18 ms·

My Procedurally Generated Music Is Awful

120 points by mproud 6y ago

pmoriarty 6y ago
Don't feel bad, plenty of human-made music is awful too.
- analog31 6y ago
  Among the many ways of creating good music, one is to crate music that is awful but becomes great through the passage of time and changing tastes. Most of the music that I perform sounds awful to most people. It's kind of funny when it comes up in conversation, people ask me what kind of music I play, and I tell them, then there's that awkward moment when they're trying to think of something nice to say about it. I've figured out the easiest thing to say is: "I play music that most people hate." Sometimes awful music stays awful too.
  - Igelau 6y ago
    I'm intrigued. Anything you can share?
    - analog31 6y ago
      Experimental, avant garde jazz. Never been recorded.
      - p1esk 6y ago
        If you don't record it, how can it possibly ever become great with passage of time?
        analog31 6y ago
        Ah, good point. I'd say the genre can gain traction, and our performances can also evolve as we figure this stuff out ourselves. But the bands that I play with don't tend to record.
  - SurfingToad 6y ago
    I think most people would put Trout Mask Replica in this category. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CeLjmIW5wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CeLjmIW5wk After you give it a listen, consider that it got one of Pitchfork's rare 10/10 reviews and ranks high in many lists of the greatest albums of all time.
    - analog31 6y ago
      Indeed, my friends and I threw a band together, to cover that album, and quickly discovered that it was impossible, so we turned to punk rock instead.
TaupeRanger 6y ago
This is a Very Hard Problem™. All current music gen is either: 1) obviously algorithmic and pattern/rule based 2a) generated from computational statistics (deep learning) but handpicked to show only the best results, or... 2b) applied to very simplistic musical styles that sound roughly fine no matter what you do (techno, elevator pop, etc.) or... 2c) not handpicked, but exists within a strange "uncanny valley" where you can tell it's not quite right and just feels a little "off" the whole time
- jleahy 6y ago
  I think (1) potentially has a place for cases where it’s supposed to be background music that you wouldn’t really pay attention to (but shouldn’t repeat). It’s pretty easy to take a style of music and produce something that sort of goes round and round modulating into different keys and so forth without actually going anywhere in particular. But what you’re really doing is composing a parameterised piece of music and the randomly substituting parameters as you play it. This is what people are doing in real-life with things like cocktail piano anyway. If you can’t compose to begin with then you don’t stand a chance, however.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  "Uncanny" is quite subjective when it comes to music. I know of at least 'DeepBach', Feynman Liang et al.'s (2016) 'BachBot' and Daniel Johnson's (2015) 'biaxial-rnn' as algorithmic music systems that could all be described as 'quirky' in many ways, but definitely not 'off'. And they're not limited to 'simplistic' music styles - all of them deal with Western music of the common practice period, which is quite non-trivial. Their main limitation is modeling structure beyond the 'short musical phrase' level, but that's to be expected.
  - TaupeRanger 6y ago
    Those are all very clearly quirky enough to be considered "off" by people who understand Bach's music and the classical tradition more generally. And the large scale structure problem is one of the primary reasons the whole thing is so hard in the first place.
Slow_Hand 6y ago
I like this quote “Don’t try to procedurally generate something that you can’t already create”. I’ve been actively making music full time for a good 15 years now. I work as a writer/producer and despite all of my experience and theoretical understanding I’d probably be hard pressed to come up with a way to algorithmically describe my musical instincts in a way that generates satisfying music. I think a large part of the trouble comes from the notion that most music requires a certain degree of subversion of expectation. And not randomly selected subversions either. Deliberate choices that feel meaningful. I could spend a lot of time defining one melodic phrase and immediately need to tweak the rule for the second half or a reharmonization. Not to mention rhythmic cadences and groove. I’ve been doing a deep dive on Autechre recently and am revisiting interviews where they hint at their process. The duo is notorious for using self-built tools that algorithmically generate the sounds, texture, and rhythms. These programs are not expected to run independently or generate great music on their own. They are actively guided and performed by the band as they jam and compose. In this way it’s more of an augmentation of their will that allows them to create such rhythmically dense compositions. In re-reading these interviews what I found interesting is that for them the act of building the program is one and the same with the act of composition. They’re defining the parameters, limits, and characteristics of a composition and then using their judgement to steer and flex the sonic structures that they’ve built up. When it comes to generative music, I think they’ve got the right attitude in not expecting the software to do the heavy lifting. It’s instead treated as an extension of their performance.
- scsilver 6y ago
  I produce music aswell. I think some genres like techno could have procedurally generated tracks, that could be then brought to an artistic level by a dj mix of those tracks. The dj would provide that needed subversion and unpredictability to make it worth listening to.
- briankelly 6y ago
  I'm just a hobbyist but I play guitar and am getting more into production (drum machines, synths, sequencing multi-sampled instruments, etc.) Recording my guitar gives me an appreciation for the fact that as great as virtual instruments are, there is still so much left on the table that a good instrumentalist (let alone a vocalist) is doing and often not even thinking about it. There's much more to it than playing the right notes at the right times if you want it to sound right, much less good. Stuff like the Linnstrument is taking it to higher levels, but I think the horizon for Faux-y Bonnamosa is a little further out than some in the tech crowds might imagine. The bar might seem a little lower for pure electronic genres but it'll still be some time before Steve Faoki is consistently better than the real deal.
iainctduncan 6y ago
Algorithmic composition is indeed a wicked hard problem. But were you are aware that there exists a whole industry for licensing music for the kind of thing you're doing? Getting music licenses is not hard. It might be too expensive for your use case, but this is what many game companies do.
codeulike 6y ago
I think part of the problem is that the 'simple plan' at the foundation of the attempt was this: 1. Have a background server process generate 8-second three-part-tune clips 2. Use some basic heuristics to guess at the key signature (“C# major”) of the clips, evaluate their intensity (lots of drum hits? loads of notes?) and save them in a huge clip database. 3. Create a search interface for the clip database. 4. Have the client request clips from the server in a specific key and intensity. 5. Weave two or three clips together, repeating them a couple of times, to make a full “song”. I think thats just a bad plan, and if you start from that, any embellishments or improvements you try to make later just wont get anywhere. Why is it a bad plan? Working out what key signature a short phrase of music is in is not that simple. e.g. you can look at the notes and say 'well that fits C major' but actually C major and A minor contain the same notes, and the difference between them is subtle, its to do with how often the root note is used, or even more abstract stuff like how often the root note is implied. There is kindof a probability distribution of notes for each key signature, and that distribution is how we recognise them. Sometimes there's ambiguity, and thats part of the art. If the generated clip only uses (say) 6 semitones, there might be a multitude of differnt key signatures or scales that it could _potentially_ fit into to (Pentatonic, phrygian, Major, Minor etc etc with various different root notes), but the most accurate one musically would be very hard to determine out of context, because in reality the context around the clip (say the 20 bars before and after) play a big part in how a 'clip' would be experienced. And if you're going to generate random clips to begin with (step 1), I'm hoping those werent random clips where any of the 8 tones or 12 semitones in play have an equal probability of being used, because thats just going to sound muddy. I guess he was going for a system that had very few rules and then tried to get the system to learn from there, but I think thats just too muddy a starting point to ever get anywhere. And obv purely generative music is hard, but what I'm talking about here I think explains why the stuff he generated was classified by him as 'awful' rather than just 'weak' or a bit boring. TLDR: I think a misunderstanding of what a key-signature really is might be to blame. Its not just 'which notes', its a whole probability curve and its very contextual.
codeulike 6y ago
Here's an example of some nice procgen music. https://github.com/devinroth/GenerativeMusic https://github.com/devinroth/GenerativeMusic Its a lot more opinionated, its not just a blank slate at the start, but thats the only way to generate stuff that sounds nice, as things stand at the moment.
MauranKilom 6y ago
Random 2 cents: A lot of what makes music (at least the kind that most people like to consume) pleasant is repetition and self-similarity. Consider the "sometimes behave so strangely" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion) for a fascinating illustration of this. For many genres, you fundamentally have repetitions at every power of two interval. For example, the hi-hat repeats every eigth. Kick drum every quarter. Snare every second quarter. Maybe an effect every bar, a rhythmic variation every second bar, phrasing covering four bars. Cadence repeats every eight bars. Melody maybe 16 bars. Verse or chorus 32 bars. ABAB song structure. It's repetitions all the way down. As with all "rules" in music you can ignore them to whatever degree you like. But ignore too many and it just sounds like a mess. On a related note (no pun intended), I am starting to notice that, for me, getting tired of a song coincides with "hearing" the repetition of material (e.g. chorus) at larger and larger intervals. Of course you know that the chorus repeats, but here I specifically mean that it sounds like an echo of the chorus a minute ago.
- ratww 6y ago
  Yep, I was thinking along the same lines. The music we hear in day-to-day is often very simple. Besides structure, chords are often the same. Most of the time it's I-IV-V, sometimes I-IV-V-vi... I even saw a video today mentioning how the I-ii-IV-V of Cure's "Just Like Heaven" is an uncommon progression. For soundtracks it's often just two chords vamping. Melody notes also rarely stray from whats sounds consonant with the current chord. Dissonance is only for passing notes. In the strong beats it's certainly something consonant. Sometimes it's all just a pentatonic. You also gotta emphasise that tonic everywhere. Melodies also need structure: you gotta have that AABA (or something like that) in your verse/theme/phrase, almost like a fractal. Broken rules only happen once or twice per song, or not at all. The more good music I dissect the more impressed I am with how simple it is.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    Not all but too much of that description applies only to western popular music. Indian classical music (probably among the most melodically advanced in the world) doesn't use anything like the song structures you're referring to (it also doesn't use harmony). The ease of certain kinds of music production has led to us to living in a decade (or two) of huge amounts of what I can only call "audio candy for ears trained on western popular music". There's nothing wrong with this music, but it's like eating cookies all the time, not realizing there are other delicious kinds of food out there.
Igelau 6y ago
Iannis Xenakis experimented with stochastic music, as well as compositions that were derived from his own architectural designs. A lot of it is very hard to listen to, but he was a trailblazer in this direction.
nbulka 6y ago
I've spent days on this problem and the hard part is not the music theory. Even Moonlight Sonata will sound dinky if you are playing it with sin waves. Generating an interesting synth sound is at least as hard as generating an interesting melody. If anyone has any good psychoacoustic resources, I'd be all ears. Melody is quickly becoming secondary to sound design in modern music, for better or worse.
- rch 6y ago
  Here's some Magenta-generated music played through a Moog One[!]: https://soundcloud.com/zndx/20201102-01-415v2 https://soundcloud.com/zndx/20201102-01-415v2 I think it would be great to set up a studio with a few modern analog synths 'in the loop' for automated training. [!] recorded through a Tascam 688 I found at a thrift store.
  - nbulka 6y ago
    For sure! I've been putting random magenta drum and melody generations through this free synth Vital ( https://vital.audio/ https://vital.audio/ ) Second step is choose a lead preset based on random letter generation (whatever is closest). (I believe this is the hard part as far as generation goes ... but there are patterns to oscillator presets) Third step is import the generated MIDI into your DAW like Logic or Ableton. Fourth, pick a key and quantize the notes. Finally pick a pad and match the bass notes. I'll generate one right now ... all AI/randomized except for the design of the preset. Be back in 5 minutes.
    - nbulka 6y ago
      https://soundcloud.com/nicholasbulka/random-magenta https://soundcloud.com/nicholasbulka/random-magenta lol, if this is interesting to anyone let me know and I'll put together a yt video.
- bambax 6y ago
  OP's examples all use generated waves, but tone.js can use samples that sound pretty realistic and can be much more pleasant to listen to IMHO.
chihuahua 6y ago
These attempts at procedurally generated music remind me a bit of twelve-tone technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique) where Schoenberg and other composers came up with new rules for writing music. The resulting twelve-tone music sounds awful (to me), worse than the procedurally-generated examples from the article.
- rectang 6y ago
  The twelve-tone technique is like a Gaussian blur for melody. It generates a melody which is all-but-impossible for a listener to focus on actively. That can be useful in certain scoring contexts where you want the music to be background while dramatic on-screen elements occupy the foreground. That's a pretty limited use case, though... which is basically my point. In most circumstances, the twelve-tone technique doesn't produce results many people find compelling.
gabereiser 6y ago
Whatever is generated needs to align with the scales’ “mode” so that each part’s i,iv,v are the same notes. Then sections of 16 bars verse, chorus, 16 bars, chorus, bridge, chorus or some variant of song structure and I’m sure this would crank out hits.
wwarner 6y ago
I thought the last song, the goodbye, was great.
Applejinx 6y ago
I figured out how to do it :) Repetition is key to people being able to latch onto music, but you can still deeply randomize things. What I'm doing is driving everything off Music Thing Modular Chord Organs, with firmware I programmed. Everything's based off a chord (or note) choice within one of twelve keys, and the secret is that you've got to modulate by circle of fifths, not chromatically. Also, chords are better arranged off pentatonic roots, rather than diatonically. Do that and you can go to challenging jazz chords, but things hang together in a logical/musical way. I've been evolving this system for years: here's a jam with heavy reliance on procedurally-generated chords and arps: https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/therefore https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/therefore And this one's more recent, but set to wander a bit more far afield as far as the random range goes. Chords and roots and arps generated procedurally, plus other playing on top. https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/fogbound-2020-11-03 https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/fogbound-2020-11-03
- bambax 6y ago
  Are you Chris Johnson? If yes, thanks for everything!! ;-)
  - Applejinx 6y ago
    Yup! And you're quite welcome! I try to put as much code as I can up on GitHub, recently working on some more Music Thing Modular Chord Organ firmware. I've got simple versions of the oscillators running up to 12 bit/2.9 megahertz, and a chord version running happily at 768k :) this greatly improves aliasing performance, both at high and low frequencies.
syrrim 6y ago
Dunno what you were expecting. Granted, it's not Mozart, but then, if music were easy, someone would have solved it and put the whole industry out of business. But the examples you posted - which, granted, were apparently the cream of the crop - sound decent enough. I think this voxel fellow is going to hard on you. If you filtered it to only capture the decent stuff, it would be fine to have in the background while the player was focused on the game. Though I suppose whatever you get someone to compose for you will sound that much better. On that basis, I would definitely grant the implied generalization of the title: if the audio samples in this post aren't good enough for you, then procedurally generated music won't cut it. On the other hand, if you want procedurally generated music, and you could see yourself living with the music from this post, it would definitely be workable.
SurfingToad 6y ago
Based on the replies so far, I think most of you would find Schmidhuber's Compression Progress Drive interesting. The idea is essentially that of an adversarial agent with two components. A attempts of to compress its entire life history, breaking it all into neat chunks. B gets off on A's progress in so doing, and finds/creates patterns that are just within A's reach. So B's intrinsic motivation comes from discovering novel patterns that are broken down by A. You can get really far with this idea, and music is the perfect example. We enjoy patterns. Complicated patterns become more interesting with listening experience. Simple patterns are quickly exhausted. So long as there is structure, there is opportunity for enjoyment. Of course, Schmidhuber's theory is a bit more complicated than that. And his own opinion of it is a bit ... grandiose. Title of one of his papers on the topic: "Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes" Nonetheless, I think it's a neat theory.
renewiltord 6y ago
Well, Punk-o-matic's Random Song sounded pretty good.
alexpc201 6y ago
Weird nobody mention Brian Eno or Damon Albarn here.
PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
>explaining in painful detail that the soundtrack to Fart Chalice IV actually takes advantage of phrygian pentameter and post-modern phrasing to create artificial dissonance between the fourth and sixteenth notes in an alternating jazz-inspired progression. > I can just barely read music. I can’t deal with that! Sadly, the author has this backwards. Reading music has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the music theory (admittedly gobbledy-gook) in the first paragraph. If you're a coder, you can do music theory. You might choose not to, and that's OK. But don't make it out to be harder than it is. There are lots of places to start. The problem with not reading music is not that you won't be able to understand music theory. It's that it is very hard to find anyone who will explain it you (in person or in writing) without the terminology (and conceptual skeleton) of western notation and 18th century western tonal harmony. Neither of these things are actually central at all, but good luck avoiding it if you were ever to try.
- legerdemain 6y ago
  My problem is that whenever I've picked up a music theory textbook, the author opens with "put your hands on the keyboard... doesn't playing <foo> <bar> and <baz> feel natural?" As someone who has had zero music training, but has considered generative music as a possible hobby, I'd like to at least start trying to understand the domain before committing to a physical instrument and working on developing muscle memory. I'd really love a rigorous music theory textbook that does not assume you already play an instrument.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Music theory is based on generalizing patterns that are found in actual music. Your "muscle memory" is an integral part of understanding this generalization semi-rigorously. About the only thing that can be called loosely 'rigorous' wrt. music theory is the derivation of the diatonic scale from "stacking" fifths.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
      I don't agree with your dismal final sentence. Musical set theory [1] is an examination of scales/harmony without giving preference to western modes. The harmonic series is a physical phenomena at the root of all musical cultural behavior, and is a completely rigorous subject. The diatonic scale isn't derived by stacking fifths, since that would be tautological: a "fifth" is a concept taken from the diatonic scale. What you likely meant was "derivation of the diatonic scale by stacking key integer ratios between frequencies, particularly the ratio 3:2)" That already elides the whole concept that dissonance and consonance correspond to the presence or absence of non-integer ratios between frequencies with notable energy. It also skips over the admittedly subjective way in which introducing more dissonance by way of "odd" ratios can still be perceived as musically interesting (though almost always in culturally determined ways). [1] this isn't pure MST, but it's a great place to start even if it is limited to 12TET tuning: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/ https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/
fenomas 6y ago
As someone who's worked on this a lot, this article resonated but I disagree with the conclusions. (Or at any rate I feel like my procedural stuff is listenable, though I can't read or compose music.) I think the author's biggest problem is the bottom-up approach of creating lots of raw clips and then at a higher level trying to assemble them. I've found music generation to consistently be a very similar task to text generation, and to me the author's approach seems analogous to generating lots of random sentences and then trying to assemble them into a short story. Everything I've done that's worked has been completely top down - the core of the engine determines the state of the song (we're in the A section, bar 7, the current chord is V/V, etc.) and the low level parts generate something to match all that. E.g. the melody part might decide to play the root tone of the current chord, but it has to ask the core what note that would be. The hard thing about this approach is that you need an environment where you can dynamically play notes of an arbitrary pitch/length/instrument, which either means lots of sound fonts or realtime audio gen. I've been doing this with WebAudio, and while it works it's been very painful - for me the "play sounds" part of procedural music has more difficult than the "compose music" part.
- bambax 6y ago
  Have you tried tone.js? It's pretty easy to setup and play with, and lets one use a few samples to imitate any instrument. Edit: tune -> tone.
  - fenomas 6y ago
    Do you mean tone.js? If so then yes I started out using it, but wound up rolling my own engines. I don't remember specifically why, but something to do with wanting less magic and more low-level control. I wanted everything to be realtime web audio, so I wound up just building instruments out of oscillators and so on. Here's a very old sample to give the idea: https://fenomas.com/2017/12/advent-17/ https://fenomas.com/2017/12/advent-17/
    - bambax 6y ago
      Yes, sorry, it's tone.js I find using the sampler very easy and convenient.
darrennix 6y ago
I loved reading this very much. Well done.
Tokkemon 6y ago
As a composer, I know my craft is far more than just deciding how to make music. It's about getting in the mind of the listener, making them second guess what's coming, or to make them experience an emotion that's already in their brain, it just has to be coaxed out. All art does this, and it takes a uniquely human understanding of the human brain to make it happen successfully.
- uxcolumbo 6y ago
  Not sure why you’ve been downvoted. I agree it’s about triggering emotions... and for that having the ability to empathise helps.
8bitsrule 6y ago
It would take a long time for one person to make PGM-created music (melodies, variations, chord progressions, rhythms, ABACA-type forms, etc) decent enough to be sort of satisfying. I'd bet that in that same time or less, you could learn to improvise equally decent stuff - probably far better - yourself on at least two instruments. If you've been listening to music for 5-10 years, you'll probably never 'train' a machine to know what music is as well as you've been trained. Whichever way you go, if the product can't compete with the flood of stuff that's already out there? including production quality? I can guarantee you what people's reaction will be. Not pretty.
keyle 6y ago
I don't know I quite enjoy some of the generative.fm streams, but they're kind of highly rigged to sound decent.
thewebcount 6y ago
The music being generated in the article doesn't sound like it has any coherent structure. When you procedurally generate terrain, for example, you do it in a way that is coherent and has structure similar to what you find in nature. You have areas that are the same height, areas where the height varies slowly or quickly. But you don't generally just have random bits of terrain stuck together. This music sounds like random bits of notation stuck together. There doesn't appear to be a time signature or chord progression or any melodic development. I think building that type of structure into it would be a good first step.
tlarkworthy 6y ago
A lot of sounds are procedurally generated (e.g. noise sources in synths). Composition is much harder though. My friend once said: Would you ever read a randomly generated book? ... so why do you think that any other art form would become palatable under procedural generation? (game levels, music etc.). Procedural generation is quantity over quality. It makes sense in some settings, but not in 1st order art.
- bambax 6y ago
  > Would you ever read a randomly generated book? 1. You may have, and didn't notice! ;-) 2. Games use randomly generated terrains and it feels just fine.
  - tlarkworthy 6y ago
    Terrain yes, npc face yes. Levels... no
- wool_gather 6y ago
  > It makes sense in some settings, but not in 1st order art. I'm forced to disagree -- in part -- here. There are plenty of beautiful and stirring (or even just intriguing) generative pictures out there. I agree in part, though: from my own experience, generative music composition is harder than generative imagemaking. Probably because there are many, many more dimensions of choices that need to be made.
sillysaurusx 6y ago
Hello, I made some ML generated videogame music: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame... There are ballroom themes, battle themes, boss fights, and the last one is my attempt at a final battle track. If there's interest, I can walk through how the model works. Gwern's writeup is here: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music All 25 tracks were made in a single night. That's the kind of boost you can get from ML. Note that it's not entirely automatic. But that's a benefit, not a downside. It's more like an AI instrument that you play. The songs each contain the ABC source code that generated it. (Click on the song's description to see.) You can replicate the song for yourself by copying the source code into a text file, then running something like this: abc2midi "${1}.abc" -o "${1}.mid" && timidity "${1}.mid" -Ov -o "${1}.ogg" && timidity "${1}.mid" (That's from my bash script called "abc2ogg".) An effective model will "group" its data in a way that the model can understand. That's the essence of why this model worked so well.
- ttjjtt 6y ago
  To be fair these results can be used as a representation of ML art output as being distinct in its qualities and related ease of production. It immediately appears as a hazy simulacrum when listened to be an interested critical ear. Which can work to your point; there vast production use cases for ML-quality media issues background dressing, eg music for cheap/free video games, infotainment videos , or any application where cheap production libraries will suffice. Huge amounts of human labor have been thrown at making throw away media assets. Similarly a large proportion of serious, foreground art works consist of mundane background chores that ML can achieve with incredible efficiency. But when ML generation is placed to the foreground, as the main focus, it appears like an unnerving vacuous simulacra. I can’t yet see it being something beyond shovel-like, in its function and form
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    I partly agree, but I like "Crossing The Channel": https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/crossing-the-channel?in=theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/crossing-the-channel?in=the... The reason the beat is so unique is because the model started out by making a mistake. Or at least I thought it was a mistake; it took several measures to hear what it had in mind. GPT did its usual "generate the next most likely thing," which happens to be a rhythm that sounds good. In some sense, it's impossible to say whether it was a mistake, or if it "planned" to write it like this. "The Cruise" is lovely and relaxing: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-cruise?in=theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-cruise?in=theshawwn/set... and "Green Mountain" is just fun: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-green-mountain?in=theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-green-mountain?in=thesh... As for the effect on the art world, I think indie gamedevs will be happy they have some nice tunes without having to work with a musician. There's no way to know what the wider implications will be, though. Perhaps kids will grow up hearing stories of how granddad learned to play the guitar himself rather than asking the computer to write a hit song.
verytrivial 6y ago
Dance/electro/pop/(?) band YACHT released an album that basically started as an AI mashup of there previous albums. It's actually not awful(!), but presumably is heavily reworked. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping-is-a-new-landmark-for-ai-music-an-album-that-doesnt-suck/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping...
lou1306 6y ago
This may be marginally relevant: the latest post on the Digital Antiquarian [0] briefly talks about "Sid Meier's CPU Bach", a procedural music generator that (the year being 1994) does not use ML in any way and only relies on music theory. It's not so famous because it was a 3DO exclusive (!), but there are some YouTube videos that showcase its output [1]. It may or may not fall into the "bland and samey" category. After all it just tries to emulate the style of one artist. You be the judge. [0]: https://www.filfre.net/2020/12/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-part-2-colonization/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/12/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-par... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QLQ_mYXf1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QLQ_mYXf1I
moocowtruck 6y ago
i am currently rocking out to cube drone and enjoying it.. I feel like I'm on a quest to slay a dragon and save the village of cubedroneville
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Listening, I feel the tunes have maybe some short-term pattern from line to line. But they don't go anywhere. Just noodling along without a plan. That's got to be part of music: it has to go somewhere?

120 points by mproud 6y ago

pmoriarty 6y ago

Don't feel bad, plenty of human-made music is awful too.

analog31 6y ago
Among the many ways of creating good music, one is to crate music that is awful but becomes great through the passage of time and changing tastes. Most of the music that I perform sounds awful to most people. It's kind of funny when it comes up in conversation, people ask me what kind of music I play, and I tell them, then there's that awkward moment when they're trying to think of something nice to say about it. I've figured out the easiest thing to say is: "I play music that most people hate." Sometimes awful music stays awful too.
- Igelau 6y ago
  I'm intrigued. Anything you can share?
  - analog31 6y ago
    Experimental, avant garde jazz. Never been recorded.
    - p1esk 6y ago
      If you don't record it, how can it possibly ever become great with passage of time?
      - analog31 6y ago
        Ah, good point. I'd say the genre can gain traction, and our performances can also evolve as we figure this stuff out ourselves. But the bands that I play with don't tend to record.
- SurfingToad 6y ago
  I think most people would put Trout Mask Replica in this category. For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CeLjmIW5wk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CeLjmIW5wk After you give it a listen, consider that it got one of Pitchfork's rare 10/10 reviews and ranks high in many lists of the greatest albums of all time.
  - analog31 6y ago
    Indeed, my friends and I threw a band together, to cover that album, and quickly discovered that it was impossible, so we turned to punk rock instead.

TaupeRanger 6y ago

This is a Very Hard Problem™. All current music gen is either: 1) obviously algorithmic and pattern/rule based 2a) generated from computational statistics (deep learning) but handpicked to show only the best results, or... 2b) applied to very simplistic musical styles that sound roughly fine no matter what you do (techno, elevator pop, etc.) or... 2c) not handpicked, but exists within a strange "uncanny valley" where you can tell it's not quite right and just feels a little "off" the whole time

jleahy 6y ago
I think (1) potentially has a place for cases where it’s supposed to be background music that you wouldn’t really pay attention to (but shouldn’t repeat). It’s pretty easy to take a style of music and produce something that sort of goes round and round modulating into different keys and so forth without actually going anywhere in particular. But what you’re really doing is composing a parameterised piece of music and the randomly substituting parameters as you play it. This is what people are doing in real-life with things like cocktail piano anyway. If you can’t compose to begin with then you don’t stand a chance, however.
zozbot234 6y ago
"Uncanny" is quite subjective when it comes to music. I know of at least 'DeepBach', Feynman Liang et al.'s (2016) 'BachBot' and Daniel Johnson's (2015) 'biaxial-rnn' as algorithmic music systems that could all be described as 'quirky' in many ways, but definitely not 'off'. And they're not limited to 'simplistic' music styles - all of them deal with Western music of the common practice period, which is quite non-trivial. Their main limitation is modeling structure beyond the 'short musical phrase' level, but that's to be expected.
- TaupeRanger 6y ago
  Those are all very clearly quirky enough to be considered "off" by people who understand Bach's music and the classical tradition more generally. And the large scale structure problem is one of the primary reasons the whole thing is so hard in the first place.

Slow_Hand 6y ago

I like this quote “Don’t try to procedurally generate something that you can’t already create”. I’ve been actively making music full time for a good 15 years now. I work as a writer/producer and despite all of my experience and theoretical understanding I’d probably be hard pressed to come up with a way to algorithmically describe my musical instincts in a way that generates satisfying music. I think a large part of the trouble comes from the notion that most music requires a certain degree of subversion of expectation. And not randomly selected subversions either. Deliberate choices that feel meaningful. I could spend a lot of time defining one melodic phrase and immediately need to tweak the rule for the second half or a reharmonization. Not to mention rhythmic cadences and groove. I’ve been doing a deep dive on Autechre recently and am revisiting interviews where they hint at their process. The duo is notorious for using self-built tools that algorithmically generate the sounds, texture, and rhythms. These programs are not expected to run independently or generate great music on their own. They are actively guided and performed by the band as they jam and compose. In this way it’s more of an augmentation of their will that allows them to create such rhythmically dense compositions. In re-reading these interviews what I found interesting is that for them the act of building the program is one and the same with the act of composition. They’re defining the parameters, limits, and characteristics of a composition and then using their judgement to steer and flex the sonic structures that they’ve built up. When it comes to generative music, I think they’ve got the right attitude in not expecting the software to do the heavy lifting. It’s instead treated as an extension of their performance.

scsilver 6y ago
I produce music aswell. I think some genres like techno could have procedurally generated tracks, that could be then brought to an artistic level by a dj mix of those tracks. The dj would provide that needed subversion and unpredictability to make it worth listening to.
briankelly 6y ago
I'm just a hobbyist but I play guitar and am getting more into production (drum machines, synths, sequencing multi-sampled instruments, etc.) Recording my guitar gives me an appreciation for the fact that as great as virtual instruments are, there is still so much left on the table that a good instrumentalist (let alone a vocalist) is doing and often not even thinking about it. There's much more to it than playing the right notes at the right times if you want it to sound right, much less good. Stuff like the Linnstrument is taking it to higher levels, but I think the horizon for Faux-y Bonnamosa is a little further out than some in the tech crowds might imagine. The bar might seem a little lower for pure electronic genres but it'll still be some time before Steve Faoki is consistently better than the real deal.

iainctduncan 6y ago

Algorithmic composition is indeed a wicked hard problem. But were you are aware that there exists a whole industry for licensing music for the kind of thing you're doing? Getting music licenses is not hard. It might be too expensive for your use case, but this is what many game companies do.

codeulike 6y ago

I think part of the problem is that the 'simple plan' at the foundation of the attempt was this: 1. Have a background server process generate 8-second three-part-tune clips 2. Use some basic heuristics to guess at the key signature (“C# major”) of the clips, evaluate their intensity (lots of drum hits? loads of notes?) and save them in a huge clip database. 3. Create a search interface for the clip database. 4. Have the client request clips from the server in a specific key and intensity. 5. Weave two or three clips together, repeating them a couple of times, to make a full “song”. I think thats just a bad plan, and if you start from that, any embellishments or improvements you try to make later just wont get anywhere. Why is it a bad plan? Working out what key signature a short phrase of music is in is not that simple. e.g. you can look at the notes and say 'well that fits C major' but actually C major and A minor contain the same notes, and the difference between them is subtle, its to do with how often the root note is used, or even more abstract stuff like how often the root note is implied. There is kindof a probability distribution of notes for each key signature, and that distribution is how we recognise them. Sometimes there's ambiguity, and thats part of the art. If the generated clip only uses (say) 6 semitones, there might be a multitude of differnt key signatures or scales that it could _potentially_ fit into to (Pentatonic, phrygian, Major, Minor etc etc with various different root notes), but the most accurate one musically would be very hard to determine out of context, because in reality the context around the clip (say the 20 bars before and after) play a big part in how a 'clip' would be experienced. And if you're going to generate random clips to begin with (step 1), I'm hoping those werent random clips where any of the 8 tones or 12 semitones in play have an equal probability of being used, because thats just going to sound muddy. I guess he was going for a system that had very few rules and then tried to get the system to learn from there, but I think thats just too muddy a starting point to ever get anywhere. And obv purely generative music is hard, but what I'm talking about here I think explains why the stuff he generated was classified by him as 'awful' rather than just 'weak' or a bit boring. TLDR: I think a misunderstanding of what a key-signature really is might be to blame. Its not just 'which notes', its a whole probability curve and its very contextual.

codeulike 6y ago

Here's an example of some nice procgen music. https://github.com/devinroth/GenerativeMusic https://github.com/devinroth/GenerativeMusic Its a lot more opinionated, its not just a blank slate at the start, but thats the only way to generate stuff that sounds nice, as things stand at the moment.

MauranKilom 6y ago

Random 2 cents: A lot of what makes music (at least the kind that most people like to consume) pleasant is repetition and self-similarity. Consider the "sometimes behave so strangely" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech-to-song_illusion) for a fascinating illustration of this. For many genres, you fundamentally have repetitions at every power of two interval. For example, the hi-hat repeats every eigth. Kick drum every quarter. Snare every second quarter. Maybe an effect every bar, a rhythmic variation every second bar, phrasing covering four bars. Cadence repeats every eight bars. Melody maybe 16 bars. Verse or chorus 32 bars. ABAB song structure. It's repetitions all the way down. As with all "rules" in music you can ignore them to whatever degree you like. But ignore too many and it just sounds like a mess. On a related note (no pun intended), I am starting to notice that, for me, getting tired of a song coincides with "hearing" the repetition of material (e.g. chorus) at larger and larger intervals. Of course you know that the chorus repeats, but here I specifically mean that it sounds like an echo of the chorus a minute ago.

ratww 6y ago
Yep, I was thinking along the same lines. The music we hear in day-to-day is often very simple. Besides structure, chords are often the same. Most of the time it's I-IV-V, sometimes I-IV-V-vi... I even saw a video today mentioning how the I-ii-IV-V of Cure's "Just Like Heaven" is an uncommon progression. For soundtracks it's often just two chords vamping. Melody notes also rarely stray from whats sounds consonant with the current chord. Dissonance is only for passing notes. In the strong beats it's certainly something consonant. Sometimes it's all just a pentatonic. You also gotta emphasise that tonic everywhere. Melodies also need structure: you gotta have that AABA (or something like that) in your verse/theme/phrase, almost like a fractal. Broken rules only happen once or twice per song, or not at all. The more good music I dissect the more impressed I am with how simple it is.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  Not all but too much of that description applies only to western popular music. Indian classical music (probably among the most melodically advanced in the world) doesn't use anything like the song structures you're referring to (it also doesn't use harmony). The ease of certain kinds of music production has led to us to living in a decade (or two) of huge amounts of what I can only call "audio candy for ears trained on western popular music". There's nothing wrong with this music, but it's like eating cookies all the time, not realizing there are other delicious kinds of food out there.

Igelau 6y ago

Iannis Xenakis experimented with stochastic music, as well as compositions that were derived from his own architectural designs. A lot of it is very hard to listen to, but he was a trailblazer in this direction.

nbulka 6y ago

I've spent days on this problem and the hard part is not the music theory. Even Moonlight Sonata will sound dinky if you are playing it with sin waves. Generating an interesting synth sound is at least as hard as generating an interesting melody. If anyone has any good psychoacoustic resources, I'd be all ears. Melody is quickly becoming secondary to sound design in modern music, for better or worse.

rch 6y ago
Here's some Magenta-generated music played through a Moog One[!]: https://soundcloud.com/zndx/20201102-01-415v2 https://soundcloud.com/zndx/20201102-01-415v2 I think it would be great to set up a studio with a few modern analog synths 'in the loop' for automated training. [!] recorded through a Tascam 688 I found at a thrift store.
- nbulka 6y ago
  For sure! I've been putting random magenta drum and melody generations through this free synth Vital ( https://vital.audio/ https://vital.audio/ ) Second step is choose a lead preset based on random letter generation (whatever is closest). (I believe this is the hard part as far as generation goes ... but there are patterns to oscillator presets) Third step is import the generated MIDI into your DAW like Logic or Ableton. Fourth, pick a key and quantize the notes. Finally pick a pad and match the bass notes. I'll generate one right now ... all AI/randomized except for the design of the preset. Be back in 5 minutes.
  - nbulka 6y ago
    https://soundcloud.com/nicholasbulka/random-magenta https://soundcloud.com/nicholasbulka/random-magenta lol, if this is interesting to anyone let me know and I'll put together a yt video.
bambax 6y ago
OP's examples all use generated waves, but tone.js can use samples that sound pretty realistic and can be much more pleasant to listen to IMHO.

chihuahua 6y ago

These attempts at procedurally generated music remind me a bit of twelve-tone technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve-tone_technique) where Schoenberg and other composers came up with new rules for writing music. The resulting twelve-tone music sounds awful (to me), worse than the procedurally-generated examples from the article.

rectang 6y ago
The twelve-tone technique is like a Gaussian blur for melody. It generates a melody which is all-but-impossible for a listener to focus on actively. That can be useful in certain scoring contexts where you want the music to be background while dramatic on-screen elements occupy the foreground. That's a pretty limited use case, though... which is basically my point. In most circumstances, the twelve-tone technique doesn't produce results many people find compelling.

gabereiser 6y ago

Whatever is generated needs to align with the scales’ “mode” so that each part’s i,iv,v are the same notes. Then sections of 16 bars verse, chorus, 16 bars, chorus, bridge, chorus or some variant of song structure and I’m sure this would crank out hits.

wwarner 6y ago

I thought the last song, the goodbye, was great.

Applejinx 6y ago

I figured out how to do it :) Repetition is key to people being able to latch onto music, but you can still deeply randomize things. What I'm doing is driving everything off Music Thing Modular Chord Organs, with firmware I programmed. Everything's based off a chord (or note) choice within one of twelve keys, and the secret is that you've got to modulate by circle of fifths, not chromatically. Also, chords are better arranged off pentatonic roots, rather than diatonically. Do that and you can go to challenging jazz chords, but things hang together in a logical/musical way. I've been evolving this system for years: here's a jam with heavy reliance on procedurally-generated chords and arps: https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/therefore https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/therefore And this one's more recent, but set to wander a bit more far afield as far as the random range goes. Chords and roots and arps generated procedurally, plus other playing on top. https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/fogbound-2020-11-03 https://soundcloud.com/airwindows/fogbound-2020-11-03

bambax 6y ago
Are you Chris Johnson? If yes, thanks for everything!! ;-)
- Applejinx 6y ago
  Yup! And you're quite welcome! I try to put as much code as I can up on GitHub, recently working on some more Music Thing Modular Chord Organ firmware. I've got simple versions of the oscillators running up to 12 bit/2.9 megahertz, and a chord version running happily at 768k :) this greatly improves aliasing performance, both at high and low frequencies.

syrrim 6y ago

Dunno what you were expecting. Granted, it's not Mozart, but then, if music were easy, someone would have solved it and put the whole industry out of business. But the examples you posted - which, granted, were apparently the cream of the crop - sound decent enough. I think this voxel fellow is going to hard on you. If you filtered it to only capture the decent stuff, it would be fine to have in the background while the player was focused on the game. Though I suppose whatever you get someone to compose for you will sound that much better. On that basis, I would definitely grant the implied generalization of the title: if the audio samples in this post aren't good enough for you, then procedurally generated music won't cut it. On the other hand, if you want procedurally generated music, and you could see yourself living with the music from this post, it would definitely be workable.

SurfingToad 6y ago

Based on the replies so far, I think most of you would find Schmidhuber's Compression Progress Drive interesting. The idea is essentially that of an adversarial agent with two components. A attempts of to compress its entire life history, breaking it all into neat chunks. B gets off on A's progress in so doing, and finds/creates patterns that are just within A's reach. So B's intrinsic motivation comes from discovering novel patterns that are broken down by A. You can get really far with this idea, and music is the perfect example. We enjoy patterns. Complicated patterns become more interesting with listening experience. Simple patterns are quickly exhausted. So long as there is structure, there is opportunity for enjoyment. Of course, Schmidhuber's theory is a bit more complicated than that. And his own opinion of it is a bit ... grandiose. Title of one of his papers on the topic: "Driven by Compression Progress: A Simple Principle Explains Essential Aspects of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes" Nonetheless, I think it's a neat theory.

renewiltord 6y ago

Well, Punk-o-matic's Random Song sounded pretty good.

alexpc201 6y ago

Weird nobody mention Brian Eno or Damon Albarn here.

PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago

>explaining in painful detail that the soundtrack to Fart Chalice IV actually takes advantage of phrygian pentameter and post-modern phrasing to create artificial dissonance between the fourth and sixteenth notes in an alternating jazz-inspired progression. > I can just barely read music. I can’t deal with that! Sadly, the author has this backwards. Reading music has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the music theory (admittedly gobbledy-gook) in the first paragraph. If you're a coder, you can do music theory. You might choose not to, and that's OK. But don't make it out to be harder than it is. There are lots of places to start. The problem with not reading music is not that you won't be able to understand music theory. It's that it is very hard to find anyone who will explain it you (in person or in writing) without the terminology (and conceptual skeleton) of western notation and 18th century western tonal harmony. Neither of these things are actually central at all, but good luck avoiding it if you were ever to try.

legerdemain 6y ago
My problem is that whenever I've picked up a music theory textbook, the author opens with "put your hands on the keyboard... doesn't playing <foo> <bar> and <baz> feel natural?" As someone who has had zero music training, but has considered generative music as a possible hobby, I'd like to at least start trying to understand the domain before committing to a physical instrument and working on developing muscle memory. I'd really love a rigorous music theory textbook that does not assume you already play an instrument.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Music theory is based on generalizing patterns that are found in actual music. Your "muscle memory" is an integral part of understanding this generalization semi-rigorously. About the only thing that can be called loosely 'rigorous' wrt. music theory is the derivation of the diatonic scale from "stacking" fifths.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    I don't agree with your dismal final sentence. Musical set theory [1] is an examination of scales/harmony without giving preference to western modes. The harmonic series is a physical phenomena at the root of all musical cultural behavior, and is a completely rigorous subject. The diatonic scale isn't derived by stacking fifths, since that would be tautological: a "fifth" is a concept taken from the diatonic scale. What you likely meant was "derivation of the diatonic scale by stacking key integer ratios between frequencies, particularly the ratio 3:2)" That already elides the whole concept that dissonance and consonance correspond to the presence or absence of non-integer ratios between frequencies with notable energy. It also skips over the admittedly subjective way in which introducing more dissonance by way of "odd" ratios can still be perceived as musically interesting (though almost always in culturally determined ways). [1] this isn't pure MST, but it's a great place to start even if it is limited to 12TET tuning: https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/ https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/

fenomas 6y ago

As someone who's worked on this a lot, this article resonated but I disagree with the conclusions. (Or at any rate I feel like my procedural stuff is listenable, though I can't read or compose music.) I think the author's biggest problem is the bottom-up approach of creating lots of raw clips and then at a higher level trying to assemble them. I've found music generation to consistently be a very similar task to text generation, and to me the author's approach seems analogous to generating lots of random sentences and then trying to assemble them into a short story. Everything I've done that's worked has been completely top down - the core of the engine determines the state of the song (we're in the A section, bar 7, the current chord is V/V, etc.) and the low level parts generate something to match all that. E.g. the melody part might decide to play the root tone of the current chord, but it has to ask the core what note that would be. The hard thing about this approach is that you need an environment where you can dynamically play notes of an arbitrary pitch/length/instrument, which either means lots of sound fonts or realtime audio gen. I've been doing this with WebAudio, and while it works it's been very painful - for me the "play sounds" part of procedural music has more difficult than the "compose music" part.

bambax 6y ago
Have you tried tone.js? It's pretty easy to setup and play with, and lets one use a few samples to imitate any instrument. Edit: tune -> tone.
- fenomas 6y ago
  Do you mean tone.js? If so then yes I started out using it, but wound up rolling my own engines. I don't remember specifically why, but something to do with wanting less magic and more low-level control. I wanted everything to be realtime web audio, so I wound up just building instruments out of oscillators and so on. Here's a very old sample to give the idea: https://fenomas.com/2017/12/advent-17/ https://fenomas.com/2017/12/advent-17/
  - bambax 6y ago
    Yes, sorry, it's tone.js I find using the sampler very easy and convenient.

darrennix 6y ago

I loved reading this very much. Well done.

Tokkemon 6y ago

As a composer, I know my craft is far more than just deciding how to make music. It's about getting in the mind of the listener, making them second guess what's coming, or to make them experience an emotion that's already in their brain, it just has to be coaxed out. All art does this, and it takes a uniquely human understanding of the human brain to make it happen successfully.

uxcolumbo 6y ago
Not sure why you’ve been downvoted. I agree it’s about triggering emotions... and for that having the ability to empathise helps.

8bitsrule 6y ago

It would take a long time for one person to make PGM-created music (melodies, variations, chord progressions, rhythms, ABACA-type forms, etc) decent enough to be sort of satisfying. I'd bet that in that same time or less, you could learn to improvise equally decent stuff - probably far better - yourself on at least two instruments. If you've been listening to music for 5-10 years, you'll probably never 'train' a machine to know what music is as well as you've been trained. Whichever way you go, if the product can't compete with the flood of stuff that's already out there? including production quality? I can guarantee you what people's reaction will be. Not pretty.

keyle 6y ago

I don't know I quite enjoy some of the generative.fm streams, but they're kind of highly rigged to sound decent.

thewebcount 6y ago

The music being generated in the article doesn't sound like it has any coherent structure. When you procedurally generate terrain, for example, you do it in a way that is coherent and has structure similar to what you find in nature. You have areas that are the same height, areas where the height varies slowly or quickly. But you don't generally just have random bits of terrain stuck together. This music sounds like random bits of notation stuck together. There doesn't appear to be a time signature or chord progression or any melodic development. I think building that type of structure into it would be a good first step.

tlarkworthy 6y ago

A lot of sounds are procedurally generated (e.g. noise sources in synths). Composition is much harder though. My friend once said: Would you ever read a randomly generated book? ... so why do you think that any other art form would become palatable under procedural generation? (game levels, music etc.). Procedural generation is quantity over quality. It makes sense in some settings, but not in 1st order art.

bambax 6y ago
> Would you ever read a randomly generated book? 1. You may have, and didn't notice! ;-) 2. Games use randomly generated terrains and it feels just fine.
- tlarkworthy 6y ago
  Terrain yes, npc face yes. Levels... no
wool_gather 6y ago
> It makes sense in some settings, but not in 1st order art. I'm forced to disagree -- in part -- here. There are plenty of beautiful and stirring (or even just intriguing) generative pictures out there. I agree in part, though: from my own experience, generative music composition is harder than generative imagemaking. Probably because there are many, many more dimensions of choices that need to be made.

sillysaurusx 6y ago

Hello, I made some ML generated videogame music: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame... There are ballroom themes, battle themes, boss fights, and the last one is my attempt at a final battle track. If there's interest, I can walk through how the model works. Gwern's writeup is here: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music https://www.gwern.net/GPT-2-music All 25 tracks were made in a single night. That's the kind of boost you can get from ML. Note that it's not entirely automatic. But that's a benefit, not a downside. It's more like an AI instrument that you play. The songs each contain the ABC source code that generated it. (Click on the song's description to see.) You can replicate the song for yourself by copying the source code into a text file, then running something like this: abc2midi "${1}.abc" -o "${1}.mid" && timidity "${1}.mid" -Ov -o "${1}.ogg" && timidity "${1}.mid" (That's from my bash script called "abc2ogg".) An effective model will "group" its data in a way that the model can understand. That's the essence of why this model worked so well.

ttjjtt 6y ago
To be fair these results can be used as a representation of ML art output as being distinct in its qualities and related ease of production. It immediately appears as a hazy simulacrum when listened to be an interested critical ear. Which can work to your point; there vast production use cases for ML-quality media issues background dressing, eg music for cheap/free video games, infotainment videos , or any application where cheap production libraries will suffice. Huge amounts of human labor have been thrown at making throw away media assets. Similarly a large proportion of serious, foreground art works consist of mundane background chores that ML can achieve with incredible efficiency. But when ML generation is placed to the foreground, as the main focus, it appears like an unnerving vacuous simulacra. I can’t yet see it being something beyond shovel-like, in its function and form
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  I partly agree, but I like "Crossing The Channel": https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/crossing-the-channel?in=theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/crossing-the-channel?in=the... The reason the beat is so unique is because the model started out by making a mistake. Or at least I thought it was a mistake; it took several measures to hear what it had in mind. GPT did its usual "generate the next most likely thing," which happens to be a rhythm that sounds good. In some sense, it's impossible to say whether it was a mistake, or if it "planned" to write it like this. "The Cruise" is lovely and relaxing: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-cruise?in=theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-cruise?in=theshawwn/set... and "Green Mountain" is just fun: https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-green-mountain?in=theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/the-green-mountain?in=thesh... As for the effect on the art world, I think indie gamedevs will be happy they have some nice tunes without having to work with a musician. There's no way to know what the wider implications will be, though. Perhaps kids will grow up hearing stories of how granddad learned to play the guitar himself rather than asking the computer to write a hit song.

verytrivial 6y ago

Dance/electro/pop/(?) band YACHT released an album that basically started as an AI mashup of there previous albums. It's actually not awful(!), but presumably is heavily reworked. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping-is-a-new-landmark-for-ai-music-an-album-that-doesnt-suck/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping...

lou1306 6y ago

This may be marginally relevant: the latest post on the Digital Antiquarian [0] briefly talks about "Sid Meier's CPU Bach", a procedural music generator that (the year being 1994) does not use ML in any way and only relies on music theory. It's not so famous because it was a 3DO exclusive (!), but there are some YouTube videos that showcase its output [1]. It may or may not fall into the "bland and samey" category. After all it just tries to emulate the style of one artist. You be the judge. [0]: https://www.filfre.net/2020/12/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-part-2-colonization/ https://www.filfre.net/2020/12/ethics-in-strategy-gaming-par... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QLQ_mYXf1I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QLQ_mYXf1I

moocowtruck 6y ago

i am currently rocking out to cube drone and enjoying it.. I feel like I'm on a quest to slay a dragon and save the village of cubedroneville

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Listening, I feel the tunes have maybe some short-term pattern from line to line. But they don't go anywhere. Just noodling along without a plan. That's got to be part of music: it has to go somewhere?