Hacker News Reader

Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

You will probably be able to listen to machine-generated music on most major platforms. I just hope there’s one which excludes all of that.

Personally I think it’s a bit like cultural junk food: it has the appearance of real food, but leaves one hungry afterward. Which really isn’t all that surprising – music isn’t just some random collection of patterns, it’s intimately tied to real culture. Current AI software is only ever going to copy and regurgitate human culture, not make meaningful creations from scratch.

View on HN

I agree with the other poster. I think it's very difficult to guide this missile so that it blows up AI-generated music and doesn't blow up EDM.

My own taste in music is pretty junk-food-y I guess. Electronic music and not the pretentious kind. Dubstep, electro. Give me something that goes wub-wub. Incidentally, I think this experience mostly isn't one about human connection? Like, there is some circuit in my brain that likes that sound and wants to be tickled.

I can play classical piano to a mediocre standard. I listen to it and enjoy it occasionally. But, honestly, what I feel like my spirit needs is something that goes wub-wub and I think that space is densely seeded enough that maybe we can scale back human involvement in producing it.

Sure that’s fair, and maybe my ideal platform doesn’t really work for electronic music and works better for singer-songwriters that perform live. Which is fine - I just like the idea of a platform that guarantees that a real person made this music.

junk food is a common misconception about electronic music with ppl who have only listened to trash versions of it on social media.

I don’t mean electronic music writ large, I mean AI generated music.

Electronic music is probably my favorite genre, broadly. But there’s a human behind the machine, not a random collection of patterns. To use a concrete example: NIN is about 1000% more interesting because of who Trent Reznor is, and not because it’s merely good music.

This disconnect is much more of an issue with say, country or bluegrass or jazz. To divorce those from the musician and their cultural context is to miss the whole point.

There's a human behind AI-generated music too. A human writes the prompts. Your distinction seems rather arbitrary.

Typing “make me an electronic guitar song about a bad breakup” is a whole lot different than learning to play the instrument yourself and conveying your own emotions from your real experience into a song that you write and perform.

If you can’t see how these are fundamentally different things, I don’t know what to tell you.

Do you really think that's the only way to do it? I spend hours refining the output, slicing things up, redoing certain parts, tossing it into the DAW and compressing, adding effects, etc. I mean, if you think one shot prompts are the only way to use AI to make music fine, but you're being intentionally obtuse.

I think a lot of songs about bad break-ups were written by talented musicians without actual experience of a bad break-up, riffing on the corpus of songs they'd heard about bad break-ups.

Like, a lot of times you're just engaging with someone's desire to have made a song, and what they felt about some songs that someone else made.

You are describing empathy, a human experience.

Even if you generate the soundtrack, if you set the lyrics it can be great music. At least for one person, who chose the lyrics. I set some poems on music and I absolutely love the results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com