8 ms·

I'm working on audio AI, both academic research and as founder of Spooky Labs. We don't have a webpage yet, but we do have clients. We are using deep learning t

I'm working on audio AI, both academic research and as founder of Spooky Labs. We don't have a webpage yet, but we do have clients. We are using deep learning to create rich new synthesizers that sound like they were designed by aliens, as well as novel vocal manipulation techniques. We've spoken to musicians and producers who are excited about new tools, new sounds, and assistants that automate boring parts of the workflow. But when the problem is framed as "music composition", it just leaves me scratching my head. Like, who's clamoring for that? I'm unaware in the history of music any automatically generated music that isn't seen as an oddity. Even if techniques improve, it's not a really sexy sell. People simply want to listen to music created by people, even if AI music were perfect. Only in commercial applications like stock music or jingles is AI composition in demand. I understand that you can move the goalposts and say: "This isn't about total AI composition, it's about co-composition!" But honestly, I think it's just framing the problem wrong to talk about composition, and its lead to some really strange solution-in-search-of-a-problem research agendas. People should thinking about it through the lens of: How do you use AI to create tools that musicians want?

robbedpeter 5y ago
As a musician, I'd love automated composition of human level music. Especially if you could navigate and blend and transform the space of styles, artists, and instruments. Co-composition has a place. The reason such tools have historically been viewed as oddities is because they were and are objectively bad. 3 year old prodigies can exceed even the best output of software. In recent years, the models have improved, but the problem space is huge and the algorithms aren't human level yet. When the tools reach human performance levels, people won't care if it's human or software. They'll only care if it's enjoyable. All creative endeavors are at risk of being automated by ai in the next few decades. Software will exceed the best of human creativity, and that's a good thing.
- tgv 5y ago
  No, it isn't. It'll make people stop making music. Even if all you care about is one particular way to evaluate the end product, it means there will be no new inputs, resulting in the death of creativity. And once that's been reached, it's almost impossible to revive.
  - FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
    People will most definitely not stop making music, if only because the physical act of playing an instrument can never be replaced by software.
    - tgv 5y ago
      Nobody is talking about playing music. And physical playing has been replaced by software quite a while ago. Not if you play it for your own fun, but almost nobody can distinguish a computer rendering from the real thing on a recording.
    - vixen99 5y ago
      Agreed. Moreover, if a genuinely sentient AI or MI as Minsky called it, comes to pass then it would then be fascinating to listen to it if it cared to compose music; in its absence musical composition is always the result of someone's human experience of being in this universe - necessarily as a human organism. And this is true even if the music is a research exploration of evocative (to a human of course) sound patterns.
    - imperistan 5y ago
      Very True! I play guitar but i’ll never be a Tommy Emmanuel. I don’t care, I play for the joy of it :)
    - TomSwirly 5y ago
      > if only because the physical act of playing an instrument can never be replaced by software. As an instrumentalist, I would love to believe this but more and more this does not appear to be the case. I have talked to many people of different ages who really don't see any difference between someone actually playing an instrument in front of you and listening to pre-recorded music. It's funny because it's in the context of me liking to play live music, and they never seem to realize they're saying, "What you do is meaningless." I think it's that they have no personal experience with playing an instrument, combined with the fact that the dominant forms of pop music now don't have much if any place for instrumentalists.
  - 5y ago
dr_dshiv 5y ago
Other than for research purposes (extending the capabilities of AI) — I 100% agree with your sentiment regarding the relative worthlessness of AI composition. As an aside, it is my understanding that there is no measure of something like consonance/dissonance in complex musical forms. There are models of dissonance in 2 and 3 note chords but even these have gaps. I'm suggesting that the research on "what sounds good to people" is surprisingly immature in contemporary science. This is surprising because that question played a major role in the history of science. For instance, many of the very first experiments conducted at the Royal Society (c1660s) investigated harmony — and arguably the first scientific experiment was designed to evaluate a mathematical model of music (Viz, the 5th century BC Pythagoreans demonstrating their integer ratio theory of harmony by casting bronze chimes at those ratios). So, I'm surprised that there isn't more interest today. That said, there was a recent breakthrough in the science of harmony: an integrated model of vertical and horizontal harmony. https://spj.sciencemag.org/journals/research/2019/2369041/#:~:text=Harmony%20studies%20the%20phenomenon%20of,physics%20and%20mathematics%20for%20centuries https://spj.sciencemag.org/journals/research/2019/2369041/#:....
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  There are measures, and they're not particularly complex. But consonance/dissonance and "sounds good" are not the point. Music is evocative and social, and it's the semantics of both that are under-researched. You won't get a grasp of either by throwing a corpus into a bucket and fishing things out of it with statistics.
  - dr_dshiv 5y ago
    > You won't get a grasp of either by throwing a corpus into a bucket and fishing things out of it with statistics. We can agree to disagree on that. Or, in any case, it's an empirical question. If we had a large corpus of music labeled by annotated "feels", I think we'd learn an immense amount about how music evokes feelings. (I'm not sure I feel comfortable with the term "semantics" applied to music) In the meantime, I've been building a corpus of the EEG response to music: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200908793S/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200908793S/abstra... Regarding the measures of dissonance, I'm only familiar with things like measures of roughness and harmonic entropy. If you know more, I'd appreciate sharing.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
The same was said about synthesised music in the 40s and early 50s. It was mostly a lab curiosity. Now look at it. In some ways you're not wrong. But only in some ways.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
brigandish 5y ago
> Like, who's clamoring for that? > even if AI music were perfect I remember Milli Vanilli (who I quite liked, to be honest), and a thousand manufactured bands since who at least make enough of an effort not to get caught out like that again. If that part of the industry (which seems like a large chunk) could get rid of the inconvenience of having to write/find good songs, I expect they would, and get back to exploiting pretty young things with not enough talent. In short, those who value money ahead of music. On the other hand, if it improved the rubbish in the pop chart then I might embrace it!
dalbasal 5y ago
>> People simply want to listen to music created by people, even if AI music were perfect. Only in commercial applications like stock music or jingles is AI composition in demand. I understand that you can move the goalposts With new tech, especially automation, moving goalposts isn't cheating. If successful, it almost always gets used in totally different ways than the human equivalent. A common pattern is imagining automation through "robots," like in the jetsons. An automated hotel has a robot desk clerk, robot maid, etc. IRL, an automated hotel may have no check in, rooms designed to be self cleaning and guests must make their own bed. Maybe it's not even a hotel anymore, but a room or pod here and there. Robotic maids act as a stand in, for things that are hard to imagine. >> AI to create tools that musicians want? So... this is a good compass for advanced stages, "productizing." Describe your goals in terms of what it can do for users. For earlier, research oriented stages, the more abstract definition is good. Composition works for that: Music composition (or generation) is the process of creating or writing a new piece of music, defined as a succession of pitches or rhythms, or both, in some definite patterns. How that is ultimately used/sold/productized is certainly up for debate, but that definition sends you on a path that's different from "tools for musicians."
zozbot234 5y ago
Current techniques are pretty successful at improvisation or 'noodling', not quite what most folks would call "proper" composition but a good inspiration for it. The paper is not very comprehensive, there's plenty of interesting stuff that it doesn't mention.
StevenWaterman 5y ago
I made https://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree https://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree which is a custom frontend for OpenAI's MuseNet. I've used that to generate music that I use on my Twitch streams, games, and other things. I'm not kidding myself that it's as good as human-written music, nor is it truly ai-written music (as there's a lot of human selection in the process), but people frequently comment on the music and enjoy it, without realising it's AI-written Some examples: https://github.com/stevenwaterman/Twitch-Overlay/raw/master/Client-Svelte/public/assets/intro/audio.wav https://github.com/stevenwaterman/Twitch-Overlay/raw/master/... https://github.com/stevenwaterman/NoTimeToStalk/raw/master/client/public/assets/audio/music/HouseStart.mp3 https://github.com/stevenwaterman/NoTimeToStalk/raw/master/c... * Edited to fix the link, my bad
- stavros 5y ago
  That site is not working for me. Port 443 isn't open.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    But port 80 is! http://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree/ http://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree/
stavros 5y ago
I don't know, I'd pay for something that gave me music I loved, 100% of the time (or, hell, even 2% of the time). Beats sifting through the infinite trove of music just so I can stumble upon something I like by chance. My success rate there is more like 0.1%.
TaupeRanger 5y ago
No one is clamoring for it because it isn't good enough yet, same reason no one is asking for AI designed houses, or business logos, or food. But that doesn't mean it can't get there eventually. It's also a very interesting scientific question, wrapped up with big questions about the nature of creativity and the capabilities of machines.
notahacker 5y ago
I think apart from the layman's resistance to the idea of nonhumans being creative, the other problem is that the basic theories of composition musicians use are pretty well understood and based on applying some surprisingly simple maths to some instruments whose timbres are very complex (and "what works" is a moving target bound to cultural familiarity with instruments, intonation, musical phrasing and comfort with dissonance; not an AlphaGoZero situation where the ML process can expose the wealth of existing human theory is objectively inferior at achieving a win condition.) Sure, a Deep Learning process with a suitably curated dataset can rediscover the basic principles of Western music theory... but why? Humans understood these things when creating the music that makes up the corpus, and non-AI software can already turn those patterns into musical structures which can be played by accurate synthesis, which only lacks a bit of nuance. The human musician looking for AI-powered shortcuts doesn't want a lot of computation thrown at learning how to approximate a 12 bar blues or arpeggiate chord tones, they want it thrown at a post-production process (or better still, a pedal) that makes their mechanical playing of simple licks approximate BB King or an autotune that makes their average voice in a lower pitch sound like Whitney Houston.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  >I think apart from the layman's resistance to the idea of nonhumans being creative, What I think is funny is the resistance to the idea that a lot of what people do isn't all that special. It all makes me think of the evolution of supermarket cashiers. It used to be a fairly skilled profession, now people are just used because of their abilities in object manipulation.
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
>who's clamoring for that? One use I can see is assist software for someone churning out commercial music. Maybe a standalone music generator (composition plus synth) would be useful for content generators avoiding copyright. As both copyright violation policing gets easier and heavier and programatically generated music becomes easier I have to wonder how those two things will collide.
grafs50 5y ago
I can imagine a future where AI can come up with new stylistic concepts, maybe even "predicting" how some music genre will evolves. which is certainly something I'd be interested in seeing explored. Imagine an AI that was able to come up with something remotely close to rock music after being fed 1930s-1940s blues music. It'd be pretty cool to see what it came up with after being fed music from the 2000-2010s.
zzbzq 5y ago
Well I agree the term "music composition" is not marketable, I disagree on all other points. Actually I think the only thing pulling for AI is the idea that people would prefer to listen to something generated by a computer. People no longer view human sources as trustworthy, they no longer experience natural things as authentic. They want computer-certified facts, machine-performed actions. You don't even need an AI to make the kind of music people like. You just need to dumb down the music--which is what has happened gradually since the gilded age. Now the charts are topped with monotone "robot" melodies and little to no chord structure, synths using standard basic wave forms, all rhythms quantized to a grid and all voices auto-tuned. You don't need an AI to generate this type of music by machine; ping pong balls in a tumbler would suffice. The role of AI, then, is not that you need it to make the music, but you need an AI to claim authenticity. In the minds of today's people, the computer-made music must be better, must be smarter, than human-made music.
awolnikowski 5y ago
I disagree that there isn't already generative music that is enjoyed just for its aesthetic qualities. I'm a huge fan of Brian Eno's work, which is highly generative (and he's even published apps that will simply generate ambient music for you 24/7). "Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results" - Brian Eno I think generative music is particularly effective as ambient background or as part of a larger art installation. Also, if you're working on developing new synthesizers I'd highly recommend you get to know Eno's work.
randcraw 5y ago
As a music-theory-unsophisticate, I foresee a lot of potential for deep learning in creating musical arrangements for existing compositions using all kinds of available instruments. How might a Beethoven symphony be arranged for a typical 4 part rock band? What if you added a piano? What other instruments might add further value, esp. toward certain ends, like when learning to play an instrument? Could a deep net learn to accompany adaptively, as only a capable human can today? Could it offer instructional suggestions for improvement, especially subtleties in timing or dynamics? I also see value in transferring musical style for a piece from one genre to another (let's say, from jazz to rock & roll). Or from one set of instruments (or voices) to others. If done well, that could provide a lot of potentially entertaining interpretations or mashups, or at worst some novel medleys. Sinatra raps. Nat King Cole does bluegrass. Because examples of uses like these aren't likely to be plentiful, I suspect these won't be so much supervised learning tasks as reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The trick then will be to somehow construct useful (and insightful) reward functions for each new use -- basically aesthetic meta-learning for RL. If RL reward functions can learn to write winning advertising jingles, it's hard to imagine what creative doors they won't open, eventually.
GDC7 5y ago
> People simply want to listen to music created by people People also want a chunk of that Bob Dylan/Beatles fame without necessarily having the talent or the luck to compose songs like they did. Let the AI do the work and then only be there for the fun part.
didibus 5y ago
> People simply want to listen to music created by people I don't think people care who composed the music, I believe people want to see music played and sang by people. Going to a concert where you're just looking at a computer generating sound won't inspire the croud, but if the band plays something composed by an AI, who cares? Even nowadays music has multiple collaborators on a composition, and I almost never pay attention to who they all are.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
The band Yacht used AI to write an album called Chain Tripping that's really good IMO. They transcribed their old music to MIDI, fed it to an AI, had it generate short snippets of new MIDI, and then cut and paste those bits to get a score, which they performed. I suspect the drums and bass are human-written, as they seem more coherent and "whole song-aware" than the other parts, but I have no way to confirm that. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/using-a-i-to-make-a-music-album/how-yacht-used-a-i-to-make-their-album-chain-tripping https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-br...
analog31 5y ago
I believe one of the problems is that we don't know what the goalposts are. People experience music differently, ranging from barely tolerating it, to pursuing it as an academic study, to making massive sacrifices in order to be immersed in it. The conscious lifestyle choice of many full time musicians is bewildering to many techies. This suggests we don't know the "customer" or the "market" at all, or at the very least, that they are fragmented.
Jeff_Brown 5y ago
It might be centuries before AI is writing good novels, but music seems a much easier nut to crack. Hell I've seen people sit down at a drum machine and make something enjoyable for minutes in literally seconds. Music doesn't have to be complicated, let alone deeply meaningful, to sound good. AI already makes cool art -- e.g. the Google Deep Dream videos.

robbedpeter 5y ago

As a musician, I'd love automated composition of human level music. Especially if you could navigate and blend and transform the space of styles, artists, and instruments. Co-composition has a place. The reason such tools have historically been viewed as oddities is because they were and are objectively bad. 3 year old prodigies can exceed even the best output of software. In recent years, the models have improved, but the problem space is huge and the algorithms aren't human level yet. When the tools reach human performance levels, people won't care if it's human or software. They'll only care if it's enjoyable. All creative endeavors are at risk of being automated by ai in the next few decades. Software will exceed the best of human creativity, and that's a good thing.

tgv 5y ago
No, it isn't. It'll make people stop making music. Even if all you care about is one particular way to evaluate the end product, it means there will be no new inputs, resulting in the death of creativity. And once that's been reached, it's almost impossible to revive.
- FranzFerdiNaN 5y ago
  People will most definitely not stop making music, if only because the physical act of playing an instrument can never be replaced by software.
  - tgv 5y ago
    Nobody is talking about playing music. And physical playing has been replaced by software quite a while ago. Not if you play it for your own fun, but almost nobody can distinguish a computer rendering from the real thing on a recording.
  - vixen99 5y ago
    Agreed. Moreover, if a genuinely sentient AI or MI as Minsky called it, comes to pass then it would then be fascinating to listen to it if it cared to compose music; in its absence musical composition is always the result of someone's human experience of being in this universe - necessarily as a human organism. And this is true even if the music is a research exploration of evocative (to a human of course) sound patterns.
  - imperistan 5y ago
    Very True! I play guitar but i’ll never be a Tommy Emmanuel. I don’t care, I play for the joy of it :)
  - TomSwirly 5y ago
    > if only because the physical act of playing an instrument can never be replaced by software. As an instrumentalist, I would love to believe this but more and more this does not appear to be the case. I have talked to many people of different ages who really don't see any difference between someone actually playing an instrument in front of you and listening to pre-recorded music. It's funny because it's in the context of me liking to play live music, and they never seem to realize they're saying, "What you do is meaningless." I think it's that they have no personal experience with playing an instrument, combined with the fact that the dominant forms of pop music now don't have much if any place for instrumentalists.
- 5y ago

dr_dshiv 5y ago

Other than for research purposes (extending the capabilities of AI) — I 100% agree with your sentiment regarding the relative worthlessness of AI composition. As an aside, it is my understanding that there is no measure of something like consonance/dissonance in complex musical forms. There are models of dissonance in 2 and 3 note chords but even these have gaps. I'm suggesting that the research on "what sounds good to people" is surprisingly immature in contemporary science. This is surprising because that question played a major role in the history of science. For instance, many of the very first experiments conducted at the Royal Society (c1660s) investigated harmony — and arguably the first scientific experiment was designed to evaluate a mathematical model of music (Viz, the 5th century BC Pythagoreans demonstrating their integer ratio theory of harmony by casting bronze chimes at those ratios). So, I'm surprised that there isn't more interest today. That said, there was a recent breakthrough in the science of harmony: an integrated model of vertical and horizontal harmony. https://spj.sciencemag.org/journals/research/2019/2369041/#:~:text=Harmony%20studies%20the%20phenomenon%20of,physics%20and%20mathematics%20for%20centuries https://spj.sciencemag.org/journals/research/2019/2369041/#:....

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
There are measures, and they're not particularly complex. But consonance/dissonance and "sounds good" are not the point. Music is evocative and social, and it's the semantics of both that are under-researched. You won't get a grasp of either by throwing a corpus into a bucket and fishing things out of it with statistics.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  > You won't get a grasp of either by throwing a corpus into a bucket and fishing things out of it with statistics. We can agree to disagree on that. Or, in any case, it's an empirical question. If we had a large corpus of music labeled by annotated "feels", I think we'd learn an immense amount about how music evokes feelings. (I'm not sure I feel comfortable with the term "semantics" applied to music) In the meantime, I've been building a corpus of the EEG response to music: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200908793S/abstract https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020arXiv200908793S/abstra... Regarding the measures of dissonance, I'm only familiar with things like measures of roughness and harmonic entropy. If you know more, I'd appreciate sharing.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

The same was said about synthesised music in the 40s and early 50s. It was mostly a lab curiosity. Now look at it. In some ways you're not wrong. But only in some ways.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

brigandish 5y ago

> Like, who's clamoring for that? > even if AI music were perfect I remember Milli Vanilli (who I quite liked, to be honest), and a thousand manufactured bands since who at least make enough of an effort not to get caught out like that again. If that part of the industry (which seems like a large chunk) could get rid of the inconvenience of having to write/find good songs, I expect they would, and get back to exploiting pretty young things with not enough talent. In short, those who value money ahead of music. On the other hand, if it improved the rubbish in the pop chart then I might embrace it!

dalbasal 5y ago

>> People simply want to listen to music created by people, even if AI music were perfect. Only in commercial applications like stock music or jingles is AI composition in demand. I understand that you can move the goalposts With new tech, especially automation, moving goalposts isn't cheating. If successful, it almost always gets used in totally different ways than the human equivalent. A common pattern is imagining automation through "robots," like in the jetsons. An automated hotel has a robot desk clerk, robot maid, etc. IRL, an automated hotel may have no check in, rooms designed to be self cleaning and guests must make their own bed. Maybe it's not even a hotel anymore, but a room or pod here and there. Robotic maids act as a stand in, for things that are hard to imagine. >> AI to create tools that musicians want? So... this is a good compass for advanced stages, "productizing." Describe your goals in terms of what it can do for users. For earlier, research oriented stages, the more abstract definition is good. Composition works for that: Music composition (or generation) is the process of creating or writing a new piece of music, defined as a succession of pitches or rhythms, or both, in some definite patterns. How that is ultimately used/sold/productized is certainly up for debate, but that definition sends you on a path that's different from "tools for musicians."

zozbot234 5y ago

Current techniques are pretty successful at improvisation or 'noodling', not quite what most folks would call "proper" composition but a good inspiration for it. The paper is not very comprehensive, there's plenty of interesting stuff that it doesn't mention.

StevenWaterman 5y ago

I made https://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree https://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree which is a custom frontend for OpenAI's MuseNet. I've used that to generate music that I use on my Twitch streams, games, and other things. I'm not kidding myself that it's as good as human-written music, nor is it truly ai-written music (as there's a lot of human selection in the process), but people frequently comment on the music and enjoy it, without realising it's AI-written Some examples: https://github.com/stevenwaterman/Twitch-Overlay/raw/master/Client-Svelte/public/assets/intro/audio.wav https://github.com/stevenwaterman/Twitch-Overlay/raw/master/... https://github.com/stevenwaterman/NoTimeToStalk/raw/master/client/public/assets/audio/music/HouseStart.mp3 https://github.com/stevenwaterman/NoTimeToStalk/raw/master/c... * Edited to fix the link, my bad

stavros 5y ago
That site is not working for me. Port 443 isn't open.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  But port 80 is! http://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree/ http://stevenwaterman.uk/musetree/

stavros 5y ago

I don't know, I'd pay for something that gave me music I loved, 100% of the time (or, hell, even 2% of the time). Beats sifting through the infinite trove of music just so I can stumble upon something I like by chance. My success rate there is more like 0.1%.

TaupeRanger 5y ago

No one is clamoring for it because it isn't good enough yet, same reason no one is asking for AI designed houses, or business logos, or food. But that doesn't mean it can't get there eventually. It's also a very interesting scientific question, wrapped up with big questions about the nature of creativity and the capabilities of machines.

notahacker 5y ago

I think apart from the layman's resistance to the idea of nonhumans being creative, the other problem is that the basic theories of composition musicians use are pretty well understood and based on applying some surprisingly simple maths to some instruments whose timbres are very complex (and "what works" is a moving target bound to cultural familiarity with instruments, intonation, musical phrasing and comfort with dissonance; not an AlphaGoZero situation where the ML process can expose the wealth of existing human theory is objectively inferior at achieving a win condition.) Sure, a Deep Learning process with a suitably curated dataset can rediscover the basic principles of Western music theory... but why? Humans understood these things when creating the music that makes up the corpus, and non-AI software can already turn those patterns into musical structures which can be played by accurate synthesis, which only lacks a bit of nuance. The human musician looking for AI-powered shortcuts doesn't want a lot of computation thrown at learning how to approximate a 12 bar blues or arpeggiate chord tones, they want it thrown at a post-production process (or better still, a pedal) that makes their mechanical playing of simple licks approximate BB King or an autotune that makes their average voice in a lower pitch sound like Whitney Houston.

OneEyedRobot 5y ago
>I think apart from the layman's resistance to the idea of nonhumans being creative, What I think is funny is the resistance to the idea that a lot of what people do isn't all that special. It all makes me think of the evolution of supermarket cashiers. It used to be a fairly skilled profession, now people are just used because of their abilities in object manipulation.

OneEyedRobot 5y ago

>who's clamoring for that? One use I can see is assist software for someone churning out commercial music. Maybe a standalone music generator (composition plus synth) would be useful for content generators avoiding copyright. As both copyright violation policing gets easier and heavier and programatically generated music becomes easier I have to wonder how those two things will collide.

grafs50 5y ago

I can imagine a future where AI can come up with new stylistic concepts, maybe even "predicting" how some music genre will evolves. which is certainly something I'd be interested in seeing explored. Imagine an AI that was able to come up with something remotely close to rock music after being fed 1930s-1940s blues music. It'd be pretty cool to see what it came up with after being fed music from the 2000-2010s.

zzbzq 5y ago

Well I agree the term "music composition" is not marketable, I disagree on all other points. Actually I think the only thing pulling for AI is the idea that people would prefer to listen to something generated by a computer. People no longer view human sources as trustworthy, they no longer experience natural things as authentic. They want computer-certified facts, machine-performed actions. You don't even need an AI to make the kind of music people like. You just need to dumb down the music--which is what has happened gradually since the gilded age. Now the charts are topped with monotone "robot" melodies and little to no chord structure, synths using standard basic wave forms, all rhythms quantized to a grid and all voices auto-tuned. You don't need an AI to generate this type of music by machine; ping pong balls in a tumbler would suffice. The role of AI, then, is not that you need it to make the music, but you need an AI to claim authenticity. In the minds of today's people, the computer-made music must be better, must be smarter, than human-made music.

awolnikowski 5y ago

I disagree that there isn't already generative music that is enjoyed just for its aesthetic qualities. I'm a huge fan of Brian Eno's work, which is highly generative (and he's even published apps that will simply generate ambient music for you 24/7). "Since I have always preferred making plans to executing them, I have gravitated towards situations and systems that, once set into operation, could create music with little or no intervention on my part. That is to say, I tend towards the roles of planner and programmer, and then become an audience to the results" - Brian Eno I think generative music is particularly effective as ambient background or as part of a larger art installation. Also, if you're working on developing new synthesizers I'd highly recommend you get to know Eno's work.

randcraw 5y ago

As a music-theory-unsophisticate, I foresee a lot of potential for deep learning in creating musical arrangements for existing compositions using all kinds of available instruments. How might a Beethoven symphony be arranged for a typical 4 part rock band? What if you added a piano? What other instruments might add further value, esp. toward certain ends, like when learning to play an instrument? Could a deep net learn to accompany adaptively, as only a capable human can today? Could it offer instructional suggestions for improvement, especially subtleties in timing or dynamics? I also see value in transferring musical style for a piece from one genre to another (let's say, from jazz to rock & roll). Or from one set of instruments (or voices) to others. If done well, that could provide a lot of potentially entertaining interpretations or mashups, or at worst some novel medleys. Sinatra raps. Nat King Cole does bluegrass. Because examples of uses like these aren't likely to be plentiful, I suspect these won't be so much supervised learning tasks as reinforcement learning (RL) tasks. The trick then will be to somehow construct useful (and insightful) reward functions for each new use -- basically aesthetic meta-learning for RL. If RL reward functions can learn to write winning advertising jingles, it's hard to imagine what creative doors they won't open, eventually.

GDC7 5y ago

> People simply want to listen to music created by people People also want a chunk of that Bob Dylan/Beatles fame without necessarily having the talent or the luck to compose songs like they did. Let the AI do the work and then only be there for the fun part.

didibus 5y ago

> People simply want to listen to music created by people I don't think people care who composed the music, I believe people want to see music played and sang by people. Going to a concert where you're just looking at a computer generating sound won't inspire the croud, but if the band plays something composed by an AI, who cares? Even nowadays music has multiple collaborators on a composition, and I almost never pay attention to who they all are.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

The band Yacht used AI to write an album called Chain Tripping that's really good IMO. They transcribed their old music to MIDI, fed it to an AI, had it generate short snippets of new MIDI, and then cut and paste those bits to get a score, which they performed. I suspect the drums and bass are human-written, as they seem more coherent and "whole song-aware" than the other parts, but I have no way to confirm that. https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-brand/using-a-i-to-make-a-music-album/how-yacht-used-a-i-to-make-their-album-chain-tripping https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/press-play-with-madeleine-br...

analog31 5y ago

I believe one of the problems is that we don't know what the goalposts are. People experience music differently, ranging from barely tolerating it, to pursuing it as an academic study, to making massive sacrifices in order to be immersed in it. The conscious lifestyle choice of many full time musicians is bewildering to many techies. This suggests we don't know the "customer" or the "market" at all, or at the very least, that they are fragmented.

Jeff_Brown 5y ago

It might be centuries before AI is writing good novels, but music seems a much easier nut to crack. Hell I've seen people sit down at a drum machine and make something enjoyable for minutes in literally seconds. Music doesn't have to be complicated, let alone deeply meaningful, to sound good. AI already makes cool art -- e.g. the Google Deep Dream videos.