How does "100s of Terabytes" compare to the amount of music the average human composer/musician listens to over the course of their career?
I recently read three distinct legal definitions of "art" have developed (in German courts at least). The details are interesting but the key notion is that in the strictest sense, art is an expression of emotions, so in some sense, this isn't music. Jaringly in this definition, the expression must be recognizable. Of course that's debatable and I don't mean to review the different philosophies. The only insight is that it depends and whether something elicites emotions or not is subjective. It's a useful attempt at a definition to differentiate intention and accident. Edit: Actually watching it now I have to say it's pretty cool and I wonder how much human input was given to control and curate the creation. NN synths over wavetables or granular synthesis are actual instruments one can play, for comparison. And I hold that whatever AI generates, it's still due to the authors.
> How does "100s of Terabytes
It's more than a lifetime.
If a minute of music is 1mb in mp3, then that's a whoopin n x 100 x 1'000'000 minutes. With n=1, that's over a million albums.
Even if the algorithm works with uncompressed pcm data, the ten times difference can be made up for by the n factor.
Edit: additionally, it's possible (likely?) that the music is downsampled before training, so this figure may be something of a lower bound.
I'm really surprised by how good this is. At times it sounds a lot like something from certain popular experimental electronica artists, e.g. Daniel Lopatin, Tim hecker.
It's a very nice demo piece, and vastly better than most of the NN efforts around.
But it still has the usual problem that it's sort-of-random orchestral wallpaper. Even if you create a workable grammar - by NN accident or design - you still have to solve the problem of intention and agency to generate music that isn't just mimicry or wallpaper.
I've heard some very, very good classical pastiche writing now - piano, chorales, orchestra - so it's essentially a solved problem technically.
Not so much artistically though.