4 ms·

Maybe I’m a Luddite, but this seems like it will just lead to music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I say it, soul.

crazydoggers 1y ago
I think you just described pop music
- thepryz 1y ago
  It’s easy and popular to hate on pop music, but even pop music has value and requires a certain skill to understand what resonates with people. This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure out a way to either market the music or just game search and digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and repeat.
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    >music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I say it, soul. This phrase though could be plunked down at any point in the last hundred years and you'd find someone making it. About autotune or electric guitars or rock or jazz or punk or disco or Philp Glass or Stravinsky... one could go on for a long time.
    - thepryz 1y ago
      You’ll always have naysayers, but I think there’s a difference between someone who doesn’t understand or share the appeal of rock or jazz or an artist like Philip Glass where music is made by someone choosing what notes to play, what rhythms, what words and the music that comes out of a statistical model. You can’t tell me that Philip Glass didn’t understand or agonize over the music when creating it. The creative process is vastly different and that’s my point. Oh course, there will be artists who use AI in new and creative ways, someone like Brian Transeau who routinely codes tools for creating electronic music. but for most artists, I fear it will just lead to mindless button clicking and prompt manipulation until it’s formulaic because the base model is the same. Or it will result in fewer people learning instruments or music theory and truly experimenting with things that haven’t been done before. I see AI as having great potential in both art and productivity but maybe it’s just that I don’t trust people to use it responsibly. We’re inherently lazy and easily distracted by anything that will give us that dopamine fix.
      - colechristensen 1y ago
        I definitely meant John Cage instead of Philip Glass, for some reason those two share the same headspace if I'm not thinking carefully. I don't think John Cage agonized over 4'33" (I was thinking about making this an elaborate joke, but I haven't the energy. That piece is 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence. It has been performed in public to sophisticated audiences) When Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed publicly it nearly caused a riot. There were arrests. It deeply upset people and was accused of not being music. Penderecki likewise composed much that was aggressively argued was not real music and is featured in several prominent Horror/Thriller kinds of films, Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood was heavily influenced for the score of There Will be Blood (listen and tell me if the sounds are just orchestra noise or real music. Rock music and Jazz music got heavy, heavy pushback from people that this was just not real music and was garbage noise. Your response fits the common pattern "I know people have said the same things in the past and were wrong but THIS TIME the same argument is correct" >mindless button clicking Sounds like all electronic music since its inception :) Point is, there has always been garbage music and there have always been people criticizing the new thing as the demise of real art. Yawn.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    The current solution for creating the kind of music this tool can back-fill is to go on a site like "Free music for presentations" and click line after line after line after line of 10-second samples hoping to find one that "vibes" with you. If anything, this is a lateral move.
darth_avocado 1y ago
A lot of criticism of AI in music seems to be around the lack of originality and it being generic slop. But unfortunately that’s true for pretty much the entire music industry. Handful of people write songs for all the artists, “artists” don’t create the songs as much as they perform them, most of the music isn’t created but rather sampled or is “inspired” by other music and pretty much most of the artists sound like other artists. Yes there are smaller creators who are trying to make something net new, but unfortunately 99.9% of the small artists are also derivative and lack originality. I see AI music as just continuation of the sad state of the industry at the moment. Hopefully it accelerates the demise of the industry as we know it and restarts the cycle of creation.
- feoren 1y ago
  None of that is new, but there were ways for the genuinely new, inspired, and genius to actually shine through before. It was hard, but possible. Humanity is making decisions that make that even harder: AI music, Spotify's revenue model, etc. They're all to the benefit of cookie-cutter slop (AI or human-made) over creativity. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem as long as people were still free to create on their own. But instead, everyone is forced to spend more hours in menial bullshit jobs for less and less (relative) pay just to survive. Give everyone enough resources to live at least a simple life, and both human creativity and AI creativity can blossom at the same time. But of course that means fewer yachts and hookers and drugs for the billionaires, so it is verboten.

crazydoggers 1y ago

I think you just described pop music

thepryz 1y ago
It’s easy and popular to hate on pop music, but even pop music has value and requires a certain skill to understand what resonates with people. This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure out a way to either market the music or just game search and digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and repeat.
- colechristensen 1y ago
  >music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I say it, soul. This phrase though could be plunked down at any point in the last hundred years and you'd find someone making it. About autotune or electric guitars or rock or jazz or punk or disco or Philp Glass or Stravinsky... one could go on for a long time.
  - thepryz 1y ago
    You’ll always have naysayers, but I think there’s a difference between someone who doesn’t understand or share the appeal of rock or jazz or an artist like Philip Glass where music is made by someone choosing what notes to play, what rhythms, what words and the music that comes out of a statistical model. You can’t tell me that Philip Glass didn’t understand or agonize over the music when creating it. The creative process is vastly different and that’s my point. Oh course, there will be artists who use AI in new and creative ways, someone like Brian Transeau who routinely codes tools for creating electronic music. but for most artists, I fear it will just lead to mindless button clicking and prompt manipulation until it’s formulaic because the base model is the same. Or it will result in fewer people learning instruments or music theory and truly experimenting with things that haven’t been done before. I see AI as having great potential in both art and productivity but maybe it’s just that I don’t trust people to use it responsibly. We’re inherently lazy and easily distracted by anything that will give us that dopamine fix.
    - colechristensen 1y ago
      I definitely meant John Cage instead of Philip Glass, for some reason those two share the same headspace if I'm not thinking carefully. I don't think John Cage agonized over 4'33" (I was thinking about making this an elaborate joke, but I haven't the energy. That piece is 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence. It has been performed in public to sophisticated audiences) When Stravinsky's Rites of Spring was first performed publicly it nearly caused a riot. There were arrests. It deeply upset people and was accused of not being music. Penderecki likewise composed much that was aggressively argued was not real music and is featured in several prominent Horror/Thriller kinds of films, Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood was heavily influenced for the score of There Will be Blood (listen and tell me if the sounds are just orchestra noise or real music. Rock music and Jazz music got heavy, heavy pushback from people that this was just not real music and was garbage noise. Your response fits the common pattern "I know people have said the same things in the past and were wrong but THIS TIME the same argument is correct" >mindless button clicking Sounds like all electronic music since its inception :) Point is, there has always been garbage music and there have always been people criticizing the new thing as the demise of real art. Yawn.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  The current solution for creating the kind of music this tool can back-fill is to go on a site like "Free music for presentations" and click line after line after line after line of 10-second samples hoping to find one that "vibes" with you. If anything, this is a lateral move.

darth_avocado 1y ago

A lot of criticism of AI in music seems to be around the lack of originality and it being generic slop. But unfortunately that’s true for pretty much the entire music industry. Handful of people write songs for all the artists, “artists” don’t create the songs as much as they perform them, most of the music isn’t created but rather sampled or is “inspired” by other music and pretty much most of the artists sound like other artists. Yes there are smaller creators who are trying to make something net new, but unfortunately 99.9% of the small artists are also derivative and lack originality. I see AI music as just continuation of the sad state of the industry at the moment. Hopefully it accelerates the demise of the industry as we know it and restarts the cycle of creation.

feoren 1y ago
None of that is new, but there were ways for the genuinely new, inspired, and genius to actually shine through before. It was hard, but possible. Humanity is making decisions that make that even harder: AI music, Spotify's revenue model, etc. They're all to the benefit of cookie-cutter slop (AI or human-made) over creativity. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem as long as people were still free to create on their own. But instead, everyone is forced to spend more hours in menial bullshit jobs for less and less (relative) pay just to survive. Give everyone enough resources to live at least a simple life, and both human creativity and AI creativity can blossom at the same time. But of course that means fewer yachts and hookers and drugs for the billionaires, so it is verboten.