I don't believe, movie makers are out of buisness any time soon. They will have to incorporate it though. So far this can make convincing background scenery.
My son was learning how to play keyboard and he started practicing based on metronome. At some point, I was thinking, why is he learning it at all? We can program which key to be pressed at what point in time, and then a software can play itself! Why bother?
Then it hit me! Musicians could automate all the instruments with incredible accuracy since a long time. But they never do that. For some reason, they still want a person behind the piano / guitar / drums.
What do you judge was the ratio of automated music (recordings played back) to live music played in the last year?
But I take it, maybe I'm not so familiar with world music, I was talking more about Indian music. While the music is recorded and mixed across several tracks electronically, I think most of it is played (or sang) originally by a person.
In the US atleast there's the occasional acoustic song that becomes a hit, but rock music is obviously on its way to slowly becoming jazz status. It and country are really the last genres where live traditional instruments are common during live performances. Pop, Hip Hop, and EDM basically all are put together as being nearly computer perfect.
All the great producers can play instruments, and that's often times the best way to get a section out initially. But what you hear on Spotify is more and more meticulously put together note by note on a computer after the fact.
Live instruments on stage are now often for spectacle or worse a gimmick, and it's not the song people came to love. I think the future will have people like Lionclad[1] in it pushing what it means to perform live, but I expect them to become fewer and fewer as music just gets more complex to produce overall.
You aren't better because you prefer live music, you just have a preference. Music wasn't better some arbitrary number of years ago, you just have a preference.
Nobody said one form is objectively better, just that there is a form that is becoming more popular.
But to state my opinion, I can't imagine something more boring than thinking the best of music, performance, TV, or media in general was done best and created in the past.
> But to state my opinion, I can't imagine something more boring than thinking the best of music, performance, TV, or media in general was done best and created in the past.
And to state my opinion, art isn't about "the best" or any sort of progress, it's about the way we humans experience the world, something I consider to be a timeless preoccupation, which is why a song from 2024 can be equally touching as a ballad from the 14th century.
(That being said, a realtime AI-based bandmate could be interesting...)
I wonder if something is lost in the recording process that just cannot be replicated? A live instrument is something that you can actually feel the sound of IMO, I've never felt the same with recorded music even though I of course enjoy it.
I wonder if when we get older we just get kind of "bored" (sadly) and it doesn't mean as much to us as it probably should.
This actually happened on a recent hit, too -- Dua Lipa's Break My Heart. They originally had a drum machine, but then brought in Chad Smith to actually play the drums for it.
Edit: I'm not claiming this was new or unusual, just providing a recent example.
Also way before that back in the early 80’a Depeche Mode displayed the recorded drumb-reel onstage so everyone knew what it was, but when the got big enough they also transitioned into an epic live show with guitars and live drum a as well as synth-hooked drums devices they could bag on in addition to keyboards.
We are human. We want humans. Same reason I want a hipster barista to pour my coffee when a machine could do it just as well.
I've wondered about this for a long time too, why on earth is anyone still able to be a barista, it turns out, people actually like the community around cafes and often that means interacting with the staff on a personal level.
Some of my best friends have been barista's I've gone to over several years.
A recorded studio version, I can also listen to at home. But a full band performing in this very moment is a different experience to me.
Outside of that, people just want to know what it feels like to be able to play their favorite song on guitar and to go skiing etc.
Being perfect at everything would be honestly boring as shit.
This is true for literally every hobby people do for fun. I am learning ceramics. Everything I've ever made could be bought in a shop for a 100th of the cost, and would be 100 times "better". But I enjoy making the pot, and it's worth more to me than some factory item.
Sona will allow a new hobby, and lots will have fun with it. Pros will still need to fo Pro things. Not everything has to be viewed through the lens of money.
I play the piano, and even though MIDI exists, I still derive a lot of enjoyment from playing an acoustic instrument.
On the other hand you've probably heard of an iPod, which I think I could describe as a device dedicated to give false sense of an ever-present musician, so to speak.
So, "they" in "they still want a person behind the piano" is not just limited to hobbyists and enthusiasts. People wants people behind an instrument, for some reason. People pays for others' suffering, not for a thing's peculiarity.
Hilariously, nearly every electronic artist I can think of, stands in front of a crowd and "plays "live" by twisting dials etc, so I think it's fairly accurate.
Carl Cox, Tycho, Aphex Twin, Chemical Brothers, Underworld, to name a few.
I stand by my original point. There are plenty of people who really do not care if there is a human somewhere "performing" the music or not. And that's totally fine.
An ML model could probably do a good job at selecting tunes of a particular genre that fit into a pre-defined "journey" that the promoter is trying to construct, so I could see a role for "AI DJs" in the future, especially for low budget parties during unpopular timeslots like first day of a festival while people are still arriving and the crew is still setting up. Some of that is already done by just chucking a smart playlist on shuffle. But then you also have up-and-comer or hobbyist DJs who will play for free in those slots, so maybe there's not really a need for a smarter computer to take over the job.
This whole thread started from the question of why a human should do something when a machine can do it better. And the answer is simple: because humans like to do stuff. It is not because humans doing stuff adds some kind of hand-wavey X factor that other humans intrinsically prefer.
You've never been to a rave, huh? For that matter, there's a lot of pop artists that use sequencers and dispense with the traditional band on stage.
Ability to create live experiences can still be a motivating factor for musicians (aside from the love of learning). Yet, when AI does the song-writing far more effectively, then will the musician ignore this?
It's like Brave New World. Musicians who don't use these AI tools for song-writing will be like a tribe outside modern world. That's a tough future to prepare for. We won't know whether a song was actually the experience and emotions of a person or not.
Steam shovels and modern excavators didn't remove our need for shovels or more importantly, the know-how to properly apply these tools. Naturally, most people use a shovel before they operate an excavator.
Human ingenuity always finds a need for value creation. Greater abundance creates new opportunities.
Take the inverse position. Should we go back to reading by candlelight to increase employment in candle making?
No, electric lighting allowed peopled to become productive during night hours. A market was created for electricity producers, which allowed additional products which consume electricity to be marketed. Technological increases in productivity cascade into all areas of life, increasing our living standards.
A more interesting, if not controversial line of inquiry might start with: If technology is constantly advancing human productivity, why do modern economies consistently experience price inflation?
Of course, this change is dislocating for the particular people whose toil disappeared. They need support to retrain to new occupations.
The alternative is to cling to a past where everyone - on average - is poorer, less healthy, and works in more dangerous jobs.
Clearly if there are ways out of being displaced, please share them
There are subtle and deliberate deviations in timing and elements like vibrato when a human plays the same song on an instrument twice, which is partly why (aside from recording tech) people prefer live or human musicians.
Think about how precise and exacting a computer can be. It can play the same notes in a MIDI editor with exact timing, always playing note B after 18 seconds of playing note A. Human musicians can't always be that precise in timing, but we seem to prefer how human musicians sound with all of the variations they make. We seem to dislike the precise mechanical repetition of music playback on a computer comparatively.
I think the same point generalises into a general dislike on the part of humans of sensory repetition. We want variety. (Compare the first and second grass pictures at [0] and you will probably find that the second which has more "dirt" and variety looks better.) "Semantic satiation" seems to be a specific case of the same tendency.
I'm not saying that's something a computer can't achieve eventually but it's something that will need to be done before machines can replace musicians.
It seems bizarre to think the gee whiz factor in a new commercial creative product makes critiquing its output out-of-bounds. This isn't a university research team: they're charging money for this. Most people have to determine if something is useful before they pay for it.
Also keep an eye on teeth and high contrast text. Anything small and prone to distortion in low resolution video and images used to train this stuff.