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Comment by yesiamyourdad | Hacker News Reader

But in the early 90's I sat in on a seminar by a music prof at my university, he was working on AI generated music. His vision was that it would be an assistive device; basically labor saving for composers.

At the time his students were doing automated compositions and I was blown away by the quality at the time. Definitely his students were already at the stage of partially composed music - basically just a songwriter who needed a good arranger / producer.

Given some of the work I've read on RNN's, I think this is really close to being fully automated. 5 years, maybe, and stuff like this will be fully automated.

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I think this is the future of AI in music, not just pop.

It's trivially easy to write a mediocre song. All it takes to turn a mediocre song into an above-average one is a clever turn of musical phrase; be it melody, harmony or rhythm or all three (typically it's all three). As a songwriter you're constantly generating options for you to choose from. "What chord goes well after this one but doesn't sound too predictable? What direction can I take this melodic idea in? My chorus is boring; is there something I could do rhythmically that would make it more interesting?" You're constrained by your own imagination, which itself is constrained by what kind of mood you're in, what you've eaten or drunk, energy levels, etc.

How nice would it be to have a super-charged co-writer that could spit out 20 alternatives that you would never have thought of. They don't even need to be perfect alternatives; simply enough to jog your head into a different frame where you can proceed to refine and build from.

Yeah, excepting that a label exec would immediately scoop them up to be produced as remix singles, to be released in stages over the next six months on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play for $1.29 apiece, whether you liked them or not.

Another point - back in the 80's, when New Age was getting popular, there was a New Age radio station that featured a format without radio personalities - it was really to my knowledge the first totally programmed station.

One music instructor got together with a couple friends and did assembly line New Age - they recorded a bunch of A sections, a bunch of B sections, and pasted them together A-B-A, A-A-B-A, that kind of thing, and turned around and got radio play on these compositions.

My point is that this kind of thing has been going on for a while. Now we're learning how to make computers do it.

That's interesting, but in that scenario, how important is the composer really?

Couldn't we just connect the variable output of the AI to some kind of Mechanical Turk-style focus group, feed those results as inputs back into the AI, and repeat that process millions of times? Might that produce a better song than an individual composer?

I've seen interviews with some modern artists, and they'll often take inspiration from decades-old hits (which are essentially de-risked melodies) and apply them to a modern template. I'm assuming the bigger labels already focus-group the output and make revisions. This seems like something that could eventually be automated.

I'm looking at this from the standpoint of someone who likes to write music. If I'm the composer then I'm important. :-)

Haha, fair enough. :)

In AI this is called actor-critic method. You got one net that spews ideas and another that ranks them. In this case, the critic is the human.

> basically labor saving for composers.

If you think about it, musicians work at low level - assembler or even raw mechanical inputs. They could use a toolchain.

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