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Comment by gabereiser | Hacker News Reader

Yessssss! I thought about MusicGAN and Markov chains last night thinking “Why can’t we just codify all chords and use a GAN to generate markov chains on chords of a key and have AI generate instruments and waveform from those chains?” IANA researcher but in my head, that sounded logical.

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That's existed for decades. It's called Band in a Box. It's also cheezy as hell.

lol, no. Not autogenerate midi (although their latest versions of BiaB are pretty darn good now) but generate waveforms together. It would be similar to having AI generate whole scores of music but ensuring it's all in sync and in key. Not taking sample database of 88 sound files and triggering them when the midi-note strikes.

That's not how BiaB works at all. It has all kinds of patterns built into it. So, it knows, how to generate, say, a bluegrass bassline in a given key. There are plenty of ways to play back MIDI with high sound quality, including feeding it into an AI-driven VST like NotePerformer.

Then explain why you categorize it as cheesy? Sounds like it’s pretty cool.

he's saying the output is cheesy. it sounds like stuff you'd hear on a demo track for a kid's toy piano

It's not THAT bad, it's just that for a programming targetting jazz the playback is rather...square.

Yeah I definitely imagine certain genres sounding off due to the rhythmic nature of computer timing. Jazz doesn’t follow rules like that so good jazz has these timing idiosyncrasies that make it sound the way it sounds. That and a ridiculous obsession with adding half step and quarter tone intervals.

This is almost the exact approach I took for my project Neptunely (https://neptunely.com/). Working on bringing it to a VST at the moment so it's more portable.

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