CKUA Correspondence, 2026:
From: Leo Cripps
Subject: Donated Hour Wed 2026-06-03 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM
To: Ryan McCourt
Good Morning Ryan,
Leo from CKUA checking in with you regarding your donated hour for next Wednesday, June 6. I see from my notes that you have been a donor since 2021. I would love to curate your donated hour with music and stories from you.
Would you mind sharing some music as well as stories you’d like to share with our audience? I would love to share with our listeners why CKUA is important to you and why you choose to donate to support in such a generous manner.
Is this donated hour dedicated to someone special etc.
Let’s curate this hour together and make it fun.
Thanks Ryan,
Leo
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Good morning Leo!
Yes, I’m a previous donor, and a long-time listener to CKUA! The station’s vision (to create a better world connected by music, arts, and culture, and we are committed to providing this for anyone who wants to listen, regardless of their age, location, or circumstance) is something I strongly support.
Generally speaking, I appreciate CKUA’s variety of styles and genres, the non-commercial format, and the support of local arts and culture. Specifically, I appreciate your enthusiasm and your willingness to present my own music, as The Synthesist, to your listening audience back in January. We live in a time of widespread anxiety and confusion about seemingly everything, and art & music are no exception to that (“same as it ever was,” to quote David Byrne).
With my two albums (The Objectivity of Taste and After Your Death) I present some deep ideas about art and life, from two of my favourite thinkers, who have already tackled the philosophical questions too many people still puzzle over today, communicated through the most immediate form of art: music. It is my sincere hope that these musical declarations do not ‘fall on deaf ears’. As Schopenhauer writes, “All genuine thought and art is to a certain extent an attempt to put big heads on small people.” I’ve written a couple of essays on related issues here: https://spunarounds.com/machines-of-synthesis/
Here are a few suggested songs for a fun thematic playlist, focused on society’s recurring anxieties over mediation, spectacle, commodification, and the replacement of direct human reality by systems of representation.
- The Spirit of Radio — Rush
- Welcome to the Machine — Pink Floyd
- Video Killed the Radio Star — The Buggles
- A New Capacity for Boredom (Kitsch) — The Synthesist
- Money for Nothing — Dire Straits
- Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger — Daft Punk
- The Futility of Rules — The Synthesist
- Ohio — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
- Fight the Power — Public Enemy
- The Revolution Will Not Be Televised — Gil Scott-Heron
- Your Revolution — Sarah Jones
- Elysium — Portishead
I’ve sprinkled a couple of my own tracks in with these much better known ones. I’d certainly be pleased if you wanted to play any other tracks from either of my two albums, or other songs from any artist of any genre that might fit in with this broad theme.
Truly, I’m happy to leave it all to your own professional expertise and personal taste.
Cheers,
Ryan
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Hey Ryan,
Just continuing to work on your donated hour. It’s been an interesting few days talking about your albums and several others that we’ve received recently. ‘M sure you can guess the subject – generative AI!! Where does it fall, how do we deal with it etc. CKUA’s policy on AI is that we do not air it. I think both records from you are two of the most brilliant albums I’ve heard in a long time, however after airing them in January ( and I must say I had not explored the background of them at the time), they never made it into the library.
I had a read of the articles in the links and they are quite interesting. Long story short, I am going to fit as many of your suggested songs into the program but I will have to leave out music from The Synthesist. Maybe very soon, something will change and we’ll be able to play AI generated music but for now, the policy is that we stay away from it.
Catch you tomorrow.
Leo
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Leo,
Thank you, again, for your kind words.
Please ask CKUA leadership to update their Mission & Vision statement to reflect this new official censorship policy (no hint of this policy currently appears in that document: in fact, I had gathered exactly the opposite message from reading it, as it stands now).
Obviously, I am extremely disappointed that I have evidently wasted my time in presenting my scholarship and reasoning on this subject, as those arguments have, just as I feared, fallen on deaf ears. Instead of choosing to have a hard conversation on the future of arts and culture in Alberta, for even this one small moment, they have quite literally tossed my work into the trash, simply because I have been upfront about using a tool they have arbitrarily decided not to accept.
(Unlike my donation, of course, which they are more than happy to take!)
No doubt other, more established artists use this technology also, but are less upfront about that use, and those songs will receive airplay. And, no doubt, other established artists will boldly use such new technology (as artists will always been at the vanguard of using new techniques and tools) and they will be celebrated for it. I guess we’ll all just have to wait until David Byrne, or some other more respected (probably non-Albertan) artist, makes it acceptable for the rest of us poor prairie schlubs.
Once again, I must express my extreme disappointment in CKUA’s refusal to confront the carefully considered aesthetic case made exquisitely explicit by the music: by the philosopher Schopenhauer, by the art critic Greenberg, and by myself, an Alberta artist for more than a quarter century: never mind the case made implicitly by the other suggested songs on the pointed playlist about societal media anxieties. This was a test that, to my great disappointment, CKUA has shamefully failed.
All the best to you,
Ryan
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Thanks for the feedback Ryan.
To be quite honest, there is no written policy at this current time. It is still in the discussion/draft stage. We’re on the cutting edge of AI and many of us are not sure where it lands in the world of art especially music. We are still exploring all of it and as I was told these actions are ‘for now.’ I honestly don’t know what the future directions are but I know we have asked leadership to present us with a directive for AI produced art.
Leo
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Well, I hope the arguments of Schopenhauer, Greenberg, and myself, and the quality of the music, are considered in those discussions.
“To hold that one kind of art must invariably be superior or inferior to another kind means to judge before experiencing; and the whole history of art is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down beforehand: the impossibility, that is, of anticipating the outcome of aesthetic experience.“-Clement Greenberg
Cheers,
Ryan
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From: Arianne Smith-Piquette
Subject: Donated Hour
To: Ryan McCourt
Hi Mr. McCourt,
Leo gave me some context around the conversation you had regarding the donated hour on Discoveries. I wanted to share more information on the forthcoming AI policy at CKUA.
As Alberta’s home for music, arts, and culture we have had a number of internal discussions regarding the use of generative AI; both in music we broadcast and in images that are used on our website and social media channels. We have also been monitoring other arts and cultural institutions and how they’re setting policy on use of AI. Both CJSR and CJSW have released their AI policies and I can assure you that we are doing our research and diligence in creating our own.
Leo is correct in his statement to you that we currently are working on a formal statement and policy that can be shared. Currently the instructions given to hosts is to not play music created with generative AI. Once the policy is complete, it will be publicly available.
The guidelines on our donated hour policy are available on our website. I would like to note that there is a specific line regarding requesting your own music; we cannot accept a donation where the expectation is to play music from the person, or family member, of the person making the donation. There are explicit rules around that and Leo would not have been able to honour your request regardless of the AI guidelines.
I can appreciate that this is likely disappointing news to you. My apologies for that.
From https://ckua.com/donated-hours/
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Arianne,
Thank you for following up and for offering additional context.
I’d note that I am a previous CKUA donor, and that my donation again this year followed airplay that had already occurred. My donated hour of Leo’s program was given out of gratitude, without an expectation of further play. My initial email to Leo makes clear that my own tracks were merely suggestions among many, explicitly deferring to his professional judgment and personal taste. I don’t believe the CRA rule you cite applies to my situation.
It’s worth observing that while I was entirely satisfied to defer to Leo’s professional judgment and personal taste, CKUA ironically is not, applying instead a blanket prohibition that overrides both his curatorial freedom, and the freedom of your listeners to make up their own minds. Leo called these albums among the most brilliant he had heard. CKUA listeners have since been denied the chance to agree or disagree.
The arguments against CKUA’s current position are not simply mine. They are laid out, with far greater authority, within the music itself, in the words of Clement Greenberg and Arthur Schopenhauer, two thinkers who addressed precisely these questions of aesthetic judgment, institutional gatekeeping, and the futility of rules laid down before experiencing any work of art. My own supporting essays on the subject are available at spunarounds.com for anyone on the policy committee who is interested. I sincerely hope that in developing your AI policy, CKUA might genuinely engage with those arguments rather than setting them aside unexamined.
Cheers,
Ryan McCourt
