Menu
What's new
By:
Filters

AI Orchestral Music

AudioLoco said:
it was an example to illustrate why who ever "prompts" is not doing anything artistic and cannot be considered an author, a musician, an artist of whatever comes out of the software
Click to expand...

Music AI prompting as it is today is nothing but curating AI output from a ton lot of loot boxes (each AI generation is a loot box that may or may not have what you're looking for). Beyond a high level prompt, there is no control. If I don't like what the AI generates, I have to start over. Or in the case of udio.com, ask for a remix that sounds x% similar to what was last generated. Rinse and repeat 10s to 100s of times. Is this artistic? I don't think so. Am I the author? No. It may make me a good curator (if I have good taste) with a lot of patience. Maybe music generating AIs are built like this by design. Their developers *want* users to generate as much as possible and then when users hit the Like or Publish buttons, that acts as positive re-enforcement for the AI's neural network. Its a way for the AI to learn what, of the music it generated, sounds good and what doesn't. Maybe. I know LLMs work this way.

The future is not that cut and dry though. When these AI models allow for a lot more specific prompting and feedback mechanisms, things become blurrier. For example, if I can't play the violin but have a lot of musical knowledge, I can certainly convey to a violinist exactly what I'm looking for. The violinist would "generate" something. I can mold, direct and shape their output through feedback. Am I the musician in this case? Still no. Am I the author? co-author? Am I being artistic? Its a collaborative effort. Now what if we replace the violinist with an AI.

Some composers welcome and even ask for musicians to improvise. For example, some tracks of the Vanguard soundtrack, Bear McCreary asked musicians to improvise. He is credited as the composer.

What about the AI acting as the orchestrator and musician(s) to a theme that I create. Am I the composer? How complex does my theme need to be before I would rightfully be called the composer? Is 8 piano notes across 2 bars enough? I don't know.

When AI becomes a collaborator that is part of the creative process as opposed to the only thing in the creative process (as it is today), things becomes much more difficult to categorize.

I've been thinking a lot about this but I'll stop here before it gets TLTR :)
 
Last edited:
mikrokosmiko said:
I think this is similar to someone working with premade loops. I don't know if making a piece assembling a bunch of loops together would be considered composing, in this terms, but for me composing is about the organization of the musical material, it does not matter where the material came from at all.
Click to expand...
Organization isn't enough. There's a level of detail that needs to be controlled to be considered composition.

Here's a concrete example. I use Band in a Box to help create backing tracks. For a cello part in a song, I specified the chord progression and picked Cello, Background PopCountry Ev 085. Band in a Box then assembled a cello track using loops that followed that chord progression.

I don't consider what I did to be "composing" a cello track.

I consider the creation of those loops to be composition. They just don't happen to be composed by me.

There have been cases where I've asked Band in a Box to create multiple tracks, and comped together those tracks into a single track.

I don't consider that to be composition, either. While I recognized that parts of some tracks fit better than others, I didn't compose those tracks. Band in a Box could have produced any number of cello tracks that would have been acceptable.

To me, it's akin to using Midjourney to generate a picture from a prompt. Although you can guide the final output using prompts, there are virtually an unlimited number of images which could have fit that prompt.

If the description allows for an almost unlimited number of outputs that match the criteria, it's not composition.

And... unlike AI, the person who composed the Band in a Bix loops knew what they were going to be used for, and was compensated for that work.
 
Please bear in mind that I absolutely hate how the IAs are being trained and used, not only musically. I respect your opinion, but I would not consider a loop a composition by itself. For me, the composition is what you do with the loop itself. Are you going to repeat it? Are you going to put another one for contrast? Are you going to play it simultaneously with another one? How is it going to contribute to the total? Those are the decisions a composer has to take. A note, a chord, a loop, a sting... they are just bricks. A whole section, a whole intro, a whole coda, are way bigger bricks but if you are searching for a specific one with the intention of putting it next to other to get a "higher level" construction, I'd definitely say that that's composing.
 
AudioLoco said:
The film director asked for very specific stuff and asked for almost a hundred tweaks.
Does that make him the composer?
Click to expand...
I think the argument you're referring to was more or less focused on the fact that it the current state of AI needs someone with adequate knowledge and connection to music to be able to produce a quality work. And I think to some extent if the film director understands music then he has helped in the composition process by asking for tweaks and edits. However, to your point, the AI, (or in your example the composer) is doing the heavy lifting and really should get the main credit for the job.

All that being said I abhor AI-generated music.
 
mikrokosmiko said:
Please bear in mind that I absolutely hate how the IAs are being trained and used, not only musically. I respect your opinion, but I would not consider a loop a composition by itself. For me, the composition is what you do with the loop itself. Are you going to repeat it? Are you going to put another one for contrast? Are you going to play it simultaneously with another one? How is it going to contribute to the total? Those are the decisions a composer has to take. A note, a chord, a loop, a sting... they are just bricks. A whole section, a whole intro, a whole coda, are way bigger bricks but if you are searching for a specific one with the intention of putting it next to other to get a "higher level" construction, I'd definitely say that that's composing.
Click to expand...
No, at the most that is arranging. Unless you write the loops yourself.
 
gamma-ut said:
Is Terry Riley not considered the composer of In C?

It's a very blurry line though clearly there is distinction between "make me something that sounds a bit minimal in the key of C" and the instructions that Riley provided (and you do have the issue today that this kind of AI software probably can't deal properly with Riley's prompts and instructions).
Click to expand...
The actual part in that is the initial idea. Something that no one has done before.
The same thing apply to the Duchamp fountain. He did not build the toilet himself. It was the idea that made it art. Christo Vladimirov Javacheff didn't actually wrap buildings, someone else does.

So once it is done you cannot write another piece of only silence (Cage), because someone has done it, broke the mold, raised interesting questions. You can't put again a toilet in a museum because the art part was the idea.

That is why just giving instructions, without an actual original idea, is not art. It is so obvious.
 
Lazeez said:
When AI becomes a collaborator that is part of the creative process as opposed to the only thing in the creative process (as it is today), things becomes much more difficult to categorize.
Click to expand...
Then if it is a writing collaborator it should be credited.

I think it is also a personal factor too.
Some people don't care and will not care. Listeners and "creators", "generators", "button pushers", "prompters", "pushers and waitandlisteners", composers.

I despise using ready made loops and phrases, I despise using samples from records I think it is highly immoral and lazy, does anyone care? Does everyone do it?
The fragile line is going to be pushed and pushed until it will be accepted to some degree or completely.

As a listener I personally would like for sure to know if AI is used in any writing capacity.


At the moment it is not a tool. We are the tools.
 
Onemandown said:
I think the argument you're referring to was more or less focused on the fact that it the current state of AI needs someone with adequate knowledge and connection to music to be able to produce a quality work.
Click to expand...
Not really. Me and my 7 yo nephew can obtain exactly the same quality result . No skill or knowledge or experience involved.
You need to basically know the genre you are after - that is about all the skill you need.
At the current state
 
Ooof, this sounds seriously amazing, way better than any library can pull out, will read the whole thread as I have ton of questions

edit: OK tried UDIO for a while and every generation is already a nice piece of music - sounding REAL. I am afraid that for stuff like library music and other "lower prestige stuff" this will replace people soon or later. We can only pray that someone will come with midi to AI way of software which will perform our composition in a way they will sound realistic as thee generations.
 
Last edited:
Daryl said:
No, at the most that is arranging. Unless you write the loops yourself.
Click to expand...
So that's musique concrète out of the window then.

First Terry Riley and various other minimalists. Now it's another bunch of composers biting the dust. Thanks, AI.
 
AudioLoco said:
Not really. Me and my 7 yo nephew can obtain exactly the same quality result . No skill or knowledge or experience involved.
You need to basically know the genre you are after - that is about all the skill you need.
At the current state
Click to expand...
I don't think you give yourself enough credit here; unless your nephew knows to ask for string ostinatos and horn marcatos?..
 
gamma-ut said:
I'm curious as to how you decide whether an idea is either actual or original.
Click to expand...
Probably one that wasn't created by a computer and/or willfully plagiarized. I guarantee Hans Zimmer was inspired by somebody when he wrote No Time For Caution, but that was still Zimmer originality (if it wasn't a ghostwriter). One of my more recent releases was noticeable inspired by Hans Zimmer, and yet I think we'd all agree I can claim that to be my original art. The cover art, on the other hand, I cannot claim, even though I fine-tuned the AI until it generated what I wanted.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom