Something tells me AI isn't going to rescue us either. I just sampled a bunch of these generated tracks and they immediately remind me of the average, mediocre, soul-lacking content that most music and film is today.
When I was 20 I was a music snob into Aphex Twin and weird IDM. I thought all pop at the time was crap, like you seem to. But then I heard, I mean like really heard, "Bye Bye Bye" by *NSYNC and seriously that is a good song!
I'm 40 now and I think it got way better even since then. Pop is so varied now! I really don't think music as quirky and weird as, say, Billie Eilish would've made it to the top of the charts in the 90s. I'd say that music like hers (and many charting artists of her generation) is a testament to how broad and compelling pop music has become.
My generation thought their parents' music was shit, my parents' generation thought their parents' music was shit, and so on, all the way until at least the invention of Jazz. But the average Gen-Z'er thinks all the music is great! They invent new genres for every song, they wear Metallica t-shirts in 2023, and they mix 80s disco with 00's Brit rock like it's just what people do.
And don't forget there's an endless long tail of music out there. There are so many good musicians and plenty of them have a sufficiently fancy label deal to be on Spotify and the likes. And otherwise they're still on Soundcloud, Bandcamp and YouTube. It's worth a deep dive!
If this appeals to you, it's worth checking out Japanese music from the Showa era to present. They've long mixed styles in a way other music markets have not. You can hear city pop songs from the 80s with metal guitar solos, jazz progressions a samba beat and synths, all in the same song.
However, I think modern rec algorithms (like the Netflix home page) are recommending more mediocre stuff than the old system, and the streaming boom did produce an abnormal glut of junk.
Anyway I think AI is going to spawn a music remixing/game modding/tv extending renaissance. They perform much better when pointing them at a good source (as you can see with the melody conditioning samples, and other stuff like sd img2img and finetuned llms).
But for movies and TV? Where do I find the good stuff? It seems Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and just milking people off boring franchises and cheap nostalgia through crappy remakes and sequels. My eyes rolled to the back of my head when I saw an ad for a show called “how I met your father” on Hulu.
As far as content goes, there has been a ton of excellent stuff just this year across movies, TV, and anime. One “organic” way to start is to look for recent recommendation threads on Reddit for a movie or show you really like.
Generally, the bullshit costs way more to produce and market and advertise. And at least on paper, a significant amount of the money made is only recuperating costs for the 3 hours of incredibly CGI it took to make a 3rd 'ant man' or a 4th 'jurassic park'. The majority of actual indie art films cost ridiculously less than that because they're filming a movie, not a commercial.
Anyways, my opinions aside, are there any articles with cited money trails that prove that billion dollar blockbusters actually fund valuable art and not just executives yahts?
Reelgood is a good one, sort by IMDB score (which is somehow still kinda working as a metric) or the reelgood score which is a popularity among enthusiasts kinda ranking. You will find tvs gems streaming services criminally and inexplicably never recommend.
But "old school" recommendations from TV /movie buffs (like the tvtropes community or various forums) are still a good source.
There’s a trove of incredible foreign movies and TV shows out there. Scandinavian and Asian (Korean in particular) content has a really good hit to miss ratio for me.
For examples, check out international film festival nominations and winners.
Mainstream entertainment has always converged to mediocrity.
Automation tools and fine grained computed metrics have rounded off the edges of emotional experiences. See Bobby Kotick about taking the fun out of games: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/bobby-kotick-wants-to-take-...
Him saying that is around the time the music compositions start becoming similar. The mentality was not constrained to games.
Nothing is allowed to be it’s own thing anymore. It has to be hypernormalized to have enough reach a billionaire CEO can profit from.
MBA-ification of reality.
> The act of shifting a song’s key up either a half step or a whole step (i.e. one or two notes on the keyboard) near the end of the song, was the most popular key change for decades. In fact, 52 percent of key changes found in number one hits between 1958 and 1990 employ this change. You can hear it on “My Girl,” “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and “Livin’ on a Prayer,” among many others.
To me, this just reflects one set of songwriters' cliches being replaced by another. Not necessarily better or worse.
Music especially just feels flat. Maybe that's just the style now, and I'm old and can't appreciate it.
Honestly, gaming is in a similar rut although not quite as bad thanks to VR.
The music is fantastic if you just look a little.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_char...
ETA: And "worse" in these studies tends to be defined in terms of measurable qualities where contemporary pop music most differs from "classical" music.
There's so much great new music being made every year, new genres and ideas, etc. Film music seems better than ever recently. Especially for TV series. Lots of new styles emerging there too, see Mac Quayle for instance.
The really good, modern music was almost always on the fringes, and there's more of it now than ever before.
There might also be more garbage, but there's no need to listen to it.
There is an overwhelming amount of good music out there. Pick an album top 50 list from 2022, for example fantano's, or pitchfork, check out bandcamp's staff picks, listen to other musicians that are on the same label as your favourite band, keep an eye on things like NPR Tiny Desk, KEXP, la blogothèque on YouTube.
Just start listening. You are almost guaranteed to stumble upon something you like. It won't come to you algorithmically but the effort required is really low.
My favourite new album I discovered last year was Immanuel Wilkin's The 7th Hand [1], I stumbled upon it by going through a top 20 jazz albums of 2022 list to see if I had missed anything, and it immediately jumped out at me as being exactly the shit I'm into.
The brothers Rosling have a nice talk about how all the big stats are improving globally (gender equality, education, health, extreme poverty, life expectation)
The stats on the planet we live in are bad and getting worse. There is 30% more carbon dioxide in the air now than when I was born.
All the improvements in gender equality mean nothing compared to that and the trend behind it.
Computers can already generate every possible waveform that can be heard by human ears. There's nowhere else to go. Anything above 16kHz is useless and can't be heard anyway.
I'm not too sure about end of history, there might well be other genres and styles popping up. Just because we always had the ability to paint on a canvas doesn't mean pointillism or cubism didn't emerge. Just because we can put any letters on a page doesn't mean new genres of fiction didn't emerge. The fact that we can generate any waveform is analogous to these (ie, having complete control over a medium) and doesn't indicate anything about what might emerge in the future.
I agree with you. When gwern investigated AI folk music in 2019, I realized it could generate a wonderful variety of music, full of soul. Be sure to listen to several tracks before making up your mind. My favorite is “crossing the channel”, since I think GPT made a mistake at the beginning, and then generated the most reasonable sounding not-mistake, which turned out to sound so cool.
My goal was strong, memorable melodies. Star Wars, not Marvel. GPT can come surprisingly close, if the input data format is right. Unfortunately I don’t think anyone except gwern has noticed that the input format is crucial: https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music
One day he posted something that sounded pretty amazing, and I was blown away. “More like that, please.” It had chords in it.
He didn’t pursue it past that. I did. So it’s possible that no one is aware of how crucial the input format actually is to the success of the music that I was able to produce.
(And “produce” is a fair description here — choosing the instruments was really important, and the model didn’t do it. It wasn’t as easy as press a button. It felt like I was suddenly a 15x music producer, since I made all those tracks in one night. Such is the power of ML.)
Unfortunately I didn’t do a writeup (which gwern has given me a hard time about over the years, and he’s quite right!), so I have nothing to offer beyond those songs as a finished product. Maybe one day I’ll try to resurrect it for devs.
To be immodest for a moment, my work serves as an example that it’s possible to do it, and better than anyone else, long before they figure out how. Many examples of this pop up throughout history, and I am gratified to be a small but real one.
It has been easier than ever for any individual to create content of any type, and there will always be gems.
AI isn't meant to "rescue" you from this problem, at least not in the present stage. You are looking for a mission that was never claimed.
This is a great song for contemplating loss of a loved one.
I'm not sure AI music will ever reach these heights because it will have trouble understanding death.
This model is just the equivalent of GPT-2 for music. It's not the GPT-4 yet. Music is trailing a few years from language. Used to be that language was about 5 years behind vision. Now language is the top.