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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

Because we like music for the fun of making it, and the shared emotional connection felt with the artist (whether it's real or not, knowing a human wrote and performed a piece allows you to imagine this connection).

I don't know what the point of machine generated music is. Just destroying one of the few remaining ways for people to make a living doing something creative, I guess.

The promise of automation was to have machines do the things we don't want to do, so humans could have more time to do things we enjoy.

Instead, we are automating the things humans enjoy, and still leaving humans to figure out how to feed, house and clothe ourselves through the sweat of our brow.

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> Because we like music for the fun of making it, and the shared emotional connection felt with the artist... I don't know what the point of machine generated music is.

Bingo.

This is a fun toy, but in terms what it means, you may as well ask an AI to pray. It's completely hollow in terms of the actual experience.

This could make suitable filler for idle games, ads, aquariums, and elevators. Not much else. Perhaps at best, a producer could use this to fill in the instrumentation behind a singer, but I have a feeling it's not there yet.

> The promise of automation was to have machines do the things we don't want to do, so humans could have more time to do things we enjoy... Instead, we are automating the things humans enjoy.

Damn. Never looked at it that way. It's still enjoyable to do these things, but perhaps less lucrative. I don't know, do professional musicians like arranging elevator music? I'm strictly an amateur who has never made a dime performing, so I really don't know if that would be joyful, soul-crushing, or somewhere in between. I just know what it means to me, and like I said, you may as well ask the machine to pray for all I think this amounts to.

> but in terms what it means , you may as well ask an AI to pray

The generative process is based on a combination of learning and randomness. The random part doesn't mean anything, but it's clear that it is far from just random notes. Do you think human music always starts from a meaning? It's just lucky accidents that sound good. We even retrofit explanations post facto to our actions, we can certainly compose music first and assign a meaning later.

Around 150 years ago classical music had a big dilemma - should music be related to concrete things or abstract? Should we put a story to music? So everyone wanted to know "what was the program?" (program==original author's meaning) sometimes composers would just hide it in order to instigate people to use their imaginations. It didn't matter what meaning the author originally assigned to it, better to try to hear it with beginners ears.

You've misunderstood. I'm not talking about the meaning of the inputs and outputs of a creative process. I'm talking about the very experience of doing the thing. Hence the prayer comparison.

> I don't know what the point of machine generated music is.

One point is that music fans can now make their own music. I think it's great that people can express themselves and it's not limited to those who put in 10k+ hours to master a single instrument. More people creating is a good thing.

The idea that creating music has had a huge technical barrier is laughable. It has not existed for ~20 years. Artists like Tinashe have learned to produce music themselves with programs like ableton, not a lick of mastering instruments or graduating from this and that art school. Just a general sense of what sounds good to you. Unlike visual art, there's no mechanical barrier either, no mastering of techniques. You can genuinely fiddle around with knobs and buttons and create something that sounds great to you - soundcloud is filled with these.

So there isn't going to be an increased level of profound self expressions because of this. Quite the opposite, more pure noise for the purpose of farming ad revenue.

What's worse, and an aspect many proponents of AI generations ignore, is that by ushering people into this specific channel of caring more about prompts than all else, we are doing a real disservice to potential people who could have become serious masters of their realm. After all, "why learn how that music program works when I can just generate it?"

>> After all, "why learn how that music program works when I can just generate it?"

That's how many of my friends in the music biz are thinking right now.

Also the same applies to Code and anything that could be generated by AI. I honestly lost the joy of learning a programming language with the advent of GPT.

The future is dark.

Chat GPT still can't do visual programming so if you use something like Unreal Engine - you still have to figure out everything yourself. Sure - GPT can generate algorithms, but it can't playtest the game. I can't ask ChatGPT to implement something like wall climbing or object throwing in Unreal. It will probably generate something, but it has no way to playtest it and check if it actually feels good to play.

Not until the next version, at least.

For me GPT allows me to explore more ideas quickly, and can help you learn languages more efficiently. More importantly, you don’t have to use it

That probably is a good thing, but the road to mastery is a great thing. I can't describe to you the feeling of being in the zone while making music, but I'll try.

Things will erode and decay, things will come into being, things will change. This flux is so constant that in truth there hardly are any things, just the changes; for as soon as you step in the river a second time, neither you nor the river are the same as you were. Epictetus, maybe? One of those guys.

Likewise, music is inherently fleeting, yet it still makes sense. You can't hold music, yet there's still a sense of it being a thing that exists. Yet when it stops, it still somehow hasn't ceased to exist. The act of musical performance, even at a basic level, especially with others, brings us one step closer to something fundamental about the universe than other forms of expression.

Like I said elsewhere, if you could ask the machine to pray or meditate, it wouldn't be fulfilling for anyone. It would be hollow.

people can express themselves...

Is it really an act of personal expression if you've narrowed the "vocabulary of creation" to the stable Diffusion equivalent of "hyper realistic, unreal engine, 8K, masterpiece, intricate details"?

At that point would not the act of creation feel rather hollow?

Tbh, since the invention of DAW software you don't actually have to learn to play any instruments.

I can create something that sounds decent in software like Ableton Live or whatever, but I can't play anything on a piano or a guitar.

This feels like a straw man to me. We are continuing to automate feeding, housing and clothing ourselves as well. These two things are not mutually exclusive.

I would like to make music, video games and movies, too, and AI lets me do that. I don’t need millions of dollars or years of training to make something creative anymore.

> I don’t need millions of dollars or years of training to make something creative anymore.

You never did... You just needed to get creative.

You can go a long way with LMMS or Ardour and free sample packs. Most big sample production companies provide royalty-free samplers. The free stuff from Sonniss (GDC freebies) and Black Octopus Sound could last an entire career. Throw in the free Komplete Start (or Helm and Surge if you prefer open source) and you have all your synthesis needs covered: https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/komplete/bund...

> I would like to make music, video games and movies, too, and AI lets me do that.

In what sense is that still you doing the creating?

> Because we like music for the fun of making it, and the shared emotional connection felt with the artist (whether it's real or not, knowing a human wrote and performed a piece allows you to imagine this connection).

Speak for yourself. I like music if it sounds good, regardless of who made it.

> we are automating the things humans enjoy, and still leaving humans to figure out how to feed, house and clothe ourselves through the sweat of our brow.

Have you been to a farm before? Have you seen a textile factory? Have you seen a construction site? How could you, with a straight face, suggest we are not automating those things? There are vastly more people working on automation in those fields than are working on AI-generated music. Automation in agriculture, construction, and textiles are massive industries. There are a lot of people in the world working on a lot of things.

I mean that I still need a job to get access to those things. Housing prices go up and up, whatever automation is happening in that market is not helping ordinary people who need a place to live.

Food is a different problem. We have access to very cheap calories, but the overall quality of nutrition is way down in advanced economies, leading to an epidemic of obesity.

Textiles is pretty much a solved problem. We have so many clothes, we give them away en masse in developing countries. I think there are very few people in the world without access to adequate clothing, and if there are I suspect it's a distribution problem.

Yep. The way commissioners react when I deliver the files and they hear what I made for them for the first time tells me AI has a long way to go. I'm not sure it can replace that human connection. There's plenty of solid, cheap, and sometimes even free library music out there if you just want music of some sort for a project, and no generative music I've heard comes close to it.

> The promise of automation was to have machines do the things we don't want to do, so humans could have more time to do things we enjoy.

But why exactly should that happen? By which mechanism? Every single company automates in order to increase their monopolies and profit, to generate more shareholder value. There exists no other mechanism, so obviously we will never do anything other than that.

> I don't know what the point of machine generated music is.

Exploring the latent space of human music. It's a cultural mirror.

But at the risk of aligning mirrors to other mirrors and hollowing out the essence of it. Computers have been essential to the evolution of modern music, AI won’t evolve it anywhere because it needs to mirror the human work, and without people to do that it’s a sad dead end. But I doubt people will stop learning instuments and stop making music the old way because it is too fun and meaningful to do that. But there’s a possibility it will shift in magnitude in either direction. Hope to go the way chess did and not press a button and a few faders and call it music.

You said it for me. Muzak lives on.

These soulless beatboxes will never have the heart of a real drummer

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