This paper examines the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of ‘return’ through the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated music, focusing on the re-created voice of Kishore Kumar in the rendition of the song ‘Saiyaara’ (2025). It explores how technology transforms nostalgia into a mediated act of remembrance, producing a new kind of aura that merges emotional authenticity with algorithmic simulation. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura and Roland Barthes’s concept of the grain of the voice, this study argues that the AI-generated voice embodies a posthuman form of return—one that reconfigures memory as a living, computational process.
Through this case study, the paper situates AI-generated music within wider cultural and philosophical debates on reproduction and the politics of nostalgia. The re-created voice of Kishore Kumar emerges as both a site of affective continuity and a marker of technological disruption. While it allows audiences to reconnect emotionally with a lost artist, it simultaneously challenges conventional ideas of originality, ownership, and creative ethics. Ultimately, this study argues, returning through technology is neither imitation nor restoration but a transformative dialogue between memory and innovation, reminding us that remembrance in the digital age is always an act of re-creation.
Introduction
The recent emergence of artificial intelligence (AI)–generated music has reopened questions about memory, authenticity, and the cultural meaning of voice. When a machine re-creates the voice of a legendary singer like Kishore Kumar to perform a modern composition like ‘Saiyaara’ (2025), the listener experiences a strange temporal and emotional dissonance. The voice sounds familiar yet unfamiliar, intimate yet spectral. This paradox of presence and absence invites a reflection on what it means to return to a sound that once defined an era but is now mediated through algorithmic mimicry. The ‘return’ here is not a mere act of reproduction; it becomes an aesthetic and ethical encounter with how technology reshapes cultural memory.
In the age of mechanical and now digital reproduction, art’s relationship with originality has transformed dramatically. As Walter Benjamin (1935/1969) argued, the ‘aura’ of the original artwork—its unique presence in time and space—diminishes when technology enables infinite replication (223). However, the AI-generated song complicates Benjamin’s framework. Rather than merely eroding the aura, such a re-creation produces a new aura that no longer rests on physical originality but on the affective shock of technological resurrection. This new aura emerges from the unsettling experience of recognition without presence: the listener encounters a familiar voice detached from the living body that once produced it. The emotional intensity arises precisely from this tension between intimacy and absence, producing a renewed sense of wonder rather than authenticity. The AI voice thus embodies a dual longing—to preserve the past and to innovate through the tools of the future—where memory is not simply recalled but reanimated through algorithmic mediation.
The essay argues that the AI re-creation of Kishore Kumar’s voice represents a posthuman form of return, where nostalgia and machine learning collaborate to produce new aesthetic experiences. This process reveals that cultural memory is not static remembrance but an evolving re-performance of the past. In the following sections, it will draw on Benjamin’s theory of technological reproduction and Roland Barthes’s reflections on the grain of the voice to examine how the act of returning through sound blurs the boundaries between human emotion, technological mediation, and artistic authenticity.
Return, Reproduction, and Remediation
Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935/1969) remains foundational to any discussion of technological mediation in art. He wrote that reproduction detaches the artwork from ‘the domain of tradition’ and substitutes for its singular presence a plurality of copies (221). The AI-simulated voice of Kishore Kumar extends this detachment further—the copy is no longer visual or mechanical but algorithmic. The digital ‘return’ becomes an act of computation rather than imitation. Yet, paradoxically, this process does not simply drain the work of its emotional appeal. Instead, it signals a shift in how auratic experience is produced under conditions of digital mediation. As Benjamin (1935/1969) also observes, technologies of reproduction transform the mode of human sense perception itself (222). The shock of hearing a dead voice returned through artificial intelligence exemplifies this altered sensory condition, where recognition and absence together produce a new emotional intensity.
Roland Barthes, in Image-Music-Text (1977), describes the ‘grain of the voice’ as the ‘materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue’ (182). When AI attempts to replicate a human voice, it inevitably misses this grain—the imperfections, breaths, and micro-textures that carry emotion. The absence of this grain becomes the trace of loss, the very space where the listener perceives the ‘return.’ What AI gives back is not the voice itself but its echo, inviting us to confront absence as presence.
In this framework, return operates on multiple registers: aesthetic (the reproduction of sound), affective (the nostalgia it evokes), and ethical (questions of ownership and authenticity). As Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman (1999), human subjectivity now coexists with intelligent systems that ‘think’ differently, compelling us to renegotiate what counts as presence or creativity (3). The AI-generated song, therefore, becomes a posthuman artefact—a collaboration between memory, code, and emotion.
Saiyaara and the Re-created Kishore Kumar
The song ‘Saiyaara’, originally from a film with the same name (2025), reappeared in a new form—re-created through an AI model trained on recordings of Kishore Kumar’s voice. For listeners raised on the warm timbre of Kishore’s songs from the 1960s to 1980s, this digital resurrection triggered both admiration and discomfort. It exemplifies what Andreas Huyssen (2003) calls ‘the politics of nostalgia’— the modern fascination with retrieving a lost past through mediated forms (25). The AI rendition performs an act of ‘return,’ not just to a song but to an emotion deeply inscribed in collective memory.
Listening to this version, one perceives a striking precision—the phrasing, the tonal modulations, and the emotional cadence are almost perfect. Yet, something is absent: the human spontaneity, the unpredictable inflections that once made Kishore Kumar’s singing so alive. The song is not Kishore Kumar’s return; it is a reminder that he cannot return. The machine reanimates memory while simultaneously confronting us with mortality. Here, Barthes’s notion of ‘the grain of the voice’ becomes crucial. If the grain signifies the material friction of the human body in sound, the AI voice offers only its surface simulation. Therefore, what returns is not the body itself but the memory of its sound. The listener thus encounters presence through absence, recognition through loss.
The emotional response to this song reveals our evolving relationship with art and technology. Online reactions ranged from awe—listeners expressing gratitude for ‘hearing Kishore da once again’—to anxiety about ‘tampering with legacy.’ These reactions highlight the tension between two cultural impulses: the desire to preserve and the need to innovate. As Huyssen (2003) suggests, nostalgia in late modernity is never passive recollection but an active cultural production shaped by media technologies (25). In this case, unlike mere stylistic repetition, AI-generated music attempts to simulate embodied performance itself, not just aesthetic surface. Memory is no longer recalled through imitation alone. It is reformatted into algorithmic process, where affect, timbre, and remembrance are reorganised as computational matter.
From an aesthetic standpoint, the AI version of ‘Saiyaara’ reconfigures Benjamin’s concept of the aura. While mechanical reproduction diminished the artwork’s unique presence in time and space, the AI re-creation produces a different kind of auratic experience—one that emerges not from physical originality but from the affective shock of technological resurrection. The aura is thus displaced from the original singer to the listener’s emotional experience. Listening itself becomes the site where aura is regenerated through affective participation, transforming return into a contemporary ritual of mediated connection rather than backward-looking nostalgia.
In the Indian context, this act of return also intersects with Bollywood’s long-standing reliance on repetition and reinvention. It has repeatedly turned to remixes, remastered tracks, and revived melodies to reactivate affective attachments across generations. The AI-generated Kishore Kumar may be seen as an extension of this remix logic, where technological innovation intensifies the industry’s established practice of recycling the past for contemporary consumption. Yet unlike conventional remixes, which rework existing recordings, the AI voice simulates the singer’s embodied presence itself. This shift makes the return not merely musical but ontological. It raises urgent ethical questions concerning consent, posthumous voice ownership, and the commodification of nostalgia—issues that Indian popular culture is only beginning to confront in the age of artificial intelligence.
Returning as Cultural and Emotional Practice
The act of ‘returning to a voice’ reveals that remembrance in the digital age is no longer a passive retrieval of the past but an active reconstruction of affect. The listener does not merely remember Kishore Kumar; they participate in his technological reanimation. This form of participatory nostalgia resonates with Marita Sturken’s (1997) concept of ‘cultural memory,’ in which collective remembrance is shaped, circulated, and stabilised through media technologies (9). The AI-generated rendition of ‘Saiyaara’ thus becomes a shared memory object, experienced not in isolation but through digital networks of listening, commentary, and circulation.
At this level of cultural practice, Benjamin’s concept of aura acquires a social rather than strictly aesthetic function. Earlier, aura emerged through the listener’s affective encounter with the resurrected voice. Here, it is sustained through collective participation. The emotional charge of the AI voice no longer resides solely in the sonic object but in the ritual of its circulation—through playlists, social media responses, and public debate. Aura therefore migrates from the artwork to the networked community of reception, where return becomes a repeated cultural event rather than a singular aesthetic shock.
Similarly, Barthes’s notion of ‘the grain of the voice’ undergoes a subtle transformation at the level of memory practice. If the grain once marked the irreducible bodily texture of vocal sound, in the AI rendition it survives not as an audible material presence but as a remembered embodiment. Listeners do not hear the grain in the algorithmic voice; they supply it through memory. The affective power of the voice is generated not from bodily vibration but from the listener’s recollection of embodiment. Grain, in this sense, becomes an act of imagining rather than an acoustic fact.
Yet this technologically enabled return is ethically ambivalent. When machines reconstruct human expression, emotion risks being transformed into simulation. The AI voice that sings ‘Saiyaara’ evokes genuine feeling, but that feeling emerges from structured absence rather than living presence. The return thus becomes emotionally powerful precisely because it stages loss. It gives form to longing without resolving it, confronting the listener with the limits of technological restoration.
From a broader cultural perspective, the desire to return—through music, memory, or voice—reflects a fundamental human impulse to seek continuity within change. Yet every return also transforms what it retrieves. The AI voice reinterprets Kishore Kumar through the algorithmic conditions of the present, giving new form to inherited affect. What emerges is not revival but reconfiguration.
Ultimately, returning to a voice like Kishore Kumar’s through AI is not about restoring the past as it was, but about renegotiating the present’s relationship with memory. It compels us to confront what it means to experience authenticity in an era of synthetic expression and to recognise that memory itself has become inseparable from technological mediation. The machine’s rendition of ‘Saiyaara’ therefore functions as a cultural meditation—not only for a singular artist, but for the fragile and shifting boundary between human and non-human creativity.
In this sense, ‘to return’ is not a backward movement but a spiral—a looping dialogue between history and innovation. The digital age transforms remembrance into a recursive act in which every return is also a re-creation. Suspended between nostalgia and novelty, mourning and marvel, the listener encounters the AI voice as neither fully alive nor fully absent. It remains a spectral testament to the evolving relationship between memory, machine, and music.
Conclusion
The AI-generated re-creation of Kishore Kumar’s voice in ‘Saiyaara’ exemplifies the complex interplay between memory, technology, and artistic expression. On one hand, it allows audiences to reconnect with a cherished cultural figure, transforming nostalgia into a living experience and offering a form of aesthetic and emotional continuity. On the other hand, it raises questions about authenticity, consent, and the ethics of re-creating voices that are no longer alive. The act of return, therefore, is neither purely restorative nor purely disruptive; it exists in a space where past and present intersect, mediated by both human desire and machine intervention.
From an aesthetic perspective, the AI voice challenges traditional notions of originality while generating new forms of cultural meaning. From a social perspective, it reveals how societies negotiate collective memory, longing, and innovation. Ultimately, returning through technology underscores that memory is never neutral: every act of remembrance reshapes the past even as it evokes it. The AI rendition does not simply revive Kishore Kumar but reconfigures the listener’s relationship to time, emotion, and art. In this light, ‘return’ is an ongoing dialogue—a spiral of remembrance, reinterpretation, and ethical reflection—reminding us that the past can never fully return, yet its echoes continue to shape our present.
- Related debates on postmodern nostalgia (Fredric Jameson) and the destabilisation of authorship (Michel Foucault) are relevant to this phenomenon but remain beyond the central aesthetic focus of this stud.
- This participatory reanimation reflects posthumanist ideas about human–machine entanglement, especially N. Katherine Hayles’s view that contemporary subjectivity is distributed across biological and informational systems (How We Became Posthuman, 1999). This perspective is noted here without being developed in detail, in order to retain focus on aesthetic and cultural memory.
The emotional force of absence produced through technological simulation recalls debates on hyperreality and mediated presence in late modern culture. While such frameworks are relevant, the present analysis prioritises affective and cultural memory over simulation theory.
- The interpretative nature of memory has been extensively theorised by Paul Ricoeur in Memory, History, Forgetting (2004). He argues that remembrance always reshapes the past in the act of retrieval. This philosophical dimension remains conceptually aligned with the present argument but is not developed in detail here.
References
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text. Translated by Stephen Heath, Hill and Wang, 1977.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 217–251. Originally published in 1935.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, Cornell University Press, 1977, pp. 113–138.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford University Press, 2003.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
“Saiyaara (1980) Ft. Kishore Kumar Full Song (Old Version) Old Is Gold With a New Voice!” YouTube, uploaded by YouTube, 2025, https://youtu.be/fuY2BGi2hAM?si=JiWgtRHl_F4-S4TW.
Sturken, Marita. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. University of California Press, 1997.