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Comment by circlefavshape | Hacker News Reader

I really don't understand the point of this. Do we need a computer to help us add to the vast store of music nobody ever listens to? Reminds me of Douglas Adams's electric monks

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As a musician I've wondered what generating actually good music would mean. Music is such a cultural experience, tied in with a sense of being part of a social group, that I don't think we would ever let computers completely replace humans in producing it - until they become sentient and we start seeing them as friends. (How could a computer be a part of my social group unless it was sentient?)

I think the non-research value will be like the value of chess computers to chess communities. It enriches the community, helping them develop their craft, but the community is still a community of humans.

http://theconversation.com/how-computers-changed-chess-20772

I can think of a few ways machines have beaten humans before, but where human experience is still valued in a way the machine achievement isn't. Modern weapons are valued for what they do, and they can beat any human, but the human practice of martial arts is still valued despite that fact. A player piano with a roll performed by Rachmaninoff will deliver an excellent reproduction of a historic performance, but I'd still rather listen to my friend play, even if what I'm hearing comes down to objectively worse key pressing.

IMO, the end game of this sort of thing would be to, one day, have an app that can generate endless new music just for you, based on your taste.

That really sounds like the computer would have to understand you and your shifting moods better than most people could.

Which might actually be quite possible. At the very least, I'm sure machine learning can have a better understanding of your general musical taste than most of your friends do.

That's a pretty exciting prospect then, and I could imagine even a mediocre implementation being almost catastrophically popular.

Spotify seems to implement this with custom play lists generated for you daily, with those play lists broken down by different styles/moods

Personally, I find that Spotify doesn't "get" me in that way, not really. Maybe it hits the broad center of a normal distribution, but I think a lot of people lie outside of that. Even then, surely the challenge of curating existing music which is heavily tagged is much less than composing it with a mood or taste in mind. Just my gut feeling that.

Part of me agrees, but at the same time computers can explore spaces far faster than we can. Perhaps it will end up like Go where an AI exploring music will lead to new inspiration for humans.

I think we're only at the place where the computer can propose ideas for the artist to dispose of mostly, and perhaps find a gem occasionally.

Music is indeed a language, so while it evolves, it still requires a network of meaning to rely upon. So doing something wild like music in 5/6 time will for the most part, bounce off people's heads and not resonate with meaning.

It will make sense when it's able to generate music in popular genres, gaming and commercials.

Entire creative industries will be automated away with this, in time.

Two words: Interactive Music

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