8 ms·

Having listened to the song linked in the OP I was blown away, but then: > I ought to note that a human being is involved in all this: the French composer Beno

by cthor 9y ago

Having listened to the song linked in the OP I was blown away, but then: > I ought to note that a human being is involved in all this: the French composer Benoit Carré, who took the raw data generated by the CSL and matched it to audio from existing recordings [..] Benoit then arranged, produced, and mixed the tracks that resulted from this collaboration. Carré has also written the words. I feel like there's a big difference between "AI creating music" and "AI as an assisstive tool for creating music".

yesiamyourdad 9y ago
But in the early 90's I sat in on a seminar by a music prof at my university, he was working on AI generated music. His vision was that it would be an assistive device; basically labor saving for composers. At the time his students were doing automated compositions and I was blown away by the quality at the time. Definitely his students were already at the stage of partially composed music - basically just a songwriter who needed a good arranger / producer. Given some of the work I've read on RNN's, I think this is really close to being fully automated. 5 years, maybe, and stuff like this will be fully automated.
- maroonblazer 9y ago
  I think this is the future of AI in music, not just pop. It's trivially easy to write a mediocre song. All it takes to turn a mediocre song into an above-average one is a clever turn of musical phrase; be it melody, harmony or rhythm or all three (typically it's all three). As a songwriter you're constantly generating options for you to choose from. "What chord goes well after this one but doesn't sound too predictable? What direction can I take this melodic idea in? My chorus is boring; is there something I could do rhythmically that would make it more interesting?" You're constrained by your own imagination, which itself is constrained by what kind of mood you're in, what you've eaten or drunk, energy levels, etc. How nice would it be to have a super-charged co-writer that could spit out 20 alternatives that you would never have thought of. They don't even need to be perfect alternatives; simply enough to jog your head into a different frame where you can proceed to refine and build from.
  - evilDagmar 9y ago
    Yeah, excepting that a label exec would immediately scoop them up to be produced as remix singles, to be released in stages over the next six months on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play for $1.29 apiece, whether you liked them or not.
  - yesiamyourdad 9y ago
    Another point - back in the 80's, when New Age was getting popular, there was a New Age radio station that featured a format without radio personalities - it was really to my knowledge the first totally programmed station. One music instructor got together with a couple friends and did assembly line New Age - they recorded a bunch of A sections, a bunch of B sections, and pasted them together A-B-A, A-A-B-A, that kind of thing, and turned around and got radio play on these compositions. My point is that this kind of thing has been going on for a while. Now we're learning how to make computers do it.
  - chjohasbrouck 9y ago
    That's interesting, but in that scenario, how important is the composer really? Couldn't we just connect the variable output of the AI to some kind of Mechanical Turk-style focus group, feed those results as inputs back into the AI, and repeat that process millions of times? Might that produce a better song than an individual composer? I've seen interviews with some modern artists, and they'll often take inspiration from decades-old hits (which are essentially de-risked melodies) and apply them to a modern template. I'm assuming the bigger labels already focus-group the output and make revisions. This seems like something that could eventually be automated.
    - maroonblazer 9y ago
      I'm looking at this from the standpoint of someone who likes to write music. If I'm the composer then I'm important. :-)
      - chjohasbrouck 9y ago
        Haha, fair enough. :)
- visarga 9y ago
  > basically labor saving for composers. If you think about it, musicians work at low level - assembler or even raw mechanical inputs. They could use a toolchain.
BurningFrog 9y ago
An average song arranged and produced by top talent will always sound better than a genius song arranged and produced by average talent.
gabrielgoh 9y ago
sounds like the ol' stone soup trick, where its all the extra ingredients which make the magic work, not the AI. I'd reckon a talented producer could make a good song out of pseudo-random notes. Unless the original untouched AI track is released, I have to be skeptical

by cthor 9y ago

yesiamyourdad 9y ago

But in the early 90's I sat in on a seminar by a music prof at my university, he was working on AI generated music. His vision was that it would be an assistive device; basically labor saving for composers. At the time his students were doing automated compositions and I was blown away by the quality at the time. Definitely his students were already at the stage of partially composed music - basically just a songwriter who needed a good arranger / producer. Given some of the work I've read on RNN's, I think this is really close to being fully automated. 5 years, maybe, and stuff like this will be fully automated.

maroonblazer 9y ago
I think this is the future of AI in music, not just pop. It's trivially easy to write a mediocre song. All it takes to turn a mediocre song into an above-average one is a clever turn of musical phrase; be it melody, harmony or rhythm or all three (typically it's all three). As a songwriter you're constantly generating options for you to choose from. "What chord goes well after this one but doesn't sound too predictable? What direction can I take this melodic idea in? My chorus is boring; is there something I could do rhythmically that would make it more interesting?" You're constrained by your own imagination, which itself is constrained by what kind of mood you're in, what you've eaten or drunk, energy levels, etc. How nice would it be to have a super-charged co-writer that could spit out 20 alternatives that you would never have thought of. They don't even need to be perfect alternatives; simply enough to jog your head into a different frame where you can proceed to refine and build from.
- evilDagmar 9y ago
  Yeah, excepting that a label exec would immediately scoop them up to be produced as remix singles, to be released in stages over the next six months on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play for $1.29 apiece, whether you liked them or not.
- yesiamyourdad 9y ago
  Another point - back in the 80's, when New Age was getting popular, there was a New Age radio station that featured a format without radio personalities - it was really to my knowledge the first totally programmed station. One music instructor got together with a couple friends and did assembly line New Age - they recorded a bunch of A sections, a bunch of B sections, and pasted them together A-B-A, A-A-B-A, that kind of thing, and turned around and got radio play on these compositions. My point is that this kind of thing has been going on for a while. Now we're learning how to make computers do it.
- chjohasbrouck 9y ago
  That's interesting, but in that scenario, how important is the composer really? Couldn't we just connect the variable output of the AI to some kind of Mechanical Turk-style focus group, feed those results as inputs back into the AI, and repeat that process millions of times? Might that produce a better song than an individual composer? I've seen interviews with some modern artists, and they'll often take inspiration from decades-old hits (which are essentially de-risked melodies) and apply them to a modern template. I'm assuming the bigger labels already focus-group the output and make revisions. This seems like something that could eventually be automated.
  - maroonblazer 9y ago
    I'm looking at this from the standpoint of someone who likes to write music. If I'm the composer then I'm important. :-)
    - chjohasbrouck 9y ago
      Haha, fair enough. :)
visarga 9y ago
> basically labor saving for composers. If you think about it, musicians work at low level - assembler or even raw mechanical inputs. They could use a toolchain.

BurningFrog 9y ago

An average song arranged and produced by top talent will always sound better than a genius song arranged and produced by average talent.

gabrielgoh 9y ago

sounds like the ol' stone soup trick, where its all the extra ingredients which make the magic work, not the AI. I'd reckon a talented producer could make a good song out of pseudo-random notes. Unless the original untouched AI track is released, I have to be skeptical