Hacker News Reader

Comment by zer00eyz | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting, but it feels a lot like a moonshot, and it isn't even groundbreaking. The approach may be novel but folks have been trying this for a while http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2010/05/ill_be_...

Can code generate a catchy pop tune? Im sure it can. Would I qualify it as music? Probably not.

Music can pull from sources that are EXTERNAL to the music: Heres a modern track that does just such a thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvtNS6hbVy4

Music can have some very non traditional structure that most would qualify as "noise" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYaWND9n9h0

Hell music can even be "silent" http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/writings/silence-taught-john...

Ultimately, I think that it is possible for a machine to generate music, but were going to be talking about something that is more or less an AI at that point, after all music has a soul.

View on HN

I don't know about that. The whole idea of "having a soul" is so nebulous that it's hard to build a view on top of it. Do we have souls? If yes, is it possible to mechanically replicate a soul? If not, why not? What's a soul?

If instead you define art as the communication of things that can't be fully expressed by direct sterile language, that's something I can get behind. Going that route, I think that getting AI to create real art has some pretty clear challenges, but there are also ways whers I could see it being better than humans.

Depending on how the AI learns and analyzes it has a chance to have a unique perspective on human communication. From there, it can find new and innovative ways of identifying gaps between primal human experiences and sterile human communication - and with a unique understanding of human communication could come up with fascinating ways of bridging those gaps.

This is all spitballing, but I think AI could eventually be the main new frontier in art.

I agree that my "having a soul" comment is nebulous, but were into a pretty fuzzy territory as it is when it comes to "what is art", and thats especially true with music.

>If instead you define art as the communication of things that can't be fully expressed by direct sterile language

Reading this, the first thing I thought of was emotion, feeling! So much of that is wrapped up in who we are, in what we are, in our experiences, and in our limitations.

I like spitballing --- and the thought exercise follows:

Lets say tomorrow we have AI, real thinking machines, with the classic 3 laws of Asimov. Lets also assume we have a few of them. Because of what and who they are, is it possible that AI generates something that other AI's consider "art" but that we, as people, do not?

Easy. A "soul" is a collection of thoughts and narratives that define the core of your being, many of which are held in common with other human beings. I think this is a useful requirement for a soul, since this means that ensouled creatures must participate in a community of discourse/culture along with humans. If AI can't do this, it's worthless.

AI will "fake it till it makes it."

I'm listening to Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin right now. What about those can't be analyzed and recreated ? There's not complex bowing technique or lyrics to speak of, but it's still relatable, and some I'm sure would say soulful. BoC for certain (by their tone) evoke "nostalgia". Does that qualify as soulful ? Does it seem out of reach of algorithms ?

I think "soul" will have to be better qualified unless its just going to be tautological.

This is the wrong idea. Of course a machine can recreate Aphex Twin with perfect fidelity, just like, unfortunately, a monkey can recreate a Jackson Pollock.

But a machine does not yet have the capacity to lay its finger on the cultural pulse and create something new and slightly different that strikes a resonating cord, pulls people in a new direction, makes them grow, because in addition to having a certain algorithmic description, the music they are making also betrays a certain darkness, a blend of fear, grotesque and dissonance that is there, somewhere down inside us, and that we love despite its ugliness. Until a machine can discover this part of humanity and translate this roiling mass into music, it hasn't managed the same feat as Aphex Twin.

This is what makes music great, that it is born from a place that requires loving observation of humanity. Real creativity requires having insights about humans, representing them in art, and exposing your insight through a particular medium. The image itself, the sound, means nothing. It's the reception, the speaker, the meaning, that matters.

A machine has no place in society. It isn't "straight out of Compton". It CANNOT make music.

Not so sure about that.

James/Aphex said back in 1997 that he was using algocomp for some of his music. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphex_Twin#Musical_style

It does not matter. This is just a human using a tool to create music. It's identical to him playing the piano. The machine is not doing the work of making his music socially relevant, he is.

That statement "music has soul" to me merely characterizes the emotional attachment that people put on music. I'm not sure how that could be 100% programmed or machine-learned at this time.

That being said, musicians have been creating machine-assisted composition (sequencer driven, stochastic, etc.) for a long time. I can imagine great art coming from AI, if the composer is there to help "guide the AI tool" in the direction he or she wants. AI as a means to an end, I don't see greatness from that... AI as an instrument, that could be very interesting...

Without sounding too nerdy - music doesn't have soul, brains apply the "soulful" property inside itself to aesthetic signals where it makes sense to do so. Music like all other sensory stimuli is purely aesthetic and lacks depth, it's the brain that connects the dots and fabricates the story, and in that sense an AI's output can have many different possible stories. Personally I really like artificial and alien music and art, and it can for example make us more aware of peoples place in the universe and our environment and the future, and connect the brain to novel atmospheres and ideas. This notion of a guy playing a guitar being the only thing that's music is very outdated to me and not interesting at all.

And yes - musicians use accidents both digitally but even in the acoustic world all the time, that suddenly makes for interesting listening. Music has never been 100% human.

And the last point is if you want computers to be able to fabricate the stories themselves, and maybe create output that tells or "exploits" such a story, then yes maybe it isn't a human story, or maybe they can emulate our story, but in the end we come down to what is consciousness, what is intelligence, and all of this. But if intelligence can be artificial similar to humans, then AI's can in theory create vast and amazingly intricate stories that would be even more fascinating than what a human could come up with.

What about it sounds like a moonshot? It's using an existing Google open source project and is looking to use it for an artistic purpose along with building a community. Honestly it sounds like a 20% project from a couple of people on the TensorFlow project. Almost 0 cost.

Plus potential PR value for Google if something meaningful comes out, the press loves AI stories like this. It feels like the effort invested in AlphaGo was at least partially because of marketing, establishing Google as a leader in AI.

This will also help attract young researchers to Tensorflow, so a low cost win for them.

I'll always like that terrible Blurred Lines song because I had a really fun time dancing to it at a friends birthday party. I'm pretty sure Macbook is a better person than Robin Thicke.

Meaning in music can come from the creator or the listener.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com