Musico: AI Generated Music
musi-co.com
musi-co.com
Many have said in this thread already that maybe we ought to expect that a ml approach in the next few months/years could be much better. I'm not so confident that it will happen so soon. Audio might end up being a much harder problem than visuals, for a variety of different reasons. Having the time domain built into the medium requires some concept of memory, and even modern neural nets seem to struggle remembering what they said before the most recent prompt.
Once again though, its not impossible. Just requires the right techniques and enough people focused on it.
I feel like most of the music people commonly listen to have that, it's an essential part of what makes music feel "human".
What AI gives you is a mash up, a mix of people's intent, a mix of people's feelings. What I want is the result of a singular person expressing his singularity though his work, I don't want the "average of the best" music or the "average of the best picture". This is good for content creation, when you need to pump out the maximum amount of "content" for people to "consume" (see marvel, netflix&co), but not for art
Art that leave a mark is always weird/quirky/personal/deep/&c. the fact that a machine can replicate the result removes the most interesting part of the equation, the human part. It's like making your own bread vs buying supermarket bread, the later is cheaper and faster, it might even taste better if you fucked it up, but it's a complete different experience
Some of the most meaningful experiences I've had with music involved DJs whose names I didn't know, playing tracks produced by musicians whose names I didn't know and had no way to discover.
With enough of a sophisticated rule system (which could be built from existing music) an AI should be able to optimize for tension building or storytelling quite easily. Of course it will only optimize for the definition of tension building or storytelling that it understands, via statistical methods or being told by the programmer explicitly. In the latter case the programmer is just doing one of the things composers always do, while in the former, the generated content is interesting - or not - in much the same way (IMHO) as transformer-based language generators like GPT-3.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN0DDD7B3oU
Bruce makes the point that early "AI" image generation was pretty shit, but a couple of specific developments (especially diffusion modelling) changed all that remarkably quickly; the corollary is that we might expect that for music too.
As amazing as AI image generation is, AI music generation (to me) is not.
to echo what the comment above is saying. not because this AI generated music is good. but because it is good enough for the vast majority! and this concerns other fields as well. the consumption economy has set the bar for music and entertainment in general very low. most people don't know (or think) that the bar is low. because they have not experienced anything better and probably never will.
what's gonna happen next will be sad.
The people who would be satisfied with AI generated music are people who would not have paid for human made music in the first place.
You as a good musician will never lose a sale to an AI music source, because that buyer wouldn't have bought your music in the first place.
Now if you make your living providing easy listening background music, then you will eventually be replaced.
If it were as simple as it looks, everybody would be a Max Martin or somebody would train an AI on his canon and maybe actually have something decent. Music is based in emotion, and the bits and bytes aren’t close to simulating anything close other than probably raw schizophrenia.
The current state of AI music? There’s no amount of money you could pay me to listen to it for an hour a day for a week. No way. It’s that bad.
Counterpoint: a moderately musically inclined person with Propellerhead’s Figure can come up with more pleasing and coherent music on their third or fourth try that would put any of these to shame. It’s just reality at present.
This. All the previous comments made really good statements, but, in the end, it's the value we give to art that might suffer from AI generated content, and the people who produce "real" art.
In the end, it's an iron law of post-industrial capitalism that the market value of human effort eventually approaches zero.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10707049
"This is a business I know well. Jukedeck is an example of how founders and investors do not conduct appropriate market research. There is a limited market demand for low-cost royalty-free music for videos. One could argue there is an oversupply* of royalty-free music relative to buyers. The quality is not good enough to disrupt the billion dollar Production music industry that is top heavy, a relative small amount of creators at the top get the majority of the money, the rest compete for the little that is left. Jukedeck has raised enough money ($3million #) to be around for a few years if they control their burn rate. But Jukedeck in its current form, is just another music startup destined for the Deadpool."
You know how I know? The Rolling Stones are still touring. Most people don’t go to Spotify or YouTube for discovery, they go for convenient on demand.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/28/streaming-musi...
“people let playlists run on in the background when they serve inoffensive, bland music they can’t be bothered to turn off. If you look at the music Spotify has broken, it’s all chill-out stuff. That isn’t art, it’s wallpaper.”
Or, the more likely one, in this case, "the first draft of the beat was AI-generated, then human-edited and the vocals were by the singer but they were processed, so it's AI-generated". Typical singularitarian bullshit.
This insane interpretation will not only not occur in 2 years, it will not occur this decade. Singularitarian delusion runs higher than even I imagined.
It's interesting you react so strongly to my prediction. Are you a musician? How much do you know about music generation research?
I am not a musician, have no musical (or any other art, actually) talent and have kept up (shallowly) with state-of-the-art music generation for a decade (because of idiocy kurzweil has spewed out).
I am "reacting strongly" because I detest singularitarians and everything they stand for. This board in particular has been a hotbed of delusion and idiocy for the last 6 months in every single AI thread I have read comments in.
Predictions rely on everyone forgetting how wrong you were
As we have seen with text-to-image, sometimes AI models can improve at an astonishing rate.
Anyway models have been improving for a long time but when was the last time you saw a news item about the progress in machine translation? That was probably around 2016-17 when the hype cycle for neural machine translation was at its apex. You don't hear anything more about it in the news because the hype cycle has now dipped to its bottom-most pit of indifference and the hype about being able to speak to a machine and communicate with any human on the planet in their native language has been replaced with, for example, the hype about being able to generate human-like art.
My point being, just because performance increased in the past in one particular task, it doesn't mean that it will improve in all other tasks, or, indeed, that it will keep improving in the same task. For all we know what we've seen so far of image generation is all we'll get for the next ten years or so.
I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have history books, so I don't make predictions. We can't even speak about the past with confidence, let alone the future.
A blind test would be better. A musical Turing test - whether you like music and can't tell if that's AI or real composer.
The gap between 'okay' and 'really good' is smaller than we think
I would say we reached that day quite some time ago, due to a variety of factors, none of which included AI/ML/correlation analysis.
As a musician and a listener, I vastly prefer real instruments played by real musicians, preferably acoustic. So I wouldn't actually listen to this stuff, but then I don't generally listen to any kind of electronic music. But this AI thing generates the same kind of shallow, bland, sometimes catchy stuff I hear all the time that's supposedly made by "creators."
I think there's great potential for that kind of music in video games, if they can procedurally generate it on the fly based on the current game state (think e.g. roguelikes).
And while comparing it to image generation, with Stable Diffusion and other models, a human has to be in the loop in order to generate the prompts, so we can't entirely replace them here either. How about an AI music generator that creates phrases, rhythms or sounds/VST presets based on a prompt for me?
If an average person can choose between listening to this, or listening to a musician that they have a personal connection to on their favorite streaming service, I wonder which one will be picked most of the time?
Also I think it's a mistake to just look at music (even electronic dance music) as a series of transformations that journey from A to B. A lot out-there music relies on fairly safe tonalities and very straightforward musical structures, to provide an anchor for wild timbral experimentation. Listeners can enjoy the departure from conventional sonic reality in somewhat the same way as a theme park roller coaster balances existential terror and reliable predictability.
Edit: Wait, the Streams have had human involvement!?
>streams are ”harvested” by human operators: after choosing some initial settings, the operator lets the engine run and collects the score it composes.
> Without changing this score, the operator then produces a sound file for it, by choosing the electronic instruments that play the score, making a simple mix and recording the result, using standard music production software.
Imagine this being the curated best they could do, even after explicitly choosing instruments after the fact to best fit and then mixing it.
It starts with a choir of ambient vocals singing "it's a sunshine", there's some bird noises and traffic sounds, a snippet of organ synth flourishes.
Then it all gets started - guitar, sitar, horns, strings a vocal duet singing "Shine your sweet loving down on me"
There's actually a ton going on, every few bars it changes things up, there's clever little harpsichord.
Then a male singer starts proclaiming "It's a sunshine daaaayyy", backed up by a chorus of "yeah, yeah, yeah"s. Honestly it's kind of catchy
The last 30 seconds or so are truly cursed, there's a voice in the right speaker moaning "wide eyed retina. mostly logical", which gets delayed, bitcrushed, and pingponged between the speakers.
Wow! I wonder why this specific track has so much going on compared to the others.
I'm thinking of those that consider themselves prompt artists or prompt engineers, and consider DALL-E/SD to be merely tools that creatives use to create their art, just like photoshop, and how dare you insinuate that the work isn't my original creation...
If I type in "Symphony, Beethoven, dramatic strings, romantic theme turning dark then triumphant, tenor flute solo in third movement" and such a thing is produced... am I a musician? A classical composer perhaps?
I'm not trying to say that there is no act of creation on the part of the user of such systems, but I do think it's an interesting area of discussion, because to me there is some sort of qualitative difference here.
But it seems very far from generating music that I’d actually connect with. Years, at least, away from creating a solid song, much less something that talented songwriters should worry about.
Still, having become accustomed to live acoustic music, I find this generated stuff not engaging. Maybe after a few more generations it will get there.