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Comment by jncfhnb | Hacker News Reader

The bluegrass one is super weird. I can’t identify exactly why.

I can identify a bunch of things. The chord structure jumps all over randomly in a genre that usually does the opposite. The banjo is clearly not an actual banjo being strummed/frailed, but a weird agglomeration of bright toned instruments including both frailed/scruggs banjo and dobro, and maybe harmonica and fiddle creeping in. The AI doesn't know it's making a combination of instruments, so where it's trained on instruments blending, it thinks it can produce pre-blended sounds. I guess maybe this is more like a return to being a child hearing music for the first time with no preconceptions or expectations.

I think the super weird part is that it's not great? I understand this is most likely very impressive technologically but musically it is disjointed, inconsistent and fake sounding. Most of the "music" examples have weird phrasing and confusing harmonic rhythm.

Kudos to stability.ai for achieving this as I am sure it took a lot of effort and this is a huge leap forward in terms of generation of audio by generative AI.

However as a musician (BMus and MMus at 2 different conservatoires) I think it's important to say that the job risk being experienced by creative writers will not be extending to musicians... yet.

I feel like music composition is a fundamentally hard task for AI. Music production seems like it should be a lot easier but I haven’t seen that

From what I've seen in the generated tracks so far (this one and others), they're pretty good locally, but just ignore the overall composition. For example any generated blues tracks will have the vague blues feel, but won't keep the 12 bar style. The bluegrass example here doesn't even seem to keep to 4/4 (or is extremely fluid about it...). Maybe one day someone will add a higher level "what's the current section, how far are you into it" inputs to that model to get something better - literally preparing the structure first and then filling it in. That should get much better results for context like "you're playing blues in A with quick change and generating bars 3-4, match the previous bars in style".

I mean, chatgpt knows how to plan this out https://chat.openai.com/share/976077c0-138b-4363-8065-3c8eed... Painting in that picture should be much easier than generating something freeflowing. Generating a good structure isn't that hard for most styles, because you can literally use the same pattern and do a few random changes that keep the key. (See lots of pop songs using the same 3/4 chord progression)

Yes, and surprisingly so. I never would have guessed we'd have AI stock photographs before AI muzak.

The AI seems to understand 4/4 time but doesn't understand groupings of 4 measures into phrases. It definitely doesn't understand ABABACA or even the basic parts of a song.

It is the musical equivalent of a meandering paragraph.

Absolutely. And all AI for music I have seen suffers that problem.

It makes me wonder whether the music generation should be stratified -- a coarse model lays out where parts like verse and chorus are, what distinguishes them, how to transition, etc., and then a finer-grained model fills in the details.

Also, the music is not bluegrass as much as it is old-time, a confusion that continually irritates old-time players.

You are right it feels off.

The position of the guitar in stereo is all over the place, higher frequency elements appear to come from the left while other parts are more centered.

Same for the death metal

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