4 ms·

This is going to sound very dismissive and condescending: "meh." Generative music has been around for half a century, or longer depending on how you want to in

by qppo 6y ago

This is going to sound very dismissive and condescending: "meh." Generative music has been around for half a century, or longer depending on how you want to interpret things. Mimicry as a mechanism for composition has been around for as long as humans have made music. It is wholly uninteresting to discover that we can design generative systems for music that excel at mimicry, because we've already perfected that mechanism in analog. The interesting bit is that the genesis of new musical ideas is driven by manual interaction and direction of the generative system, and at that point it's the guiding hand of the engineer turned artist that we can respect and appreciate, not the mimicry of a machine.

visarga 6y ago
> Generative music has been around for half a century, If you start by referring to results from 50 years ago, have you tried listening to state of the art generative music systems lately? They can probably compose music better than 99% of humans.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Have you been moved by any of that music though? Am I missing something?
  - TomMarius 6y ago
    Yeah, it's very moving to see a human-made machine do such wonders. Fills me with awe, appreciation, and hope.
    - dahfizz 6y ago
      That's exactly it, though. This stuff is interesting because of the novelty of AI. The works themselves are not independently relevant (not yet, at least).
      - TomMarius 6y ago
        Elsewhere someone replied that art is interesting in a large part because of the personal story. How is this differemt?
        FartyMcFarter 6y ago
        99% of the time, I don't listen to music for the personal story of the artists involved. In fact, a lot of the music I listen to is made by artists that I know very little about.
  - woko 6y ago
    Listen to some samples: - https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/ https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/ (2020, quite good, but no classical music) - https://openai.com/blog/musenet/ https://openai.com/blog/musenet/ (2019 so not as good as the 2020 one, but showcases classical music) There is no reason to assume that one cannot be moved by AI-generated music, as the AI has learnt from human-generated music and tries to mimick the styles.
    - vnorilo 6y ago
      While it's technically impressive and has a decent surface-level resemblance, none of the samples had any sense of direction or substance. I can see this kind of tech taking over stuff like stock music that's automatically added to consumer holiday videos or played on the phone while you wait for a customer service agent. That said, I'd expect the agent to be an AI long before generated music becomes independently musically relevant.
- sdenton4 6y ago
  But we mostly listen to music written by humans who are better at writing music than 99.9999% of humans.
  - candiodari 6y ago
    Yes. And there was a time when we literally used paintings to assess progress in a mine. Cars didn't outperform horse carriages for certainly 10, arguably 30 years after their invention. This "human music" > "ai music" will flip. Suddenly. And it will never flip back.
    - brogrammer2018 6y ago
      > This "human music" > "ai music" will flip. Suddenly. And it will never flip back. Already starting to happen with ai lyrics I use for inspiration in creating EDM music ( i.e. https://TheseLyricsDoNotExist.com/ https://TheseLyricsDoNotExist.com/ )
- htrp 6y ago
  Is there anything you'd recommend for SOTA music gen?
  - visarga 6y ago
    Here are some links: [1] https://magenta.tensorflow.org/music-transformer https://magenta.tensorflow.org/music-transformer [2] https://storage.googleapis.com/magentadata/papers/music-transformer/index.html https://storage.googleapis.com/magentadata/papers/music-tran...
- weego 6y ago
  This shares the same foundation as the argument that ebooks will kill physical sales and solent will change how people see food, namely that we're all purely motivated by boiling every need we have down to the most fundamental version. It never seems to play out that way at population scales
- qppo 6y ago
  Yes - the older music is better, because it was an exploration of nondeterminism in art, and not automated replication. Doing what has already been done is rarely compelling.
ajuc 6y ago
That's like saying we've had abakuses since forever therefore these computers will never be revolutionary. Quantitative change by orders of magnitude is qualitative change. Imagine a world where you ask your smartphone to make you a death metal song about fishing and feminism in Australia and to use Freddy Mercury voice and jazz harmonies and it does that on the fly and generates something objectively good. Wouldn't that be revolutionary for music? Because it's entirely possible in the next decade. Probable even.
- boffinism 6y ago
  To be honest, that doesn't sound _that_ revolutionary for music. Because I'm pretty sure if you went digging, you could already find somewhere on Spotify a pretty decent death metal song with a vocalist who sounds like Freddy Mercury and jazz harmonies (I will concede, the specified subject matter is unlikely). Would you go looking for that, though? Probably not, because musical tastes and interests aren't about wanting a very specific set of attributes in a song. It's about tribalism, cults of personality, senses of belonging, nostalgia etc. The world is not short of good music, or variation in styles of good music, and what causes songs to be popular is not the objective quality of the music. Put it another way. If an AI could generate new Beatles music on the fly, making it sound exactly like the Beatles, with the same creativity of lyrics, tight harmonies, beautiful melodies, would Beatles fans go out in their millions to buy them? No. In the same way that the same dusty demos from the 60s found in an attic somewhere became valuable when it was discovered that they were Beatles demos. The music didn't change, it didn't get better or worse. The personal story attached to them was what mattered.
  - ajuc 6y ago
    My point isn't that any particular generated song will be revolutionary. My point is that you can get any song you can describe. There will be billions of good quality songs made because billions of people will be able to produce a song just by describing it. I expect new genres to be created almost immediately. And I'm not sure how real musicians can compete with that level of noise out there.

by qppo 6y ago

visarga 6y ago

> Generative music has been around for half a century, If you start by referring to results from 50 years ago, have you tried listening to state of the art generative music systems lately? They can probably compose music better than 99% of humans.

chrisco255 6y ago
Have you been moved by any of that music though? Am I missing something?
- TomMarius 6y ago
  Yeah, it's very moving to see a human-made machine do such wonders. Fills me with awe, appreciation, and hope.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    That's exactly it, though. This stuff is interesting because of the novelty of AI. The works themselves are not independently relevant (not yet, at least).
    - TomMarius 6y ago
      Elsewhere someone replied that art is interesting in a large part because of the personal story. How is this differemt?
      - FartyMcFarter 6y ago
        99% of the time, I don't listen to music for the personal story of the artists involved. In fact, a lot of the music I listen to is made by artists that I know very little about.
- woko 6y ago
  Listen to some samples: - https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/ https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/ (2020, quite good, but no classical music) - https://openai.com/blog/musenet/ https://openai.com/blog/musenet/ (2019 so not as good as the 2020 one, but showcases classical music) There is no reason to assume that one cannot be moved by AI-generated music, as the AI has learnt from human-generated music and tries to mimick the styles.
  - vnorilo 6y ago
    While it's technically impressive and has a decent surface-level resemblance, none of the samples had any sense of direction or substance. I can see this kind of tech taking over stuff like stock music that's automatically added to consumer holiday videos or played on the phone while you wait for a customer service agent. That said, I'd expect the agent to be an AI long before generated music becomes independently musically relevant.
sdenton4 6y ago
But we mostly listen to music written by humans who are better at writing music than 99.9999% of humans.
- candiodari 6y ago
  Yes. And there was a time when we literally used paintings to assess progress in a mine. Cars didn't outperform horse carriages for certainly 10, arguably 30 years after their invention. This "human music" > "ai music" will flip. Suddenly. And it will never flip back.
  - brogrammer2018 6y ago
    > This "human music" > "ai music" will flip. Suddenly. And it will never flip back. Already starting to happen with ai lyrics I use for inspiration in creating EDM music ( i.e. https://TheseLyricsDoNotExist.com/ https://TheseLyricsDoNotExist.com/ )
htrp 6y ago
Is there anything you'd recommend for SOTA music gen?
- visarga 6y ago
  Here are some links: [1] https://magenta.tensorflow.org/music-transformer https://magenta.tensorflow.org/music-transformer [2] https://storage.googleapis.com/magentadata/papers/music-transformer/index.html https://storage.googleapis.com/magentadata/papers/music-tran...
weego 6y ago
This shares the same foundation as the argument that ebooks will kill physical sales and solent will change how people see food, namely that we're all purely motivated by boiling every need we have down to the most fundamental version. It never seems to play out that way at population scales
qppo 6y ago
Yes - the older music is better, because it was an exploration of nondeterminism in art, and not automated replication. Doing what has already been done is rarely compelling.

ajuc 6y ago

That's like saying we've had abakuses since forever therefore these computers will never be revolutionary. Quantitative change by orders of magnitude is qualitative change. Imagine a world where you ask your smartphone to make you a death metal song about fishing and feminism in Australia and to use Freddy Mercury voice and jazz harmonies and it does that on the fly and generates something objectively good. Wouldn't that be revolutionary for music? Because it's entirely possible in the next decade. Probable even.

boffinism 6y ago
To be honest, that doesn't sound _that_ revolutionary for music. Because I'm pretty sure if you went digging, you could already find somewhere on Spotify a pretty decent death metal song with a vocalist who sounds like Freddy Mercury and jazz harmonies (I will concede, the specified subject matter is unlikely). Would you go looking for that, though? Probably not, because musical tastes and interests aren't about wanting a very specific set of attributes in a song. It's about tribalism, cults of personality, senses of belonging, nostalgia etc. The world is not short of good music, or variation in styles of good music, and what causes songs to be popular is not the objective quality of the music. Put it another way. If an AI could generate new Beatles music on the fly, making it sound exactly like the Beatles, with the same creativity of lyrics, tight harmonies, beautiful melodies, would Beatles fans go out in their millions to buy them? No. In the same way that the same dusty demos from the 60s found in an attic somewhere became valuable when it was discovered that they were Beatles demos. The music didn't change, it didn't get better or worse. The personal story attached to them was what mattered.
- ajuc 6y ago
  My point isn't that any particular generated song will be revolutionary. My point is that you can get any song you can describe. There will be billions of good quality songs made because billions of people will be able to produce a song just by describing it. I expect new genres to be created almost immediately. And I'm not sure how real musicians can compete with that level of noise out there.