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"Good" is context dependent, so any credible backing generation system would have to be aware of context - ideally while playing with others. Which is a whole o

"Good" is context dependent, so any credible backing generation system would have to be aware of context - ideally while playing with others. Which is a whole other level of difficulty compared to pumping out canned MIDI files. In any case, studio session musicians have a very different set of skills to pop headliners. Arrangers have different skills to composers. Producers have some of all of the above, but are there to bridge the differing creative pulls of the artist and the record company and manage the project. Label executives and A&R set goals and make high level editorial choices. When the public hears a finished track, it will have been worked on by tens or sometimes hundreds of people. Some of them - image and marketing consultants, PR people, social media managers - have no musical input of any kind, but still shape the subjective experience of the product. As you say, all of the above are paid because they bring a personality and a unique creative flavour to a project. For a culturally significant and/or successful project, each flavour has to be distinctive but also has to blend successfully. Music is always a composite product. Headline talent only gets you so far. The rest comes from creative tensions between individuals with different goals working in different domains. For most styles - including classical - the public wants a narrative/image/hook fantasy that locates the product in a credible cultural space. Generative music has almost none of this. Even if you create a perfectly polished pop single it will be culturally two dimensional because all of the surrounding context is missing. It will be flavourless - not just musically (most likely) but also culturally. In fact there are spaces where this either doesn't matter much or (rarely) doesn't matter at all. But they're small, specialised, and not particularly interesting to work in. Influential, interesting, highly paid projects demand strong and identifiable personal flavours. And they're far harder to synthesise than musically credible tracks/pieces.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> It will be flavourless - not just musically (most likely) but also culturally. Actually, I doubt this very much. I think there's a tendency to overestimate the "special" that actual humans bring to artistic creation and underestimate what contemporary machine learning (or I prefer to call it, overcooked cross-correlation analysis) can bring. The problem is not so much that something generated using such techniques will be flavorless. It's that once it's good enough, it will have a distinct flavor, just like human artists, and that flavor won't sit well with everyone. That is to say, you can't solve this once: you have to solve it for every human aesthetic preference (within limits). I can entirely believe in an automatic drummer that is "as good" as Steve Gadd, having been trained on the performances of said master percussionist. However, if you want Gavin Harrison instead, you need a different instance. And if you want something new, let's say 20% Vinnie Colaiuta, 30% Phil Collins and 40% Bill Bruford and 10% John Bonham, that will be very to accomplish through ML-style techniques. By contrast, Gavin Harrison could probably do that if you asked him nicely and paid him enough :)
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I disagree. Firstly the sound of all of those drummers was shaped by the people they worked with. This is most true of Collins and Bonham but the others were also very much shaped by the bands and producers they worked in. There is no definitive "Phil Collins" style you can bottle. Phil Collins with Brand X sounds nothing like Phil Collins with early Genesis, or like Phil Collins with late Genesis, or Phil Collins on his solo albums. It's easy to emulate the Phil Collins™ 80s gated snare, and of course in the 80s many people did. But even that was a collaborative effort and only happened when Collins did session work for Peter Gabriel who didn't want cymbals, so engineer High Padgham had to fill the gap. That sound is only a copy in a very superficial and trivial sense. Secondly, Collins as a drummer is inseparable from Collins as a person. During the early Genesis years Collins was as much of a political influence as a creative one. He was relaxed, easy-going, and professional, in among a group of highly strung insecure public school boys who used to argue a lot. In all the interviews the other band members say that suddenly he made playing the music feel a lot lighter and easier, which very welcome but also hugely influential. This is absolutely not something you can analyse easily by running his timing or drum choices through ML. Because the key part to both isn't the drum parts or the sounds, it's the creative ability to generate cultural influence. So the idea that ML will give you 20% this and 50% that is a non-starter. Even if you could define what this and that are - very questionable - there's no guarantee you'll get something that has equivalent cultural reach, as opposed to just another drum part by a poor Collins (etc) imitator. This turns out to be true of all the arts. Culturally what people want from art isn't just technique and superficial style, it's a distillation and validation of relatable experience channelled through an extraordinary personality. It's actually a relationship - albeit a very remote and idealised one. You can only copy that if your AI actually has an extraordinary personality and is capable of personal experience which it can share. I don't think ML is going to be able to do that any time soon.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    Hmm. I think you're missing something important. Yes, you're absolutely right that the sound of a particular musician is shaped by their musical and social collaborations and history. Nobody could seriously question this. However, when someone wants to hire Gavin right now, it's almost always because they want "the Gavin sound" (whatever they conceive that to be). Although a musician's sound is to some extent always evolving, after 10-20 years of playing, it's fairly well formed, and evolving much more slowly and more subtly. Their musical and social history is "baked in", so to speak. So, you train up your overcooked cross-correlation analysis system on the drum performances of Gavin Harrison, and just like GPT-3 "responding" to text prompts, I think there's a pretty good chance it will "respond" to your musical prompts in a style very similar to Mr. Harrison. However, it will sound nothing like Mr. Collins (except to whatever extent Mr. Harrison already did, which is ... not so much). > So the idea that ML will give you 20% this and 50% that is a non-starter. That was specifically what I said. Even so, I think there's some possible artistic intrigue that might come from some sort of "cross-breeding" between two systems trained on two different drum performance sets. Good to come across someone else who at least knows that Phil Collins was an amazing drummer and not just the only other person besides McCartney & Jackson to sell a million records inside and outside a band. Still, Chester Thompson, seriously :)

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago

> It will be flavourless - not just musically (most likely) but also culturally. Actually, I doubt this very much. I think there's a tendency to overestimate the "special" that actual humans bring to artistic creation and underestimate what contemporary machine learning (or I prefer to call it, overcooked cross-correlation analysis) can bring. The problem is not so much that something generated using such techniques will be flavorless. It's that once it's good enough, it will have a distinct flavor, just like human artists, and that flavor won't sit well with everyone. That is to say, you can't solve this once: you have to solve it for every human aesthetic preference (within limits). I can entirely believe in an automatic drummer that is "as good" as Steve Gadd, having been trained on the performances of said master percussionist. However, if you want Gavin Harrison instead, you need a different instance. And if you want something new, let's say 20% Vinnie Colaiuta, 30% Phil Collins and 40% Bill Bruford and 10% John Bonham, that will be very to accomplish through ML-style techniques. By contrast, Gavin Harrison could probably do that if you asked him nicely and paid him enough :)

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I disagree. Firstly the sound of all of those drummers was shaped by the people they worked with. This is most true of Collins and Bonham but the others were also very much shaped by the bands and producers they worked in. There is no definitive "Phil Collins" style you can bottle. Phil Collins with Brand X sounds nothing like Phil Collins with early Genesis, or like Phil Collins with late Genesis, or Phil Collins on his solo albums. It's easy to emulate the Phil Collins™ 80s gated snare, and of course in the 80s many people did. But even that was a collaborative effort and only happened when Collins did session work for Peter Gabriel who didn't want cymbals, so engineer High Padgham had to fill the gap. That sound is only a copy in a very superficial and trivial sense. Secondly, Collins as a drummer is inseparable from Collins as a person. During the early Genesis years Collins was as much of a political influence as a creative one. He was relaxed, easy-going, and professional, in among a group of highly strung insecure public school boys who used to argue a lot. In all the interviews the other band members say that suddenly he made playing the music feel a lot lighter and easier, which very welcome but also hugely influential. This is absolutely not something you can analyse easily by running his timing or drum choices through ML. Because the key part to both isn't the drum parts or the sounds, it's the creative ability to generate cultural influence. So the idea that ML will give you 20% this and 50% that is a non-starter. Even if you could define what this and that are - very questionable - there's no guarantee you'll get something that has equivalent cultural reach, as opposed to just another drum part by a poor Collins (etc) imitator. This turns out to be true of all the arts. Culturally what people want from art isn't just technique and superficial style, it's a distillation and validation of relatable experience channelled through an extraordinary personality. It's actually a relationship - albeit a very remote and idealised one. You can only copy that if your AI actually has an extraordinary personality and is capable of personal experience which it can share. I don't think ML is going to be able to do that any time soon.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  Hmm. I think you're missing something important. Yes, you're absolutely right that the sound of a particular musician is shaped by their musical and social collaborations and history. Nobody could seriously question this. However, when someone wants to hire Gavin right now, it's almost always because they want "the Gavin sound" (whatever they conceive that to be). Although a musician's sound is to some extent always evolving, after 10-20 years of playing, it's fairly well formed, and evolving much more slowly and more subtly. Their musical and social history is "baked in", so to speak. So, you train up your overcooked cross-correlation analysis system on the drum performances of Gavin Harrison, and just like GPT-3 "responding" to text prompts, I think there's a pretty good chance it will "respond" to your musical prompts in a style very similar to Mr. Harrison. However, it will sound nothing like Mr. Collins (except to whatever extent Mr. Harrison already did, which is ... not so much). > So the idea that ML will give you 20% this and 50% that is a non-starter. That was specifically what I said. Even so, I think there's some possible artistic intrigue that might come from some sort of "cross-breeding" between two systems trained on two different drum performance sets. Good to come across someone else who at least knows that Phil Collins was an amazing drummer and not just the only other person besides McCartney & Jackson to sell a million records inside and outside a band. Still, Chester Thompson, seriously :)