Ha, you had me til the AI part. Personally I figure the musicians will have the last jobs, along with designers. Really artists generally speaking will be the most difficult AI, no?
All that you need then is a human avatar that the kids can connect to and take as their role model.
Here's a great break-down of "Shake It Off" from a songwriting perspective, which kind of reveals the simplicity is deceptive in some ways:
http://www.stereogum.com/1788251/30-essential-max-martin-son...
Also, I forgot to mention that the weird thing about music is that it follows trends just long enough to want a new one. Thus, whatever formula might win out for a period of time would likely be usurped by a variation or counter-intuitive trend. A funny thought in this line is that a hit-making, successful "Hair Metal Pop" AI would be going great until the "Grunge Rock Pop" AI started getting traction. Humans are fickle!
As an Olde Phart(tm), what DJs do looks very much to me like "a human avatar" and aggregator.
Already in production. See Hatsune Miku in live concerts.[1][2] Not only is the performer an avatar, the singing is synthesized by Vocaloid software, which you can buy.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYaX01NOfA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyTmXLWCazw&nohtml5=False [3] http://www.vocaloid.com/en/
"To create a song, the user must input the melody and lyrics".
There will come a point when one of the easiest ways to make money for a musician - sync licensing - is overtaken by computer generated tunes.
That article goes further, that their goal is to be Instagram like, helping the unlearned make more professional sounding things.
That doesn't seem more revolutionary than the Auto-Tune.
[1] http://www.globaluniversityventuring.com/article.php/5136/ju...
Do either of you write or play any music? What supports your arguments other than a few marketing op-ed pieces put out by Google in the last couple of year?
You do realize that Google's self-driving cars and other AI research programs are mainly exercises in show business themselves, right? Well kudos to the people running public relations down in Mountain View, they've certainly convinced their target demographic that Google is the place to be for AI research!
> AlphaGo alone shows that the AI is likely to discover new styles that we failed to examine before, why can't the same happen with Art?
Because Go is a game with set of rules and clearly defined winner. Art has no rules and no winners and no losers. You can only program a computer, be it a neural network or some other machine learning algorithm, to deal with a finite set of inputs. Human oversight is still needed to set up and do the initial training of unsupervised learning algorithms and obviously needed during the entire process of supervised learning.
The number of variables that go in to a music production are pretty astonishing. I'm guessing you have pretty much no experience with writing lyrics, melodies, counter melodies, arranging a song, playing the drums, playing the bass, playing any accompaniment, singing, recording, mixing, and then mastering. There's probably around a billion subtle variables that go in to what ends up being 4 minutes of a stereo recording. I would imagine it would take hundreds of thousands of man-hours just to train the initial complex neural network that could get anything that would spit something out that remotely sounded like the Beatle's Yesterday. Perhaps it wouldn't take as much effort to reproduce some plastic pop star, but you know what? People don't really like that shit. Kids do. For like 3 weeks. Then the plastic melts.
You know what, this is basically pointless. You've made your mind up to remain ignorant about music. That's your prerogative. I'm safe in my knowledge that some genious in the Bay Area isn't going to be taking my job playing covers in a bar room any time soon. What, do you think a bunch of people sitting around in a dive bar want to watch a laptop sing them country music? But who knows, judging by how tasteless and uncultured most techies are, you guys would probably be fine with listening to the world's worst poetry, the world's worst instrumental lead, and the tackiest, lamest, emotionless expression of the inhuman condition a machine could possibly imagine.
Why do AI zealots hate humanity so much? Are you ashamed of our past? Do you treat your parents and friends and family as ultimately replaceable by a machine? Art is much closer to the home and heart than you're realizing. I mean, it's you whose gonna end up driving real love away from your own life. I'm surrounded by a bunch of lovely morons who are fine with their shameful existence and are fine from spending the rest of their years being far from perfect and living side by side with misery and sin. You'd better get acquainted with reality at some point. You're still just a bag of flesh and bones with a set expiration date!
Here's how I'm wasting away my remaining years: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10153729538523439
Rest in peace, Merle. It's a shame he never got around to learning about and writing about techies... although if you use your imagination his "Here In Frisco" is pretty damned close:
It's four a.m. in New York City, three a.m. in Dallas
The night is still early here in Frisco
Market street's still going, the same old shows are showing
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
They say it's raining in Chicago, but it's cold and clear in Denver
Been windy all night long here in Frisco
Trolley cars are clinging, the big Bay Town's swinging
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
The way I feel tonight, I won't be staying long
But when I leave, I'll leave my heart just like in the famous song
Trolley cars are clinging, the big Bay Town's swinging
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
And I'm still all alone here in Frisco
---
Yup, and I'm still all alone here in Frisco, sitting around with my Artificial Love Machine and my Oculus VR wired directly in to the Google-Apple-Amazon mothership circling the earth... full-stack, full vertical integration, corporate assisted lifestyle... pumps me full of vitamins and movies made by computers.
That this doesn't sound like the living embodiment of hell on earth, I don't know what the fuck does...
The regular crowd shuffles in
There's an old man sitting next to me
Making love to his tonic and gin
And the waitress is practicing politics
As the businessmen slowly get stoned
Yes they're sharing a drink they call loneliness
But it's better than drinking alone
Sing us a song you're the piano man
Sing us a song tonight
Well we're all in the mood for a melody
And you've got us feeling alright
AI could perhaps work soon for certain formulaic music (like say bubblegum pop) as well as some forms of synth music (I easily can see generative minimal techno for instance). I will say that people don't tend to like overly formulaic music though; they tend to like the twists, turns, and "personality" that people can bring to art. Even in pop, formulaic pieces are quickly forgotten. But it's probably possible to write an algorithm now that does this sort of stuff really well.
Beyond pop formula, I think AI advocates sometimes underestimate the difficulty. There are no real "rules" in music. The music of the world is very diverse, the "rules" even in pop / folk vary from culture to culture.
Many styles of music are way beyond AI at this point IMHO. They are either much more technically complex (Western classical) or rely on improvisational skills that I would think would be difficult to parametize (jazz, Indian classical) Heck, even with something like say blues music, which pretty much uses the same template for most songs (well, a similar rhythm and similar chord changes at least), you've still got the soloists and the singing. Vocaloid ain't got nothing on Muddy Waters or BB King etc. :)
I don't think anthropomorphising something that generates pleasant sounds is going to get you anywhere, by the time you get anywhere interesting, you've become the artist.
Here[1] is an interview with Alex Ebert where he discusses a non lyrical song teaching him about death.