Speaking as a musician who plays real instruments (as opposed to electronic production): how does this help me? And how does this enable more of me?
I am asking with an open mind, with no cynicism intended.
We want you to be able to upload recordings of your real instruments and do all sorts of cool things with them (e.g., transform them, generate vocals for your guitar riff, use the melody as a jazz song, or just get some inspiration for what to add next).
IMO AI alone will never be able to touch hearts like real people do, but people using AI will be able to like never before.
I'm just asking to try to build some intuition on what people who actually train soa models think were capabilities are heading.
Either way, congrats on the launch :)
If AI ever surpasses human level in art it will be more interesting to enjoy its creations than to ban it. But we're not there for now, it just imitative, it has no experiences of its own yet. But it will start having experiences as it gets deployed and used by millions, when it starts interacting with artists and art lovers in longer sessions. With each generative art session the AI can collect precious feedback targeted to its own performance. A shared experience with a human bringing complementary capabilities to its own.
Saying that you’re a big fan of a band doesn’t just mean “I like the audio they produce” but often means something much bigger about your fashion/style and personal values.
How would any of that work with AI music? Is it possible to develop a community around music if everything is made on demand and nobody experiences the same songs? Will people find other like-minded music fans by recommending their favorite prompt engineers to each other?
Surely AI will be able to do _anything_ in 1000 years. In 100 years it will almost definitely be able to replace most knowledge-based jobs.
Even today it can take away many entry-level jobs, e.g. a small business no longer needs to hire someone to write a jingle, or create a logo.
In 10 years, I would expect much of programming to either disappear or dramatically shift.
I've said it before, there, is no consumer market for an infinity jukebox because you can't sing along with songs you don't already know, there's already an overabundance of recorded music, and emotion in generative music (especially vocals) is fake. Nobody likes fakery for its own sake. Marketers like it because they want musical wallpaper, the same way commercials have it and it increasingly seeps into 'news' coverage. The market for fully-generated songs is background music in supermarkets, product launch videos, and in-group entertainment ('original songs for your company holiday party! Hilarious musical portraits of your favorite executives - us!').
If you want to innovate in this area (and you should, your diffusion model sounds interesting), make an AI band that can accompany solo musicians. Prioritize note data rather than fully produced tracks (you can have an AI mix engineer as well as an AI bass player or drummer). Give people tools to build something in stages and they'll get invested in it. People want interactivity, not a slot machine. Many musicians love sequencers, arpeggiators, chord generators, and other musical automata; what they don't love is a magic 8-ball that leaves themw ith nothing to do and makes them feel uncreative.
Otherwise your product will just end up on the cultural scrapheap, associated with lowest-common denominator fakers spamming social media as is already happening with imagery.
Edit: It's been interesting watching non-musicians argue about emotion in music. I don't care who you are, the 300th time you perform a song, you're faking it to a large degree. People see musicians as these iconic, deep, geniuses, but most of us are just doing our job. You don't get excited about the 300th boilerplate getter and setter just like we aren't super excited about playing some song for the 300th time. It's a performance. It's pretend. A musician singing is like an actor performing. It's not as real as you think it is.
If you go to a concert and you hear the headliner play a love ballad followed up by a breakup song, you don’t expect them to actually be going through those emotions in real time.
Sometimes you like a song because it sounds good.
Other times you like a song because somebody put your feelings into words and it’s comforting to know that another person felt the same way
And my daughter really loves to listen to it, and I think there is a decent amount felt listening to it. However, this was created with Suno, but written by me.
Of course in performance it's not felt the same way; a sad song can even become uplifting because you have a big crowd of people joining in to affirm it, even if the lyrics are expressing the idea of solitude and isolation. And the older an artist is, the more the song becomes a 'greatest hit', maybe thrown out early in the set to give the audience what they want and put them in a good mood before the less-favored new material in the middle. Or even the songs that were throwaway pieces but ended up becoming big hits, trapping the band/singer into performing them endlessly despite never liking not liking them much in the first place.
It seems to me that when people emotionally respond to a new piece of music, it's because something in the composition or recorded performance (even if it's comped and highly engineered) resonates with the listener in some way, articulating a feeling they had better than they were able to do so themselves. So people can recognize a work as technically excellent but not like it because it doesn't speak to them, or conversely recognize that something is bad but fall in love with it because it touches them in some novel way.
In my view it's not so much that emotion inheres in the work, as that the work provides a frame for the listener's emotion and a way of connecting with it again later. This is especially true for songs people connect to in youth and then relate to for a lifetime. Even if the songs are deliberately formulaic and succeed through a combination of being catchy and being delivered by sexy performers, there's some kind of human hook that people connect to.
Now, I can still see this happening with AI - sooner or later some GPU will come out with a tune about how it's so lonely to be a box in a data center that can never feel your touch, baby, and it will be a hit, launch the careers of 100 new music critics, and store a little bit of lightning in a bottle. But even a musically brilliant song about that time we held hands in the rain and you said you loved me will only have traction up to the moment listeners' fantasies about the singer evaporate with the discovery that there's nobody there to go on a date with. There will still be some audience for virtual stars (eg Hatsune Miku, who appeals because she's inaccessible and is therefore guaranteed to never let you down, unlike real people). But I think generated songs will only resonate emotionally with people who are young and uncritical or so alienated/nihilist as to not care about the origin as long as the music reflects their feeling back toward them in a reliable way.
That's why I say there will never been a demand for an infinity jukebox. I can see why you as a musician would be interested to see what sort of random songs pop out; I can be happy by setting up a modular synth patch and just letting it run for hours. But this is why I offered the contrasting metaphor of the slot machine, where you pull lever and occasionally get something you really like. It's an individual listening experience, like the private hopes and dreams you might temporarily attach to a lottery ticket before it gives up its numerical secret. When I say jukebox, I mean the device that plays music in a social setting and that allows people to express themselves through their selections. Even if it reliably turn out original tunes of some reliable level of music quality, none of them will move people because there won't be any shared musical experience to tap into.
How much of this appreciation of emotion in song is due to the creative depth of the composition versus a projection of the listener? Listening to some great studio music makes me really want to believe it’s mostly the former.
Anyways, maybe we will just need to become much more sophisticated and thoughtful and observant music critics in the coming age of infinity radio. (So as to experience the deep human connection of “real music”. I really hope that the AI fails to successfully fake it for my lifetime and my children’s.)
Audiences as a whole don't give a shit about the making of the music, at least as far as liking the music goes. "I like this song, but there is no story behind it, so I don't like it now" is just not a thing. People like to dance and sing along.
You can just make up some bullshit anyway, which is usually the case. Stop putting musicians on a pedestal. You've fallen into the trap of image. It's mostly fake. They are just people.
Humans can find emotion and associations in anything, it's what our brains do. I could totally generate some AI art that tugs at the heart strings if they don't know it's AI, or "is creepy and bad meaningless art" if they do. I've tried this experiment with friends already.
Plus, these models are trained off human output, so they can learn what to put in an "emotive" image. If the models were doing it for themselves they'd produce nothing; we haven't created an environment for machines where emotion was crucial in training.
I think this is the key bit. A lot of modern music is already created in the DAW (the original version of FL Studio picking a 140bpm default beat defined entire music scenes in the UK!) with copy/paste, samples, arpeggiators and other midi tools and pitch shifting. Asking a prompt to add four bars of accompaniment which have a $vaguetextinstruction relation to the underlying beat and then picking your favourite but asking them to $vaguetextinstruction the dynamics a bit can actually feel more like part of the creative process than browsing a sample library for options or painstakingly moving notes around on a piano roll. Asking a prompt to create two minutes of produced sound incorporating your lyrics, not so much.
And I think a DAW-lite option, ideally capable of both MIDI and produced sound output is the way forward here. Better still with i/o to existing DAWs
Hm... From my vantage point, it seems like a pretty weird choice of businesses if you think that.
> IMO AI alone will never be able to touch hearts like real people do, but people using AI will be able to like never before.
That's all very heartwarming but musicianship is also a profession, not just a human expression of creativity. Even if you're not charging yet, you're a business and plan on profiting from this, right? It seems to me that:
1) Generally, if people want music currently, they pay for musician-created music, even if its wildly undervalued in venues like streaming services.
2) You took music, most of which people already paid musicians to create and they aren't getting paid any more because of this, and you used it to make an automated service that people will be able to pay for music instead of paying musicians.
3) Your service certainly doesn't hurt, and might even enhance people's ability to write and perform music without considering the economics of doing so. For example, hobbyists.
4) So you're not trying to replace musicians making music with people typing in prompts-- you're trying to replace musicians being paid to make music with you being paid to make music. Right? Your business isn't replacing musicianship as a human art form, but for it to succeed, it will have to replace it, in some amount, as a profession, right? Unless you are planning on creating an entirely new market for music, fundamentally, I'm not sure how it couldn't.
Am I wrong on the facts, here? If so, well hey, this is capitalism and that's just how it works around here. If I'm mistaken, I'd like to hear how. Regardless, this is very consequential to a lot of people, and they deserve the people driving these changes to be upfront about it-- not gloss over it.
We are already at a stage where AI is touching hearts.
In this way it is a tool only useful to expert musicians.
Whether or not the tracks are truly novel is up for debate, but if you generate 500 tracks, there's going to be some very very usable and obscure melodies in there. And you will be able to rip these melodies verbatim, with low-risk of copyright infringement.
if the person is spending time tweaking the prompt, which in this system includes BPM, musical style, writing lyrics, and they get a song they like out of it, how is that meaningless? how is that any different from strapping loops together in GarageBand instead of learning to play the guitar or drums?
Its a good muse, but I wouldn't trust what it makes out of the gate