Comment by vjerancrnjak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vjerancrnjak | Hacker News Reader

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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 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".

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.

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.

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