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Comment by anoopelias | Hacker News Reader

> I don't believe, movie makers are out of business any time soon

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.

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Isn't it obvious? Life is about experiences and enjoyment, all of this tech is fun and novel and interesting but realistically, it's really exciting for tech people because it's going to be used to make more computer games, social media posts and advertisements, essentially, it's exciting because it's going to "make money".

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.

I completely agree. There is more to a product than the final result. People who don't play an instrument see music I terms of money. (Hint: there's no money in music). But those who play know that the pleasure is in the playing, and jamming with your mates. Recording and selling are work, not pleasure.

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.

You articulated what I wanted to add to this thread -- thank you!

I play the piano, and even though MIDI exists, I still derive a lot of enjoyment from playing an acoustic instrument.

I like this saying: “The woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those who sang the best.” It's fun learning to play the instrument.

I think it's not. If musicians and only musicians wanted themselves behind instruments, for the sake of being, there should be a market for autogenerated self-playing music machines for their former patrons who wouldn't care. And that's not the case; the market for ambient sound machines is small. It takes equal or more insanity to have one at home than, say, having a military armored car in the garage.

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.

I don't think this is entirely accurate. There are entire genres of music where the audience does not want a person behind the piano/guitar/drums. Plenty of electronic artists have tried the live band gimmick and while it goes down well with a certain segment of the audience, it turns off another segment that doesn't want to hear "humanized" cover versions of the material. But the point is that both of those audiences exist, and they both have lots of opportunity to hear the music they want to hear. The same will be true of visual art created by computers. Some people will prefer a stronger machine element, other people will prefer a stronger human element, and there is room for us all.

I don't think this is entirely accurate. There are entire genres of music where the audience does not want a person behind the piano/guitar/drums.

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.

DJ performances far outnumber "live" performances in the electronic scene. Perhaps you can cherry-pick certain DJs and make a point that they are creating a new musical composition by live-remixing the tracks they play, but even then a significant number of clubbers don't care, they just want to dance to the music. There are venues where a bunch of the audience can't even see the DJ and they still dance because they are enjoying the music on its own merits.

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.

Why does the DJ need to be there, in such a case?

Mainly to pick songs that fit the mood of the audience. At the moment, humans seem to do a better job "reading" the emotions of other humans in this kind of group setting than computers do, and people are willing to pay for experts who have that skill.

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.

If there is no human performing there, then it's a completely different event, so I actually have little idea what we're debating.

Your reasoning is circular. Humans who go to performances of other humans playing instruments enjoy seeing other humans playing instruments. That should not be surprising. The question is whether humans as a whole intrinsically prefer seeing other humans playing instruments over hearing a "perfect" machine reproduction. And the answer to that question is no. There are plenty of humans who really do prefer the machine reproduction.

If you're still talking about whether people want to hear live covers, or recordings, I think it's an apples to oranges comparison therefore I don't see the point in it.

> Musicians could automate all the instruments with incredible accuracy since a long time. But they never do that.

What do you judge was the ratio of automated music (recordings played back) to live music played in the last year?

Just to be clear, I was talking about the original sound produced by a person (vs. a machine). Of course it was recorded and played back a _lot_ more than folks listening live.

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.

His point still stands.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuBas80oGEU

Thankfully, art is not about the least common denominator and I'm confident that there will continue to be music played live as long as humanity exists.

Music has a lot of people who believe that not only is their favorite genre the best but that they must tear down people who don't appreciate it.

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.

It's not that I think my tastes in music are objectively better, it's that I strongly feel that music is a very personal matter for many people and there will be enough people who will seek out different forms of music than what is "popular". Rock, jazz, even classical music, are still alive and well.

> 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.

When I was studying music technology and using state of the art software synthesizers and sequencers, I got more and more into playing my acoustic guitar. There's a deep and direct connection and a pleasure that comes with it that computers (and now/eventually AI) will never be able to match.

(That being said, a realtime AI-based bandmate could be interesting...)

My son is an interesting example of this, I can play all the best guitar music on earth via the speakers, but when I physically get the guitar out and strum it, he sits up like he has just seen god, and is total awe of the sounds of it, the feel of the guitar and the site of it. It's like nothing else can compare. Even if he is hysterically crying, the physical isntrument and the sound of it just makes him calm right down.

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.

Mirror neurons?

What does this have to do with it?

I'm speculating that one would have more mirror neuron activation watching a person perform live, compared to listening to a recording or watching a video. Thus the missing component that makes live performance special.

The sound feels present with live music. Speakers have this synthetic far away feel no matter how good they are.

What about live music on non-acoustic instruments so it inherently comes through a speaker?

My son isn't even a toddler so I don't think it would possibly be "mirror neurons".

I really briefly looked at AI in music, lots of wild things are made. It is hard to explain, one was generating a bunch of sliders after mimicking a sample from sine waves (quite accurately)

For me the guitar is like the keyboard I am writing on right now. It will never be replaced, because that is how I input music into the world. I could not program that, I was doing tracker music as a teenager, and all of the songs sounded weird, because the timing, and so on is not right. And now when I transcribe demos, and put them into a DAW, there seem to be the milliseconds off, that are not quite right. I still play the piano parts live, because we don't have the technology right now to make it sound better than a human, and even if we had, it would not be my music, but what an AI performed.

> 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.

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.

This goes way back. Nine Inch Nails was a synth-first band with the music being written by Trent in a studio on a DAW. That worked but what really made the bad was live shows so they found ways even using 2 drummers to translate the synths and machines into human-plated instruments.

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.

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.

Back before Twitter was born, or perhaps tv, cafes were just that - a place to spend evenings (…just don’t ask who watched over the kids)

It’s more than that, doing it well is still beyond sophisticated automation. Many variables that need do be constantly adjusted for. Humans are still much better at it than machines, regardless of the social element.

If true, probably not for long. Still my point is people are customer. It’s more fun to think about what won’t change. I think we will still have baristas.

A good live performance is intentionally not 100% the same as in the studio, but there can and should be variations. A refrain repeated another time, some improvisation here. Playing with the tempo there. It takes a good band, who know each other intimately, to make that work, though. (a good DJ can also do this with electronic music)

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.

Regarding your point about music:

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.

[0] http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_gradient_tool.php

You can modulate midi timinbg with noise. In some programs, there’s literally a Humanize button.

Yes. I tried that with some software-based synthesisers (like the SWAM violin and Reason's Friktion) which are designed for human-playing (humans controlling the VST through a device that emits MIDI CC control messages) but my understanding is that the modulation that skilled human players perform with tends to be better/more desirable than what software modulators can currently achieve.

The real dilemma is with composition/song-writing.

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.

Even if we assume that people want fully automated music, the process of learning to play educates the musician. Similarly, you'd still need a director/auteur, editors, writers and other roles I have no appreciation or knowledge of to create a film from AI models.

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.

It's interesting though, the question really becomes, if 10 people used to shovel manually to feed their family. And now it takes 1 person and an excavater, what in good faith do you tell those other 9..."don't worry you can always be a hobby shovelist?"

They can apply their labor wherever it is valued. Perhaps they will become more productive excavator operators. By creating value in a specialized field their income would increase. Technology does not decrease the need for labor. Rather it increases the productivity of the laborer.

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?

You miss the important point, which is the productivity gain means the average living standard of society as a whole increases. A chunk of what is now regarded as 'toil' work disappears, and the time freed up is able to be deployed more productively in other areas.

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.

That's awesome, sign me up for retraining. Where do I go and who can I talk to so I can be retrained into a less drudgery filled position?

Clearly if there are ways out of being displaced, please share them

The ‘augmented singer’ is very popular, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-Tune: “Auto-Tune has been widely criticized as indicative of an inability to sing on key.”

Live play is what, 1% of all music heard in the world? Computers, radios, iPods and phones all play automated reproductions.

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.

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.

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