(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38298670, but we merged the comments hither)
Stuff like mixing, equalizing, sidechaining and eternal sample hunts all take a lot of time as well... It's why making music is one of the hobbies I had to let go.
Can't wait to get my hands on an AI powered DAW that skips all the tedious stuff!
Am I still the one making the music? Well, I'd argue the 300+ hours I'll probably sink into finetuning all the other stuff will say yes.
(until: smartphone companies generate personalized musicians and directors and writers for you, and then even Disney gets sunk)
Creative people will find creative ways to use new creative tools.
There is even still amazing marble sculpture being made today but we are not going back to ancient Rome in terms of the importance of sculpture as a popular artistic medium of the day.
There will be cool, new electronic music genres from these AI tools and that sound might eventually make its way to whatever cultural icons of the day are making music. Mostly though no one will listen to these genres just like they don't listen to them today. Music just isn't that culturally important anymore overall.
The real big deal is AI video because video is the dominant artistic medium of right now by several orders of magnitude. This is all just a dress rehearsal for AI video at mass scale.
To each their own (I mean that) but I do wonder sometimes…At some point, what’s the point?
Here's my guess: I think that this stuff will continue to iterate until it's to the point where the amount of control people have over it as well as the quality of handling edge cases is sufficient to allow people with fairly unsophisticated tools to create things that look fairly high quality. And once this happens, people armed with amazing tools but no better taste than they had before, will flood the Internet with a bunch of tasteless garbage at rates never before seen. It hasn't happened yet, but I think this is partly an accessibility issue (not everyone has datacenter GPU access, there's still limitations in open models, and many hosted offerings are pretty limited compared to what local models can do right now in terms of tooling) but also it will make a big difference if we hit the point where it's really genuinely just not possible to reliably distinguish AI generated images and sound. Then, even if people wanted to ignore AI generated media, it would probably quickly become pretty difficult, and many people will probably not be honest if it limits their reach and potential.
What’s it matter, if the mind can’t tell either from aether. Samsara, no Abraham’s Sara, abra-cadabra, open sesame, oh well, stuck in the loop, but who cares, we’re in this together so I’ll take either. Some say Samuel paved the way, eat the apple, it’ll be fine they say.
The widespread availability of DAWs, streaming services, and music distribution services has greatly enabled people to create and publish their music online. Not to mention services like Splice which enable the purchase and curation of ready-made musical loops. It's never been easier to make a record, render it, and distribute it.
Of course the problem then becomes one of sifting through the endless pool of releases. There's a lower ratio of quality signal to noise. So be it. I still get the majority of my recommendations from people who I trust to have good taste.
I happen to think this enabling of creation is a net positive because it breaks down barriers for people to be creative and I consider that to be an intrinsically rewarding activity. At the end of the day creators still need to have good taste and discipline to see their vision realized or succeed, but the act of creating itself is beneficial to people on a personal level. Even if their creation is objectively hot trash.
Hard to predict, but I'm sure we'll get something new out of it. Imagine a talented singer just freewheeling with an AI band backing the vocals. A few prompt nudges before you start ("something in the style of Aphex Twin with bagpipes"), some buttons to make live adjustments, with labels like "darker / brighter", "more pop / more alternative" or "activate cowbell".
I guess the main thing to solve is reproducible output, but we almost have the technology to do this.
You don't have to be a singer either. Practicing an instrument could be so much more fun when a complete song in the style of your favorite band is generated along with whatever you are doing.
Can you imagine if the GraphCast article were like that? "Revolutionizing the future of weather".
I'm sure this music thing is cool but I have no idea what was built.
[1]: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for...
Lyria is for operators, Graphcast is for engineers. The former care about what something does, the latter care about how something does.
You are saying "I love watching the skill of the painter, I couldn't care less about the final product"
And that's without even going into voice tuning. We've crossed into that world long time ago and the line is only going to get more blurry.
Perhaps what will happen is that we will have more time to play/watch more?
The problem with these new BigTech companies is that they are accustomed to subjugating everyone. They deal with users and content, not with artists and creations. This is starkly different from the past. Yamaha and other synth makers would go out of their way to satisfy capricious artists, now it's the other way around, the tech dictates to artists what is possible, including the limits of what they are allowed to make/say and sell.
Not the HN audience. Luckily in the background there will be a machine or a even better, a company that can be worshipped!
Not even audience, since few care for music with any real passion anymore among the masses (not even teens).
It became a niche, or something you put in the background. As for "popular" concerts and festivals, they are more like country fairs...
And second, you express yourself, you said it. If a generator produces something, it's not _your_ expression, per definition. You may still have "constrained" it among myriad of possibilities through your prompt, it is still the production of the generator, not yours.
Example: when I play something on a Mellotron, I cannot claim that I played the flutes or violins recorded there. Those are definitely not mine. What I do play with it, what I sing above it, yes, maybe because I produce/play those, with what I understood of my previous musical education/experience.
That's, fundamentally different.
Regarding whether it is "my" expression or not, I consider expression as a way of making my feelings or thoughts known. This grants me an additional way of making my feelings or thoughts known. Perhaps of lower fidelity than if I learn to play an instrument but maybe that will improve with time. Either way, since I now have an additional choice of expressing my thoughts and _I_ decide if it's "good enough" to publish, I consider it as allowing me to express more.
I think the negativity comes from the fact that our economic reality isn't currently structured to handle the consequences.
In an idyllic society, this might be all one needs to say about generative AI: "how wonderful, a new way to express ourselves!" I think the backlash stems from the fact that we do not live in such a society. Many people already barely scratch out a meagre existence through self-expression. Now major companies that posses far more power than individuals, that take people's work and data without doing due diligence or asking, that effectively impose the shape of the technical landscape from top down, are introducing tools that threaten the ability of people to survive.
It's kind of hard to paint a completely rosy picture when that's the way these tools are being developed and introduced.
[0] https://ai.meta.com/blog/generative-ai-text-images-cm3leon/
> As such, and as described in our paper, we’ve trained CM3leon using a licensed dataset.
Besides, the reason why the power law distribution here is exceptionally skewed is precisely BECAUSE of technology like the internet. If you read about the history of music, in the past before technology, all musicians made less but at least there were places for local musicians to play in a strong community such as in local pubs and such.
TECHNOLOGY created the problem of the extreme power law and now it's disguising itself as a solution. But like the devil, a company like Google does not offer anyhting for free.
The barrier of entry is a business one, not a talent or skill one. Every country in the world has virtuoso musicians who don't earn money. Many/most of the hugely successful musicians released music that could be recreated pretty convincingly by amateurs with a few years of experience (vocals are probably the only exception as we strongly associate them with individuals).
I tried riffusion and sang 10 seconds of "the house of the rising sun" [0]
It produced... this...
https://www.riffusion.com/riffs/d0464fb4-a53a-4ad8-a765-0a64...
which, by some measure, is impressive (perfect recognition of lyrics, for one), but is also... a musical abomination?
So IDK. Let's see where this goes.
"I've never seen a diamond in the flesh" from Lorde, sung into Riffusion: "I've:0.72-0.96 never:0.96-1.20 seen:1.20-1.48 a:1.48-1.64 diamond:1.64-2.32 in:2.32-2.76 the:2.76-3.02 flesh:3.02-3.86"
With the timestamps being second-annotations. The Google model takes the whole melody and phrasing as input as well.
Why not output MIDI instead, and let the artist manipulate that?
I for one would gladly buy a VST instrument that would generate a constant stream of MIDI ideas, chordings, voicings, variations, from a few seconds of singing or whistling or clapping.
It seems the technology is here to build it, yet (AFAIK) it doesn't exist. Why?
> Each participating artist has partnered with us and will have a hand in helping us test and learn to shape the future of AI in music.
Let me correct that: each participating artist has been given a wad of dirty cash in return for their help in training replacements for mass music. Notice that I said "mass music" -- people will always be able to create by hand, but it's clear that the ultimate goal is to create a system whereby people pay for AI generated music (either with money or with ad views) and no longer need human-created music for commercial purposes.
> Our music AI experiments have been designed in line with YouTube’s AI principles, which aim to enable creative expression while protecting music artists and the integrity of their work.
This is hardly a protection. It only protects existing, secure artists. It does not protect new artists from being outcompeted by AI. (Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available.)
This article written by Google is a testament to the true nature of Google, which is the nature of being a leech and parasite. OF COURSE, at first, this tool MIGHT be interesting and provide new ways of creating music, but we have to remember that it will mainly function in the context of YouTube, which is about superficial consumption and advertising. The addictiveness and widespread usage of YouTube is becoming a societal problem, and this technology will standardize AI music into becoming mainstream.
Many people think that AI is just a tool to aid in music creation. It is for now, but what it actually does is three things:
(1) It creates a new standard where music is no longer about human expression but about creating a basic layer of entertainment to go along with advertising.
(2) It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines.
(3) At some point, it will be so advanced that it will hardly need anyone to create it, and Google and other big tech companies can use it to be an alternative to traditional musicians, who will not be able to compete and therefore will not be able to do what they love to survive.
Remember, technology at first is an optional curiosity but successful technologies ALWAYS become entrenched in society and modify it significantly, and in this case, for the worse.
Shame on Google for this and I truly despise them.
Moments where music is truly important in one's life will never be replaced by meaningless bit fiddling.
I cannot imagine people caring about books, music, art created by bit fiddling. They will always care about things created by other people. We do not watch chess engines playing together, even though the level of play is "godlike". AlphaZero didn't make human chess less popular. Chess is extremely popular now and it is mostly due to personalities participating in it and the ease of access (streaming videos...).
I find the demo where a random song from an artist you like is created very weird. Who would want to do that? And why would anyone connect to that? Will these people save these random creations and relisten them? Will they remember these moments by remembering these random silly unique tracks? I cannot imagine that at all.
But think about it, people used to watch the same movies in DVD. The movies they loved. Now people watch and infinity of short random videos (tik tok, instagram)...
Technology changes the habits of people, specially in young people. Think about it, one friend sends a song auto-generated from some text, it is "a song made by someone", at least that will be their perception...
This has similar energy to the writer’s strike - save money by removing the first layer of human effort. For some things (like the backing music in a commercial) this is sufficient, and for others you can have AI generate the base and then have a human “punch it up” with their vocals or by performing it on live instruments.
I don’t think we risk losing music production in general, but I do think there’s a legitimate concern that many many smaller, less publicly visible music jobs will be lost.
What is your definition of "traditional" here - historically, both music and art were not full time jobs for most. It was a thing people with a passion for did as a side gig, with some (but not a lot) of people eventually sustaining themselves full time with art. Or it was done by already rich people who did not need to work and could afford to be people of leisure.
That was true even of organized things like orchestras, etc. Doing these as a full time job is a relatively recent thing, and even there, "surviving" has been limited to a remarkable few.
Even a decade ago, 30% of musicians had a second job. The 70% was not mostly "bands" but,again, permanent things like orchestras, etc.
Trying to forcefully keep jobs alive that don't need to exist is insanity, and rightfully gets pointed out as such in other contexts. This would be no different in this case.
Here, it's also totally non-obvious that if these things go back to "people pursue it as a side gig because they love it" we will be any worse off than we were in terms of quality of art/music, happiness, you name it.
Because that was the way of the past and art/music were not just fine, but most people even consider it better!
You have to know the change is real, of course, but once you do, we've ended up with insane results when we try to fight it.
It _is_ just a tool, a new instrument essentially, one that is easier to play than most. People being angry that there is now a new instrument that is much easier to play than the one they spent years to learn come across as entitled brats to me. This will enable me to express myself in a way I couldn't before, how is that not about human expression?
It's a accessibility thing as well. Expressing oneself through music has always been nearly impossible to the tone-deaf among us. Now that may change, and you want to stop that because it might maybe potentially affect how much money you can earn from playing music?
Glory to Google for enabling the musically impaired to express themselves through music!
...
Then they came for the Indie Game Devs. And there was nobody left to speak for them.
It's not the same as a new instrument that is easier to play, because with an instrument, you have to determine entirely what comes out of it. With this "tool", you only determine part of the output, a skeleton, and a machine determines the basic musicality.
I 100% do not buy the accessibility argument. Of course, everyone plays that card. But the overall gross societal effects of AI are not worth it, even if it does help some people.
Imagine a new nuclear technology that cures all cancer, but simultaneously allows anyone to create an atomic bomb in their backyard. Would you think this worth it? We have to consider the costs and benefits, not just the benefits like most technophiles think.
You may create something with this tool for your game, but I certainly won't buy your game if AI has been used in its creation.
I'd only add that the sort of music they're aiming at is already pretty much at your end state. Muzak (and its slightly more advanced cousin Library Music) isn't about human expression, but about a background noise to convey a loose mood. God forbid we should just listen to what someone has to say - it always needs a distracting background interference to go with it.
But, like it or not, creating this drivel does put the food in the mouths of a great number of professional musicians. Even big-name recording studios aren't busy full time with wonderful new creative experiments, it's jingles and library music that keep their doors open. But even this work has been declining sharply for decades, and this new wave of tools will just continue that decline.
If anything, it's going to entrench the music profession for the privileged as there'll be an even smaller pot of work available and so only those that can afford the massive time investment and comfortable with the risk of being without work will survive.
And all this because the people building and paying for these tools are themselves musically illiterate - they don't know what makes good music, or why muzak is utterly devoid of the thing they profess to love and democratise.
This is the next iteration of music. First we had only live concerts, then we had recordings, and finally auto-generated music.
I hope some old dudes with long beards will like to hang out and jam with me when I'll be old.
This is not the next generation of music. It is one possible future that we can oppose if only we were not so convinced that technology is completely deterministic and can't be opposed.
Why would anyone owe the musicians a job just because they enjoy doing it? I don’t expect anyone to defend my love of coding when I’m replaced by a future iteration of an LLM.
> Music composed by humans could still be better but AI will compete simply because it is cheap and widely available
If it’s truly better, the market for manmade music will still exist. If bland/poor quality art is no longer produced by humans, what’s the loss?
> It changes the minds of human beings to think more like machines
Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.
That is definitely not true. There are other things that determine what is sold besides quality: ability to mass produce, economies of scale, bullying tactics, etc.
> Not sure how this works, or why it’s so bad.
Because thinking like machines means that we are locked into the cycle of optimizing resource usage to expand and grow forever and not be stewards of the environment. Thinking like a machine means being a human cog in the consumerist machine of selfishness. Thinking like a machine means facilitating the endless growth of technology that furthers us from connecting genuinely with other people in a small community.
Because even artists often produce bland/poor stuff, sometimes even some that sells well? (or that is recognised several decades/centuries, to be actually great work)
The goal is to create background music for youtube videos without paying artists anymore at all. Youtube videos feel sterile because they lack music with emotion and are all recycling the same audio library tracks. It's a way to allow some pop culture to youtubers who are scared to death of copyright claims.
And who owns copyright for these songs? Of course not the user. If one of the 1 000 000 00 songs becomes a hit, it's a bank for the google owners.
The most music we (humans collectively, not you and me specifically) hear are made for one single purpose: profit.
It's not an AI problem. It's nothing new. Actually it's older than you and me.
Imagine a burglar who robs houses. He might rob 1-2 per month. Now imagine the same burglar being given a technology that allows him to rob 1000 houses a month. Wouldn't you say that's much worse, even though it essentially arises from the same problem?
Doesn't matter if it is music, drawing or scientific discoveries.
What an Artist does is pushing the boundaries.
Having tools like ths allows much more people to push and not 'just' the artists who mastered certain skills.
I can write very good software, do i care if my family suddenly can also write softwre thanks to ai? Honestly no. My goal was never to write code but always to create something which adds value to my life or to others.
I would not have thought that we will achieve this level so fast but yes writing code and using certain tools will be not necessary in the near future.
But hopefully we will have more time to learn all of those skills for the sake of having fun learning them.
I have a very good sense of what music sounds good to me and what art looks good to me. Should i be not allowed to create my own art even if its through tools like SD, Midjourney and co?
don't be that type of person
#oxford comma blues.
Maybe music creation via tools like this will be like using a camera to create images. We don’t think of photographs as shitty paintings, right? It’s a different kind of thing.
Yes, in the sense that most people don’t know how to take photos and they look like crap even with heavy AI retouching
It would also already work very well for creating background music without bothering artists to do so.
Concentration background music etc.
"Imagine singing a melody to create a horn line, transforming chords from a MIDI keyboard into a realistic vocal choir, or adding an instrumental accompaniment to a vocal track."
This is what composers do! It's not hard, it requires a journeyman level of skill and training. I guess it will change how non-musicians create really bad music though?
I'm not saying it's not a game changer - the crappy library music world is running on borrowed time. But positioning this as revolutionizing music production is just bizarre. It's not solving the problems that one faces trying to write good music - it's just making the simplest steps faster. And only significantly faster for the untrained.
This has nothing more to do with democratizing music production then audio to text has to do with democratizing writing a novel!
> Within the experiment, a limited set of creators will be able to use Dream Track for producing a unique soundtrack with the AI-generated voice and musical style of artists including Alec Benjamin, Charlie Puth, Charli XCX, Demi Lovato, John Legend, Sia, T-Pain, Troye Sivan, and Papoose*.
So... we're watching you and we'll know if you so much as sample one bar to create something of your own. But our preferred creators are having so much fun using AI exclusively to make the entire composition, directly ripping off the personal style of these artists who said it's OK!
I also found it hilarious that they claim the idea of embedding a watermark in the audio by adding the image to the 2d spectrogram is a "novel method ... unlike anything that exists today, especially in the context of audio." Considering Aphex Twin did it in 1999...
* Apparently it was removed from the game, and his Wikipedia doesn't even mention it, but, yes, Papoose, of the "You just mad cuz I'm stylin' on ya!" track from GTA IV.
Nothing more trustworthy than a multi billion corporation trying to destroy the internet as we know it to get more billions out of ads convinces a bunch of washed up artists that their new project is benign and even are so good that they use the hashtag "Social Responsibility".
This is very totally not just a plan to try to get others on board, wonder what's the catch here? try to do a FOMO where only the first few get to get rights for their voice being used? playing a very long con getting voice exclusivity rights? or what exactly?
One thing I know is that whatever Google says is a lie.
Is this a unique or boolean watermark (==ai_generated)? Sounds like it would be amazing to have for regular YouTube uploads to prove authorship and deal with reuploads/content theft.
Also, as I understand you must be able to sing properly to use this tool, so it is only for talented kids, and ordinary kids still have to use a keyboard?
So I'm not sure your projection is valid.
But quality has always been a very important aspect of popularity in art as well as in music (see: Renaissance sculptors & painters, Baroque and Classical composers, etc.)
Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.
AI helps with the last part; real artists should still provide the emotional seed.
Music may already have been turned into a commodity selected by traits other than quality, but tools like this bring the effect up to a whole new level, a whole new order of magnitude.
Previously it was also a way of showing it to others in a way of a filter, also it was so crazy creating new 'styles'.
But this time is over.
We are in a Post art discovery face. I have not really seen (at least not regular) something totally/complelty/utterly new in art.
But thats good. The search space is much deeper now, art is much more accessable.
Maybe punk music was partly a consequence of mass media pop and rock music for these reasons too.
Huge trend back to 90s CCD digital cameras, film, polaroid etc.
Imagine the talent AI assisted music programs will unlock. I think it will be a new instrument people learn to play.
IF we assume that:
1. "Beautiful" (nice "looking" / "sounding" / "moving" things) things will be easy to create.
2. "Meaningful" things are, and will continue to be, harder to create.[A]
Then it seems that the only thing that could differentiate you is the quality of your ideas, and the meaning you are transmitting.
Put another way -- if everyone can create "Beautiful" things by default (in the world of static art, we live here now!) then why choose one piece of art over another?
This is my intuition about it, at least.
-----
[A]: I think this is just a fundamental property of "meaningful" things. They require more computation, which means more scarcity.
I really hope it's not google that drives the future of AI in music.
Google continues to live in the darkest timeline when it comes to ai and ml.
In one interview I watched, Yo-Yo said he strived to play pieces perfect until his 20s when in the middle of a concert he realized he was playing perfectly and it was boring. From that moment he decided to dedicate his musical performances to making a connection with the audience. His concert was incredible to experience a room of 1000 people all having their seats shaken by a human being bowing a string without any electronics involved. People were getting drawn in, then jumping back, and getting transported outside the physical. Hard to describe.
And that was when i realized that no matter how perfect a computer plays, humans will always want to hear other humans play. We have had player pianos for over a century and not to mention a long history of sculptures that play music and even now you can get a virtually unlimited amount of extremely high quality near perfect replication recording of the best performances out there.
But still, I just went to buy tickets to a classical music event on a monday night to a solo concert by a not-famous player that each seat cost around $100 and they were sold out.
For me personally, learning an instrument has been a tremendous experience. Even the interaction with my teacher gives me weekly human contact that has become scarce in the post-covid world filled with remote work.
Spending months of practice just to play a song poorly is actually an incredibly freeing and humbling experience. I had my recital with a bunch of people watching me, where I messed up, I played out of tune, but it was an incredible flood of human connection that i never really had prior.
I think worrying about AI taking over music is overblown. Unless the music is going to be generated to manipulate people somehow, but the reality is that in 100 years people will still crave live performances. Just like for the past 100 years, paradoxically, the access and lowered barriers of entry, has actually increased accessed to classical and live performances. People complaining that people today don’t like “music with passion” anymore are living in some fairytale land where they imagine every single person 200 years ago was skipping down to the opera house. The reality was that 200 years ago access to music was incredibly limited and most people only experienced it in church context. If that (rural churches had a lot less going on musically).
People will always crave to see other humans’ accomplishments. Music, paintings, etc are not just an end product, but the more you understand the difficulties and journey of the person producing it, the deeper your appreciation becomes.
The human being was not created to be deprived of the right to express his feelings through fine arts. From the moment you deprive me of the right to express myself as I feel through external as well as internal stimuli and you want to replace me with an insensitive mechanism that neither feels nor has judgment like a human being, then everyone will become cynical and unsmiling and all they will lose their meaning.
I've learned far quicker playing chess against an AI than I would have playing against humans. And yet I still really enjoy playing against humans too. In fact the experience playing against humans is richer thanks to a deeper understanding of the game that came from AI.
Your argument is along the same lines as arguing electric guitar is lifeless when compared to the non-machine acoustic version. When what really matters is who is operating the machine. AI is just another tool. It will be used in insensitive mechanical ways and in ways that deeply enrich our lives.
Now imagine in a group of people you share a hand-crafted song but one of your friends who isn't as interested in producing music takes your song as inspiration and creates something that sounds better. Imagine they aren't even trying to do this to intentionally one-up you; they think of it as the same kind of sharing and creation. You may disagree but their definition of self-expression differs, and it's difficult to change people. But this happens consistently and the bar is raised ever higher each time.
How well someone handles this kind of scenario depends on mindset. Is the joy in being better than others, or pursuing the craft and learning things, or sharing in the experience in consumption? People will have different values. But I think the bias in AI is for people to focus on the end result without needing to put in a lot of effort.
It's the entire selling point of these products - taking out the effort in getting a high-quality result. Yet the effort spent on human art isn't wasted effort. The effort doesn't just go towards the finished price, but to the satisfaction of the artist themselves. It stimulates their neurobiology. And in a lot of tutorials for hand-crafted art, the mindset taught is to focus on the process and not the end result. Generative art contradicts that bit of knowledge, and it could cause dissonance.
In Stanisław Lem's story about the electronic bard, the existence of the impeccable poetry-generating robot does not directly deprive the poets of their ability to create their own poems. Instead, after perceiving the generated work to be higher quality than anything they're capable of writing, the poets become depressed and commit suicide.
You could say the poets didn't have the right mindset of how to approach life, but I think it raises a good point. It's the mental state of people who create and how society views these tools that matters. You will always have the ability to put pencil to paper regardless of what big technology does, but will you want to if you think the rest of the world has moved on without you?
I think maybe in modern times the effect will be closer to: artists scale back or give up their craft because the potential audiences vote with their wallets and attention spans for people who rent server farms. It's the despair at seeing the public valuing the end-result over the human element in a broader cultural sense. It's feeling as if a piece of yourself is being lost in an eternal void.
And it's the idea that generative models could become a fundamental part of society. Billboards are generated because those cause the most successful ad campaigns. People hold massive music festivals exclusively made of generative synth lines because they attract the crowds. The taste of your drink is algorithmically modeled with ingredients adjusted for the best product-market fit possible.
What stops these people in their tracks is perceiving the world as one that values the machine over the human, and even if you value the human, you still have to get in line with the machine - everyone else is doing it. Generative models could retrain our value systems.
It's not so much what generative models take away than how they change the public's perception of art itself. It is the depression and mindset changes that come with knowing the poetry-robot will be there for all eternity.
Older forms of thinking become outdated, some which may be considered virtuous or delicately intertwined with the human spirit, and this causes anguish and despair at the state of things, and the ever-improving army of poetry robots that sees no end in sight. Because we haven't put an end state on improving technology, and I think deep down some of us believe there was never meant to be such an end state in the future. We would have to spin terms like degrowth and Luddism into something more palatable to have any chance of creating one.
If you want to be competitive in music production industry you have to be somewhat economically effective as in any industry and AI will raise economical effectiveness to the whole new level.
Using the "journey metaphor", for some people what matters is the destination; for others what matters is the journey itself; for others what matters is the person doing it; and for others any combination of those.
The target audience for most generative stuff is mostly people who are looking at "the destination".
> The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the distance, a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.
Part of me worries that I am just gatekeeping.
However to me, the point of music was that its meant to put across something personal, human and emotional. Even when its a cover. Whether its a protest song, or shouting about taking someone to a gay bar. To automate that away, what does that do to us culturally?
So much of our identity comes from shared art. Emos liked emo music (you know with the shouty backing singer), goths went for death metal or the cure. Indie twats waxed lyrical about how heroine was great for the libertines.
All of that shared (mostly bullshit) memory is going to disappear, so what will bring us together, unite groups of kids with a shared like of x? Will it matter?
I worry that all the things I enjoy doing are being automated away. Perhaps this is what the weavers felt like when they were replaced with powered looms. Or cabinet makers felt when they saw steam powered power tools that sparked the arts and crafts movement[1]
I also frankly worry about how my kids are going to make money.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arts_and_Crafts_movement#Criti...
Then seriously start thinking about which politicians are going to support a future where fewer and fewer jobs are being done by humans. UBI, healthcare for everyone, access to housing etc are all things that can and should be done already. The more that work is automated away, the more crucial these become.
We should be striving for a “Jetsons future” where complaining about a long work day means being in the office for two hours.
It also makes me wonder about agriculture.
It's difficult to envision a post-scarcity future where food production is still manual-intensive. Mandatory picking service, as a civic obligation? And there are a lot of food types that require manual picking.
UBI would therefore effectively end production of those types of food. (E.g. more grain, less fruit)
Also, the inter-national implications of some UBI countries while others aren't...
This is going to require taxation. Maybe a wealth tax ? Maybe fed-level Georgism ?
Previous musicians said the same things, electric guitars are not musical instruments, synthesizers have no soul, music made on computer DAWs is artificial and of no value, ....
The kids will embrace 100% AI generated music, the parents will be "they don't make music like they used to", forgetting that their parents said the same things about their music.
1. The people who think AI won't really work (at least in some fundamental way - it might make some stochastic melody but it won't have any creative spark to it).
2. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be great.
3. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be terrible.
Of course, because, just like in advertising, they are the main target.
One really has to love those companies protecting children. Marquis de Sade would have been proud of those companies.
But more and more, I’m finding I don’t enjoy newer music, not because it scares me or I find it to be racket, like earlier generations said of mine.
Instead, I find newer music to be boring and devoid of life. Zero dynamics. Hearing the same few guitar and drum plugins. Rigidly mechanical tempos and tone correction. It’s just dull and boring.
A lot of this is poor execution. Maybe some of it is changes in how we listen to music. A lot, not all, of new music feels like content instead of art, mashed through a template for ease of production. Yes - that’s something that’s been done through the history of recorded music. But the uniformity gives everything a generic feel that used to be reserved for the most bubblegum of pop music.
Watching the music scene over my 50+ years has taught me that music is often as much a reaction to current music scenes as much as it is anything else.
I think it's just as likely the kids will go zydeco or jug band — start finding the equivalent of washtubs and washboards to make music.
Hence my worry that I am gatekeeping.
For example in 2007, making good sounding music required at least a studio. If you wanted to record 4 microphones at the same time, you needed expensive hardware.
Doing any kind of music editing required a huge machine and expensive software with expensive plugins.
Now I can mix and apply effects in real time to 24 tracks and have a video reference. With this I can add a track by humming out a line.
I'm less worried about "music like they used too" modern music has always, and will always be shit, according to old people.
Added to my article on economics of LLM's: https://open.substack.com/pub/rakkhi/p/economics-of-large-la...
The abhorrence of "gatekeeping" may be my least favorite cultural trends of the last decade. Gatekeeping is often desirable. Expertise is a good thing. Specialization is a good thing. Communities based around shared interests and values are a good thing.
> Expertise is a good thing. Specialization is a good thing
yes! that's a standard of quality. To be a good x you need to pass this quality bar. I don't think that's really gatekeeping. Gatekeeping, well the way I see it, is someone dismissing someone else based on parameters unrelated to the matter at hand. "you can't understand x if you didn't do y" Hence why me dismissing AI generated backing tracks not being "real music" because its not made by "real musicians" could be read as gatekeeping.
> Communities based around shared interests and values are a good thing.
Also yes! But thats not a reason to be hostile to newcomers.
What is the purpose of marking AI content? I don't really understand. Should we mark content edited in GIMP or Audacity as well?
I see a future where we all make our own music and share it freely with family and friends. This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit. This will still happen of course but at least we'll have another option.
What gets lost in this short-circuited process is the physical involvement with an instrument, a sort of embodied cognition. I suppose profound and/or interesting musical ideas could spring from someone without such experience, I’m skeptical.
The part about privilege: a lot to unpack. I’m a professional musician in classical music. There are a lot of paths to learning one’s craft. In my own experience, privilege - at least as defined by access to resources of finance and influence wasn’t part of my training. Still there’s much to be done to broaden access in my field.
I'm not being funny but this is a poor take when the excellent guitarist Mdou Moctar learned on a guitar he built himself using the brake cables from a bike for strings. The guitar at least is not an inaccessible instrument.
You can learn to play the guitar, and buy a guitar, but it's very hard and expensive to also learn the 3-4 other instruments you need to make a full song. (my brother learned both the guitar and percussions; this took a lot of time and was quite expensive, if he had a tool like this he would probably focus on the guitar and just rely on this to generate a background track)
let us side step the binary "privileged" argument which is disruptive here.
The issue for us now is given that level of talent, would Hendrix, Johnson or anyone else be able to make a career in 2028? Or will it be the preserve of people with free time and money?
There are a million things you _wanted_ to do that you'll never get to do. And that's unfair.
What will it mean to "make music" when the amount of necessary skill, experience and insight approaches zero?
> This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit
Unfortunately, unless we replace capitalism, this is exactly what you can expect. The veil of false corporate authenticity grows every day, you can see it in the opening sentence of this press release:
"From jazz to heavy metal, techno to opera, music is a much loved form of creative expression."
The statement, while true on the surface, takes on a different tone when you remember who the speaker is, who the audience is, and what their ultimate goal is.
I am excited as a musician to explore this coming age, and I am also deeply saddened and fearful of how things will shake out.
The problem though is that fewer and fewer people are interested in this sort of thing and more interested in generic electronic garbage background music, as others have said. Classical concerts are getting less attendance over time, there are less acoustic or live performances, etc. People altogether seem to no longer buy traditional art because they can buy prints that look good on the wall. The point of buying traditional art isn't just it looking good, because like musicians, the character of the artist and their personality comes through in the paint strokes, color choices, design, composition, etc. Which is why people close to the artist often appreciate the work even more than a stranger would (ie: your 4-old child's school drawing), because the way it's created reminds you of that person and their soul/spirit.
AI music is not a continuation of the degrading of music away from the "one true music" that is classical. All types of music up until AI music have required skill to create. Being able to have a digital audio workspace on your laptop with a few presets did make it a little easier to make trash, sure. But most electronic music requires massive technical expertise in so many more fields than playing the guitar does. I know because I've learnt both.
Electronic music production requires you to master software, multiple pieces of hardware, understand the physics of waveforms deeply, understand music theory, be a composer of an entire symphony and the performer of every part of that symphony at the same time, understand sound design (which is a whole job on its own), and then learn to dj if you hope to promote your music.
Also people go to rock gigs all the time that are performed on live guitars etc so I dunno what you're on about.
That still doesn't change some drawbacks, which is what you lose when you do that. It's mostly an economics thing. There's value to having artisanal products over industrial ones because of the craftsmanship involved. The artist or craftsman's personal touch ends up as part of the piece. That used to be common but now it's just a high end product for rich people to afford. There's a downside to these kinds of technologies, even if they bring benefits.
