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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

Given the relatively short, finite length of the average pop song; given the well known, restricted inputs; given that there is a general formula for successful pop songs; not only can AI write pop songs, it can (and will) write every possible pop song. At this point it's merely a question of a short amount of time, sub ten years perhaps, twenty tops.

The creation part will ultimately end up being the trivial aspect. Figuring out which of the billion songs AI create are any good will be the more difficult, time consuming filtering / discovery aspect (that will process partially at human-speed).

AI will create vast amounts of content/goods in the relatively near future (of all types, from VR worlds to pop songs to physical things automatically made by printing). A large industry will spring up around filtering that, deciding what's good, to then serve it up to people for popular mass consumption.

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Imagine a world where 80's new wave never ended.

Imagine a world where the Police never broke up?

This is the most insightful comment. Pop music tends to be particularly susceptible to the impression that it can be copied, because it seems to fit the idea more than any other genre (that is debatable of course) that successful music is a template. But even in pop, things progress. AI has been shown to be pretty decent at copying and modeling. Creativity? Not so much. We've been making the equivalent of HMM-based "music in the style of (i.e. generative stochastic processes modeled on) Beethoven" since the 60s, but such a design is to going to write the next hit. Or if it does, it won't write the following 10 by itself. You would think it's not true from how the radio presents it to you, but the fact is that people (eventually) get bored of hearing the same thing over and over.

> You would think it's not true from how the radio presents it to you, but the fact is that people (eventually) get bored of hearing the same thing over and over.

Evidence is against you.

The number of radio stations that play something "new" are VASTLY outnumbered by the radio stations that play the same things over and over and over.

If we start removing things which sound almost identical (See: modern "bro" country, etc.), the number of places where you can get exposed to new music dwindles to effective zero.

> The number of radio stations that play something "new" are VASTLY outnumbered by the radio stations that play the same things over and over and over.

That's true. I'm not really convinced it's a reflection of what people want though, so much as a reflection of the bare minimum necessary to satisfy listeners.

I feel it's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy though --- it sells because it's there.. but everyone complains about it.

And it's there because it's easier for companies to repeat the same thing than to make something new. It's not necessarily a reflection of what people want. It's more like.. the lowest common denominator.

I think in the end, play time and music popularity are much more complicated social phenomena than whether people think a song "is good" or not.

However, maybe you're right in that this phenomenon could play to the benefit of AI-generated music. But I really think it will hit the limits of people's patience, quickly.

>We've been making the equivalent of HMM-based "music in the style of (i.e. generative stochastic processes modeled on) Beethoven" since the 60s, but such a design is to going to write the next hit. Or if it does, it won't write the following 10 by itself.

This is important to recognize, yes, but it's also important to realize that for every 1 AI agent that writes a hit, there's going to millions others (or more) crunching away at songs that aren't hits (like musicians currently, but many more, working more hours, and pumping out many more songs each).

The next 10 hits don't need to all come from the same AI musician to "take over" pop. They just need to come from 10 of millions others all competing with each other (and humans) for those top spots.

Even with current technology, this really isn't so much a music generation problem as it is a filter problem asking "how do you know which of these billion (generated or not) songs are going to be hits?".

When I look for new music in a particular style (let's say trap), I can discard 90% of new songs with just 2 sec snippets. Very few songs get 30 sec of listening, and even fewer a full listen. I would say I'm pretty good at it (the ones I like tend to become hits).

If I can filter 90% in 2 sec, you can probably machine learn it. Of course, if after you filter out the easy stuff, you still have heaps of songs, there will be a problem.

But I think the solution will still be some form of machine learning. So we'll have a long automated pipeline filtering out stuff, and only surface for human rating a minuscule amount. Gems will be thrown away, but it won't matter.

Me, I wait for the day when algorithms will invent a new genre (house/trance/drum&bass/dubstep/trap/???).

And one thing that keeps coming to my mind. Can "good music" be absolutely rated? Will eventually advanced computers consider our music good? Will they "like" completely different music, which sounds like garbage to us? Or to put another way, how much of music depends on general intelligence, and how much on the specific realization of said intelligence (brain/culture)

> ... sub ten years perhaps, twenty tops

I hope you are being sarcastic :) Even though pop songs aren't that imaginative, exponential growth means causes problems. We can't count all ways of ordering 52 cards using all the computers in the world in the history of the universe, and I bet one could come up with an algorithm for creating pop songs, one per ordering of a deck of cards.

Nope, not being sarcastic. You're radically overestimating the range of potential pop songs (much less the range of possible good songs, which is far, far, far smaller).

Human ears & taste/preferences drastically, inherently reduce the set. It's a deck of 9 or 10 cards, not 52.

We don't necessarily need to count all ways of ordering 52 cards if we can build a model of how people will react to playing those cards.

We can count all the ways of ordering 52 cards.

It's 52!, or 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.

Enumerating them is where it starts to get tricky.

Yes, you are right, I meant enumerate :)

> A large industry will spring up around filtering that, deciding what's good, to then serve it up to people for popular mass consumption.

That apparatus already exists and is quite functional. Are you fully in charge of choosing what music you discover and end up liking? Are you sure?

< given the well known, restricted inputs;

Really? Yes there are some intervals that we have discovered/learned in our audio spectrum, but the fact that you can so confidently discredit something highlights your ignorance. Unfortunately, life ain't no engineering problemo

> [T]here is a general formula for successful pop songs

What would you say that is?

Your answer has to be detailed enough that a computer can understand it.

There's a lot of patterns to pop songs but there's patterns in all music. I haven't seen any function that inputs x and outputs a pop hit.

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