benjamin once spoke of aura—the singular presence of a work of art in time and space. Indian aesthetics offers a parallel in rasa. Rasa is not the performer’s emotion, nor the listener’s sentiment. It is what emerges in the meeting. When the inner state of a performer (bhāva) resonates with a receptive heart, rasa arises—not transmitted or displayed, but co-created. Without the listener, it does not exist.

In Indian classical music, the raga is not a script. It is a grammar. The music happens in the tension between structure and surrender. Presence is not an extra; it is the thing itself.

And presence is not limited to live performance. It lives in the stillness before a note, the weight of a brushstroke, the pause between gestures. I once wrote about Yo-Yo Ma playing a single note, again and again, each time different—shaped only by bow and breath. That, too, was presence.

A machine might render every note of Malhar with flawless precision. But it won’t lean into a phrase because the room just stilled. It won’t stretch a silence to let the rain in. It won’t listen back.

That, for me, is the test.

---

The Standard to Hold On To

I didn’t stay for the reception. I had to get back—there was that deadline, the paper still unfinished, the world waiting to reassert itself. So I slipped into the cold, found my car, and began the quiet drive back to New Haven.

It had started to snow—a steady hush that seemed to echo the music still playing somewhere inside me. The roads were mostly empty. I didn’t stop for food. I didn’t turn on the radio. That night, Malhar didn’t bring rain—it brought snow instead.

The raga lingered—not as performance, but as presence. I wasn’t thinking about AI, or tests, or whether machines could move us. I was just thinking about how rare it is to feel something singular, and to know it while it’s happening.

Not whether something passes as art, but whether it reminds us how to listen—that’s the standard I want to hold on to.

I couldn’t find a recording of the raga she sang that night. But Kaushiki’s rendition of Raag Bhimpalasi, from another evening entirely, offers something just as luminous—another unfolding, shaped by a different time and place. It’s not the same, and it’s not live. But perhaps it carries a trace of the same presence.

---