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Comment by ihm | Hacker News Reader

In my view, attempts like this misunderstand much of the point of music. That is, to communicate aspects of human life that are deeply interwoven with facts and experiences outside of the music itself.

I don't see how any of that will be possible before we have some kind of general AI, and in the meantime I think these attempts will continue to be semantically empty, even unsettling in their emptiness.

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> In my view, attempts like this misunderstand much of the point of music. That is, to communicate aspects of human life that are deeply interwoven with facts and experiences outside of the music itself.

I actually think you've missed the point. These attempts do not aspire to communicate aspects of human life at all. They're simply scientific and engineering endeavors that seek to answer less profound questions like: "Can computers generate music?" (Yes) and "Can computers generate music that is enjoyable to listen to?" (Not yet)

To go one step further: There are glaring and obvious technical faults in many of the generated samples (this isn't a criticism, they're better than past work!). I suspect that if you are feeling unsettled by these songs it's because of those flaws and not because they are "semantically empty".

> These attempts do not aspire to communicate aspects of human life at all.

Of course not. They, just like enough humans do already, imitate the results of "having an adventure of the soul".

> "Can computers generate music?" (Yes) and "Can computers generate music that is enjoyable to listen to?" (Not yet)

And we're talking about the question "should they?", which science can't even attempt to answer. "Play from your heart", and all that; not even best-selling artists pumping out mediocrity are above that criticism, even when they do it according to the best of their ability and conscience, and even when it makes people "happy".

Who gets to decide what is the "point" of music? Music is a twenty billion dollar industry. An AI system that can spit out highly "realistic" and "pleasing" music can change the music industry as we know it.

And this is music with a different, albeit equally valid "point": to see ourselves reflected, abstracted, and find what we can still recognize. It's like a Rorschach test, or a piece of highly abstract art. Who are we to say what was going on in the mind of the artist? So often, we are absolutely wrong about their state of mind, their intention, those experiences and beliefs.

Alternatively, here, we are still witnessing art. The artist, as ever, is human: the scientists who pieced together these techniques. Theirs is the voice, if only humans can have a voice, that we hear in the work.

They are not semantically empty: they are absorbed, semantically, in the domain of the computer scientist who, through no fault of their own, could never sing before now.

Most people don't really care about deeply interwoven aspects of the human condition or semantic meaning when they listen to music, because most popular music is shallow and derivative as it is, a catchy beat and a hook and little else. When you think about the possibilities for automating creative output, you have to consider that the lowest common denominator brings the most potential profit.

I think you're missing that even shallow popular music is fundamentally about the interplay between familiarity and unfamiliarity in a way that's informed by the broader world. Sometimes it's about knowing who the performer is and how a song fits into their life and persona, or maybe it's about the way the melody and style conform to or defy current idioms, but it's definitely not about anything simple enough to be replicated in an unguided way by an AI. Like an AI could spit out a perfect 2000-era Britney Spears song tomorrow and it wouldn't be a hit regardless of its technical merits, because that's not what anyone is actually looking for in 2020.

> to communicate aspects of human life that are deeply interwoven with facts and experiences

So a computer communicating the aspects of its life based on the facts and experiences it has been fed is any less valid?

If turtles spontaneously developed human-level intelligence and created music, would it "miss the point of music" for not conveying human experinces?

Agreed, The "data" being used to generate real human music is the human condition ... so anything trained on a featurized low dimensional representation of that will ultimately be derivative.

Image and sound are ultimately related to feeling ... and it is those feelings that give us humanity -- not the ability to think and manipulate symbols (though that was not apparent to me until this current AI revolution)

So it sounds like the old goalpost problem of AI. Once you realize an AI can do something then this something is no longer what it means to be human?

I think we will soon find that what really makes us "human" is the shared chemo-biological composition of our selves with the rest of the ecosystem and evolutionary hierarchy.

When you cuddle a puppy you can actually smell the infant hormones on them... why... because we share evolutionary biology. How do you teach a computer to do that?

You can think of the body as "data" and the brain as nothing more than a database that let's you query it. AI might give a better database... but until it gets the same chemo-informatic data... well good luck.

Good point about the necessity of embodiment. I would go one step further and consider the environment, which is the source of evolution and knowledge, a simple environment like Atari games can't even begin to compare with the human society and world we experience. What makes us human has a lot to do with the dynamics of interacting with the other humans, an AI would need to be part of society to experience that.

> That is, to communicate aspects of human life that are deeply interwoven with facts and experiences outside of the music itself.

What does that even mean? As a counter-point I listen to heavy bass music with zero lyrics. The production value is the most important thing for me and I would 100% listen to AI generated music.

From the article:

We chose to work on music because we want to continue to push the boundaries of generative models.

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