Dave Rand is a Harvard grad student, member of the SSA affiliated Harvard Graduate Humanist Community, electro-punk musician, and the newest member of the SSA's Speakers Bureau.

Dave's synthesized sounds and thought-provoking lyrical project is called Robot Goes Here .  If you're looking for something more Bob Dylan and less Iggy Pop, Dave also has his Gertler's Law project, which is an accoustic version of the Robot tunes.

Learn more about Dave in the following interview conducted by senior campus organizer, Alison Bates.  To invite Dave to shake things up on your campus, email a request with 3 workable dates.  (Speakers Bureau members are provided for free to SSA affiliate groups on a first-come first-serve basis!)

Alison:  I remember you once said of your sound:"start with a computer kid in a punk rock band, take away the band and this is what you get."  Can you tell me more about your style, and what students can expect to see when you visit their campus?

Dave:  These days I do two very different musical projects, each right for a different kind of event/feel.

Robot Goes Here, my electro project, is loud, fun, and energetic, and involves me playing synthesized music off my laptop, running around, singing, and doing jumpkicks.  It's pretty out there and not like anything else you've seen anyone do, but its lot of fun and tries to be lyrically thought-provoking at the same time.  A Robot Goes Here performance would fit in well in the context of a rock show, maybe with one or two other bands from campus or something like that.  You can see a live video to get a feel for what to expect.

Gertler's Law is my acoustic folk-rock project, and is just me and an acoustic guitar.  This is more palatable to people who are a not into loud rock music, and can easily happen in any space without any sound equipment, or even electricity.

For both projects, my lyrics are reflections on the world and our place in it, from a scientific and humanist perspective.  Some samples are below.

A You were on NPR's Here and Now?! Tell me about that experience.

D The Robot Goes Here song "When The Well Runs Dry" was played on Here and Now on Jan. 23, 2007 as part of a piece on Boston's Antenna Alliance.  The Antenna Alliance is a group I'm involved with that promotes artists that agree to allow free downloading of their music.  I'm planning on releasing a full length acoustic Gertler's Law album with Antenna Alliance in September.

A The Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy/SSA conference seemed to ignite lots of interest in discussing organized humanism.  A common criticism of the conference was that Humanism spends too much time mimicking religious practices. What's your opinion of this?

D I thought that the conference overall was a great success, and that Greg Epstein really did an amazing job putting it all together.  I learning a lot and got exposed to some sides of humanism I was not previously aware of, particularly from Salman Rushdie and Amartya Sen. As is often the case on the first iteration of anything, there were also some rough spots.  The invocation at the opening of the conference definitely made me personally feel quite uncomfortable. Humanism is a broad movement and among people that identify with the label Humanism, there's a pretty wide range of attitudes towards religious-style trappings. 

It is a challenge in a diverse movement to satisfy as many people as possible, and is impossible to not alienate anyone. I'm interested in being part of a Humanist community that does more than just sponsor intellectual events, but I also am not a big fan ritual or events that feel religious. 

In the coming year, the Harvard Humanist Graduate Community is planning on doing a lot of community service, which I feel like can achieve the goal of building community and doing good, but steers clear of feeling religious.  But that being said, to each their own: I know there are a lot of Humanists that really enjoy the spiritual and ritualistic, and that is fine with me.

A Humanists and atheists are always talking about science and progress. Being a computer musician, how do you feel about combining music with scientific and technological advancements?  Do you ever worry that synthesized instruments will take the place of instruments played by people? Don't you warn about replacing humans with machines?

D My conflicted feelings about technology and progress are one of the main lyrical themes in my music.  Specific to the interaction between computers and music, I think that the concept of creativity as uniquely human is a pretty widely held belief, and that this is fundamentally dualist and non-naturalistic or non-materialistic.  I am completely convinced that it is possible for computers to be creative and to write good songs that I would enjoy.  If you believe that the brain is only a physical object and that there is no soul, then what we think of as creativity must be a very complicated algorithm that takes as input everything you've ever heard, plus some randomness, and comes out with something new. As an undergrad I wrote a paper (currently in review by the journal Music Perception) with a professor in the psychology department at Cornell University dealing with computation and creativity.  We had an artificial intelligence algorithm look for patterns in hundreds of classical melodies and distill out basic rules governing their structure. We then tested the algorithm by playing it new melodies it had never heard, as well as jumbled versions (which sounded bad, but still contained all the same notes).  The AI algorithm was as good as human subjects at differentiating the real melodies from the jumbled ones.  To me, this is pretty powerful evidence that one day soon we can have creative machines.  Making that a reality is definitely a life goal of mine.

A What else is on the horizon for Robot Goes Here and The Harvard Graduate Humanist Community?

D I'm planning on releasing a CD of Robot Goes Here covers in the fall, as well as an acoustic full length CD (free online release).  A new CD of explicitly humanist songs is also in the works, hopefully to be jointly released thru the Harvard Humanist Chaplaincy.  I just finished a tour around the eastern US, and will hopefully hit the road again over winter break, plus visits to humanist/atheist groups thru the SSA Speaker's Bureau.  As I said above, the Harvard Graduate Humanist Community is aiming to do a lot service this year, as well as lectures and social events (and hopefully some shows!).

A Can you share some of your most humanist lyrics with me?

D ZEN AND THE SCIENCE OF NIHILISM
Drew a black dot in the center of my palm and I was visited by the face of divinity, dressed to kill in its six-sided form. Can you see the row-sham-bow (rock paper scissors) that Darwin tattooed on your skin? I bet you think you can but you're obviously wrong, or you wouldn't\ using protection, now would you? // CHORUS: So I burn this song as a tribute to my gods: chance and the span of four billion years. Science as religion I'm a man of the cloth: Logic and reason like the flame and the moth. Your brain is just a beautiful machine forever calculating nothing. So here's a koan for the modern age: How many rolls of the endless-sided die did it take to make a reason why? // Saw a squirrel by the base of a tree and it struck me so powerfully how stupid and pointless life is. I know that's melodramatic but its true. All of our ideas about what's important are merely self-delusions. A biologist might say that sex really matters, but even that's not true cause who cares if your genes get passed on?  So on the lawn of my parents' house I found nihilism - who cares what it means? CHORUS. But I'm still looking for a job and writing this song, cause after all, it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter. No it doesn't matter that it doesn't matter! In light of this, here's another question with no answer: What will you do tomorrow?

THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION
People like to say that Darwin's earth is selfish, that evolution means look out for #1 so lock your doors, lock your windows, and lock your heart.  But dig a little deeper and you'll find altruism all around you. You can see it in the ant, in the bee, and in you and me. // CHORUS: At first it seems like a contradiction, but evolution's so clever: we're programmed to work together! Do you think that it cheapens the idea of brotherly love to realize that helping each other really comes down to helping ourselves? Maybe you do, but I think its beautiful, the evolution of cooperation! // So "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" gives us plenty of reason to help our neighbors, help our friends, and help our families. But what about tipping, what about jump-starts? Why help someone that you'll never see again? Ya why give a favor that you know will never be returned? Well what if somebody else is watching? What'll they think if you don't lend a hand? They'll tell everyone and then you're on your own when you're the own in need. So... // CHORUS // So my friends, now you see where we get our morality - it turns out that when you do the math, nice guys don't really finish last!

MY EXPERIMENT
Lately we've been hearing a lot about the importance of saying the course, but personally I believe in evolution, always searching for the best new ideas. Cause nothing's more exciting than discovering novel ways to see the world, with so many centuries of different understandings just waiting for me to explore. // CHORUS: Cause if life is a laboratory, this is my experiment, a biased random walk in search of it all // Saying you know anything with absolute certainty is fundamentally unscientific. You see in my line of work there is no kill, just the thrill of the chase, but the things we learn along the way can help to make the world a better place // CHORUS // It's like I took a journey to the center of the earth and I'm standing in the core gazing up thru the crust. Watching as my world-view continually spins I'm hurtling thru space but not moving at all. Starring into the void I'm choking down my vertigo, with knuckles clenched white like the Milky Way, I realize that Pangloss was almost right: This is indeed the best of all worlds, but just because it's the only one we have.