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Musico: AI Generated Music
- BFay 4y agoI highly highly recommend listening to the track called "Test_energylevel", it is absolutely bonkers, and more interesting than any of the other tracks I clicked on here. (You have to click on "Explore" and then scroll down a bit to find it) It starts with a choir of ambient vocals singing "it's a sunshine", there's some bird noises and traffic sounds, a snippet of organ synth flourishes. Then it all gets started - guitar, sitar, horns, strings a vocal duet singing "Shine your sweet loving down on me" There's actually a ton going on, every few bars it changes things up, there's clever little harpsichord. Then a male singer starts proclaiming "It's a sunshine daaaayyy", backed up by a chorus of "yeah, yeah, yeah"s. Honestly it's kind of catchy The last 30 seconds or so are truly cursed, there's a voice in the right speaker moaning "wide eyed retina. mostly logical", which gets delayed, bitcrushed, and pingponged between the speakers. Wow! I wonder why this specific track has so much going on compared to the others.
- djmips 4y agoI can't find that track. Any link you might have?
- BFay 4y agoOh, yes sorry I didn't realize I could actually link: https://www.musi-co.com/listen/track/test_energylevel https://www.musi-co.com/listen/track/test_energylevel
- djmips 4y agoThanks! Pretty neat really. But suspicion got me - I used Shazaam and a substantial part of the song is directly lifted from: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XFXmr1CVO74 https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=XFXmr1CVO74
- BFay 4y agoWow, yeah it seems entirely plagiarized. It's still a very strange song, but I don't think the AI did anything noteworthy here. Thanks for looking into it!
- tiborsaas 4y agoThis could have been better targeted for musicians as a VST tool or some other DAW extension. I'd be curious what it could do with my samples and recorded loops.
- z9znz 4y agoWell, from listening to several on the first page, I say musicians and composers have nothing to worry about in terms of AI competition for some time. As amazing as AI image generation is, AI music generation (to me) is not.
- blondin 4y agoi am sorry but we (i make music in my spare time) need to worry. to echo what the comment above is saying. not because this AI generated music is good. but because it is good enough for the vast majority! and this concerns other fields as well. the consumption economy has set the bar for music and entertainment in general very low. most people don't know (or think) that the bar is low. because they have not experienced anything better and probably never will. what's gonna happen next will be sad.
- z9znz 4y agoThe thing is, and this applies to any other human made vs computer made thing: there will always be people who cannot or don't care to discern between quality and "whatever" (aka "good enough", but where "good" is a very low bar). The people who would be satisfied with AI generated music are people who would not have paid for human made music in the first place. You as a good musician will never lose a sale to an AI music source, because that buyer wouldn't have bought your music in the first place. Now if you make your living providing easy listening background music, then you will eventually be replaced.
- frankzander 4y agoNot even that I think. Even background music has more purpose than AI generated one. But you are right ... some people may have a low threshold with being satisfied and hear this kind of music.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoLook at Max Martin - his songs are massive hits because they are highly engineered and use a proved Swedish recipe / formula / composition techniques (ex: balanced lines) that on paper are actually quite simple. On paper. If it were as simple as it looks, everybody would be a Max Martin or somebody would train an AI on his canon and maybe actually have something decent. Music is based in emotion, and the bits and bytes aren’t close to simulating anything close other than probably raw schizophrenia. The current state of AI music? There’s no amount of money you could pay me to listen to it for an hour a day for a week. No way. It’s that bad. Counterpoint: a moderately musically inclined person with Propellerhead’s Figure can come up with more pleasing and coherent music on their third or fourth try that would put any of these to shame. It’s just reality at present.
- anigbrowl 4y agoFawed but interesting. Experimental page should have nudge/spin again option on each section; sometimes the results are musically very good and an interesting segue from the previous section, sometimes they're just kinda ass. Also I think it's a mistake to just look at music (even electronic dance music) as a series of transformations that journey from A to B. A lot out-there music relies on fairly safe tonalities and very straightforward musical structures, to provide an anchor for wild timbral experimentation. Listeners can enjoy the departure from conventional sonic reality in somewhat the same way as a theme park roller coaster balances existential terror and reliable predictability.
- shard 4y agoIs it on purpose, is it me, or do most tracks sound like chiptunes?
- xbar 4y agoMany of the timbres the AI selected were not very rich in replicating natural instruments. Also, almost every single track in every song is continuously overloaded with randomness, or perhaps I should call it juvenile improvisation attempts. Together, these make for a frenetic chiptunes vibe, as I hear it.
- hallux 4y agoThese things make me sad. Not that the results are anywhere close to good enough to replace a human artist yet, but eventually it'll probably be at a level that's good enough for most people, and that'll be the day when music will be truly disposable. I imagine an endless stream of music equivalent to the average Netflix-produced movie. Perfect for people who want music to play all the time without actively listening to any of it.
- bhedgeoser 4y agoNow we just need something similar to https://github.com/nogasm https://github.com/nogasm with a different kind of "implant" that monitors my dopamine levels and optimizes based on that.
- aliqot 4y agoBy the Transitive Property of the Monkey's Paw, I think you'd be in an endless loop of punching yourself in the face as the quickest and easiest way to release it.
- garyrob 4y agoOne of the aspects of Orwell's 1984 that makes it a dystopia is that popular music for the proles is composed by machines...
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago> that'll be the day when music will be truly disposable I would say we reached that day quite some time ago, due to a variety of factors, none of which included AI/ML/correlation analysis.
- frankzander 4y agoMusic is disposable ... just today. Just take a listen at the most songs in charts ... senseless crap. At the end always better like this AI crap at least to my ear. Don't worry because AI would not replace a big part of music if ever. Maybe AI would be used for generating catchy hook lines but that's all. The end selection of what's catchy and what's boring will always do a human.
- allears 4y agoI guess I have no taste. I had a lot of fun playing with the "live" music generator. Some of the settings produced interesting, catchy riffs. As a musician and a listener, I vastly prefer real instruments played by real musicians, preferably acoustic. So I wouldn't actually listen to this stuff, but then I don't generally listen to any kind of electronic music. But this AI thing generates the same kind of shallow, bland, sometimes catchy stuff I hear all the time that's supposedly made by "creators."
- bhedgeoser 4y agoDamn, the first track bops. There are artifacts but somehow that adds to the quality.
- radiojasper 4y agoWhat I learned from this is that AI can't compose music.
- omwow 4y agoSeems they're trying to corner the market for more annoying elevator music.
- classichasclass 4y agoIf folks remember Ballblazer by Lucasfilm Games, Russ Lieblich wrote a music player that would string together riffs like weird chiptune jazz solos. The walking bass was the best part. It was constrained by the template but could come up with some surprising harmonies.
- Rodeoclash 4y agoInteresting, I think it needs better samples though - got a real early 2000s midi feel to it.
- bagelbruno 4y agoCan we just not.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoThis is a wonderfully concise response and I plan to use it verbatim in the future to evidence my sincere and perhaps bottomless disdain for something. Bravo phrasing.
- jonas-w 4y agoIs there some newer music on there or is the newest really 2 years old?
- dalmo3 4y agoSurprisingly good. Not Good good but I expected a lot worse. I think there's great potential for that kind of music in video games, if they can procedurally generate it on the fly based on the current game state (think e.g. roguelikes).
- throwaway888abc 4y agoAlso very slick UI
- dieselerator 4y agoYou have to start somewhere, and this probably has a place. Still, having become accustomed to live acoustic music, I find this generated stuff not engaging. Maybe after a few more generations it will get there.
- xor99 4y agoIt's just all very midi sounding..was my immediate reaction
- jzb 4y agoInteresting and listenable in a “don’t mind this, but forgettable” way. It’s currently okay as disposable background music. But it seems very far from generating music that I’d actually connect with. Years, at least, away from creating a solid song, much less something that talented songwriters should worry about.
- RockRobotRock 4y agofor gods sake please have a volume slider
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y agoThey signed up for Bandcamp (or at least, the Bandcamp religion)
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago102% on-point recent video from composer David Bruce ("The DALL-E2 of Music?") https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN0DDD7B3oU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN0DDD7B3oU Bruce makes the point that early "AI" image generation was pretty shit, but a couple of specific developments (especially diffusion modelling) changed all that remarkably quickly; the corollary is that we might expect that for music too.
- Nursie 4y agoI wonder how people will react when this does become "good enough". I'm thinking of those that consider themselves prompt artists or prompt engineers, and consider DALL-E/SD to be merely tools that creatives use to create their art, just like photoshop, and how dare you insinuate that the work isn't my original creation... If I type in "Symphony, Beethoven, dramatic strings, romantic theme turning dark then triumphant, tenor flute solo in third movement" and such a thing is produced... am I a musician? A classical composer perhaps? I'm not trying to say that there is no act of creation on the part of the user of such systems, but I do think it's an interesting area of discussion, because to me there is some sort of qualitative difference here.
- jijji 4y agoAll of this sounds like techno... and every sample is from over 2 years ago. Any updates in this area?
- seasnake 4y agoI'm not sure you understand techno...
- throw149102 4y agoTo my ear, they all sound about okay for 4 seconds, until my brain recognizes that there's no tension being built or story being told. It's like every track is 4 seconds of music followed by 4 seconds of music followed by 4 seconds of music rather than a track with a real sense of progression. Many have said in this thread already that maybe we ought to expect that a ml approach in the next few months/years could be much better. I'm not so confident that it will happen so soon. Audio might end up being a much harder problem than visuals, for a variety of different reasons. Having the time domain built into the medium requires some concept of memory, and even modern neural nets seem to struggle remembering what they said before the most recent prompt. Once again though, its not impossible. Just requires the right techniques and enough people focused on it.
- Rochus 4y agoSo far so true. But there are also better examples. Bachbot was rather good, or some of the examples of MuseNet (https://openai.com/blog/musenet/ https://openai.com/blog/musenet/).
- Tenoke 4y agoMost real tracks don't have tension buildup or progression. That you judge music based on it mostly just speaks of your preferences. As far as I heard the tracks were coherent and not just 4s snippets glued together. Having said that, I don't think they were exceptional or anything.
- capableweb 4y agoBesides ambient music, what music doesn't have any sort of buildup of tension and subsequent release? Do you have any particular example tracks that doesn't have any tension/release at all? I feel like most of the music people commonly listen to have that, it's an essential part of what makes music feel "human".
- standardly 4y agoI think maybe you two aren't on the same page. I know you are referring specifically to tension and release as a music theory concept, which is for sure very common. Even a single "tense" chord in a chorus resolving to the tonic is tension and release. I think the other person is speaking of "tension" in the context of progression, like a song's building up to a crescendo would be considered tension, or a dubstep drop, or a metal breakdown, etc. (those are also tension and release in music theory, but I think the person is speaking broadly in laymens terms)
- trention 4y agoThe good thing about this hitting the music industry is that lawsuits will follow very soon and the stealing of intellectual labor and property all those models are based on can probably end a bit sooner.
- Paraesthetic 4y agoAh, Human Music
- Paraesthetic 4y agoAh, human music
- justusw 4y agoI assume this is using a lot of soft synths and samples? Whatever they are, they sound really cheap. I hope I don't back myself into some Luddite corner here and this later turns out to be really impressive, like we are seeing in the image generation space. But given that we are living in a market of overabundance of stock photos, royalty free music, etc., I am sure that this is not endangering anything anytime soon. And while comparing it to image generation, with Stable Diffusion and other models, a human has to be in the loop in order to generate the prompts, so we can't entirely replace them here either. How about an AI music generator that creates phrases, rhythms or sounds/VST presets based on a prompt for me? If an average person can choose between listening to this, or listening to a musician that they have a personal connection to on their favorite streaming service, I wonder which one will be picked most of the time?
- JasonBlack555 4y agoMany of these sound like Amiga MOD music from the 1980s. I don't think real musicians have much to worry about ... for a few years anyway !
- kasajian 4y agoI'm really surprised how bad these are.
- midenginedcoupe 4y agoWow, this is terrible. Why would you release this in this state? Edit: Wait, the Streams have had human involvement!? >streams are ”harvested” by human operators: after choosing some initial settings, the operator lets the engine run and collects the score it composes. > Without changing this score, the operator then produces a sound file for it, by choosing the electronic instruments that play the score, making a simple mix and recording the result, using standard music production software. Imagine this being the curated best they could do, even after explicitly choosing instruments after the fact to best fit and then mixing it.
- random_upvoter 4y agoIt's going to be an interesting lesson for humankind to gradually come to realization that anything worth reading, worth watching or worth listening to cannot be born from algorithm. Any science that is based on averaging a gazillion things can only produce things that are average at best.
- ghoomketu 4y agoI think this sort of music is really good for video games or repetitive loopy music like in the earlier video games. I even love this during programming sessions as there is a certain quality to such tracks that help you gain more focus quickly.
- marban 4y agoSounds like a toddler and a Corgi jamming away on a Roland Juno.