Maybe someone will say this will let people who aren’t musicians express themselves by creating music. That’s not true. It’s as true as hiring a musician to make a song for you, given a description. And nobody would say that the person who hired the musician was expressing themself.
What happened to automatic the boring things?
Instead they seem to be all in on washing out any hope in creativity and pointing people to put all their hope in minting and munging “code”.
It’s so myopic and short sighted it hurts my soul. I don’t understand at all. All that money, all that knowledge and talent… and this and stupid headsets strapped to peoples faces is the game? God dammit.
I'd say it lets me, a non-musician, create generic tracks for other projects that need music, but don't need the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.
If you want the insane soundtrack, you still need an artist, as this project demonstrates.
The same way we traded away the profession of painters for photography, it seems like we might be trading away muscicians for generative music AI. Except photography is super useful for lots of things and truly benefitted humankind, and generative music AI… only replaces musicians? I have no idea why we would make this trade, as a society.
People still paint? Even portrait, although I'll acknowledge it's far less popular than it was in the 1700s. A town full of reproduction artists in China seems a bigger threat to capitalistic western artists than an AI that will mostly provide generic output.
That'd be pretty cool for example.
This kind of automated "filler" music has been around for decades, and is usually used for exactly that - filler. It's pretty much the stock photos of music.
And that could be a good thing - suddenly content-creators don't have to spend money or energy on purchasing that kind of stuff.
If you've ever seen youtube automation videos - typically those "TOP N" list vids, they always contain some kind of muzak-style soundtracks.
Unlike classic "hiring a musician", here it's practical to "hire" the (robot) musician 10000 times with a feedback loop between the model and the prompt writer, iterating and picking the best output(s)... which looks like a similar process to other exercises considered art forms.
Man wants to dominate nature and always has. I don't think this is particularly difficult motivation to understand, as it seems omnipresent.
And every tech advance has side effects , usually in unforeseen ways