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Comment by SubiculumCode | Hacker News Reader

If I am to retain any interest as an amateur music writer without proaudio engineering skills and equipment, but with a day job, , I want tools that help me enact MY vision to reality. That means multi tracking, ability to hum or score a melody and have it transfer to musical instrument, ability to enter existing tracks, provide a temporal segment for diffusion, and ask it to 'generate a counterpoint to the melody with strings, etc. The most exciting possibilities of this is enabling talented writers with day jobs, not one click song writing.

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^ THIS

As an amateur musician, I'd like tools that help me be more productive musically - those that complement my skills (whatever they may be). All the things you mentioned above, namely, ability to score a melody via a simple hum, transfer to various instruments, generate proper responses to calls, generate melodies within a framework, etc., all these would be super valuable to me.

I'm an OK guitar + bass + keyboard player, I'd LOVE to have an AI assistant that accompanies along. That would make my own jammin' so much richer.

I dont think we have seen the end of AI-driven tools in music-tech yet. I'm cautiously hopeful.

I definitely see this happening. Music generation has lagged behind image generation but is following more or less the same path. Early image generation models were completely unconditional; all you could do was sample an image. Then coarse conditioning methods such as text prompts and depth images came along; then additional tooling to tune images in a more fine-grained way.

That said, there is a difference to images in that music also has a "symbolic" level to it that is closer to text than images [1]. There's other work out there that uses LLM-type tools for direct melody generation (no audio). And of course, there's lyrics. I do expect commercial tools to start integrating all these capabilities gradually, it's just a matter of time.

[1] I guess there's also vector images (like SVG) - I've seen work in generating those as well, though it's less mature than directly generating pixels.

I'd be surprised if the people who are writing these understand what this means.

Yeah, I'd think that it will take commoditized generation tools that existing or new composition multi-tracking tools could incorporate. i.e. FLStudio plugin

What does the ideal VST(s) look like for you? How would you like it to be broken down?

For example, I tend to think of "composition" and "synthesis" as two very different topics.

One VST could spit out chords or melodies (not a common VST) whereas another could render those sounds (very common VST)

The request is valid; you just need the right tools for the job.

Story Jam lets you design chord progressions without needing to know about music theory, instead offering intuitive terms like "lightness", "darkness", "drifting" and "roaming". They mean about what you think they mean.

https://storyjam.tenpens.ink

I'm planning a "Show HN" post for tomorrow morning EST with more details. But you can get the sneak peek here :)

The people writing the one-shot tools are living a pipe dream and are riding the hype wave. One-shot AI music will have a short amount of interest based on its novelty, but the very next generation of humans will revolt against it as a cringe decision of the old guard. Form there it might finally be applied more realistically as an aid to human expression instead of a replacement.

one-shots are essentially toys

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