Google's advanced music generation model and two new AI experiments | Hacker News Reader

Google's advanced music generation model and two new AI experiments

deepmind.google

209 pointskmisiunas352 comments

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38298670, but we merged the comments hither)

Michael Jackson was an excellent musician, who just happened to not play any instruments. He'd hum lines, beatbox rhythms to his band who'd then take his ideas and transform his ideas into instrumental music. Most people don't have access to the quality musicians MJ had, but there's a lot of creative people that lack the skills to create their artistic vision. Tech like this could be the unleashing of an age of new genres and musical creativity. I'm optimistic.

The requirement to either pay a lot for or learn how to do mastering always seemed unnecessary to me.

Stuff like mixing, equalizing, sidechaining and eternal sample hunts all take a lot of time as well... It's why making music is one of the hobbies I had to let go.

Can't wait to get my hands on an AI powered DAW that skips all the tedious stuff!

Am I still the one making the music? Well, I'd argue the 300+ hours I'll probably sink into finetuning all the other stuff will say yes.

While the mixing process is certainly a frustrating one, it’s also the part I’m most addicted to. I mix something almost every day, whether it’s my own work or other multitracks “acquired” from the internet. It’s so much fun working backwards on a song I’m familiar with and going “ok, how the hell did they make the kick sound like that?!” and figuring it out :)

Where can one find multitracks on the internet?

Cambridge Music Technology has a great list of multi tracks for learning the art of mixing. The submissions cover many genres.

https://www.cambridge-mt.com/ms/mtk/

Tbh as much as I'm against stuff like this, I think a mixing and mastering AI could be useful since it is the less creative part of the process. I highly object to AI composing music though.

Michael Jackson also would not be Michael Jackson if not for the advent of MTV and Thriller. Embracing a new artistic medium to its fullest extent to make a 13 minute video in an age of 3 minute songs on the radio.

Creative people will find creative ways to use new creative tools.

There is even still amazing marble sculpture being made today but we are not going back to ancient Rome in terms of the importance of sculpture as a popular artistic medium of the day.

There will be cool, new electronic music genres from these AI tools and that sound might eventually make its way to whatever cultural icons of the day are making music. Mostly though no one will listen to these genres just like they don't listen to them today. Music just isn't that culturally important anymore overall.

The real big deal is AI video because video is the dominant artistic medium of right now by several orders of magnitude. This is all just a dress rehearsal for AI video at mass scale.

The next michael jackson will be an ai generated 3d model placed in ai generated videos with an ai generated voice making ai generated music, owned wholly by some big entity like zenimax or Disney. AIs like that will swamp the internet with so much stuff that it will become impossible to find authentic content, much like it's almost impossible to find a blog that isn't seo optimized and basically a business these days, except 10x worse since the ai output will be so large. This will be the end of non-live music and of celebrity musicians

(until: smartphone companies generate personalized musicians and directors and writers for you, and then even Disney gets sunk)

The older I get, the more I appreciate craftsmanship. Applies to nearly everything. Lately, I’ve been sitting in a chair and listening to records - not doing anything else. There’s a connection to myself, the music and the artist that’s different than when I’m listening on Spotify with my AirPods on.

To each their own (I mean that) but I do wonder sometimes…At some point, what’s the point?

Some of this generative AI stuff is going to raise some interesting questions. Right now a lot of it is rough around the edges and distinctly inhuman. However, I do believe that even if we're not entirely on the right track, there's not much reason to believe a machine can't do human-like things as well as humans with enough computational power.

Here's my guess: I think that this stuff will continue to iterate until it's to the point where the amount of control people have over it as well as the quality of handling edge cases is sufficient to allow people with fairly unsophisticated tools to create things that look fairly high quality. And once this happens, people armed with amazing tools but no better taste than they had before, will flood the Internet with a bunch of tasteless garbage at rates never before seen. It hasn't happened yet, but I think this is partly an accessibility issue (not everyone has datacenter GPU access, there's still limitations in open models, and many hosted offerings are pretty limited compared to what local models can do right now in terms of tooling) but also it will make a big difference if we hit the point where it's really genuinely just not possible to reliably distinguish AI generated images and sound. Then, even if people wanted to ignore AI generated media, it would probably quickly become pretty difficult, and many people will probably not be honest if it limits their reach and potential.

It will just raise the bar of entry. Tolerance for generic garbage will decrease. Elevator muzak producers are in trouble. Real talent will still float to the top.

That would be the equivalent of automating out the middle class. Surely the prodigies will survive, but everyone else's dollars will only result in autotuned musical frozen dinners.

I like your optimism. In my opinion, popularity is not a great selector of raw skill/talent/quality. In practice, it does select for greatness certainly much more than random noise, but it's also quite arbitrary too, it both misses a lot of quality and selects a lot of low-quality crap.

You could call it "taste", though it doesn't exactly matter what you call it. You know it when you see it. Every so often, someone sells me on why something is awesome and suddenly it 'clicks' for me in a way that it hasn't, and now I'm enjoying something on another level. Thanks to curation and filtering by picky people, you get to experience a lot of things that would be hard to discern on your own. In general, you still have to rely on your own untrained senses to judge things, so curation can be very helpful to find the best stuff. Sometimes you don't know why something is better, but that doesn't mean you can't tell.

So then, a problem with generative AI is that it will mainly be optimized to mimic the appealing end results and then probably also tuned to prefer things that people respond positively to. That's cool and it can definitely produce results that people like, but I think it misses a lot of dimensions of artistic endeavors. Stable Diffusion today isn't drawing; it's forming pictures out of noise that look like they were drawn. No reason, imo, to believe an AI model won't some day actually be drawing; it's just not what's going on today. But because Stable Diffusion skips all of the details, it does things that don't make stylistic sense at all, like putting vastly overly photo-realistic details/rendering onto a cartoon drawing and other such bizarre things. On one hand, this is probably something that can be fixed, but I also think that fixing it is patching around the fact that it's generating images rather than creating them the way a person would. (To me, diffusion models feel like they could be the "imagination" of some AI agent that draws; but, ultimately, I have no idea what the future will hold.) The other thing that's awkward about the way this works is that it's a bit deceptive: looking at the end results, you can see things that are extremely impressive at times, but no doubt part of the problem is that it's difficult for us to actually evaluate it. For any of these very impressive generative models, I think that a surprising ability of being able to produce novel things has been demonstrated in many cases, but the truth is that even some less novel things tend to still be hard. Kind of like how you can generate a pig with a cowboy hat in space using one of these generative models, but ask it to generate two people holding hands and you may be treated with man-made horrors beyond our comprehension. (Or maybe it will work, but either way, the failure mode of these models is very interesting.)

OK, so I droned on a bit there. But what I'm trying to say is, I think these generative AIs are basically all going to be tuned to be as appealing as possible to the average person. Because of that, they will short-circuit our dumb ape brains into thinking "Wow! This is surprisingly good!" even though they are often lacking much substance and a closer inspection may show plenty of issues and general strangeness.

I think that more advanced AI agents might some day overcome this on a fundamental level, by simply not skipping "the hard part" and going right to the end result. That would help limit a lot of weirdness that just fundamentally does not make sense. Even when that happens, though, I suspect the domain of AI stuff will wind up being more limited than it initially appears, as the generative models will prove to have unintuitive limitations, and as a result of that, we may see floods of very same-y garbage stuff.

I'd be glad to be very wrong here. In the past, the availability of powerful tools definitely did what you said: it raises the bar. I mean, seeing what kids are doing in Blender and Inkscape feels like proof of this. AI does change some variables in a way that is scary, though: it produces things effectively infinitely fast and infinitely voluminous compared to humans, and at least by my measure it often achieves superficially good results, and the flaws may not be apparent quickly and maybe not at all to the untrained senses.

So maybe we're in for a flood of same-y garbage. Or maybe not. Guess we'll see.

AI Generative music sounds pretty darn good to me present day ... here's an AI Mariah Carey singing a 1990s Michael Bolton song ... you wouldnt know it's AI by just your ear. If you were familiar with the song and Mariah carey you'd probably think or ask I didnt know she sang this song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whqp81U19gg

Still recognizable from some imbalance in higher frequencies which could also be due to the use or simulation of an harmonic exciter, and the usual "s" still sounding a bit fake, but yeah they made some pretty darn good progress lately.

Some time ago, far, far away, a human species became so enamored with their automatons that the entire world was essentially under the spell of their own creation. They became enchanted with their illusion, becoming their own disillusion. No one realizing the veil overmind glooming and looming. Reflections linger, memory pays mind to neither. Eager to discover what’s real, but the reel keeps playing what’s surreal.

What’s it matter, if the mind can’t tell either from aether. Samsara, no Abraham’s Sara, abra-cadabra, open sesame, oh well, stuck in the loop, but who cares, we’re in this together so I’ll take either. Some say Samuel paved the way, eat the apple, it’ll be fine they say.

I would argue that this has already happened and it's only a matter of degree now.

The widespread availability of DAWs, streaming services, and music distribution services has greatly enabled people to create and publish their music online. Not to mention services like Splice which enable the purchase and curation of ready-made musical loops. It's never been easier to make a record, render it, and distribute it.

Of course the problem then becomes one of sifting through the endless pool of releases. There's a lower ratio of quality signal to noise. So be it. I still get the majority of my recommendations from people who I trust to have good taste.

I happen to think this enabling of creation is a net positive because it breaks down barriers for people to be creative and I consider that to be an intrinsically rewarding activity. At the end of the day creators still need to have good taste and discipline to see their vision realized or succeed, but the act of creating itself is beneficial to people on a personal level. Even if their creation is objectively hot trash.

Yeah the democratization era is already well underway: arguably over, even, in that it’s no longer possible to become a “big star” from throwing together some shit in fruity loops and hitting it big. Every once in a while, a bedroom musician with a little talent will break through, but more and more music is either relegated to “good taste but unknown” or “weird conglomerate of ghostwritten tunes operated by a Hollywood finance group”. AI might as well already exist. Half of what you find on soundcloud is low effort/low skill/low expression anyway. Which I think is great.

Why do you think it's great?

Everything must always evolve, I suppose? I do wonder what will become of music when the Great Blender is done remixing everything.

Hard to predict, but I'm sure we'll get something new out of it. Imagine a talented singer just freewheeling with an AI band backing the vocals. A few prompt nudges before you start ("something in the style of Aphex Twin with bagpipes"), some buttons to make live adjustments, with labels like "darker / brighter", "more pop / more alternative" or "activate cowbell".

I guess the main thing to solve is reproducible output, but we almost have the technology to do this.

You don't have to be a singer either. Practicing an instrument could be so much more fun when a complete song in the style of your favorite band is generated along with whatever you are doing.

You could have said the same thing about a synthesizer. Look how that revolutionised music. AI is just another tool. This is just the beginning. People will use these tools in extremely creative ways.

The not so subtle difference is that synthesizers and drum machines don't play by themselves, or when they do (arrangers) they're 100% recognizable from a real band. AI will change everything.

Not that much difference. You used to have to gather 4 musicians to form a band, pay for recording studio, record an lp, and tour to get your music out. This took years to get that sort of creativity out. Now you make a song on your laptop with some existing samples, and release it to SoundCloud. So it takes much less technical and theoretical knowledge to create a song than 70 years ago. This is just an extension of this. You will have loads of people making subpar music with AI, but you will also have incredible innovators using that technology to form new music genres. Happens each time we get a new tool. PEOPLE will use AI. AI alone can’t set up a nice production, or play on festivals. :)

No. You no longer have to gather other humans. But electronic music production requires a wild amount of technical knowledge from a single individual, whereas being in a band only requires you to know how to play one instrument. To do electronic music production decently, you need to understand music theory, the actual physics of waves and how to manipulate that (synthesis), how to even process samples (you can't just chuck them in there), how to mix and master by yourself (bands would generally save up together from playing live to pay someone else for this - these are two fields that people dedicate their whole lives to, and that most electronic music producers do entirely by themselves alongside making the whole song), you need to be able to play piano a little bit usually... you need to learn loads of different hardware and software, and you need to be the sole composer coming up with an idea from nothing, usually containing a number of musical parts closer to a symphony than a rock band.

Electronic music production is not easy. If you really just throw some samples in a daw, it will sound like a 10 year old made it and it will probably break people's speakers because it's not mixed and mastered properly. Electronic music is a mature enough genre (that incidentally even in its inception was originated by people who were also traditional musicians) that fans don't accept a macaroni collage of a song that once again probably would break their speakers.

We are actually kind of agreeing. Let me change my words a little bit then.

The barrier to entry was significantly lowered through electronics. I was making music on Fruity loops when I was 12 years old. It was shit, but I had everything I needed in a single program. Becoming a producer however is extremely difficult.

The same will happen with AI. The barrier of entry to making something nice will be even lower. But mastering the AI tools, and really using it and combining it with musical knowledge will be extremely hard.

And those people will rise to the top of creating new musical genres, with the inclusion of AI.

I think these tools will unleash a Cambrian explosion of music from all types of people. It’ll be amazing.

This article is such a stark contrast from the GraphCast AI weather model they released [1]. The latter focused so much on the tech and what it does do, whereas this article buries the tech in a bunch of fluff about what it could do.

Can you imagine if the GraphCast article were like that? "Revolutionizing the future of weather".

I'm sure this music thing is cool but I have no idea what was built.

[1]: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for...

It's because the audiences are different.

Lyria is for operators, Graphcast is for engineers. The former care about what something does, the latter care about how something does.

It's definitely a stark contrast, but it's also two vastly different domains. One is traditionally the domain of deep science and simulations, and the other is the domain of artists and creatives. Their announcement is also pretty clear - it's a new generative model (Lyria), which seems to do some impressive vocals generation (at least in the sampled videos); combined with a creators' platform/toolbox.

For now weather models are - fortunately - not generative.

In "Brave New World," all the music is made by machines. We are approaching that dystopia. For me, much of the pleasure in listening to music lies in appreciating the virtuosity of the musicians. It's like watching a great tennis player or a great dancer. You admire their skill and grace and technical mastery. For me, listening to music made by machines would be like watching robots playing tennis, or robots dancing. Pointless!

Unfortunately for many people music is nothing more than 'something to play in the background'.

I'm sure this reads as very cynical, but a lot of the replies here seem to be written by people who do not like music, or don't place much value in it.

I think you're correct. I also think that they're envisioning this tool's potential in terms of the kind of derivative, trite rubbish that makes up 95% of what is played on pop radio stations nowadays.

I don't doubt that's achievable. What I do very much doubt is that software will ever capable of auto-generating something with the beauty, passion and originality of a Beethoven symphony, as performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of von Karajan. I don't believe that an algorithm will ever be able to compose and render a new song in the style of Nick Drake, that has even 1% of his soulfulness.

Machines can be programmed to imitate patterns of musical notes, or even the timbre of a voice. That's nothing. Lived experience and human emotion are prerequisites for the creation of great art.

A ton of these comments are cynical or defeatist. It’s like they think that music is already a dying art and this is the final nail in the coffin.

There’s tons of amazing, wonderful music being made all the time, to a degree that is staggeringly incomprehensible, and nothing about AI generated music is going to stop people from making beautiful art “by hand”

100%! I think a lot of people love to say "Music's not what it used to be."; while they do have a point, in that music does tend to rely more on computation than instruments, it's not like the usage of instruments is a dying art. Some artists just choose to provide a different experience; if people like it, they buy it, and that's the form of quality control we've always had for music (I'm not saying it's perfect, of course.)

You made me think of some of my favorite lines from LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge”:

> I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

> I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.

> I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I love music and listen to it all the time, but frankly I do not care much about the artists, in the same way that I don’t care much about the person making my coffee or my house. Obviously I don’t wish harm on anyone out of pure malice, but if a robot could make better coffee or build a better (to my tastes) house I wouldn’t stay stuck in the past out of some sense of romanticism.

Yep and this is a key and major point driving the whole AI craze. The hyper capitalist consumer society in which all sense of value has been strictly translated to "what's the immediate output" is prerequisite to the love of these tools. If all you care about is the destination, not the journey, if you are nothing but a consumer, generative AI is fantastic. Infinite monkeys are just as good as Shakespeare if they can produce the output of Shakespeare. What this perspective misses is that, at least historically, the things we value as human beings are actually not just outputs but something much richer and deeper than that. The crazed embrace of AI is just a marked shift toward an even deeper philosophical bankruptcy and pure focus on materialism.

Why is this unfortunate? I have visual art on my walls that is mostly just for the background. This doesn't destroy the experience of going to a museum or a local art fair and experiencing visual art. Not everybody has to engage with everything in the way that you do.

It's only a matter of time now before sports and other performance entertainment are replaced by generative AI.

How would sports and performance ent. be replaced by "generative AI"?

The opposite. Performance entertainment, especially sports, are least likely to be replaced by generative AI.

Some people listen to the actual music.

You are saying "I love watching the skill of the painter, I couldn't care less about the final product"

Human-created and intelligence-created are not mutually-exclusive

This already happens with chess - despite the machine being superhuman, people have never been more attracted to the human game.

Perhaps what will happen is that we will have more time to play/watch more?

The same argument was made about electronic music at the time. Just like computers, AI is a tool used by human.

studio albums are already partly machine generated and completely different from live performances. popular music is often impossible to perform live due to the actual track being composed from split segments sawn together so fast that a human performer does not have any time to breathe.

And that's without even going into voice tuning. We've crossed into that world long time ago and the line is only going to get more blurry.

Wonder where the human fits in this new landscape. Composer? no. Performer? no. Music artist is more like a conductor now. Thankfully audience doesn't care because they need to worship a human in the end, so she 'll be receiving all the money anyway.

The problem with these new BigTech companies is that they are accustomed to subjugating everyone. They deal with users and content, not with artists and creations. This is starkly different from the past. Yamaha and other synth makers would go out of their way to satisfy capricious artists, now it's the other way around, the tech dictates to artists what is possible, including the limits of what they are allowed to make/say and sell.

>Composer? no. Performer? no.

Not even audience, since few care for music with any real passion anymore among the masses (not even teens).

It became a niche, or something you put in the background. As for "popular" concerts and festivals, they are more like country fairs...

There are still a lot of people that care about good music. Most of the shows I go to are sold out and I certainly don't listen to that top 40 trash. I don't see "the masses" there, nor would I want to.

Maybe I’m in a weird bubble, but I know plenty of people who love music with a passion. We travel for concerts, we go to festivals with lots of other passionate music enjoyers, heck we have our own yearly get together that’s about playing music with friends and family. The people I know who are into music are into music, and that’s most of my friends because those are the people I get along with - we make, play, and listen with passion, and there are a lot of us.

I think you might be applying your perspective a little globally. For lots, music is NOT something that's necessarily put in the background.

> Thankfully audience doesn't care because they need to worship a human in the end

Not the HN audience. Luckily in the background there will be a machine or a even better, a company that can be worshipped!

Not sure I agree with the negative opinions in this thread. Surely, having an additional option to listen to the song you want to is a good thing? It's not like the choice to listen to human artists is taken away. Furthermore, a lot more people can now express themselves through music that were previously unable to.

Right? The only thing I fear for is the amount of generic AI generated trash that will be spawned among good music. But I'm super excited about this honestly, I only play guitar and have a musical mind but am absolutely horrible at production tools. Something like this could totally let me create a real production of what I imagine/hum/sing, which would otherwise be impossible.

It's not that the choice is taken away. It's that it is going to be even more buried under an avalanche of industry-normalised, generated crap (crap because generated and industry-normalised).

And second, you express yourself, you said it. If a generator produces something, it's not _your_ expression, per definition. You may still have "constrained" it among myriad of possibilities through your prompt, it is still the production of the generator, not yours.

Example: when I play something on a Mellotron, I cannot claim that I played the flutes or violins recorded there. Those are definitely not mine. What I do play with it, what I sing above it, yes, maybe because I produce/play those, with what I understood of my previous musical education/experience.

That's, fundamentally different.

Regarding the first point of being buried under an avalanche of crap, we can solve this problem through many ways. We can still filter by human music. Or we can use better recommendation systems (automated or p2p/word-of-mouth).

Regarding whether it is "my" expression or not, I consider expression as a way of making my feelings or thoughts known. This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known. Perhaps of lower fidelity than if I learn to play an instrument but maybe that will improve with time. Either way, since I now have an additional choice of expressing my thoughts and _I_ decide if it's "good enough" to publish, I consider it as allowing me to express more.

> we can solve this problem through many ways

You realise that this is a problematic situation created by technology, that was designed as such first, right?

> This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known.

Not really. Because again, this is a generator: what it outputs according to your prompt may _please_ you, or seem like it matches what you think you wanted, but this is still an output determined hugely by all the biases and sum of data it ingested before you even decided to use it.

It is vastly, it is even, again, fundamentally different that putting in the effort of expressing yourself, by formulating your own words, trying to express something on your own, and not being content of it, reflecting about why, trying a different formula or perspective, etc. before finally saying "ok, this is all I can say about it at this point, let's try".

The "your" is critically important here, both for correct attribution (from the perspective of others; this may or may not have financial or legal consequences), and foremost for your own self-esteem/understanding (devoid from an automated, biased generator, whose understanding is beyond yourself).

> You realise that this is a problematic situation created by technology

I'm saying this technology is a net positive for me. Sure, problems can arise from applying this net-positive technology but even considering them, they're a net positive. Especially in this case where we already have solutions for large amounts of crap content created by humans today. I think they'll scale well to crap content created by AI tomorrow (eg: Recommendation systems, p2p sharing etc).

Regarding your second point. I think we just have different perspectives on this. I see this technology as allowing me to do "strictly more" than I could before. You say that it's not "my expression" but I say it is because I'm able to bring forth what's in my mind (according to me!). You say it's not what I had in mind but compare against this scenario: I have an idea for a song and use a musical instrument. The output that I produce is quite far from my intent as I'm untrained. With this model, I can get a lot closer to my intent compared to using an instrument since I'm untrained. I still have the option of later learning an instrument if I'm unsatisfied.

Overall, I lose nothing and gain a nice power and still retain the option to learn an instrument if I wish. Thus it's a clear net positive for me that allows me to express more right now.

...and for the people whose hard work this was trained on without permission or compensation?

Agree that training without permission and compensation is wrong. My argument is more that this tool is a net good. If suppose in the future, Someone releases a similar model trained on purely licensed data (Eg: Like Meta did with their Cm3leon model[0]), my arguments still stand that it gives people more choice and allows them to express more.

[0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/generative-ai-text-images-cm3leon/

> As such, and as described in our paper, we’ve trained CM3leon using a licensed dataset.

In theory it is fantastic and yes this is great.

I think the negativity comes from the fact that our economic reality isn't currently structured to handle the consequences.

In an idyllic society, this might be all one needs to say about generative AI: "how wonderful, a new way to express ourselves!" I think the backlash stems from the fact that we do not live in such a society. Many people already barely scratch out a meagre existence through self-expression. Now major companies that posses far more power than individuals, that take people's work and data without doing due diligence or asking, that effectively impose the shape of the technical landscape from top down, are introducing tools that threaten the ability of people to survive.

It's kind of hard to paint a completely rosy picture when that's the way these tools are being developed and introduced.

It's really interesting for me to see AI voice cloning taking off. A few years ago I worked on a paper called HuBERT (https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.07447) which has since really taken off for doing this kind of stuff (it's the speech representation that SoViTs uses, for example). At the time the main research focus was low-resource ASR; it was sort of a fluke that it works so well for voice conversion. It makes me feel confident that open-source ML will drive more value over the next five years than closed-source ML, despite all the hype around big tech, simply because random people building weird, unexpected stuff on top of foundation models will make things that no one could have predicted.

Replace "Transforming" with "Disrupting" and the story feels more real. Frankly, I love music. That is why I'd prefer if Google did not mingle in this bussiness. Creatives already have a hard time making any sort of living from their talent, and AI generated "elevator music" will not make that situation any better.

Earning money by making music is a power law, that is, only a few people will make a lot of money while many will earn almost nothing. This is partially due to the required skills. If a system could lower the barrier to entry, then you could also make an argument that a music AI makes it a more level playing field.

That is true, but does it make sense to lower the barrier of entry if in return, the world becomes a fiefdom where Google is part of a tech feudal-lord conglomerate and you have to be subservient to their wishes?

Besides, the reason why the power law distribution here is exceptionally skewed is precisely BECAUSE of technology like the internet. If you read about the history of music, in the past before technology, all musicians made less but at least there were places for local musicians to play in a strong community such as in local pubs and such.

TECHNOLOGY created the problem of the extreme power law and now it's disguising itself as a solution. But like the devil, a company like Google does not offer anyhting for free.

Looking at EDM, the sheer amount of bedroom musicians capable of producing that poped up since the 90s is part of the reason why it has become so hard to make any money from your art. There is simply too much music out there to actually be able to find the gems you like. Lowering the barrier for entry will only worsen this effect.

Very real and pertinent example. Being big in EDM now is 100% about being a constant networker. You have to go to every party, know every person and have a massively professional social media presence and a conisistent flashy image to have any success. This will be accelerated in AI, actually turning being a musician into a ridiculously demanding amalgamation of many many different jobs... or just a game of having enough money to know people already and have employ a PR army.

No. Smaller creators of art gain their markets through uniqueness not through how easy it is to create. If music is a commodity that does not require a personality or skillset to produce, then the individuality of artists becomes irrelevant. Whoever has the means of production to pump out as much as possible as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible while investing in as much advertising as possible with as many connections as possible, will be the only people that matter. Allowing AI to take over labour for us means that the people who make money from these products are only the people who own the servers. Under capitalism, the capitalists own the means of production and hoard most of the fruits of the labouring class, who are only able to make money by selling themselves. In moving straight from capitalism to an age of AI technofuedilism, we remove even labour and skill as a means of making money for the masses. The only means of making money is owning a server farm. This means wealth continuously flows into the hands of a few tech companies. Even smaller capitalists will be paying their dues to the server owners that control the entire economy. No small man will have a place in any industry.

> If a system could lower the barrier to entry, then you could also make an argument that a music AI makes it a more level playing field.

The barrier of entry is a business one, not a talent or skill one. Every country in the world has virtuoso musicians who don't earn money. Many/most of the hugely successful musicians released music that could be recreated pretty convincingly by amateurs with a few years of experience (vocals are probably the only exception as we strongly associate them with individuals).

Some examples are interesting (the sax, the string ensemble); the "realistic vocal choir" is anything but.

I tried riffusion and sang 10 seconds of "the house of the rising sun" [0]

It produced... this...

https://www.riffusion.com/riffs/d0464fb4-a53a-4ad8-a765-0a64...

which, by some measure, is impressive (perfect recognition of lyrics, for one), but is also... a musical abomination?

So IDK. Let's see where this goes.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-43lLKaqBQ

Growing pains. Remember how this all started (Google Magenta, circa 2019): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRnbbtqxBEc

It seems most (or all?) AI music projects aim at producing audio?

Why not output MIDI instead, and let the artist manipulate that?

I for one would gladly buy a VST instrument that would generate a constant stream of MIDI ideas, chordings, voicings, variations, from a few seconds of singing or whistling or clapping.

It seems the technology is here to build it, yet (AFAIK) it doesn't exist. Why?

That sounds almost like Scaler: https://www.scalerplugin.com/

I mostly use it as a database of chord progressions, but it can do quite a bit more.

Its because the ultimate goal with these gen AI tools is to replace not support professionals. Your idea makes sense, is eminently doable, and would be awesome. The problem is, it still requires a human with expertise. Gen AI companies want to remove the human with expertise from the equation precisely so they can "empower" (take money from) the much wider population of humans without expertise. These humans, since they lack expertise will actually need gen AI to produce anything at all. A professional could use it but could ultimately make do without it--they would not have a strong dependency on gen AI. It's essentially the same idea as addicts being lucrative prospects for drug dealers--once you establish dependency, you've got them.

Let's be frank, gen AI projects are ultimately about companies wanting make money by putting small-scale professionals out of work for good. In other words, they want to capture a significant portion of all that capital that currently flows across small companies and projects (even if small scale operations continue a large percentage of their production will require funneling money to Gen AI subscriptions instead of skilled human workers)

> Why not output MIDI instead, and let the artist manipulate that?

This is not true at all, it all started with generating MIDI, and even the very link I shared is of a system that generates MIDI.

When you sing into Riffusion, it just puts time constraints on the lyrics. Example:

"I've never seen a diamond in the flesh" from Lorde, sung into Riffusion: "I've:0.72-0.96 never:0.96-1.20 seen:1.20-1.48 a:1.48-1.64 diamond:1.64-2.32 in:2.32-2.76 the:2.76-3.02 flesh:3.02-3.86"

With the timestamps being second-annotations. The Google model takes the whole melody and phrasing as input as well.

From the article:

> Each participating artist has partnered with us and will have a hand in helping us test and learn to shape the future of AI in music.

Let me correct that: each participating artist has been given a wad of dirty cash in return for their help in training replacements for mass music. Notice that I said "mass music" -- people will always be able to create by hand, but it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music (either with money or with ad views) and no longer need human-created music for commercial purposes.

> Our music AI experiments have been designed in line with YouTube’s AI principles, which aim to enable creative expression while protecting music artists and the integrity of their work.

This is hardly a protection. It only protects existing, secure artists. It does not protect new artists from being outcompeted by AI. (Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available.)

This article written by Google is a testament to the true nature of Google, which is the nature of being a leech and parasite. OF COURSE, at first, this tool MIGHT be interesting and provide new ways of creating music, but we have to remember that it will mainly function in the context of YouTube, which is about superficial consumption and advertising. The addictiveness and widespread usage of YouTube is becoming a societal problem, and this technology will standardize AI music into becoming mainstream.

Many people think that AI is just a tool to aid in music creation. It is for now, but what it actually does is three things:

(1) It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising.

(2) It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines.

(3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive.

Remember, technology at first is an optional curiosity but successful technologies ALWAYS become entrenched in society and modify it significantly, and in this case, for the worse.

Shame on Google for this and I truly despise them.

But isn't music more than just the music track? People like to listen to the same music, go to concerts, share it with others, share the experience of audience/artist performance.

Moments where music is truly important in one's life will never be replaced by meaningless bit fiddling.

I cannot imagine people caring about books, music, art created by bit fiddling. They will always care about things created by other people. We do not watch chess engines playing together, even though the level of play is "godlike". AlphaZero didn't make human chess less popular. Chess is extremely popular now and it is mostly due to personalities participating in it and the ease of access (streaming videos...).

I find the demo where a random song from an artist you like is created very weird. Who would want to do that? And why would anyone connect to that? Will these people save these random creations and relisten them? Will they remember these moments by remembering these random silly unique tracks? I cannot imagine that at all.

Well, this could have the potential to make infinite covers of your favorite song.

But think about it, people used to watch the same movies in DVD. The movies they loved. Now people watch and infinity of short random videos (tik tok, instagram)...

Technology changes the habits of people, specially in young people. Think about it, one friend sends a song auto-generated from some text, it is "a song made by someone", at least that will be their perception...

I still don't see the pull. Take a band like The National. I'm 100% certain most of the listeners absolutely do not care about covers at all.

This musical world where we generate random stuff that will be consumed equivalently to current music just does not feel real. What will probably happen is that people just won't listen to music or get passionate about it at all. That might already be happening because gaming is something what music was for the generation when pull of the games was not as strong.

Young people today will probably never care about Beatles or Bob Dylan or contemporary bands. The music is just not the main interest.

Just imagine AI making games and everyone in the industry losing their job. It just does not work that way. Product is not the end. Music does not work that way. Music is more than the product.

Any creative history is focused on a group of people and their audience, not on the songs/books/poems in general, but the whole experience of creativity and its outputs.

I do think music is slightly more immune to this than some other forms of art because music is usually so tied to a personality and a physical presence that there will be ways for artists to overcome this to some extent.

I think the bigger concern should be around things like backing scores, soundtracks, and other instrumental music. Things that you might have paid a composer to do, or a local orchestra to perform, can be done by AI and a synth.

This has similar energy to the writer’s strike - save money by removing the first layer of human effort. For some things (like the backing music in a commercial) this is sufficient, and for others you can have AI generate the base and then have a human “punch it up” with their vocals or by performing it on live instruments.

I don’t think we risk losing music production in general, but I do think there’s a legitimate concern that many many smaller, less publicly visible music jobs will be lost.

> I think the bigger concern should be around things like backing scores, soundtracks, and other instrumental music. Things that you might have paid a composer to do, or a local orchestra to perform, can be done by AI and a synth.

This was already somewhat accomplished by synths and music production software. Take any keyboardist with knowledge of composition and you can get a very realistic sounding orchestra, played by one person. Synths make air/string instruments sound extremely realistic even when played on a keyboard.

Sounds like that kind of work is almost equivalent to clerical work, yet maybe requires a bit more training effort. Although, do you really need to be a violin maestro to play for a movie soundtrack in an orchestra, are your skills being used at their limits?

So I guess we can just see what happened with clerical work and how the society responds. I guess clerks just didn't have enough "voting power".

Would you say a mastering engineer is "fiddling with bits?" and also: would you say there's artistic merit in bringing out the brilliance of a song with said engineering?

Almost no human activity in music is fiddling bits, everything has its place. Pretty sure there are not that many points in music where your role can be trivial. Mastering engineer is somewhat replaced by good music production software and his craft became more approachable to the artist who's not familiar with mastering but can now do it easily due to software.

I do not know if mastering engineers who worked with analog equipment started complaining about losing jobs to digital programs, making their experience obsolete. Did they? I don't think any AI product will be able to separate itself from the human will. Anything we humans do is by humans for humans and all of these places where software would steal our music experience is just hard for me to imagine.

I guess someone will make it, if not google or others will.

This is the next iteration of music. First we had only live concerts, then we had recordings, and finally auto-generated music.

I hope some old dudes with long beards will like to hang out and jam with me when I'll be old.

If not google, others will? That is like justifying stealing from an old man on the street by saying that because the street is dangerous, someone else will do it anyway.

This is not the next generation of music. It is one possible future that we can oppose if only we were not so convinced that technology is completely deterministic and can't be opposed.

I am not justifying this.

But that's how life works. Someone invents something. Some people love it and others hate it.

It's like forums. There ara people who hate forums and prefer good old books. There are people who hate books and love forums. There ara people who love both

Some people like watching plays. Others like cinema. And some play videogames.

But be sure this will hurt professional musicians. Not pop musicians, I mean professional musicians that earn a humble living.

> It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising.

The most music we (humans collectively, not you and me specifically) hear are made for one single purpose: profit.

It's not an AI problem. It's nothing new. Actually it's older than you and me.

You are ignoring the fact that there's a new problem: the ability to milk it with an extreme level of efficiency.

Imagine a burglar who robs houses. He might rob 1-2 per month. Now imagine the same burglar being given a technology that allows him to rob 1000 houses a month. Wouldn't you say that's much worse, even though it essentially arises from the same problem?

As a indie game developer, this could plausibly enable me to add decent sounding soundtrack to my games. I couldn't afford to pay a proper artist, and my musical skills are... Limited..

It _is_ just a tool, a new instrument essentially, one that is easier to play than most. People being angry that there is now a new instrument that is much easier to play than the one they spent years to learn come across as entitled brats to me. This will enable me to express myself in a way I couldn't before, how is that not about human expression?

It's a accessibility thing as well. Expressing oneself through music has always been nearly impossible to the tone-deaf among us. Now that may change, and you want to stop that because it might maybe potentially affect how much money you can earn from playing music?

Glory to Google for enabling the musically impaired to express themselves through music!

Have you considered something like https://www.indiegamemusic.com/, where a lot of artists have their music available free or super cheaply?

I have, and it kinda works, but I usually have a pretty good idea of what I want the theme to sound like, and I'm never able to find something that even resembles my vision.

That leaves me with 2 options: hire an orchestra and a choir, along with a composer to make the sound I want, which would cost me a lot more than my games ever sell for, or pick a sound that's never quite, or usually even close to, what I had in mind.

With this tool, I'm hoping even someone as musically untalented as me could take the music that's playing in my head, and get it(or something very similar to it) playing on some speakers. It probably won't win me any musical awards, I don't expect this to to magically take me from zero to Vivaldi, but if I can make a tune that sounds like what I imagined, it'll be a win for me.

I'll add here that I really for the life of me cannot see the harm in that, even though you didn't really imply there would be, but others in this thread have been screaming it pretty loudly, so it appears to be a concern among fellow hn'ers

If you have music that's playing in your head, genuinely playing in your head, as in you can actually hear the physical melody then you should be able to trivially whistle it. So in that respect, this tool which aims to combine pitch detection with instrumentation synthesization would be a pretty big net win for you.

Exactly why I'm so excited about it! And so confused by the apparent outrage on display here for it. How is it morally wrong for me to be able to do that?

I'm trying to understand it but so far all I can see is gatekeeping saying that my music isn't music if I used AI to create it. Judging by the comment paraphrasing pastor Niemöller I'm apparently a Nazi sympathiser for wanting to use this tool.

What in the world is up with that?

There is NO SUCH THING as "just a tool". All tools have societal effects that are inevitable in different ways because we operate on basal instincts most of the time, or at least our capitalistic society has made us fairly deterministic.

It's not the same as a new instrument that is easier to play, because with an instrument, you have to determine entirely what comes out of it. With this "tool", you only determine part of the output, a skeleton, and a machine determines the basic musicality.

I 100% do not buy the accessibility argument. Of course, everyone plays that card. But the overall gross societal effects of AI are not worth it, even if it does help some people.

Imagine a new nuclear technology that cures all cancer, but simultaneously allows anyone to create an atomic bomb in their backyard. Would you think this worth it? We have to consider the costs and benefits, not just the benefits like most technophiles think.

You may create something with this tool for your game, but I certainly won't buy your game if AI has been used in its creation.

You are exactly why this is a problem. By creating demand for this soulless music we will be inundated by it everywhere. Also all small musicians will basically have to give up because no-one will even bother to save up to pay them. Absolutely trash mindset.

I already can't pay them, so nothing changes in that point.

I don't know why it makes you so angry that I want the best tools imaginable to make music, for my games and otherwise?

I promise you won't be inundated by the music I create, and no-one will force you to listen to it.

The mindset that you have the right to dictate what tools I can and cannot use to express myself via music is downright dystopian and extremely autocratic. If me creating some tunes for my own benefit in my basement scares you, I think you might need to revise your world view, or all that anxiety is gonna have a detrimental effect on your health sooner or later.

I understand that you can't afford it. I have been a poor hobbyist before. I've been so poor I had to try and do all my projects on an overheating piece of hot garbage government issued laptop and I felt very hard done by for being someone with expensive hobbies that only rich people could afford to actually excel at. But there are free music options. AI is an existential threat to our very right to expression as human being and you should not vote with your money for it to wipe out creatives as a fellow creative. There are also struggling amateur music producers out there who are attempting to get good and make a break. They don't deserve to be drowned forever by a machine.

As humans, the fundamental way we derive meaning from life is creation. The purpose of automation has always been to allow for humans to have more space to be creative, as this is really what we excel at and enjoy. If we insist on replacing our creative functions with machines, we will make ourselves obsolete, apart from the few CEOs who own the massive servers that nobody else can afford to own and closed source super-powerful AI systems. Even if you think these ghoul-like assholes would actually care to help the destitute masses whose jobs have rapidly become obsolete on an unprecedented scale that our economy cannot handle, humans require meaning and goals to survive. If we have to all just be kept alive by server owners because our passions are made irrelevant by mass producing robots, humans will die out just from the psychological stress. This is a real thing, one of the top indicators of long lifespan is older people retaining passions, goals and some level of work.

This is of course all worst case scenario stuff I'm talking about here. But I struggle to see an argument for how allowing AI to take over every aspect of our society would not lead to plenty of horrible consequences.

Your convenience is not worth it, I'm sorry.

First they came for the artists. And I did not speak out because I was not an artist. Then they came for the actors. And I did not speak out because I was not an actor. Then they came for the musicians. And I did not speak out because I was not a musician.

...

Then they came for the Indie Game Devs. And there was nobody left to speak for them.

fr it's like this guy doesn't get that if art music and coding are all taken over by AI his whole job/hobby will be redundant

So what do you think will happen when the indie-game-making AI is released?

Oh that would be so cool! I could finally give all my game ideas a shot, even the more weird/experimental ones! As it is now I have to consider expected payout divided by expected effort, and a lot of ideas are just non starters because they're simply too big to finish for me.

Financially, well I'd expect people as an aggregate would keep spending about the same amount of money, so I don't think the proverbial pie would get any smaller, though it might change who gets a piece and how large that piece is.

Guess what, such is life! Even if we, for the sake of argument, imagine that the existence of such an AI is 100% guaranteed to render me personally unable to make any money whatsoever from making games, that's a price I would be willing to pay! I'd have to work with something less fun but I'd keep making games in my spare time just for fun anyway.

It's not like making a living from our passions is some god given right, It's a privilege! And if that privilege is the cost for making my passion more accessible to everyone, that's a price I'd pay in a heartbeat. I can't wait to make reality out of all my ideas, and I can't wait to see what others are going to make with it either!

It's already one of my bigger regrets that I don't contribute more to open source resources that would make game development easier for others, I just can't find enough time and energy for it.

From the consumers perspective, I expect there'd be a lot more to choose from. I imagine the quality of indie games would rise immensely. Heck gamers could even just use the AI to make a custom game tailored for their own tastes from home, how sweet would that be? Might that make the pie smaller for pro Devs? Sure, it might, but who cares! It also might not! Who knows?

The one thing that is guaranteed from such an AI is that awesomeness goes up. I want it!

So what's the job that you'd be hoping to get to sustain your hobbies that is immune from AI takeover. Please tell me?

I am a creative type that became a commercial SE to actually fund my lifestyle. I don't expect to just make money from creative hobbies just because I want to, so I have gone for a job that is in high demand. But AI will eventually learn to code well enough. Then there will be no demand for software engineering, one of the few job markets that even has this level of demand and high employment. So what's the next avenue for us when that job becomes obsolete.

Technology has a way creating new jobs when it takes old ones away. I'm not wise enough to know that those new jobs will be, perhaps we're all destined to become "prompt engineers" or similar. Who knows?

I've worked hard to be where I am too, but if you, like me, were able to land a software engineer job, you'll be able to pick up whatever new skill will be needed in the future without much trouble! I have no doubt you'll manage, so I don't worry about it!

If AI leads to ALL jobs being automated well guess what, we're ready for Luxury Gay Space-Communism as described in Iain M Banks' The Culture. My personal favourite sci-fi utopia!

I wouldn't hold my breath for that though, seems about as likely as running in to Jesus Christ in the supermarket. And I say that as an atheist.

It's not a god given right, but I worked really hard to get to where I am in life my visa is tied to my profession and I have a feeling it's going a way soon. Which means my visa might go away soon. I've gone from contemplate suicide to how to carry on. What you might think is awesomeness is dread for others. Just to point out there are 2 sides to this coin.

> traditional musicians… will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive.

Why would anyone owe the musicians a job just because they enjoy doing it? I don’t expect anyone to defend my love of coding when I’m replaced by a future iteration of an LLM.

> Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available

If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss?

> It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines

Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.

> If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist.

That is definitely not true. There are other things that determine what is sold besides quality: ability to mass produce, economies of scale, bullying tactics, etc.

> Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.

Because thinking like machines means that we are locked into the cycle of optimizing resource usage to expand and grow forever and not be stewards of the environment. Thinking like a machine means being a human cog in the consumerist machine of selfishness. Thinking like a machine means facilitating the endless growth of technology that furthers us from connecting genuinely with other people in a small community.

> If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss?

Because even artists often produce bland/poor stuff, sometimes even some that sells well? (or that is recognised several decades/centuries, to be actually great work)

Eh, I don't think anyone owes musicians a job, but I also don't think that jobs going anywhere. The painter is still an artist if they use the factory-produced canvas. The musician is still an artist if they use the mass-produced Fender. Or a mass-produced sample library.

Amen.

I'd only add that the sort of music they're aiming at is already pretty much at your end state. Muzak (and its slightly more advanced cousin Library Music) isn't about human expression, but about a background noise to convey a loose mood. God forbid we should just listen to what someone has to say - it always needs a distracting background interference to go with it.

But, like it or not, creating this drivel does put the food in the mouths of a great number of professional musicians. Even big-name recording studios aren't busy full time with wonderful new creative experiments, it's jingles and library music that keep their doors open. But even this work has been declining sharply for decades, and this new wave of tools will just continue that decline.

If anything, it's going to entrench the music profession for the privileged as there'll be an even smaller pot of work available and so only those that can afford the massive time investment and comfortable with the risk of being without work will survive.

And all this because the people building and paying for these tools are themselves musically illiterate - they don't know what makes good music, or why muzak is utterly devoid of the thing they profess to love and democratise.

Well perhaps we should try and rethink society instead of trying to make its generation more efficient...

> it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music

The goal is to create background music for youtube videos without paying artists anymore at all. Youtube videos feel sterile because they lack music with emotion and are all recycling the same audio library tracks. It's a way to allow some pop culture to youtubers who are scared to death of copyright claims.

Yes.

And who owns copyright for these songs? Of course not the user. If one of the 1 000 000 00 songs becomes a hit, it's a bank for the google owners.

Commercial background music is already sterile, even if it is written and performed by humans. Here is a video from four years ago complaining about this sort of commercial music - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIxY_Y9TGWI.

"(3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive."

What is your definition of "traditional" here - historically, both music and art were not full time jobs for most. It was a thing people with a passion for did as a side gig, with some (but not a lot) of people eventually sustaining themselves full time with art. Or it was done by already rich people who did not need to work and could afford to be people of leisure.

That was true even of organized things like orchestras, etc. Doing these as a full time job is a relatively recent thing, and even there, "surviving" has been limited to a remarkable few.

Even a decade ago, 30% of musicians had a second job. The 70% was not mostly "bands" but,again, permanent things like orchestras, etc.

Trying to forcefully keep jobs alive that don't need to exist is insanity, and rightfully gets pointed out as such in other contexts. This would be no different in this case.

Here, it's also totally non-obvious that if these things go back to "people pursue it as a side gig because they love it" we will be any worse off than we were in terms of quality of art/music, happiness, you name it.

Because that was the way of the past and art/music were not just fine, but most people even consider it better!

I'll also add - the times folks have spent fighting change in what jobs are needed rarely ends up well vs the time spend helping people adapt to that change.

You have to know the change is real, of course, but once you do, we've ended up with insane results when we try to fight it.

What we do as humans is to push against a wall of mist of a unlimited search space.

Doesn't matter if it is music, drawing or scientific discoveries.

What an Artist does is pushing the boundaries.

Having tools like ths allows much more people to push and not 'just' the artists who mastered certain skills.

I can write very good software, do i care if my family suddenly can also write softwre thanks to ai? Honestly no. My goal was never to write code but always to create something which adds value to my life or to others.

I would not have thought that we will achieve this level so fast but yes writing code and using certain tools will be not necessary in the near future.

But hopefully we will have more time to learn all of those skills for the sake of having fun learning them.

I have a very good sense of what music sounds good to me and what art looks good to me. Should i be not allowed to create my own art even if its through tools like SD, Midjourney and co?

don't be that type of person

>Doesn't matter if it is music, drawing or scientific discoveries.

#oxford comma blues.

As drawing discoveries are hardly a thing, I see no ambiguity here.

Im german, had the second worst grade in english when i graduated. Feel free to be more precise than a hashtag :P

Will be great for people who have studied composition, for everyone else it will just increase exponentially the amount of garbage circulating around

There is so much garbage already on video sharing apps, I don't think anything will change.

Or maybe something entirely unexpected will happen. You never know what can happen when you give people creative tools.

Maybe music creation via tools like this will be like using a camera to create images. We don’t think of photographs as shitty paintings, right? It’s a different kind of thing.

> Maybe music creation via tools like this will be like using a camera to create images.

Yes, in the sense that most people don’t know how to take photos and they look like crap even with heavy AI retouching

My photos might look like crap but I’m happy to have them.

Maybe something similar will happen with AI-powered music creation?

It might just be a way for me to create my own art.

It would also already work very well for creating background music without bothering artists to do so.

Concentration background music etc.

The tech is amazing, if it wasn't the comment section would be about how it's not good and not as melancholic as it is here. The melancholy is a testament to the capability.

To musically trained people, this is so weird. From the page:

"Imagine singing a melody to create a horn line, transforming chords from a MIDI keyboard into a realistic vocal choir, or adding an instrumental accompaniment to a vocal track."

This is what composers do! It's not hard, it requires a journeyman level of skill and training. I guess it will change how non-musicians create really bad music though?

I'm not saying it's not a game changer - the crappy library music world is running on borrowed time. But positioning this as revolutionizing music production is just bizarre. It's not solving the problems that one faces trying to write good music - it's just making the simplest steps faster. And only significantly faster for the untrained.

I'm a bit confused why so many models seem to focus on text-to-audio.. what use is an mp3 in a composition? I just need the notation. One could take an avant garde approach and find ways to make use of the audio outputs, but that doesn't necessarily serve "normal" music.

One can only assume they have decided their market is people who want to type some stuff in and then pat themselves on the back for "composing". It's all accompanied by ballyhoo about "democratizing music production".... which happened in the late nineties when you could run a DAW on a home machine.

This has nothing more to do with democratizing music production then audio to text has to do with democratizing writing a novel!

I can't wait until youtube content creators start using ai-generated music in their shorts and reels. What a wonderful world.

There is an extremely weird juxtaposition between the idea of watermarking the outputs so AI-generated samples can be detected if they make up even part of a song (which is arguably considerable as fair use of even copyrighted material if only a single bar is sampled), and the statement:

> Within the experiment, a limited set of creators will be able to use Dream Track for producing a unique soundtrack with the AI-generated voice and musical style of artists including Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, Troye Sivan, and Papoose*.

So... we're watching you and we'll know if you so much as sample one bar to create something of your own. But our preferred creators are having so much fun using AI exclusively to make the entire composition, directly ripping off the personal style of these artists who said it's OK!

I also found it hilarious that they claim the idea of embedding a watermark in the audio by adding the image to the 2d spectrogram is a "novel method ... unlike anything that exists today, especially in the context of audio." Considering Aphex Twin did it in 1999...

* Apparently it was removed from the game, and his Wikipedia doesn't even mention it, but, yes, Papoose, of the "You just mad cuz I'm stylin' on ya!" track from GTA IV.

This is cool, I'm sure people will use this responsibly and not take advantage of this.

Hahahaha poor naive people that accepted to "collaborate" with Google, Google has taught us how their seemingly benign acts always end up as they started, right?

Nothing more trustworthy than a multi billion corporation trying to destroy the internet as we know it to get more billions out of ads convinces a bunch of washed up artists that their new project is benign and even are so good that they use the hashtag "Social Responsibility".

This is very totally not just a plan to try to get others on board, wonder what's the catch here? try to do a FOMO where only the first few get to get rights for their voice being used? playing a very long con getting voice exclusivity rights? or what exactly?

One thing I know is that whatever Google says is a lie.

Why did they pick T-Pain for their demo, out of all the good musicians in the world?

He embraced applying tech to music early and he's not the terrible musician you might be thinking.

The slander in this thread against Top 40 is depressing if not unexpected. The music sounds good, what's the problem? Musical elitism is one of the oldest of the modern tropes, and deserves no attention paid to it.

I believe it will still be worth it to become musically trained; otherwise, you’d just be adding to the pile of worthless garbage on redundant storage somewhere. My only fear is how to preserve the idea with kids of how awesome and enlightening it is to learn to play a musical instrument, be able to master it, even hacking it, and maybe improving it. That’s why over time I’m appreciating more and more analog music producers like Vulfpeck, and their success might be a lesson to learn from, even though I don’t expect many to know them in this high-tech context.

> SynthID embeds a watermark into AI-generated audio content that’s inaudible to the human ear and doesn’t compromise the listening experience. It does this by converting the audio wave into a two-dimensional visualization that shows how the spectrum of frequencies in a sound evolves over time. This novel method is unlike anything that exists today, especially in the context of audio.

Is this a unique or boolean watermark (==ai_generated)? Sounds like it would be amazing to have for regular YouTube uploads to prove authorship and deal with reuploads/content theft.

This whole section made me laugh. Maybe it was AI generated, because "converting the audio wave into a two-dimensional visualization that shows how the spectrum of frequencies in a sound evolves over time" is far from a "novel method (is) unlike anything that exists today, especially in the context of audio". Perhaps they're talking about the actual watermarking method, but it's a terrible pair of sentences if so.

The watermarking is worrying. I can imagine many different vendors will start adding something like that to their products - at some point it has to interfere with the signal, no?

Google is pursuing the absolute worst of what AI music could be. It's really disappointing. Instead of elevating human expression they went straight for generating generic mass-market music to back Shorts videos. Zero influence from human creators that can actually make things great. Models can reproduce style, but they can't reproduce taste and emotion.

Audio quality is not great yet, but the harmony is ok. Also, there's a video where a beatbox is transformed into a drum loop - the result doesn't match the source perfectly, AI has added some crash (?) and extra shakers.

Also, as I understand you must be able to sing properly to use this tool, so it is only for talented kids, and ordinary kids still have to use a keyboard?

AI will remove the traditional 'Creator'. Now, it's a direct line from platform to consumer, with the AI as the new creator. No royalties, no middlemen, just pure, content delivery... Creators better wake up, or have something to license to the platform...A gait, a singing style, a voice tone, a guitar or piano style...

"Propaganda is making puppets of us. We are moved by hidden strings which the propagandist manipulates."

The moment quality in art becomes commodified, what is popular will select on something other than quality. Look what happened to visual art in the earliest 20th century. Any art academy graduate could give you a beautiful painting, but nobody remembers any artists from the 20th century who simply made "beautiful paintings"

Already been seeing this play out in photography.

Huge trend back to 90s CCD digital cameras, film, polaroid etc.

Quality never was the only or even the most important aspect of popularity in music and probably art in general.

So I'm not sure your projection is valid.

His projection is valid because it's not a qualitative problem, it's a quantitative one.

Music may already have been turned into a commodity selected by traits other than quality, but tools like this bring the effect up to a whole new level, a whole new order of magnitude.

Every tool that makes it easier to create art is good in my book. In years past you had to actually have the instruments and had to know how to work them. Now you can much easier learn to use simpler tools to get even better results, which just increases the amount of people that can actually realize their creativity.

But part of the whole point of listening to music is enjoying the expression of the people playing the instrument. Music is much more than just the final output of a machine, it's an expression of the soul. You may be able to create music more easily with this tool, but I guarantee it will be soulless, just like Google.

The results certainly will not be better. They will be a hideous amalgam from a computer. Just listen to real music created by real people (preferably live) and you will know how hideous these results really are.

Everything, even EFFICIENCY, has its limits to how much we should have.

The sheer amount of pop music and its pop-ularity contradicts you a bit here. Because one can play live AI generated music just as well, hop around on the beat and prompt the viewers to put their hands in the air - a live performance is (arguably much) more than the music. But I may be wrong, maybe the pop assembly line is not the sign of commoditization I seem to see, and won't gain that much from AI support.

You are right. The pop assembly line is EXACTLY what you describe. However, that does not mean we should create new technology to make that assembly line even MORE efficient! Instead, we should work on changing and dismantling society so that it is LESS efficient.

The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music. And a world without the Velvet Underground would be more soulless to me.

I've heard soulless music performed by highly trained musicians playing on great instruments. And soulful music played on crappy instruments by untrained musicians. On average, the great music comes from the more trained musicians on the better tools.

AI is just another tool. The vast majority of music is terrible. It will continue to be terrible. And a few geniuses will use AI the way Hendrix used the electric guitar. I'm excited to hear what that will sound like.

> The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music

Just because people were wrong in the past doesn’t mean they are wrong now.

> AI is just another tool

Not all tools are the same. A tool that changes how sound is amplified (like an electric guitar) is vastly different than a tool that can theoretically replace the human in the loop entirely.

Someone playing a piano and someone playing an electric piano are much, much closer to each other than someone pressing the start button on a player piano is to either of them.

That same argument has been wrong over and over again. So there's no reason to believe it's now suddenly a good argument unless given solid evidence.

Distortion was just another tool, and first rejected as highly undesirable. It's literally "just" putting an electric guitar through a tube amp and turning up the knob. And it revolutionized music. It sounds amazing in the right hands.

The more important point that I already made is the not all musicians are the same. Give a piano or a player piano to the vast majority of musicians and the output will be common and familiar. Give either to a musical genius like Hendrix and they'll manage to get something beautiful and new out of it. I'm looking forward to what the handful of geniuses out there will get out of AI. It's going to be fun.

Is a photograph soulless?

If people love paintings, they won't be replaced. But they will go to places photographs can't.

We're going to find out who loves music, and who loves manufactured crap. Wait, I think we already know.

You're right that pure formal perfection is not the only component in art; art has to mean something.

But quality has always been a very important aspect of popularity in art as well as in music (see: Renaissance sculptors & painters, Baroque and Classical composers, etc.)

Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.

AI helps with the last part; real artists should still provide the emotional seed.

> Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.

Emphasis on unique

Can you give an example of a unique insight or emotion? A lot of the classic books I read, the greatest films of all time, and the most celebrated visual artists are unique mostly in style or execution, but all express the same basic universal human truths.

> But quality has always been a very important aspect

But what is quality? I used to think it was just degree of goodness, then I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and now I have no idea what it is (or what it isn’t).

It doesn't have to be something that you can objectively measure to exist and people to be able to recognize it (even if not perfectly) - which is the whole point of Z.A.M.M. by the way.

But effort itself is also a quality. The fact that a human took out a substantial fraction of their time on planet earth to create something is already a sign that at least one individual cared about the work: the creator. If art is like vomit then that initial round of validation is absent.

This.

A videogame AI[1] (the AI itself; we're not talking about its developers here) in a FPS being invincible with omniscience and perfect accuracy, at most makes me think "nice".

But a flawed meaty human with enough skill to be the best human at that same game, makes me think "wtf is this witchcraft", with full respect and acknowledgment, and I'll have way more interest in them than in the perfect omniscient flawless AI.

[1]: Yes, I know here "AI" is not used in the same sense as in the article. The point still stands.

I think there are two kind of AI uses.

I as an artist can come up with an idea want to archive and then use AI tools to reach it or an artist is completely cut out of the loop.

I don't believe that the later can be called an art or even a creation. It is just a patterned noise and more of it is produced the more noisy our environment becomes.

I don't think I agree with that. "A for effort"? Who cares if someone spent time on something, if the result isn't good? They wasted their time, which is their problem; but they shouldn't waste mine as well to compensate for that.

There are even artists who don't actually make anything: they formulate an idea and then commission craftsmen to produce what they imagined. While the resulting oeuvre involves some degree of effort by someone, that someone isn't the artist themselves; this is quite similar to AI.

Now, there's something to be said for scarcity. If producing something becomes so easy that anyone can output anything, then sure it may become a problem.

Yet the history of the arts is in many ways a history of explosion, and the number of things produced did not kill art. Often, it invented new art forms.

Baudelaire had this to say about photography in 1865:

> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. (…) it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

I think he was dead wrong.

Photography may have influenced painting and force it into non-figurative territories (or it may have gone there by itself), but 1/ painting in general, even figurative painting, survived, 2/ photography became a new art form, and 3/ if abundance of photography did in fact, eventually, devalue the work of professional photographers, it didn't block the existence of great photographic art.

Not an 'A for effort' but 'effort for initial validation'. It shouldn't lead to automatic approval but zero effort is less of a signal than some effort and probably a weaker signal than 'a lot of effort' assuming the basic skills are present.

Photography is interesting because it has very subtle parallels with for instance painting. One of the more interesting ones to me is that it ranges the gamut from 'technical documentation' through 'personal memento' all the way up to very high end art. The big thing missing in photography is spirituality, which arguably was the driver (and often the patron in a financial sense) of lots of great art in paint.

One of my very favorite pieces of visual art is just some text painted on a canvas taken from a review of some of the artist's other work. It probably took her maybe ten minutes to put together.

You have to care to put in effort, but effort isn't the core of art.

So what if humans make a lot of not especially interesting art. More art is good! You can choose what you connect with.

Now you need to define what a unique, profound emotion is.

And you need to define great execution.

And you need to explain why intentionally having poor execution couldn't express a unique, profound emotion. On Radiohead's biggest hit Creep "That's the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up. He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song."

At the end of the day it's always going to seem all subjective and a matter of opinion. Because it's too hard to pinpoint the objective part of what we are doing when we decide what's great and what's garbage. If there even is an objective part.

That true? Haven't heard that story

Quick google and found this[0] - fun little read so far

[0] https://www.theringer.com/2021/11/17/22785868/radiohead-cree...

Ha! Great article, thanks

Hm. It was before the 20th century maybe. People knew of artists by name, not by their social life and sex tapes. The pop culture paraphilia is a very recent thing.

You're claiming that gossip and hero worship and celebrity didn't exist before the 20th century which is a wild claim that you'd need to back up with evidence. Humans haven't changed that much over the centuries.

..but our ability to communicate quickly and broadly has.

That doesn't validate the claim.

Picasso died an inflation adjusted billionaire.

Like most things I read outside programming on this board, it is people talking out their ass about things they don't know much about but they think they do because they are well paid to write javascript.

What does it mean "becoming commodified"? And how it relates to art?

I think it differentiates "uniquely created by a single soul" vs "mass-produced standardized item"

Popularity is only relevant for making money;

Previously it was also a way of showing it to others in a way of a filter, also it was so crazy creating new 'styles'.

But this time is over.

We are in a Post art discovery face. I have not really seen (at least not regular) something totally/complelty/utterly new in art.

But thats good. The search space is much deeper now, art is much more accessable.

Most K-POP, reggaeton or even Pop music hits in general wouldn't be so popular if popularity was based on quality.

We are already there- take a gander at the latest Grammy nominees. It's about to get a whole lot worse.

I would argue spotify is more consequential than a new tool generate music then. Spotify et al commodify the access to very obscure and niche music so people are now much more able to access or express themselves with whatever they want.

Maybe punk music was partly a consequence of mass media pop and rock music for these reasons too.

I think this is fanastic. I just read an article where Vince Clark talks about using 1 finger to program his synthesizer and he's written some of the best pop songs.

Imagine the talent AI assisted music programs will unlock. I think it will be a new instrument people learn to play.

Art is going to become less about creating beauty, and more about transmitting information.

could you elaborate more on that statement and how you envision the future of art? sounds interesting

It's an intuition biased on my own preferences, and a bit of a "Misnomer" because ideas can also be beautiful, but:

IF we assume that:

1. "Beautiful" (nice "looking" / "sounding" / "moving" things) things will be easy to create.

2. "Meaningful" things are, and will continue to be, harder to create.[A]

Then it seems that the only thing that could differentiate you is the quality of your ideas, and the meaning you are transmitting.

Put another way -- if everyone can create "Beautiful" things by default (in the world of static art, we live here now!) then why choose one piece of art over another?

This is my intuition about it, at least.

-----

[A]: I think this is just a fundamental property of "meaningful" things. They require more computation, which means more scarcity.

> 9 artists ... who have chosen to collaborate in this experiment and work with us to shape the future of AI in music

I really hope it's not google that drives the future of AI in music.

They will be if people let them.

I'm guessing Charlie Puth is getting some revenue share.

This would be like 50x more cool if that example UI you scroll down to was real and live and embedded on the page.

Yeah. How do we use this? I assume since it's Google it's yet another announcement of a technology that they invented but only a few special people will be able to play with.

I'd like a version of this that can do MIDI, like the next generation Band-in-a-box.

Because musicians haven't been hurt badly enough already by big tech

I never want to hear this stuff but you know they're going to make it available for every content junkie publishing hype beast low effort mouth open consumer product placement having youtuber so it's going to be forced into your ear holes at some point. I hate google so much.

Yet another tool from Google that's closed. No model, no code, no real details. You can't even run the model today.

Google continues to live in the darkest timeline when it comes to ai and ml.

I certainly hope this will fail, but because it's part of YouTube and thus part of their main advertising goal, it probably won't.

Google is living the innovator dilemma on steroids at the moment because Google Search + ads are so profitable everything else is a second thought and Google does not even bother to release stuff that they are developing.

Yet another reason why we should be skeptical about AI and stop these companies from accelerating their monopoly of markets using it. The only way that AI can be good is if we all have equal opportunity to participate in the revolution. Otherwise, we will come to reside in an increasingly technofuedalist state where all smaller businesses are required to pay a tax to exist to the large companies who have their super secret AI models on massive servers that nobody with less capital can compete with, and the average worker will become totally obsolete and destitute.

Reminds me of magenta/ddsp - vaporware.

They're just making headlines for shareholders. It's fine.

Google AI can't even produce proper subtitles yet for youtube.

I hate this much less than I thought I would. It seems great for prototyping. My kids would love it. If you're trying to make a finished track, you're going to want to jump some of the rails the AI puts in place, and at the end of the day, the map is not the territory, so someone will need to be able to make the exact sounds and music that you want, unless you are willing to go with whatever the AI puts out there. I anticipate this is more than just a toy, but still confined to something like a genre of music, albeit one that could eat most of the industry (see rock vs classical).

Did they release it? If not, then it's because it sucks, not because they care about "safety".

Google doesn't care about safety. It's exceptionally naive to think that a company that pulls in this kind of money to ever think about safety. They only pay lip service to it to keep their legal department happy. They are leeches.

How can I use Lyria?

I might have a different take, but the introduction of ChatGPT last year actually prompted me to dive head first into learning an instrument aided also by a fantastic live performance by Yo-Yo Ma.

In one interview I watched, Yo-Yo said he strived to play pieces perfect until his 20s when in the middle of a concert he realized he was playing perfectly and it was boring. From that moment he decided to dedicate his musical performances to making a connection with the audience. His concert was incredible to experience a room of 1000 people all having their seats shaken by a human being bowing a string without any electronics involved. People were getting drawn in, then jumping back, and getting transported outside the physical. Hard to describe.

And that was when i realized that no matter how perfect a computer plays, humans will always want to hear other humans play. We have had player pianos for over a century and not to mention a long history of sculptures that play music and even now you can get a virtually unlimited amount of extremely high quality near perfect replication recording of the best performances out there.

But still, I just went to buy tickets to a classical music event on a monday night to a solo concert by a not-famous player that each seat cost around $100 and they were sold out.

For me personally, learning an instrument has been a tremendous experience. Even the interaction with my teacher gives me weekly human contact that has become scarce in the post-covid world filled with remote work.

Spending months of practice just to play a song poorly is actually an incredibly freeing and humbling experience. I had my recital with a bunch of people watching me, where I messed up, I played out of tune, but it was an incredible flood of human connection that i never really had prior.

I think worrying about AI taking over music is overblown. Unless the music is going to be generated to manipulate people somehow, but the reality is that in 100 years people will still crave live performances. Just like for the past 100 years, paradoxically, the access and lowered barriers of entry, has actually increased accessed to classical and live performances. People complaining that people today don’t like “music with passion” anymore are living in some fairytale land where they imagine every single person 200 years ago was skipping down to the opera house. The reality was that 200 years ago access to music was incredibly limited and most people only experienced it in church context. If that (rural churches had a lot less going on musically).

People will always crave to see other humans’ accomplishments. Music, paintings, etc are not just an end product, but the more you understand the difficulties and journey of the person producing it, the deeper your appreciation becomes.

After a lot of thinking, I have come to a conclusion that expresses me personally, so feel free to disagree if you like:

The human being was not created to be deprived of the right to express his feelings through fine arts. From the moment you deprive me of the right to express myself as I feel through external as well as internal stimuli and you want to replace me with an insensitive mechanism that neither feels nor has judgment like a human being, then everyone will become cynical and unsmiling and all they will lose their meaning.

Nodoby forbids you to create art for the sake of art however you want, be it by recording instruments, making stuff in FL Studio, mixing meme samples or using AI.

If you want to be competitive in music production industry you have to be somewhat economically effective as in any industry and AI will raise economical effectiveness to the whole new level.

Totally agree. Fuck off google.

This is becoming Reddit. Please continue.

You are not being deprived of any rights. You just don't have them exclusively. Make music, or don't. Up to you. Either way, there will be machines also making music. So, what?

How are people going to become professional musicians if it stops being a career?

Plenty of people make music for fun while having other careers. A lot of the masterpiece painters did it for passion and lived in poverty (I'm not saying that is good, but clearly a career is not necessary for great results).

Sure but most renowned artists had the time to become really skilled because they could dedicate all their time to it. If no one wants to pay humans for art any more, how will that happen?

People pay a lot of thing much higher because they are less perfectly made by humans. All the time.

Then become politically active and make sure we have a strong safety net with healthy labor rights that allow everyone to have ample free time. You don't ban music production software.

You can never reach a high proficiency of playing a musical instrument if you have another career. It takes an insane amount of practice.

Becoming a professional musician isn't a "right" of any kind. You don't have a "right" to be paid to do anything you want. You're certainly allowed to do it (barring outright criminal activity), but don't expect to be entitled to monetary compensation.

Plenty of musicians make money doing live performances. Since Spotify, record sales are just not a great revenue stream any more. I don't see AI impacting this much. But of course there are going to be some musicians that specialize in background music or other forms of, relatively, low value music work that are going to be affected by this.

Why would I go see a jazz band made of 20something year olds when I can just go into youtube and hear all the masters in the comfort of my bedroom?

Oh, maybe because watching live music is a different experience. Maybe because being the best is not as important as simply doing something most people can't do.

Funny thing is, when you go to shows of people who are not yet professional musicians but might be studying, might be in a band with their friends and so on... most of the people who attend these shows are their friends and also other musicians. Most musicians are not professional musicians.

Strange question. Tautology they can't. But AI will be better than humans everywhere so why is this one different

But the question is if this is your passion why is being a hobbyist not enough. If there are no limitations of what you can be/do as a hobbyist

Being a professional musician is already a fraught career with low rates of success. This is even more true if you exclude people that are working with modern digital systems. Not a lot of jobs available for orchestral musicians, for example.

But there still are people making art with older techniques. There is a greater variety of art being made today than ever before in history. The development of new techniques has made art richer rather than poorer. Yes, the most commercially focused art chooses techniques based on price (far cheaper for a single person to stack synths than to pay a full orchestra) but that's okay.

Hip hop and electronic music have been creating totally new things for decades without ever touching a physical instrument. Music didn't die, it flourished.

This is different though, because the end game of AI music isn't better music technology for musicians, but replacing musicians.

I'm worried we're going to go into a dark age where society forgets how to make truly creative new art due to lack of incentives, and the AIs won't make anything new due to lack of anything creative to train on. We'll just regurgitate the pre-AI stuff forever.

If we're fast-forwarding the tape, why not directly go to the ultimate conclusion that the end game is AI replacing humans, period?

This is not a slippery slope; new art will be created regardless of incentives and skilled people who learn to augment their craft with AI will probably create better works of art.

Why is it different? I don't see how any of the incentives go away here.

Because previously if you honed your skills as a musician there was a chance that you could do it for a living, so there was another incentive to get better. Electronic tools just facilitated human creativity, but the random listener couldn't sit down with a synth or a DAW and just press a button to get music out. But if all the money drops out of the music industry because the consumers can auto-generate unlimited music, how will that work?

Furthermore, generate music based on music you created. They're alienating the labor of the musician then using it to drive that musician ut of their livelihoods. I feel like pro-AI people constantly miss this point with inane quips about the printing press. Artists created all the value and get none of the reward.

You could make the same argument against recordings (and people did). It would take away jobs from the musicians. Yet, 136 years later and people are still creating music and playing instruments.

I think it may be worth asking if social media has the capability to deprive a subset of people of living a peaceful life, because of its mental health effects. It is the users' choice to stop using social media, but they don't, maybe because their friends are all their and it drags them back into the orbit of algorithmic timelines and depression. Is it simply a matter of saying "up to them" to stop using?

Now imagine in a group of people you share a hand-crafted song but one of your friends who isn't as interested in producing music takes your song as inspiration and creates something that sounds better. Imagine they aren't even trying to do this to intentionally one-up you; they think of it as the same kind of sharing and creation. You may disagree but their definition of self-expression differs, and it's difficult to change people. But this happens consistently and the bar is raised ever higher each time.

How well someone handles this kind of scenario depends on mindset. Is the joy in being better than others, or pursuing the craft and learning things, or sharing in the experience in consumption? People will have different values. But I think the bias in AI is for people to focus on the end result without needing to put in a lot of effort.

It's the entire selling point of these products - taking out the effort in getting a high-quality result. Yet the effort spent on human art isn't wasted effort. The effort doesn't just go towards the finished price, but to the satisfaction of the artist themselves. It stimulates their neurobiology. And in a lot of tutorials for hand-crafted art, the mindset taught is to focus on the process and not the end result. Generative art contradicts that bit of knowledge, and it could cause dissonance.

In Stanisław Lem's story about the electronic bard, the existence of the impeccable poetry-generating robot does not directly deprive the poets of their ability to create their own poems. Instead, after perceiving the generated work to be higher quality than anything they're capable of writing, the poets become depressed and commit suicide.

You could say the poets didn't have the right mindset of how to approach life, but I think it raises a good point. It's the mental state of people who create and how society views these tools that matters. You will always have the ability to put pencil to paper regardless of what big technology does, but will you want to if you think the rest of the world has moved on without you?

I think maybe in modern times the effect will be closer to: artists scale back or give up their craft because the potential audiences vote with their wallets and attention spans for people who rent server farms. It's the despair at seeing the public valuing the end-result over the human element in a broader cultural sense. It's feeling as if a piece of yourself is being lost in an eternal void.

And it's the idea that generative models could become a fundamental part of society. Billboards are generated because those cause the most successful ad campaigns. People hold massive music festivals exclusively made of generative synth lines because they attract the crowds. The taste of your drink is algorithmically modeled with ingredients adjusted for the best product-market fit possible.

What stops these people in their tracks is perceiving the world as one that values the machine over the human, and even if you value the human, you still have to get in line with the machine - everyone else is doing it. Generative models could retrain our value systems.

It's not so much what generative models take away than how they change the public's perception of art itself. It is the depression and mindset changes that come with knowing the poetry-robot will be there for all eternity.

Older forms of thinking become outdated, some which may be considered virtuous or delicately intertwined with the human spirit, and this causes anguish and despair at the state of things, and the ever-improving army of poetry robots that sees no end in sight. Because we haven't put an end state on improving technology, and I think deep down some of us believe there was never meant to be such an end state in the future. We would have to spin terms like degrowth and Luddism into something more palatable to have any chance of creating one.

This tool will help people who're not musically trained to express themselves musically.

Its not self expression when something else does the expressing.

It's almost like the peak form of being a consumer. All you have to do is express your desire in a sophisticated (maybe even not sophisticated?) way, and you can easily pay a device to fulfill it on the cheap.

Machines cannot express, as far as I know. They're sophisticated tools but still tools.

If someone feels these tools help them express what they want, if they are satisfied, I would call that a form of self-expression. I mean, who am I to deny them that feeling?

this is getting philosophical, but maybe humans are sophisticated tools

A director directing the orchestra...

Case: I create a painting. When it's done I say: "yes, this represents how I feel, and I want to share it."

Case: I create a painting with a prompt and when it's done I say: "yes, this represents how I feel, and I want to share it."

What's the difference?

That you created a prompt, not a painting.

I like your answer. I also didn't create the prompt if we're going down that road. I just spoke.

I think you enjoy twisted arguments too much for me to continue this conversation.

This 100%. I'm amazed that people somehow are unable to distinguish between the craftsmanship of a painting, and writing a prompt that an external system uses to paint.

What I always emphasize is that if the input and output are sufficiently divergent then your sense of accomplishment at the resulting creation should be proportionally diminished. But what do I know? People use ChatGPT to write a story and midjourney to illustrate it, then make a viral post with the caption "I just wrote a book in under 24 hours."

It is the act, how that experience shapes us.

Have you ever told someone you code and they say "I have an idea for an app!", proceeding to explain in like one sentence the vague idea of an app? Would you call that person a creative? An engineer? An inventor? An entrepreneur? Do you really ever feel that they added any value to you? Do you not find them incredibly naïve? If you did create the app, do you feel like they did 90% of the work of creating this app, because the rest of the process is that meaningless? If you created it from their one line prompt of their idea, would you agree with the concept that the final result was actually all a direct expression of their idea?

The difference is clearly massive.

I like playing video games with a computer. I also like playing music with a computer.

I've learned far quicker playing chess against an AI than I would have playing against humans. And yet I still really enjoy playing against humans too. In fact the experience playing against humans is richer thanks to a deeper understanding of the game that came from AI.

Your argument is along the same lines as arguing electric guitar is lifeless when compared to the non-machine acoustic version. When what really matters is who is operating the machine. AI is just another tool. It will be used in insensitive mechanical ways and in ways that deeply enrich our lives.

I have hard time believing that you can learn quicker playing chess against AI. Humans can explain ideas behind their moves, their long term plans and their position evaluation. That what chess coaches will explain you and that's what you can read in chess books. Computer has hard time explaining his moves, has no notion of long-term plan and it's position evaluation is often useless for beginner or intermediate chess players (like evaluating position as a draw while one side has to do a series of very precise moves to achieve equality, which is a clearly lost position for a non-grandmaster player).

You can play with the computer forever unlike with a human

You can play with humans forever online. There isn't a lack of people willing to play.

Will those players analyze and rate your moves like a chess engine will? Will they name common opening strategies for you so you can research them in books? Will they let you take back several moves to explore different lines?

AI can do that to a game you play against humans.

Yeah, I've used that a lot. Yet another example of how AI engines can help you learn quicker.

Some of what you are claiming is false. Most chess AIs for example can identify almost every opening move in existence. Something no human can do. That's a type of position evaluation, and a good starting point for further research. No free coach is going to sit for 4 hours straight, 5 days a week, playing thousands of games exploring variations of a particular opening. That kind of self-study will definitely help you become a better player. Humans just aren't willing to be that opponent, especially to a beginner and not for free.

Also I'm not claiming you can learn quicker by exclusively using AI. I'm claiming you can learn quicker by adding it to your set of tools. Human coaches and books are other tools you can or should use.

Even the some of the best chess players in the world are now using AI opponents to explore new ideas.

Chess engines are very important for grandmasters, for sure. But for beginners they are mostly useless. That’s what I was arguing about.

Regarding openings - the best place to learn are books/studies/even Wikipedia articles that explain the ideas behind the major moves and variations, which chess engines don’t do. Also, a human can explain which opening are good to play at your skill level and which are not.

Regarding free coaches, playing with a friend/relative over the board and discussing the game afterwards has a similar effect.

Chess engines aren't useless for beginners. That's an empty claim and is as easily dismissed as it was made.

I gave a list of reasons why a chess engine is good for learning. Refute those as a start.

Here's another reason: an AI engine will point out illegal moves, and patiently over hundreds of games in your home. A free coach isn't going to come to your house and do that.

Neither will most friends or relatives. People get bored and move on.

> I have hard time believing that you can learn quicker playing chess against AI.

I’d be more inclined to agree if everyone learned the same way, but we don’t. What works for you may not work as well for others.

For me and music, for example, I learn best by hearing and playing by ear. If I want to learn a song, it’s usually a good bit of time with me playing and rewinding, pausing, playing, pausing, rewinding, etc. I can read sheet music, but the process is woefully slow and not fun for my brain. I could watch someone teach me each part, but that also sounds boring, and I feel I learn better through my own method of trial and error because my brain has to work out the nuances - “was that a hammer-on? Was there a slide transition there? That sounds like a permutation of an earlier chord instead of a direct reuse of it! Etc”

Being able to play against AI may be just as valuable for person A to learn as playing against a human would be for person B. To suggest one is strictly superior to the other, in all cases, is very black and white thinking that doesn’t fit how people work.

Don't underestimate a well-timed "Eureka!" moment in terms of learning.

Yeah it depends how you look at it.

Using the "journey metaphor", for some people what matters is the destination; for others what matters is the journey itself; for others what matters is the person doing it; and for others any combination of those.

The target audience for most generative stuff is mostly people who are looking at "the destination".

To quote from 1984:

> The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the distance, a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

Part of me worries that I am just gatekeeping.

However to me, the point of music was that its meant to put across something personal, human and emotional. Even when its a cover. Whether its a protest song, or shouting about taking someone to a gay bar. To automate that away, what does that do to us culturally?

So much of our identity comes from shared art. Emos liked emo music (you know with the shouty backing singer), goths went for death metal or the cure. Indie twats waxed lyrical about how heroine was great for the libertines.

All of that shared (mostly bullshit) memory is going to disappear, so what will bring us together, unite groups of kids with a shared like of x? Will it matter?

I worry that all the things I enjoy doing are being automated away. Perhaps this is what the weavers felt like when they were replaced with powered looms. Or cabinet makers felt when they saw steam powered power tools that sparked the arts and crafts movement[1]

I also frankly worry about how my kids are going to make money.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement#Criti...

> I also frankly worry about how my kids are going to make money.

Then seriously start thinking about which politicians are going to support a future where fewer and fewer jobs are being done by humans. UBI, healthcare for everyone, access to housing etc are all things that can and should be done already. The more that work is automated away, the more crucial these become.

We should be striving for a “Jetsons future” where complaining about a long work day means being in the office for two hours.

I wish to subscribe to your Post-Scarcity Party newsletter.

It also makes me wonder about agriculture.

It's difficult to envision a post-scarcity future where food production is still manual-intensive. Mandatory picking service, as a civic obligation? And there are a lot of food types that require manual picking.

UBI would therefore effectively end production of those types of food. (E.g. more grain, less fruit)

Also, the inter-national implications of some UBI countries while others aren't...

UBI would likely only be enough for the barest of necessities of survival. Gardening in an empty lot would be an obvious way to supplement that income, with the same benefits of a gym membership.

The point of UBI is that via automation and reduction in cheap energy, opportunities for useful economic activity will be harder to find. In the best case, most people would have a mixture of reliable but marginal income (gardening) and high-potential but risky activity (inventing) with UBI allowing enough security to make crime a bad proposition.

> In the best case…

Why is that the best case? In my “best case”, all of everyone’s needs are met, people pick and grow more intense crops because they want to, artists just enjoy making art, and “income” from work just isn’t really a thing anymore. My best case is everyone has what they need and can access what they want.

It would require a lot of strong social structres. Because a lot of important tasks (like maintaining the floor cleaning equipment in the robot-tractor tyre factory) just really isnt that interesting but still needs to be done. I can see ways motivation can come from others. I'd argue my motivation to persist in my work isn't (directly) because of the money I am paid but rather due to social effects of my colleagues, and the money only contributed to building up this colleague social structure in the first place (alongside the potential value our work brings being an almost equally powerful motivator)

keeping these things going when people lose interest will be a challenge.

> a lot of important tasks (like maintaining the floor cleaning equipment in the robot-tractor tyre factory) just really isnt that interesting but still needs to be done

In a heavily AI-oriented future, why wouldn't that be done by the floor-cleaning robot?

the robot would be the equipment. Someone needs to maintain it, and it wont be very exciting

Why would a human be taking the job of the general-purpose maintenance robot (which maintain each other, before you ask)?

Some people do a job for the pride of it because it must be done. I wouldn't want to be a plumber, but that doesn't mean there aren't plumbers who take pride in doing it. Same with the floor cleaner at the robot-tractor tyre factory.

Though I suspect on a long enough timeline, that job will be automated too and UBI will become a "here's a [weekly|monthly] stipend to live life on, but it's not too much to act truly foolish with."

I would say your best case requires technological advances that won't necessarily happen. In a truly postscarcity future I don't think we'd have any use for UBI. I do think UBI would help empower everyone to work on hard problems in a way that maximizes our odds of getting there, but I'm envisioning it existing alongside scarcity. We're just thinking about very different scales of time.

illegal immigration and migratant issues are already a huge problem. it's less about how good it is in modernized countries, and more about how shit it is in crappy countries. UBI may push that a little more, but it's nothing new.

Food production being manually intensive today isn't going to be the case forever. There are lots of innovations happening in ag-tech that continue to reduce the need for humans in the loop * laser precise weeding * drone flyovers + image detection for keeping tabs on the land without going out there * purpose built harvesters that could eventually be driven by an autonomous agent

Manual picking is not so bad if you're only trying to meet your own needs, rather than trying to make a living at it; my family used to visit "u-pick" farms when I was a kid, and we could easily collect all the fruit we would need for a year in a few hours of work. My mother spent far more time canning and preserving it all than we ever did picking it.

Perhaps this idyllic post-scarcity future would include networks of community orchards, akin to the "p-patch" garden system we have in Seattle.

It'll be curious if season-shifting / preserving methods will come back.

Much of international industrial farming seems geared towards "anything, anytime."

Not being able to get fruit in spring, but retaining access during seasonally appropriate periods, wouldn't be the worst outcome.

> UBI, healthcare for everyone, access to housing etc are all things that can and should be done already. The more that work is automated away, the more crucial these become.

This is going to require taxation. Maybe a wealth tax ? Maybe fed-level Georgism ?

I suspect it'll mostly go the other way where UBI really means just shelter and food.

UBI [1] is a pre-industrial era concept. The world inflation-adjusted GDP has grown from basically 500B to 100T [2]; like it's a pretty hard sell that you can't get UBI (as envisioned pre-telephones) to work with a 200x increase.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income#16th_ce... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...

Sadly, I think UBI covering shelter and food is optimistic. If the past is any indicator UBI just means a rent increase and we hand over our UBI to the landlords.

Would we still have landlords in a post-scarcity future? Surely if all wealth is being generated by AIs, it's the end of capitalism.

Even if we introduced UBI today, this doesn't make much sense. It wouldn't mean everyone just gets more cash because tax would have to rise to compensate.

I think you're imagining that landlords would think, "oh everyone is getting an extra 100 zorkmids a month, so I can raise rents by 100 zorkmids". But it couldn't work like that because the cash has to come from somewhere; what would actually happen is that someone receiving 100 zorkmids in benefits now gets 100 zorkmids in UBI, and someone who was paying 100 zorkmids in tax now pays 200 zorkmids in tax and gets 100 zorkmids in UBI.

Most of today's popular music is heavily computer based.

Previous musicians said the same things, electric guitars are not musical instruments, synthesizers have no soul, music made on computer DAWs is artificial and of no value, ....

The kids will embrace 100% AI generated music, the parents will be "they don't make music like they used to", forgetting that their parents said the same things about their music.

> The kids will embrace 100% AI generated music,

Of course, because, just like in advertising, they are the main target.

One really has to love those companies protecting children. Marquis de Sade would have been proud of those companies.

Nirvana, pink floyd, metallica were also listened mainly by kids. Same with Beatles, and Elvis before that. It's always the kids who listen to what later will be called "great music".

Counterpoint: kids have generally trended towards music that expresses strong youth-centric viewpoints (rock, punk, rap, etc).

Even with AI generation, I expect the most popular music will still have a human viewpoint behind it.

Problem is, AI will understand/emulate human viewpoint better than any human could. It's just a matter of continuing to optimize.

We'll see. I expect youth vernacular (and its mutation rate) will prove an extremely challenging domain for AI.

But maybe someone will crack it! God knows it's worth enough money.

Sure, AI songs will be about love and Gucci belts.

There is also dance music which arguably has no viewpoint (considering it has almost zero lyrics).

I think Max Tegmark said there's 3 main camps of people talking about AI:

1. The people who think AI won't really work (at least in some fundamental way - it might make some stochastic melody but it won't have any creative spark to it).

2. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be great.

3. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be terrible.

4. The people who think AI will be able to do some things better than humans and that this will be great.

I think the point is there is no technical "better" in arts. Otherwise painting wouldn't have moved past photorealism and in music we wouldn't have got punk, grunge, lo-fi, screamed vocals... Like I can literally go in tear listening to a singer going slightly out of tune due to the emotions of connecting with another human being. The point is transmitting emotions. AI will be better when you need something generic, consensual, in the current zeitgeist, and mass produced and consumed. It will never replace a human performing by definition.

4. The people who think that AI will be able to do everything worse than humans, but at an acceptable enough level for executives, and it's far cheaper than even outsourcing work to other countries.

The trajectory of the last 10 years has been that the quality of the human experience will go down so the people at the top can make more money, and AI fits perfectly into this narrative.

If any arbitrary job becomes trivially easy, what's the monetary value in the work?

If everyone's job becomes trivially easy, how do we all eat?

That's just either 2 or 3 except said hypothetical executive isn't so bright.

People used to say that this will never be accepted, especially in high stakes areas like driving a car, but then we saw how it works in the real world.

> Most of today's popular music is heavily computer based.

Hence my worry that I am gatekeeping.

For example in 2007, making good sounding music required at least a studio. If you wanted to record 4 microphones at the same time, you needed expensive hardware.

Doing any kind of music editing required a huge machine and expensive software with expensive plugins.

Now I can mix and apply effects in real time to 24 tracks and have a video reference. With this I can add a track by humming out a line.

I'm less worried about "music like they used too" modern music has always, and will always be shit, according to old people.

> For example in 2007, making good sounding music required at least a studio. If you wanted to record 4 microphones at the same time, you needed expensive hardware. Doing any kind of music editing required a huge machine and expensive software with expensive plugins.

A lot of people point to Garageband (released 2004) as having a big democratizing effect on digital audio production. I think v2 in 2005 supported recording 8 tracks simultaneously. Not an especially sophisticated tool (and arguably responsible for the built-in loops being heard in way too many popular songs), but a big change at a time when the alternative might have been a computer with ProTools and dedicated PCI cards.

https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/apple-garageband-m...

What you said was true about 2001. I'm not so sure about 2007 though. For $1000 you could have bought 4 decent condenser microphones and an audio interface for them. And for another $1000 a medium-high computer.

Arguably not that expensive, considering that you probably already had a computer and you could split the audio hardware costs between the 4 band members (otherwise why 4 microphones)

Software and plugins were indeed expensive, but there were plenty of free alternatives of decent quality. Reaper, FruityLoops were pretty cheap and quite good for the basics.

tbh, in 2007 you had blog house and other borderline lo-fi electronic genres. before that you had 8-track 909-loop house music. It doesn't _necessarily_ require a studio, though I can't argue it helps.

If you squint hard enough anything might look any other thing, that doesn't mean that AI generated music can be compared to conventional tools that help you to create music.

> The kids will embrace 100% AI generated music

Watching the music scene over my 50+ years has taught me that music is often as much a reaction to current music scenes as much as it is anything else.

I think it's just as likely the kids will go zydeco or jug band — start finding the equivalent of washtubs and washboards to make music.

Maybe. I don’t think technology in music is a bad thing. I enjoy pushing limits and non-transitional elements. I love music that upends expectations and may even be grating to listen to for most people. I enjoy music made with synths, plugins, and effects (analog and digital).

But more and more, I’m finding I don’t enjoy newer music, not because it scares me or I find it to be racket, like earlier generations said of mine.

Instead, I find newer music to be boring and devoid of life. Zero dynamics. Hearing the same few guitar and drum plugins. Rigidly mechanical tempos and tone correction. It’s just dull and boring.

A lot of this is poor execution. Maybe some of it is changes in how we listen to music. A lot, not all, of new music feels like content instead of art, mashed through a template for ease of production. Yes - that’s something that’s been done through the history of recorded music. But the uniformity gives everything a generic feel that used to be reserved for the most bubblegum of pop music.

> Part of me worries that I am just gatekeeping.

The abhorrence of "gatekeeping" may be my least favorite cultural trends of the last decade. Gatekeeping is often desirable. Expertise is a good thing. Specialization is a good thing. Communities based around shared interests and values are a good thing.

I think you're missing my point. I'm acutely aware that I might be wrong, and gatekeepers tend to be the type of people that belittle other people because they feel threatened by newcomers trying to join in.

> Expertise is a good thing. Specialization is a good thing

yes! that's a standard of quality. To be a good x you need to pass this quality bar. I don't think that's really gatekeeping. Gatekeeping, well the way I see it, is someone dismissing someone else based on parameters unrelated to the matter at hand. "you can't understand x if you didn't do y" Hence why me dismissing AI generated backing tracks not being "real music" because its not made by "real musicians" could be read as gatekeeping.

> Communities based around shared interests and values are a good thing.

Also yes! But thats not a reason to be hostile to newcomers.

Yes arts will be impacted by AI.

Added to my article on economics of LLM's: https://open.substack.com/pub/rakkhi/p/economics-of-large-la...

> Any content published by our Lyria model will be watermarked

What is the purpose of marking AI content? I don't really understand. Should we mark content edited in GIMP or Audacity as well?

Because it undermines all human achievement to allow one company with their close source AI model to devalue all other products in the market at a speed previously unprecedented to man and honestly incomprehensible (could take literally less than hours), without us being able to monitor it.

What are you scared of?

Humans becoming basically obsolete and our whole system of society collapsing allowing only the owners of closed source AI systems on incredibly expensive servers to make money, throwing the rest of us into destitution.

Wow, AI really will democratize music creating. This is an awesome way for people to translate their ideas to music without needing to be privileged enough to get violin or guitar lessons.

I see a future where we all make our own music and share it freely with family and friends. This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit. This will still happen of course but at least we'll have another option.

This is sarcasm right?

You don't think this will lower the barrier of entry for music creation?

NO, it will lower the barrier for music generation, which is different from CREATION, which implies a creative act.

I think you're looking at this wrong. If I have an idea for a song I my head, I could record myself humming or sining it. While it might represent a thought, feeling or experience it's not going to be very pleasant. With AI, I will be able to transform it into something enjoyable. That is creation and not just generation.

Between someone that generated music from ideas, and someone that spent time and thinking and practicing to refine and these ideas, each will not relate the same to the end result. If only because the latter will know which happy/sad accidents made it to the end, and which did not, based on a specific judgement, or moment.

I've already done both. Generators are only good to produce specific ideas to integrate sometimes, at most.

It's exactly the same difference between writing your own novel, and getting it written by a text generator. You don't relate to the story, and to the characters, the same way. You may not even _explain_ them the same way.

But you can use AI and still refine these ideas. The entry is just easier.

On a walk -> Idea -> hum melody into website -> listen if that is something that floats your goat. And then you can follow the traditional way of midi keyboard + daw or however you produce.

Missing the point. The vast majority of uses for this will be music generation for profit:

const song = generateSong() const royalties = Spotify.Publish(song) Bank.getRoyalties(royalties)

You have to think of this like a typewriter or a word document. It is mostly used for profit. And profit always wins over anything else

Did you reply to me? I'm the OP of this comment tread so it's not me who is missing the point at all. In the context of my original post, AI in music will be a barrier to entry for _creation_. It is not relevant how Spotify use AI in music.

Why is it creative to

hum a melody -> match in daw -> work on it creative

but hum -> AI generation -> work on it in daw is not?

It's your conjecture that using AI tools doesn't involve a creative act. That conjecture may be true inside your mind, but so far you haven't provided support for it through your words - all you did was scream into the void as if everyone who doesn't agree with your conjecture is mad.

That's not the point that I find sarcastic, but whole rest of it. Yes it lowers the barrier of entry, don't think anyone can disagree with that.

The entry for music creation is really not high.

It first resides in your own, personal, self appreciation: do you feel yourself legitimate to sing, to play, to say something, for yourself, or to present to others?

That's the only valid question.

The rest, all the rest, comes from that. And it does not require to be complicated or complex or clever music at this point.

Sure, you may start with the practice, with the education, the experimentation, if you have not answered for yourself that first question, you won't create/play music or songs, you'll just apply a rulebook.

Then, another totally different question may be, can you find a way to get a sufficient revenue from that activity. But that's another question still.

It's not sarcasm. If you expand your short comment I can address it.

I'm sorry, but we've had the other option for hundreds of years. Playing an instrument or using your voice to make pleasant sounds isn't rocket science.

What “privilege” is required to learn to play guitar? Was Jimmy Hendrix privileged? Robert Johnson?

People get caught up in their lives.

There are a million things you _wanted_ to do that you'll never get to do. And that's unfair.

This gives me the eerie feeling of a future in which we let AI do all fun, creative things, thereby freeing up spare time in which we don't need to learn to play guitar anymore, giving us more hours to spend on work.

Shouldn't we aim for a future that is the exact opposite of this?

> giving us more hours to spend on work

What work?

There is no future without work outside books, movies, and daydreams.

How caught up can you get that somehow using your built-in and free instruments (see human voice and hands/feet for percussion) or a cheap $50 guitar/uke is a privilege but having an internet connection and a modern smartphone that can run this kind cutting edge software is not?

This comment tree is discussing how AI will provide a new way to music creation. Cheap smart phones are seen in poorer countries and communities. In the future, there will be models that run on these types of phones locally. They might not be the state of the art models at the time but they will be available.

If we assume the above to be correct then the "cheap" guitar is an additional cost whereas the AI music model isn't. In addition, guitar lessons cost money and spending time practicing is harder for some people than others due to their circumstances.

I disagree. It makes me cherish what I DO do, and the choices I make become more impactful to me because of it.

How about "AI will further democratize music"? Anyone can make music today, but ask any musician and they'll be mindblown by the idea that they can hum a melody and immediately generate a sax/percussion track matching it.

You can learn to play the guitar, and buy a guitar, but it's very hard and expensive to also learn the 3-4 other instruments you need to make a full song. (my brother learned both the guitar and percussions; this took a lot of time and was quite expensive, if he had a tool like this he would probably focus on the guitar and just rely on this to generate a background track)

I learnt to play 3 (serious) instruments during my lifetime. Guitar, traverse flute and piano. While I dont play any of them actively today, I would still miss the overall skills I gained from learning them. Motor coordination, memory, just to name two. If I had this AI thing back then, I probably wouldn't have learnt any of them, and missed out on a lot of side effects.

Learning something difficult is rewarding on several levels. To boil it down to just the intended outcome is a rather narrow view of the matter.

Hand and finger privilege. It's much harder to play if you don't have hands or fingers!

I know plenty of guitarists that play quite well with their feet.

Time and discipline in a busy life. For most people also money for lessons from bored teachers if you're not a one-in-a-million like Hendrix.

You need free time and money to learn to play. You then need commercial support to make it full time.

let us side step the binary "privileged" argument which is disruptive here.

The issue for us now is given that level of talent, would Hendrix, Johnson or anyone else be able to make a career in 2028? Or will it be the preserve of people with free time and money?

> an awesome way for people to translate their ideas to music without needing to be privileged enough to get violin or guitar lessons.

What gets lost in this short-circuited process is the physical involvement with an instrument, a sort of embodied cognition. I suppose profound and/or interesting musical ideas could spring from someone without such experience, I’m skeptical.

The part about privilege: a lot to unpack. I’m a professional musician in classical music. There are a lot of paths to learning one’s craft. In my own experience, privilege - at least as defined by access to resources of finance and influence wasn’t part of my training. Still there’s much to be done to broaden access in my field.

>without needing to be privileged enough to get violin or guitar lessons.

I'm not being funny but this is a poor take when the excellent guitarist Mdou Moctar learned on a guitar he built himself using the brake cables from a bike for strings. The guitar at least is not an inaccessible instrument.

Arguing a general case by pointing out a massive exception doesn't really work though.

The guitar is literally the most mass-produced instrument in human history

I was quite surprised by this. I played some guitar in my teens and a good guitar was quite an investment (mid-late nineties). My dad is a bit of a guitar collector and it is surprising what guitars he finds for ~300 Euro, quite respectable quality.

(Maybe it also has to do something with the lack of demand now, guitar music was still very popular in the 90ies.)

That agrees with my own experience.

I think the big changes that caused prices to drop was online shopping and the move to East Asian manufacturing outside of Japan. There are "store-brands" like Harley Benton that target below $150 for some instruments, the Internet is awash with positive reviews.

I'm not sure if demand has changed. Guitar music is less popular but it's much easier to learn right now.

https://reverb-res.cloudinary.com/image/upload/v1457648516/C...

> I see a future where we all make our own music

What will it mean to "make music" when the amount of necessary skill, experience and insight approaches zero?

> This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit

Unfortunately, unless we replace capitalism, this is exactly what you can expect. The veil of false corporate authenticity grows every day, you can see it in the opening sentence of this press release:

"From jazz to heavy metal, techno to opera, music is a much loved form of creative expression."

The statement, while true on the surface, takes on a different tone when you remember who the speaker is, who the audience is, and what their ultimate goal is.

I am excited as a musician to explore this coming age, and I am also deeply saddened and fearful of how things will shake out.

There are still people that appreciate watching someone play a guitar or violin or piano, or make traditional art, because the character of the artist comes through. For example, with classical pieces, each musician plays the composition a little bit differently, and so their character comes through, their soul. I don't think a machine can really replace that, because there are still people that like to listen to live artists play at a classical concert or in a coffeeshop, when that same music has been able to be composed electronically for a couple of decades now.

The problem though is that fewer and fewer people are interested in this sort of thing and more interested in generic electronic garbage background music, as others have said. Classical concerts are getting less attendance over time, there are less acoustic or live performances, etc. People altogether seem to no longer buy traditional art because they can buy prints that look good on the wall. The point of buying traditional art isn't just it looking good, because like musicians, the character of the artist and their personality comes through in the paint strokes, color choices, design, composition, etc. Which is why people close to the artist often appreciate the work even more than a stranger would (ie: your 4-old child's school drawing), because the way it's created reminds you of that person and their soul/spirit.

Not sure why I got downvoted. There's a false dichotomy here... I agree that there are really cool things with this technology, opening up a lot of possibilities for music creation for those that aren't well versed in music composition to get their ideas out. I think that's great. Just like how electronic music allowed us to have digital recordings to play the same song cheaply over and over again, and also allowed people to create great tracks with only knowledge of music composition and no need to learn an instrument.

That still doesn't change some drawbacks, which is what you lose when you do that. It's mostly an economics thing. There's value to having artisanal products over industrial ones because of the craftsmanship involved. The artist or craftsman's personal touch ends up as part of the piece. That used to be common but now it's just a high end product for rich people to afford. There's a downside to these kinds of technologies, even if they bring benefits.

Nothing wrong with traditional art. But AI is already fairly good at imitating specific artists or writers, so why not performers? Also what if a new AI performance or style develops its own character that may be valid in the same way as human performers are?

Electronic music can involve virtuousity and high levels of knowledge and skill. If you actually learnt about electronic music production you would realise that as a whole its pretty highly technical and actually requires knowledge not only of music, but actual physics (yes I mean the science) and a great command of a computer or great skill with many digital instruments.

AI music is not a continuation of the degrading of music away from the "one true music" that is classical. All types of music up until AI music have required skill to create. Being able to have a digital audio workspace on your laptop with a few presets did make it a little easier to make trash, sure. But most electronic music requires massive technical expertise in so many more fields than playing the guitar does. I know because I've learnt both.

Electronic music production requires you to master software, multiple pieces of hardware, understand the physics of waveforms deeply, understand music theory, be a composer of an entire symphony and the performer of every part of that symphony at the same time, understand sound design (which is a whole job on its own), and then learn to dj if you hope to promote your music.

Also people go to rock gigs all the time that are performed on live guitars etc so I dunno what you're on about.

A little incendiary, but I agree with the underlying sentiment. It's gonna be a coexistence thing, not a zero-sum game. The important part is not to bemoan the other side, if they like acoustic singer-songwriters or "generic electronic garbage" I mean, popular electronic music.

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