3 ms·

Rather abrasive music in my opinion, although I suppose "abrasive music" is still music, so maybe this is qualified praise? How does "100s of Terabytes" compar

Rather abrasive music in my opinion, although I suppose "abrasive music" is still music, so maybe this is qualified praise? How does "100s of Terabytes" compare to the amount of music the average human composer/musician listens to over the course of their career?

sscotth 8y ago
The Rite of Spring is pretty abrasive in everyone's opinion.
- MisterOctober 8y ago
  Not to mention the opening of Beethoven's Op. 130
jondeuce 8y ago
Very roughly, a 3 minute song is ~5MB, and so 100 TB ~ 60M minutes ~ 114 years; needless to say, this is many times the amount of music one person could listen to in their lifetime. Edit: additionally, it's possible (likely?) that the music is downsampled before training, so this figure may be something of a lower bound.
- caseymarquis 8y ago
  Maybe they should have used less data of 'higher' quality then?
- sp332 8y ago
  It's probably hard to train a computer on music that has been MP3 or AAC encoded since that throws away a lot of the acoustic information. Amazon's Alexa APIs for example upload WAV audio.
3131s 8y ago
It's probably not much more abrasive than the music it's sampled from, if the source is mostly modern classical music. I'm really surprised by how good this is. At times it sounds a lot like something from certain popular experimental electronica artists, e.g. Daniel Lopatin, Tim hecker.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  If you start from terabytes of some of the highest quality orchestral recordings available, you have to work quite hard to make the output sound terrible. It's a very nice demo piece, and vastly better than most of the NN efforts around. But it still has the usual problem that it's sort-of-random orchestral wallpaper. Even if you create a workable grammar - by NN accident or design - you still have to solve the problem of intention and agency to generate music that isn't just mimicry or wallpaper. I've heard some very, very good classical pastiche writing now - piano, chorales, orchestra - so it's essentially a solved problem technically. Not so much artistically though.
posterboy 8y ago
> I suppose "abrasive music" is still music I recently read three distinct legal definitions of "art" have developed (in German courts at least). The details are interesting but the key notion is that in the strictest sense, art is an expression of emotions, so in some sense, this isn't music. Jaringly in this definition, the expression must be recognizable. Of course that's debatable and I don't mean to review the different philosophies. The only insight is that it depends and whether something elicites emotions or not is subjective. It's a useful attempt at a definition to differentiate intention and accident. Edit: Actually watching it now I have to say it's pretty cool and I wonder how much human input was given to control and curate the creation. NN synths over wavetables or granular synthesis are actual instruments one can play, for comparison. And I hold that whatever AI generates, it's still due to the authors. > How does "100s of Terabytes It's more than a lifetime. If a minute of music is 1mb in mp3, then that's a whoopin n x 100 x 1'000'000 minutes. With n=1, that's over a million albums. Even if the algorithm works with uncompressed pcm data, the ten times difference can be made up for by the n factor.

sscotth 8y ago

The Rite of Spring is pretty abrasive in everyone's opinion.

MisterOctober 8y ago
Not to mention the opening of Beethoven's Op. 130

jondeuce 8y ago

Very roughly, a 3 minute song is ~5MB, and so 100 TB ~ 60M minutes ~ 114 years; needless to say, this is many times the amount of music one person could listen to in their lifetime. Edit: additionally, it's possible (likely?) that the music is downsampled before training, so this figure may be something of a lower bound.

caseymarquis 8y ago
Maybe they should have used less data of 'higher' quality then?
sp332 8y ago
It's probably hard to train a computer on music that has been MP3 or AAC encoded since that throws away a lot of the acoustic information. Amazon's Alexa APIs for example upload WAV audio.

3131s 8y ago

It's probably not much more abrasive than the music it's sampled from, if the source is mostly modern classical music. I'm really surprised by how good this is. At times it sounds a lot like something from certain popular experimental electronica artists, e.g. Daniel Lopatin, Tim hecker.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
If you start from terabytes of some of the highest quality orchestral recordings available, you have to work quite hard to make the output sound terrible. It's a very nice demo piece, and vastly better than most of the NN efforts around. But it still has the usual problem that it's sort-of-random orchestral wallpaper. Even if you create a workable grammar - by NN accident or design - you still have to solve the problem of intention and agency to generate music that isn't just mimicry or wallpaper. I've heard some very, very good classical pastiche writing now - piano, chorales, orchestra - so it's essentially a solved problem technically. Not so much artistically though.

posterboy 8y ago

> I suppose "abrasive music" is still music I recently read three distinct legal definitions of "art" have developed (in German courts at least). The details are interesting but the key notion is that in the strictest sense, art is an expression of emotions, so in some sense, this isn't music. Jaringly in this definition, the expression must be recognizable. Of course that's debatable and I don't mean to review the different philosophies. The only insight is that it depends and whether something elicites emotions or not is subjective. It's a useful attempt at a definition to differentiate intention and accident. Edit: Actually watching it now I have to say it's pretty cool and I wonder how much human input was given to control and curate the creation. NN synths over wavetables or granular synthesis are actual instruments one can play, for comparison. And I hold that whatever AI generates, it's still due to the authors. > How does "100s of Terabytes It's more than a lifetime. If a minute of music is 1mb in mp3, then that's a whoopin n x 100 x 1'000'000 minutes. With n=1, that's over a million albums. Even if the algorithm works with uncompressed pcm data, the ten times difference can be made up for by the n factor.