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Comment by citilife | Hacker News Reader

We're actually using a similar technique (quite a bit more complex) to generate synthetic data for applications:

https://medium.com/capital-one-tech/why-you-dont-necessarily...

IMO this is eventually going to replace a lot of tasks. This for example, can dynamically generate elevator music (or music in an office). The system we built can generate synthetic data for testing and sharing samples of datasets. Eventually, we'll have entirely synthetically generated videos, advertisements, and more.

In 50 years, entire movies may be generated.

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My english teacher in high school said that some guy from Apple came to talk to them and said that soon AI would be able to write stories. That was 15 years ago and as far as I can tell, they cant use bots to write anything like an original story that anyone would want to actually read. Good luck making "entire movies."

You mean like this: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/an-ai-wrote-this-movi...

As that’s an example of it being funny-bad, I’d have suggested AI news writers instead: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_journalism

Is anyone currently affected by a lack of elevator music, be it due to financial reasons or any other reason, and does your approach solve this?

I hope you'll agree that you gotta find a better, more sympathetic example if you want to sell your generative algo's...

One such example would be for people making videos on sites like YouTube, where you want some sort of background music to keep the video alive but where you don't want to license something, use the same music as everyone else, or spent a lot of time digging through the internet to find something that ticks all the boxes.

Yes. Mood Media is a company that bought Muzak, Inc - the original elevator music company (and the reason we sometimes talk about disposable music like this as “muzak”). They are a substantial business now owned by private equity. They acquired Muzak for soemthing like $300m a few years back.

Background music is actually quite difficult, commercially. Someone needs to write and arrange it, and they need to be paid - either royalties each time it is played which is why a lot of companies don’t use “known” music for telephone hold and so on - it’s too expensive. If it’s not on a royalty basis then the writer needs to be bought out - which can be expensive.

So having algorithmically generated music is actually really interesting because there is potentially no author to be paid. This is actually an emerging area of music copyright law. If an algorithm writes music who owns the copyright to that music? The computer? Probably not, not a legal person. The people who wrote the algorithms? Possibly - but did they actually create the music? Or does no one own it - meaning anyone can use it without payment? If a label commissions an algorithm to write hits who owns the music publishing?

Thanks for changing my mind on this, I was looking at it in an overly simplistic way

You are welcome!

Elevator music was, in retrospect, pretty much what I a decade ago in a failed effort to be a Mac shareware developer. Mostly games, and their background music was procedurally generated, no real beginning or ending.

Drunk walk around a key, with randomised reset locations whenever the walk went out of bounds. Very good for fake oriental music, acceptable for action/scifi, terrible for theme development or classical style.

Nothing special, except that I totally failed to know anything about any of the previous efforts until years later, so it was all wheel-reinvention.

And then Apple deprecated Java, so it became obsolete.

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