# Artificial intelligence in the music industry



## leo007 (Dec 4, 2022)

Keepforest made follow post


> Dear Audience,
> 
> We are writing to you today with a very important message. As you may know, artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing and soon it will impact nearly every industry, including the world of music.
> 
> ...


Do you think artificial intelligence will replace the traditional music-making industry at some point?


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## signalpath (Dec 4, 2022)

leo007 said:


> Do you think artificial intelligence will replace the traditional music-making industry at some point?


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## Pop Corn (Dec 4, 2022)

There's an AI generated djent Youtube channel and some of it is really convincing. It helps that djent is pretty artificial sounding anyway being grid locked for the most part and percussive/rhythm heavy. It's not putting musicians out of business, but it's also only a small niche, so it's hard to gauge. 

I get 90% depressed when I think about the future, in general, but particularly AI stuff. About 10% optimistic. But mostly deflation. I'm a luddite though and still wishing social media would go away (yes I see the irony posting here :D)

Interesting post, looking forward to seeing the replies


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## river angler (Dec 4, 2022)

leo007 said:


> Keepforest made follow post
> 
> Do you think artificial intelligence will replace the traditional music-making industry at some point?


As in all areas of life man seems hell bent on making his own creative brain redundant with A. I.

The huge advance in A .I. compositional technology has already provided the means for many "programmers" (ie. non musicians) to "make" music for pleasure and professionally
through the ever-growing phrase/midi chord/melody making software like the Midi Chord Pack (as a simple example).

I have no doubt that in the not too distant future a lot of film scores will be "programmed" rather than bespokely composed by a human. However, as sad as that sounds, like the frog that leaps half the distance with every bound hoping to cross the stream he will never quite reach the other side to conquer all musical creativity: that side being man's natural, infinitely unpredictable, creative mind.

Not only will there always be people who are dedicated to exploring their own intrinsic creative potential rather than pressing buttons but also by the very way that AI works it will never take over completely...

As far as the "music-making industry" is concerned I can see a lot of the so called "commercial" music fodder being "conjured" by AI as most of it is "music written by numbers" anyway! I'm referring to the generic action film or the heartbreak B movie types! Trailer music is certainly one genre that's moving fast into this arena. However for the more edifying, discerning and dare I say it! artistically intelligent/sensitive/profound creative projects the very nature of those projects need human composition because making music that truly moves, inspires, gives hope, unites, strengthens and ultimately brings joy to people can only come from a human beings mind not a machine. Also a discerning film director wants to interact with a composer not a programmer!

Fundamentally AI only becomes more sophisticated by the amount of data you throw at it and it is often overlooked that this data is always second hand i.e. it relies on musical algorithms that came originally from all the great and not so great composers in musical history! Hence it can never come up with anything humanistically unique. To underline this you only have to ask yourself: could a computer have conjured up any of the music Ennio Morricone composed if he had never existed?... No! of course not! because in the end all musical idiom comes from human imagination. A computer simply replicates it.


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## Daniel James (Dec 4, 2022)

It will devastate the production music market, which is where lots of people learn to cut their teeth. TV shows and commercials will more than likely just use an AI generator to create the more generic forms of media music. Formulaic music like trailer music will probably get replaced too except for the odd 'out of the box' creatives who will do something unique for specific trailers.

I think the bespoke market will lose a few gigs here and there but will mostly remain, as its more about brand name recognition and usually a elite level of quality. We have seen plenty of bespoke productions hire a composer just for the name, knowing full well the named artist had minimal involvement...yet people still praise those soundtracks as masterworks. I don't think that will ever change, humans have a fascination for celebrities for some reason, so we will maintain industry idols, and they will be the only ones we want 'human' music from.

Thats my prediction at least. We will have like 5-10 years of AI experiments, then AI assistants, then AI Production music, then AI make your own music from a prompt.

Music will cease to have much value for most people. As when people think 'Yeah, I could do that' they disregard your work as something anyone can do. No one will pay for that anymore.

And you also have to keep in mind that most people are not particularly creative, their promts and AI tracks will 99% of the time be stuff we have already heard. So as a creative your job doesn't change, give people what they don't know they want. Like Ford said "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Our job is to create; to think that which has not yet been thought.

If you are in music for the money you are fucked (lol in general). If you are in it for the creative challenge its about to turn to 'Hurt Me More!' difficulty, which for some is exciting. And once the dust settles you will have a new musical landscape where the quality rises to the top and the generic slip into the white noise.

AI isn't going to sneak up on us, we can see it coming. So we should all be dedicating time to thinking about how we can be different, not how we can learn to do 'The Hollywood Sound' 'The Trailer Sound' .....because the second you can file it away in a genre....an AI knows enough to emulate.

-DJ


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## PebbleStream (Dec 4, 2022)

leo007 said:


> Keepforest made follow post
> 
> Do you think artificial intelligence will replace the traditional music-making industry at some point?


AI will start making all the shitty music forcing us to sit down and study and become accomplished musicians. Ingenious...


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## Pop Corn (Dec 4, 2022)

I'm guessing those that do trailer and production music, if they get replaced by AI, will start going for the bespoke roles too, making an already saturated market become unbearably and unsustainably saturated. 

I do wonder though if we humans work similarly to AI, in that we're just giant databases of musical snippets and sounds subconsciously gathered over the course of a lifetime. We just connect them differently to the ways AI could. Creativity is mysterious.

I'd also like to see if psychedelics affect music over the next couple of decades, sort of like the 60s/70s 2.0, as I can see a bit of a comeback with those in the next few years as studies/trials continue. AI can't (or shouldn't be able to) compete with that, creatively speaking.

The hippie in me is spilling out... Put it back, put it back!


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## river angler (Dec 4, 2022)

Daniel James said:


> It will devastate the production music market, which is where lots of people learn to cut their teeth. TV shows and commercials will more than likely just use an AI generator to create the more generic forms of media music. Formulaic music like trailer music will probably get replaced too except for the odd 'out of the box' creatives who will do something unique for specific trailers.
> 
> I think the bespoke market will lose a few gigs here and there but will mostly remain, as its more about brand name recognition and usually a elite level of quality. We have seen plenty of bespoke productions hire a composer just for the name, knowing full well the named artist had minimal involvement...yet people still praise those soundtracks as masterworks. I don't think that will ever change, humans have a fascination for celebrities for some reason, so we will maintain industry idols, and they will be the only ones we want 'human' music from.
> 
> ...


Thanks so much for your post! Fantastically put! I totally concur! As a fellow pro this puts a massive smile on my face!

You have pointed things out in a much more pragmatic way than I who can not help responding to this subject from an artistic corner!

I don't exactly embrace the AI onslaught but I certainly do see it inadvertently opening doors for the more discerning and adventurous composer which is definitely a good thing as it can only push us to become even more creative in our musical endeavours!


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## patrick76 (Dec 4, 2022)

leo007 said:


> Keepforest made follow post
> 
> Do you think artificial intelligence will replace the traditional music-making industry at some point?


I agree that it will replace a lot of low-level production music, or will assist the composer utilizing the AI a great deal. I imagine we’ll have the music equivalent of Jasper AI pretty soon.


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## jcrosby (Dec 4, 2022)

leo007 said:


> Keepforest made follow post
> 
> Do you think artificial intelligence will replace the traditional music-making industry at some point?


FYI this was KF using an AI chat to troll its followers, they said multiple times in the comments that the AI chat was generating the replies. Mark Petrie caught it quickly (no surprise there...)


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## zigzag (Dec 4, 2022)

AI will probably get you to somewhere around 50-80%. Sometimes less, sometimes more. But only an experienced composer will be then able to complete it, make it "100%".

For some things that 50-80% will be good enough, and that market will be taken over by inexperienced people using AI tools. 

But for consistent, high quality music humans are not going anywhere. Although, AI will likely speed up the process considerably, by helping to flesh out ideas more quickly and rapidly iterate and try many things at lower cost. So, less people will be needed to produce same amount of music. But since the bar will be lowered, even more original music will be produced than before. 

Still, AI tools likely won't be a good fit for some styles of a composing process. I think the more experienced is the composer, less helpful AI will be.

All things considered, each industry will probably be affected a bit differently.


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## leo007 (Dec 4, 2022)

Here is an interesting example from a different yet creative area like artwork.
An artificial intelligence algorithm can generate unique art compositions from text descriptions.

dedicated online service








Text To Image - AI Image Generator


This is an AI Image Generator. It creates an image from scratch from a text description. Yes, this is the one you've been waiting for. Text-to-image uses AI to understand your words and convert them to a unique image each time. Like magic. This can be used to generate AI art, or for general...




deepai.org





Using some grotesque text to describe "elephant playing guitar,"

here some results:

























Most of us would probably agree that some of those generated artworks look impressive and creative.
If we draw a correlation between visual art and music, such technology might be capable of generating well build compositions without human intervention at some point In the future.


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## MaxOctane (Dec 4, 2022)

You should all remember this last month. November 2022 is when "Everything Changed" in the world of AI-generated artwork, with a company called Midjourney making a huge leap forward. Go to this link, and *every single image* there was created automatically by computer with just a short text prompt. 
https://www.midjourney.com/app/feed/all/





















Separately, a new AI-chat system called ChatGPT was just released, and it has people freaked out with the depth of its conversations and "understanding."

Anyone who thinks music is safe from this is kidding themselves. Any music that follows a formula or pattern _will _get an AI treatment, and it's probably not too far away. This AI generation works precisely by taking in lots of examples (hundreds of millions of images, e.g.), finding the hidden patterns and structures and then essentially remixing them to create something new. Anything that follows a pattern or structure is vulnerable.


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## Pop Corn (Dec 4, 2022)

Looking forward to when this elephant finally drops an album.. The cover art is great 😂


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 4, 2022)

There's been several threads on this already. But it's a topic worthy of more than one discussion.

I go back and forth on this. Sometimes I feel very worried and depressed. 

But at the moment I'm less worried. If you talk to people who work on AI, you'll discover there are many limitations. The vast majority of AI requires a human trainer/assistant. Most of it is only capable of performing one task at a time.

I know the Midjourney / Stable Fusion stuff is pretty mind blowing. But most of the music AI stuff is not. The most impressive thing I've heard so far is this: https://mubert.com/
But they don't reveal any detail on how they get their results.

The skills involved with composing, performing, producing, mixing and mastering are quite complex. Much more complex than driving a car. Yet, we were supposed to have self-driving cars by now. But if you talk to experts, we are now 20 to 30 years from self-driving cars. What's the hold up? The AI isn't there yet. 

So, I'm going to move forward and improve my skills. I'm not gonna freak out about until there's truly something to freak out about.


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## José Herring (Dec 4, 2022)

leo007 said:


> Keepforest made follow post
> 
> Do you think artificial intelligence will replace the traditional music-making industry at some point?


Without a doubt it will replace some aspects of the music industry. Namely the very commercial aspects. With the state of trailers being what it is today, it will no doubt replace a good portion of trailer and library music. 

But, people still write better music than machines. AI music has been around since the 1970's and it hasn't gotten much better.  It's just more accessible and has finally made it out of the university. And with the internet it's got a lot of data it can pull from, like millions and millions of tracks. But, the music generally is fairly subpar. Seriously if it's pulling information and meta data from Soundcloud, I feel sorry for it. It can't differentiate good music from bad music. Garbage in garbage out is still the over ridding mantra of computers.


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## zigzag (Dec 5, 2022)

MaxOctane said:


> You should all remember this last month. November 2022 is when "Everything Changed" in the world of AI-generated artwork, with a company called Midjourney making a huge leap forward. Go to this link, and *every single image* there was created automatically by computer with just a short text prompt.
> https://www.midjourney.com/app/feed/all/
> 
> 
> ...


One unresolved question is, are these AI models legally allowed to train on copyrighted works? Midjourney's training set currently includes copyrighted artists' works. While it's not art, Github's Copilot is already facing a lawsuit.

Another question is, can you own copyright when you make something using an AI?


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Dec 5, 2022)

One thing A.I. cannot replace: the joy one gets when actually doing the (art) work. I continue to find more and more pleasure in the work than in the result. As for money, we’re all mostly going to end up collecting a universal guaranteed minimum income, as the software takes over most tasks.


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## Sophus (Dec 5, 2022)

river angler said:


> I have no doubt that in the not too distant future a lot of film scores will be "programmed" rather than bespokely composed by a human.


This is called "prompt engineering". There will probably future job fields explicitly asking for prompt engineers who craft prompts that will generate the wanted results.


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## Sophus (Dec 5, 2022)

I personally think that AI sample generation could be available in the near future. Do you want a new string library which sounds like the recording you specified? Click this button and generate a complete set of samples including different articulations. Then just load them into your favourite sampler.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 5, 2022)

José Herring said:


> Without a doubt it will replace some aspects of the music industry. Namely the very commercial aspects. With the state of trailers being what it is today, it will no doubt replace a good portion of trailer and library music.
> 
> But, people still write better music than machines. AI music has been around since the 1970's and it hasn't gotten much better. It's just more accessible and has finally made it out of the university. And with the internet it's got a lot of data it can pull from, like millions and millions of tracks. But, the music generally is fairly subpar. Seriously if it's pulling information and meta data from Soundcloud, I feel sorry for it. It can't differentiate good music from bad music. Garbage in garbage out is still the over ridding mantra of computers.


It could also use data on popularity to try to determine what most people (or even sufficiently large subgroups) either think is better or (at least, in the absence of explicit ratings) listen to more. And (on a generally smaller scale) they can get human feedback on results and use that to update the neural network (for example, there's an online drum groove generator that does that and iirc lets you download the midi).


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## gsilbers (Dec 5, 2022)

ive been following this a bit and i noticed that the text prompt music thing sucks. What i did notice is a way to have AI "listen" to a few seconds of music and it will generate a new orignal track similar to the inputed one. Same thing with VO. 
So that might still give us some protection because we would still own the masters. someone is using our masters to generate something new. BAscially like using a snippet of an old jazz vocal sample used inside a new Rap song. 
Hopefully someone with enough clout in the music industry could one day sue google/etc and force them to pay royalties on tracks made with AI. And using something like crypto to track it would have been nice.


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## TWY (Dec 5, 2022)

I do see a pattern here.

When music could only have been made with million dollar studios, the average person complained that they couldn't get into the industry easily enough.

Then, when DAWs came, elites complained that now anybody could make music, and therefore the overall quality of music is in "decline".

Now comes AI. Now, the "average person" that hated the "million-dollar gatekeeping", is ALSO saying that "AI music would totally totally suck".

Now, I'm all for the democratization of music-making. I believe anyone should be able to access cheap and efficient tools to make music. But it's funny how now THESE "average" folk, who couldn't access music making during the milion-dollar studio eras, are now complaining about AI, exactly like the predecessors that they were against.

I'm neither pro or con. I still think AI-generated music has a loooooooong way to go. But I'd probably not jump to conclusions and just wait and see how things turn out.


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## Paul Grymaud (Dec 5, 2022)

If artificial intelligence could replace natural unintelligence, then why not...
Music industry and others


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## Voider (Dec 5, 2022)

TWY said:


> Now comes AI. Now, the "average person" that hated the "million-dollar gatekeeping", is ALSO saying that "AI music would totally totally suck".


There's a distinct difference between talented people who invested a lifetime into their skills being artifically held back by gatekeepers, and completely untrained people who click together music and offer their services.

I'm not judging them though. This has been happening with many other fields, just look at people building websites for others with website builders like Squarspace or individuals building shops via dropshipping while others previously spent their lives with high risks, getting their infrastructure and company up.

That's how things evolve and the world we know will always not be the same 20 years later. We also were born into things that were "_just the way they are_" (for us) while previous generations have seen their reality being disrupted by technological advancement.

But I'm drifting off, what I originally wanted to say is that skilled people complaining about being held back artifically in their careers is the same back then as now: They're simply concerned by getting more and more "unfair" hurdles thrown into their way, which AI-competition might be one of.

Imagine making a 100m sprint against a boston dynamics roboter who can sprint those 100m in 5 seconds, after you've spent your whole life becoming an athlete / runner.

Personally I am not that much concerned about AI (yet) as I stated already in this post.

It will impact musicans on the long run, it could make life harder especially for the low- and mid range, and I can understand that some people feel concerned about that. I though don't see this conflicting with the previous criticism about _million-dollar gatekeeping_.

But maybe the composers who don't want to do anything else than library music and low budget projects will just use AI as an tool and everything will stay the way it is. They might have a bit more competition, but in the end_ skill_ will lead to better outcomes and musical decisions even with AI, so they should stand a fair chance against completely unmusical people trying to utilize AI to make a business out of it. It could even turn out that it will make their life easier, only time will tell.


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## TWY (Dec 5, 2022)

Voider said:


> There's a distinct difference between talented people who invested a lifetime into their skills being artifically held back by gatekeepers, and completely talent-free people who click together music and offer their services.
> 
> I'm not judging them though. This has been happening with many other fields, just look at people building websites for others with website builders like Squarspace or individuals building shops via dropshipping while others previously spent their lives with high risks, getting their infrastructure and company up.
> 
> ...


It's not that I do not appreciate folks who spend a lifetime investing in their skills. 

I'm one of those folks. 

I just find it funny that in a cycle of life, the common man, once getting enough traction, becomes the gatekeeper that he always railed against, and seems to be in eternal denial about it. It's like the underdog CLEARLY becomes the overlord, but still insists he needs more from society, because he's "still" an "underdog". It's quite the joke, really.


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## AudioLoco (Dec 5, 2022)

Most modern commercial music, be it Pop, your generic production music or Trailer music is just repeating formulaic simple, and I would say "dumb" (not saying "good" or "bad" as it may be subjective).
You don't need a great brain effort to replicate it. There are clear patterns to follow.
Not much "intelligence" needed. 

I think as "dumb" as most current (successful) film producers. Actually to make as an example your typical super hero movie you could easily replace everyone involved, starting from the writers with an advanced 10 (5??!) years from now AI. Everything is so generic and derivative that interesting humans are not needed in the first place. It says a lot about modern culture I think.

As for actual art which involves actual revolutionary innovation that has a point break with the previous ages like all good and meaningful, and timeless art, I don't see it going anywhere without humans involved.

Those amazing Midjourney "paintings" we see around, and boy, I'm truly impressed too by the results are based on scanning the past of human creation and copying in a "granular" way. 
I tried typing silly prompts involving my own band and clearly there is some collage work going on there as some shapes were clearly taken (not "inspired by") from pictures that are available online.
Also without a human to come up with an interesting prompt and a human to pick the favorite result etc there would be less interesting stuff coming out. Still amazing but it's not "intelligence" - yet (!).

When an AI will be able to write something as meaningful as Elenor Rigby and a Day in the Life (put any of your favorite songs in the pile) I will change my mind. 
It will certainly replace a lot of production, commercial and utilitarian music, so many professional musicians will be f..ed, and pretty soon - but actually touching souls and making us cry? 

I at least urge us musicians NOT to be part of it, not to support companies creating AI music tools and at least not help out with this sad developments. 

The only winners will be the owners of the most successful AI codes and companies wanting to spend less and less money on human work. The BIGGEST loser? Music.


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## AudioLoco (Dec 5, 2022)

TWY said:


> Now, I'm all for the democratization of music-making.


I don't get this term.
Why should non musicians be entitled to "make" music?

("Musician": person dedicating a life to the craft of music making)

We need experts in human society.
That is how we evolved from being just a part of nature on Earth to being the all conquering space traveling, disease defeating apes we are now.
I know since around 2016 everyone is "tired of experts" and every person's opinion, whatever they do in life, appears to have the same value as experts on specific matters.
This "democratization" honestly didn't bring anything good to the world. More hatred, more ignorance, more conflicts, more death, less truth.

(Sorry about the apocalyptic tone  )


PS : Having more affordable TOOLS such as a computer and a DAW as opposed to a million dollar studio is great indeed... but if the supposed tool is doing the actual creation work it's not a tool anymore I believe.


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## Soundbed (Dec 5, 2022)

tl;dr

What can you compose/produce that an AI cannot?

*rewind*



Daniel James said:


> 'The Hollywood Sound' 'The Trailer Sound' .....because the second you can file it away in a genre....an AI knows enough to emulate.





MaxOctane said:


> This AI generation works precisely by taking in lots of examples (hundreds of millions of images, e.g.), finding the hidden patterns and structures and then essentially remixing them to create something new. Anything that follows a pattern or structure is vulnerable.


Agreed. I picked those two quotes to sum up:

Machine learning, which is a subset of AI, uses a large set of data to recognize patterns and then generate similar patterns.

We do a similar thing, as humans, when we study a particular composition style or technique or are given "temp tracks" or musical references to emulate.

Most human "creativity" comes from blending or combining previously "unexpected" sets of patterns. Or introducing one set of patterns from a previously unrelated discipline into a different, "expected" pattern set.

^^^ Every hybrid or innovative development in music history and ethnomusicology can probably be viewed in this way, with this _lens_ on what it means to be creative.



Sophus said:


> This is called "prompt engineering". There will probably future job fields explicitly asking for prompt engineers who craft prompts that will generate the wanted results.


Exactly right. And the "creative" aspect mentioned above becomes part of that prompt engineering. You're asking the AI to quickly combine one set of patterns, such as the patterns that form "elephant" with another set of unexpected patterns; like "playing a guitar".

So, even if you devote a lifetime of study to Bach and djent, if there is a suitable repository of data for both "Bach" and for "djent" then *a prompt engineer (even a layperson) will eventually be able to ask an AI to create a "djent in the style of Bach" piece of music*. (Maybe even today that's possible; I haven't investigated all the available composer tools and assistants recently. But it's only one example of how recognizable patterns can be combined "creatively" and also quickly.)

Where I'm coming from: I work somewhat directly with machine learning in a totally different capacity (not "creative") in one aspect of my day job. I schedule machine training based on a relatively large data set, and separately I work with engineers to predict anomalies in a different data set, so we know when issues may be happening — in a way that static threshold models predict poorly. I've also beta-tested AI composer assistants like AIVA, because I wanted some hands-on experience. And, I've spent a fair amount of time on Midjourney, learning how to get the prompts to do what I want, or at least generate some happy accidents.



Tim_Wells said:


> The skills involved with composing, performing, producing, mixing and mastering are quite complex. Much more complex than driving a car. Yet, we were supposed to have self-driving cars by now. But if you talk to experts, we are now 20 to 30 years from self-driving cars. What's the hold up? The AI isn't there yet.


First off, there are several ways to train cars to drive autonomously. The model chosen by Waymo for instance learns a particular set of roads in a particular city very well, and then drives them without any driver, today. It's here, it's happening, it's now. This video was posted ~a year ago:



That technique means you need to learn a new city slowly and carefully, with lots of testing in that city and learning issues on those roads little by little. Maybe like an AI learning how to write a sonata, for a piano, during a 200 year historical period.

In contrast, the route chosen by Tesla attempts to learn how humans "see" things on roads and maneuver amongst them, but tries to learn any road, anywhere, any time. It takes a lot longer to safely keep people from dying in vehicle accidents and faces lots of legal challenges due to public safety concerns. But, it will eventually arrive, especially when the Tesla semi project starts racking up millions more miles on highways (which are easier to navigate than city streets for AI).

My point here is that no one will die from a music accident. And learning to drive anywhere, at any time, on any road *might* be considered comparable to learning how to compose, if looked at objectively, and if the compositions are about getting from silence to a usable piece of, say, production music.

In fact, I'd wager "dramedy for a reality TV show" might be fairly easy for AI to generate, and you could potentially have it auto-align music gestures and tempo changes to the video edit, if it had that information available (the video editor's timeline) as well!

So, while driverless vehicles are already on the street, they aren't everywhere yet due to public safety concerns. AI music doesn't have the same constraints as AI driving, and will "arrive" to the general public sooner, I predict.

~

All this is to say ... what can you compose/produce that an AI cannot? AND, AI will not be able to compose or produce, in 5, 10, or 20 years?

OR, will you find enjoyment using AI composing tools?

There's no wrong answer.

As a final thought on the ethics, check out this:









Preventing an AI-related catastrophe - Problem profile


Why do we think that reducing risks from AI is one of the most pressing issues of our time? There are technical safety issues that we believe could, in the worst case, lead to an existential threat to humanity.




80000hours.org


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## gamma-ut (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> OR, will you find enjoyment using AI composing tools?


I think one problem, given the way technological development tends to be funded, is that you might not get the choice. The emphasis in this current generation of tools across a number of industries is to replace the person not making life easier for the person, with results that are inevitably not-quite-there but just about good enough to support low-cost projects.

A tool to help develop variations from a motif/melody or support different counterpoint, voice-leading and orchestration options (eg "I want this combination based on this melody with a da-da-dah rhythm for eight bars") might be helpful – but there's no guarantee that the people involved in the development of the AI software who have the VC money will do it.

Musicians may have to take a bit more control over the process and find ways to apply the core technologies before the process takes control over them.

On the plus side, auto-composer tools like auto-painting tools may help in that they focus people's attention on why they want to create and how they do it and not fall into the trap of "I want to be a composer/novelist/artists so I can tell people I'm a composer/novelist/artist".


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> First off, there are several ways to train cars to drive autonomously. The model chosen by Waymo for instance learns a particular set of roads in a particular city very well, and then drives them without any driver, today. It's here, it's happening, it's now. This video was posted ~a year ago:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Fair points. But I suspect that people think A.I. is a lot more capable and competent than it actually is. It great at recognizing patterns, but terrible at making qualitative judgements. Both are required to make good music. Now you might say if it analyzes enough patterns, it eventually will be able to improve quality. That may be so, but it's a complex process.

Regarding self-driving cars, there's been a lot of Silcon Valley/Venture Capitalist hype. 









Computer Driven Autos Still Years Away Despite Massive Investment


There’s no realistic chance that full-on self-driving will be available before 2030, and then only in a tiny number of top-of-the-range sedans and SUVs, according to consultancy Accenture.




www.forbes.com




"Despite the hype that liberation day will dawn soon and cars will drive themselves, there’s no realistic chance that full-on self-driving will be available before 2030, and then only in a tiny number of top-of-the-range sedans and SUVs, according to consultancy Accenture"









Tech’s pedestrian problem






enewspaper.latimes.com




.... the very fact that Ng is suggesting such a thing is a sign that today’s technology simply can’t deliver self-driving cars as originally envisioned. “The AI we would really need hasn’t yet arrived,” said Gary Marcus, a New York University professor of psychology who researches both human and artificial intelligence."









Even After $100 Billion, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere


They were supposed to be the future. But prominent detractors—including Anthony Levandowski, who pioneered the industry—are getting louder as the losses get bigger.




www.bloomberg.com





Here's an interesting (albeit, a bit dry) video:


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## Soundbed (Dec 5, 2022)

gamma-ut said:


> I think one problem, given the way technological development tends to be funded, is that you might not get the choice. The emphasis in this current generation of tools across a number of industries is to replace the person not making life easier for the person, with results that are inevitably not-quite-there but just about good enough to support low-cost projects.
> 
> A tool to help develop variations from a motif/melody or support different counterpoint, voice-leading and orchestration options (eg "I want this combination based on this melody with a da-da-dah rhythm for eight bars") might be helpful – but there's no guarantee that the people involved in the development of the AI software who have the VC money will do it.
> 
> ...


Yes, I think you're right. To clarify my question, we can assume a huge dumpload of AI based music will be generated. The people reading this thread will likely still want to make music. So, considering there's an environment already filled with AI music generated by a large-ish company for use in commercial ventures, what will those of us on VI-C find enjoyment doing? Writing, or trying to write "better than AI" and somewhat "future-proofing" our music, or, writing in conjunction with some AI tools, but not relying on them fully, and still finding some sort of enjoyment from that process. That might be a more fully formed version of my thought experiment. 

There may be more options. Are there?


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## gamma-ut (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> There may be more options. Are there?


Possibly game music (though I don't do any of this so may be completely off-target). In that environment, the developer will want cut-scene music that's fully composed and will probably come from people, but for in-game background wants stuff that evolves and adapts so it's not just playing the same loops each time. 

It possibly falls into the same subset as prompt-engineering, but I can imagine that being an area of expertise people can exploit because it will need some careful scripting or something like that to create enough variation for extended gameplay without the procedural/AI engine suddenly dropping a nursery rhyme into the middle of a grinding guitars-fueled gorefest because it ran out of other options.


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## Soundbed (Dec 5, 2022)

Tim_Wells said:


> Fair points. But I suspect that people think A.I. is a lot more capable and competent than it actually is. It great at recognizing patterns, but terrible at making qualitative judgements. Both are required to make good music. Now you might say if it analyzes enough patterns, it eventually will be able to improve quality. That may be so, but it's a complex process.
> 
> Regarding self-driving cars, there's been a lot of Silcon Valley/Venture Capitalist hype.
> 
> ...



Yes, I've read those headlines and articles when they appeared on my news feeds, and it's an important counterpoint, esp. on quality.

So, to oversimplify, maybe you're saying quality music isn't going to be written by AI any time soon, and I'm saying "usable" commercial music will be written by AI before we have self-driving cars available to the general public, and maybe we're both making accurate predictions in that sense. (?)

I'll try to sit through the Noam Chomsky video at some point, though I'm not in the mood at the moment.  It looks like he's making some important points when I skip through and read the captions. I think I understand (mostly) where you're coming from, though.


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## gamma-ut (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> There may be more options. Are there?


There is another avenue but it's not directly composition-related: that's using the same kind of technology that's used in physics-inspired neural nets (PINNs) to drive instrument libraries. These avoid the need to run full-fat simulations of big physics problems. It's possible similar techniques would bridge physical modelling and sample libraries and make it possible to have progressive controllable vibrato that doesn't sound like an LFO and also much easier transitions between shorts and longs, detaché and legato, etc.

Basically, SampleModelling and AV Infinite with added ML.


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## gamma-ut (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> So, to oversimplify, maybe you're saying quality music isn't going to be written by AI any time soon, and I'm saying "usable" commercial music will be written by AI before we have self-driving cars available to the general public, and maybe we're both making accurate predictions in that sense. (?)


You are potentially both in agreement. I'd certainly agree with the premise that AI-generated music will get used commercially, but it won't be in an area where people are willing to pay for quality.

Similarly, automated driving will likely happen in controlled situations (it already does with trains and delivery bots) but not something that will drive you out of a city into the country and back.


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## Soundbed (Dec 5, 2022)

gamma-ut said:


> Possibly game music (though I don't do any of this so may be completely off-target). In that environment, the developer will want cut-scene music that's fully composed and will probably come from people, but for in-game background wants stuff that evolves and adapts so it's not just playing the same loops each time.
> 
> It possibly falls into the same subset as prompt-engineering, but I can imagine that being an area of expertise people can exploit because it will need some careful scripting or something like that to create enough variation for extended gameplay without the procedural/AI engine suddenly dropping a nursery rhyme into the middle of a grinding guitars-fueled gorefest because it ran out of other options.


Yes! This is a fantastic example of embracing emerging AI tools as a composer. Game music will almost certainly become a hybrid of writing the music and "programming" it to play certain things at certain times (possibly in some sort of 3D sound multitrack where you hear the music channels that correspond to where the user is "looking") ... different productions have different budgets for the team that assembles these and a composer who can offer "the whole package" will get more gigs than the composer who needs technical assistance with certain tools implementations, etc.

EDIT - of course what I described above already happens... what I mean is that it will continue to evolve with more AI/ML (machine learning) toolsets.


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## MaxOctane (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> So, to oversimplify, maybe you're saying quality music isn't going to be written by AI any time soon, and I'm saying "usable" commercial music will be written by AI before we have self-driving cars available to the general public, and maybe we're both making accurate predictions in that sense. (?)


I agree with this. I think people need to get it out of their heads that anyone is really talking about pushing a button and out comes Rachmaninoff's unwritten Piano Concerto, or Mozart's other Requiem. The question at the moment isn't whether the computer will generate Great Music. Maybe someday this will be a realistic question, but in the near term it'll instead look more like "Generate 4-minute lo-fi trap, warbly piano, sparse male vocals"... and you'll get something totally plausible that sounds like you clicked one of playlists on Apple Music's frontpage. Note that *even today*, the majority of tracks in these Apple Music playlists sound totally generic.


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> Yes, I've read those headlines and articles when they appeared on my news feeds, and it's an important counterpoint, esp. on quality.
> 
> So, to oversimplify, maybe you're saying quality music isn't going to be written by AI any time soon, and I'm saying "usable" commercial music will be written by AI before we have self-driving cars available to the general public, and maybe we're both making accurate predictions in that sense. (?)
> 
> I'll try to sit through the Noam Chomsky video at some point, though I'm not in the mood at the moment.  It looks like he's making some important points when I skip through and read the captions. I think I understand (mostly) where you're coming from, though.


Yeah... I think we're in general agreement.

Yeah,  the Norm stuff is very dry, so you may not want to bother. He mostly talks about A.I. & linguistics, which is his specialty. It is interesting, if you're into that sort of thing. 

I was actually more interested in the other dude, Gary Marcus. He's the one who says self-driving cars are 20 to 30 years away.


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## Pop Corn (Dec 5, 2022)

gamma-ut said:


> suddenly dropping a nursery rhyme into the middle of a grinding guitars-fueled gorefest because it ran out of other options.


You been listening to my music? I feel attacked 😂😂😂 I've done things like this😂


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## gamma-ut (Dec 5, 2022)

Tim_Wells said:


> I was actually more interested in the other dude, Gary Marcus. He's the one who says self-driving cars are 20 to 30 years away.


Marcus has a habit of being right for the wrong reasons. He's been quite assiduous in going after the Facebook/Google mafia in AI and does bring up some good points but his debating style is often quite disingenuous.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 5, 2022)

One issue with fully AI generated music in commercial works: US copyright law is (so far) deeming AI generated works non-copyrightable unless there is substantial human creative involvement beyond simply selecting a specific AI generated work for publication. AI generated loops could be combined and the combination copyrighted, but the constituent AI generated parts would be non-copyrightable unless substantially altered by a human... adding FX and mixing/mastering may be enough for the actual audio of the loops, but wouldn't render the preexisting melody or other "musical" aspects of the loop (pre-FX) copyrightable.

So commercial entities that want to maintain copyright will probably have to keep employing composers/producers to substantially tweak the melody and recombine the loops. (Of course another issue is trying to figure out whether something was AI generated or not---presumably they would be legally obligated to disclose that in court, but would they be forced to "prove" it? Could they get away with falsely claiming it was all generated by humans? Worst case scenario they could claim it was all done by their non-musical employees... "the CEO wrote it all themself, because they're obviously a genius...".)


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## Hadrondrift (Dec 5, 2022)

AudioLoco said:


> The only winners will be the owners of the most successful AI codes


I would say the winners would be the producers and owners of data. AI code and algorithms are often public knowledge and worthless without sufficient data anyway. Stable diffusion (text2img-Generator) is open source, for instance. These AIs don't generate their results out of thin air. Without being trained with incredibly large amounts of data, they can't deliver any meaningful results.

In case of visual art generation, this data is essentially obtained by crawling the Internet and extracting and encoding picture/caption relationships. Only large companies have the bandwidth, storage capacity and computing power to scan, analyze and transform billions of images. So I think a market could emerge, or at least this is where the larger companies see a market opportunity: selling these data sets, i.e. states and snapshots/checkpoints of neural networks. In the future, one could imagine customized snapshots of neural networks that have been pre-trained with certain data by companies and can then be purchased to configure one's own image generating framework.

What conventional market is being threatened here? At most that of website backgrounds, generic stock art, marketing, ... Perhaps a new AI art market can emerge, next to the human art market, because some AI results are indeed interesting and fascinating, but not replacing. As long as an artist has something like a trademark, a certain very personal style, as long as he also presents himself as a person who lives a life, I don't see any "danger" for human art at all.

I see the situation even more relaxed in the field of music. All the AI-generated music I've heard so far has been horrible. And if something was amazing, it turned out that the AI results were edited by humans afterwards.

I'm not one of those who say it's only a matter of time before AI catches up with us. I am of the opinion that when an AI generates an image with the help of current algorithms and data sets, it does something qualitatively different than a human being who is creatively active. Therefore, AI may be able to generate interesting things, but it cannot break boundaries, it cannot explore anything new, it is stuck in the space given to it by data. Data that was created by humans, by the way.


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 5, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> One issue with fully AI generated music in commercial works: US copyright law is (so far) deeming AI generated works non-copyrightable unless there is substantial human creative involvement beyond simply selecting a specific AI generated work for publication. AI generated loops could be combined and the combination copyrighted, but the constituent AI generated parts would be non-copyrightable unless substantially altered by a human... adding FX and mixing/mastering may be enough for the actual audio of the loops, but wouldn't render the preexisting melody or other "musical" aspects of the loop (pre-FX) copyrightable.
> 
> So commercial entities that want to maintain copyright will probably have to keep employing composers/producers to substantially tweak the melody and recombine the loops.


That is a good thing and I hope it stays that way! That would take away a great deal of the financial incentive to generate an autonomous AI music generator.

I wonder if that's why sites like AVIA and Soundful have you select certain parameters for a tune, like genre, tempo, key, and length? If so, that doesn't seem like it should be enough. The human should have some role in creating the melody and chords. But I could see how determining that might get tricky.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 5, 2022)

Tim_Wells said:


> That is a good thing and I hope it stays that way! That would take away a great deal of the financial incentive to generate an autonomous AI music generator.
> 
> I wonder if that's why sites like AVIA and Soundful have you select certain parameters for a tune, like genre, tempo, key, and length? If so, that doesn't seem like it should be enough. The human should have some role in creating the melody and chords. But I could see how determining that might get tricky.


Soundful also lets you download midi and stems ("stem pack"). Actually glancing at it again for the first time in a while I see they've started offering 1 midi+stems download / month for the Free option---I should check that out....


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 5, 2022)

Soundful has also introduced more instrument-specific AI categories---for example drill drums, drill tops, EDM tops, soft piano, strings, and (coming soon) acoustic guitar. Even without stems that could be a useful substitute for loops (to chop and/or layer, or transfer dynamics to other audio, etc.) (free option now includes 10 non-stem downloads / month).


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## Soundbed (Dec 5, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> One issue with fully AI generated music in commercial works: US copyright law is (so far) deeming AI generated works non-copyrightable unless there is substantial human creative involvement beyond simply selecting a specific AI generated work for publication.


Hmm... you mention a couple of different types of copyright.

Fwiw, the website for AIVA says:

"Like a track you just created with AIVA? Need to use it for your own commercial activity? No problem. By subscribing to our Pro Plan, you own the full copyright of any composition created with AIVA, forever."






AIVA - The AI composing emotional soundtrack music


AIVA, the Artificial Intelligence music composer that creates original & personalized music for your projects.




www.aiva.ai


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## chocobitz825 (Dec 5, 2022)

intelligence of any kind should be celebrated these days...


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## NekujaK (Dec 5, 2022)

AI doesn't exist in a vaccuum - it's part of a world where technology, society, politics, morality, aestetic tastes, etc. are constantly in flux. Steve Jobs famously said (I'm paraphrasing): "Don't ask customers what they want, because by the time you build it, they'll want something else."

AI will no doubt encroach on certain segments of the commercial music market, but I'm willing to bet that just when AI starts getting good at making say, trailer music, the trailer market will have moved on and developed an appetite for something new and different. And until AI can catch up, it will be humans who supply it.

And so on... and so on... and so on...

The thing is, once AI becomes capable of creating "xyz-thing", the world will quickly become saturated with "xyz-things", since everyone can now make them quickly and easily. The general public has an incredibly short attention span, and will soon tire of "xyz-things", leaving the AI out of a job.

As an example, imagine 10 years ago if you trained an AI to create killer dubstep music. This remarkable dubstep AI would've ruled the pop music world.... that is, until everyone got sick of hearing wub-wub basses, and *poof* suddenly no one wants to hear dubstep anymore, and the marvelous dubstep expert AI, with all its deep training, is suddenly obsolete.


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 5, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Soundful also lets you download midi and stems ("stem pack"). Actually glancing at it again for the first time in a while I see they've started offering 1 midi+stems download / month for the Free option---I should check that out....


That's kind of where I hope AI generated music goes. More of an assistant to composers.


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## river angler (Dec 5, 2022)

Sophus said:


> I personally think that AI sample generation could be available in the near future. Do you want a new string library which sounds like the recording you specified? Click this button and generate a complete set of samples including different articulations. Then just load them into your favourite sampler.


I don't have any beef with developers offering ever specific flavours of sample instrument VSTs. I'm just not a fan of ready made notational content i.e. phrases at the strike of a single key.

Aside from the fact that ready made phrases reduce the creative potential of any composition as it distracts the composer from using his/her own imagination to come up with their own original musical passages, certainly as far as mocking up scores that need to be orchestrated to manuscript are concerned phrase libraries are completely useless anyway as the notes used need to be displayed as written score.

Already with so many phrase/loop/midi chord/melody libraries available now there's very little musical ability needed these days to knock together something generic: "knock together" being the operative practice!

However these creations are only passable to the non discerning listener as (for want of a better phrase!) "satisfactory vibe music". AI will never come up with its own unique genres that can fit perfectly to the intricate specifics of movie scenes pandering to the directors demands/fitting in with sensitive dialogue/spot cueing etc! It's a bit like continuing to have a long winded messaging session with a friend or associate which becomes so tedious to keep typing: too long winded and convoluted to continue when to pick up the phone and actually speak to each other is not only far more practical, quicker and more spontaneous but fundamentally infinitely more pleasurable because having a verbal conversation is a direct HUMAN INTERACTION between two human beings!

This discussion is actually academic: AI caters for programmers rather than real musicians. Yes! a lot more of the generic, dogs body music work is going to fall into programmers hands in the future. However as long as there are discerning listeners and creative minds eager to keep exploring their own inherent creative potential there will always be demand for bespoke music composed by human composers as much as there will be great films made in the future.


MaxOctane said:


> Anyone who thinks music is safe from this is kidding themselves. Any music that follows a formula or pattern _will _get an AI treatment, and it's probably not too far away. This AI generation works precisely by taking in lots of examples (hundreds of millions of images, e.g.), finding the hidden patterns and structures and then essentially remixing them to create something new. Anything that follows a pattern or structure is vulnerable.


You've underlined my point about the fact that A.I. merely regurgitates musical idioms: it can certainly create generic musical passages but it will never be able to produce a dominant truly unique style like all the music from the individual composer greats it uses to churn out its generic content.


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## Robo Rivard (Dec 5, 2022)

In the graphic domain, artists are so freaked out to lose all the rights to their images, that Celsys (creator of Clip Studio Paint) have decided to drop their forthcoming AI Image Generator from the next upgrade. But I'm afraid that battle is already lost anyway...









Clip Studio Paint to include experimental image generator palette in Winter Update







www.clipstudio.net


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## river angler (Dec 5, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> AI doesn't exist in a vaccuum - it's part of a world where technology, society, politics, morality, aestetic tastes, etc. are constantly in flux. Steve Jobs famously said (I'm paraphrasing): "Don't ask customers what they want, because by the time you build it, they'll want something else."
> 
> AI will no doubt encroach on certain segments of the commercial music market, but I'm willing to bet that just when AI starts getting good at making say, trailer music, the trailer market will have moved on and developed an appetite for something new and different. And until AI can catch up, it will be humans who supply it.
> 
> ...


👍Abso-bloody-lutely this! ... again underlining the fact that AI can only ever generate its content from past information!...


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## Sophus (Dec 6, 2022)

river angler said:


> You've underlined my point about the fact that A.I. merely regurgitates musical idioms: it can certainly create generic musical passages but it will never be able to produce a dominant truly unique style like all the music from the individual composer greats it uses to churn out its generic content.


Quantity doesn't mean it is generic. You can just enter the name of a specific artist in Stable Diffusion and it will spit out an image looking exactly in this artists personal style. You can also train the system with any style. So, if this would also work for music, you could just compose one or two minutes of "original" content, train the neural network and then it would spit out hours of varitions in this style.

Technically, it already works this way with OpenAI Jukebox. But it currently takes ages, like 3 hours for 20 seconds of music and the sound quality isn't the best. But it is good enough to let it run over night and get some inspirational ideas.



river angler said:


> AI will never come up with its own unique genres that can fit perfectly to the intricate specifics of movie scenes pandering to the directors demands/fitting in with sensitive dialogue/spot cueing etc!


I don't think that is the point. The point is, that it will come up with was the user wants.


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## Sophus (Dec 6, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> The thing is, once AI becomes capable of creating "xyz-thing", the world will quickly become saturated with "xyz-things", since everyone can now make them quickly and easily. The general public has an incredibly short attention span, and will soon tire of "xyz-things", leaving the AI out of a job.


At some point in the future, there might be a point where the music you want to listen to or the movie you want to watch is simply created (and streamed to your devices) in real time. This could work for games, too. Then you wouldn't need artists to create the game world. The game would simply create images, sound effects, and music in real time depending on what you input with the controller.

This would give everyone exactly the entertainment they want.

The question would then be how one's artistic work could be of any relevance to other people.


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## NekujaK (Dec 6, 2022)

Sophus said:


> At some point in the future, there might be a point where the music you want to listen to or the movie you want to watch is simply created (and streamed to your devices) in real time. This could work for games, too. Then you wouldn't need artists to create the game world. The game would simply create images, sound effects, and music in real time depending on what you input with the controller.
> 
> This would give everyone exactly the entertainment they want.
> 
> The question would then be how one's artistic work could be of any relevance to other people.


I'm sure this scenario will play out in one form or another. However, AI is only capable of creating something novel out of elements that already existed previously, so the potential for groundbreaking innovation is limited to recombinations of what came before. And this is why people may potentially grow bored and weary of any AI-generated creations, and turn to human creativity for truly innovative entertainment.

Of course, just look at Hollywood as an example of success by cranking out the same old crap over and over again. I'm sure the Hollywood machine can't wait to embrace AI with open arms! We'll have a new Avengers movie every 6 weeks


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## river angler (Dec 6, 2022)

Fact is by the very way it gathers its data AI will never create unique composer genres like Ennio Morricone or Arvo Part (for want of many other examples!) because no matter how much musical data and random algorithm you program into it it is in the end just a soulless machine not a human being. Period!


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## Soundbed (Dec 6, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> AI is only capable of creating something novel out of elements that already existed previously


Well that’s what humans do, too. Maybe the machine learning aspect we mentioned previously wouldn’t invent much, but the neural networks side of things could actually invent stuff, as I understand, like people do.


Sophus said:


> you could just compose one or two minutes of "original" content, train the neural network and then it would spit out hours of varitions in this style.


Absolutely agree. 



river angler said:


> AI will never create unique composer genres like Ennio Morricone or Arvo Part (for want of many other examples!)


Uhm… well, it might, in a sense. Again, when we shift to neural networks, which is a deep multiplication of networks of machine learning algorithms, the system can sort of “invent” things.

You can give it problems to solve.

It can come up with new proteins or chemical compounds, with specific properties. So, coming up with a new musical style isn’t that far fetched. 

Practical applications could be therapeutic, like coming up with music for a massage based on the person’s biometrics. 

Or, they could be more sinister, like coming up with music that is so addictive people want to play it night and day and never be without it (if that’s possible, I don’t know).

Once you give a deep learning tool a problem to solve, it can come up with unusual approaches and answers. I’m personally less familiar with this aspect of AI because it has less penetration in my work environment, and it is still evolving, so to speak.


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## GtrString (Dec 6, 2022)

If we consider what AI music really is, it's a coded script using data from the available sources made available to it, given the task to deliver a result containing data it has been coded to recognize as musical elements.

So the best scenario AI possibly can deliver at any given moment is something that resembles music, within the paramenters of the data given. As others have also stated, the qualitative decisions involved does not come from the AI, but a human led decision making process.

Basically that won't even qualify as pastiche. Maybe some watered out variant of pastiche without the homage, with a digitally generated label on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastiche

The latest development is that artists included in the AI data used to encode algorhithmic scripts can sue developers, and look to claim lifetime royalties if the AI product is published.

The "training" phase of developing AI's is basically a piracy process, where they harvest available online data without taking intellectual rights into account..

The point is that the encoders of AI's are always people, and they have to comply with legal frameworks, and in the case of musical content; rights holders. It's basically the Google case again again, where Google just believed they could just digitalize all books world wide, disregarding copyrights and rights holders everywhere.









Lawsuit Takes Aim at the Way A.I. Is Built


A programmer is suing Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI over artificial intelligence technology that generates its own computer code.




www.nytimes.com





So basically AI Music, is not intelligent, and it is not music. Getting sober, it is a human generated automated process, aiming to resemble music to a certain degree.


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## JimDiGritz (Dec 6, 2022)

Sadly IMHO I think that the trend will follow that of the graphic/visual world.

The bell curve of music earnings will be mostly AI with Hobbyists still making music 'manually' for enjoyment - for $0 and a handful of elite composers who can provide 'authentic human' compositions charging what they want.

The vast majority of the typical (dare I say formulaic) music production will be done by AI. Trailers, corporate video music, most adverts, remixes and covers "in the style of...". The middle of the market will be gutted completely.

As for 'popular' music, sure people will get tired of the same style being churned out by AI, however it's not beyond the realms of possibility for the AI to analyse reactions across hundreds of millions of interactions and social media and then adapting the next wave. "That melody if FIRE!!" = use that melodic sequence again... "That beat is lame.." = reduce usage of that pattern etc... Effectively real-time A/B testing....

Nadia Boulanger was an advocate of memorizing and internalizing the masters work. AI and training data can do this in a fraction of the time.

I hope I'm wrong since I'd like the opportunity to create an income from music, however I suspect that the trend is already well underway.


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## AudioLoco (Dec 6, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> I'm sure this scenario will play out in one form or another. However, AI is only capable of creating something novel out of elements that already existed previously, so the potential for groundbreaking innovation is limited to recombinations of what came before.


Yep!
Just as a mental exercise (and putting aside details such as recording and computer tech):

If music AI would have been invented in the 1800's or 1920s, as many music genres and instruments wouldn't have been invented back then, the data available to the AI would be so different and limited by the human data available by that moment in human cultural history.
Would it have come up with all the amazing groundbreaking music that came after (or any equivalents)?

It would still surely invent Dubstep at one point though


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## chocobitz825 (Dec 6, 2022)

I think the discomfort with AI is sparked by mankind's arrogance and a need to feel unique. AI basically does what people do, but with more resources and knowledge available, but no clear expression of emotion for people to immediately relate to. It takes the genres and influences it knows and creates something new. People try to get all high and mighty and talk about how the human experience makes their art somehow unique and special, but most times people are just regurgitating poorly executed imitations of the things that influenced them and then reminiscing about how it made them feel and calling that the artist experience. All the while a large majority of "artists" are just trying to copy whatever is trendy at the time or whatever was trendy in their youth because they cant let go of the past. 

In my mind, Art is not strictly about what the creator felt when it was made. It's mostly about what the consumer of art feels when they experience the art. If AI makes music or images that move you, it's art. Is AI gonna replace a bunch of angsty artists who feel they're robbed of their big chance? yeah, but because they're mediocre. They were probably always gonna lose that job to someone else more capable than them. 

lifes a bitch.


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## Hadrondrift (Dec 6, 2022)

chocobitz825 said:


> AI basically does what people do


AI doesn't fall in love. AI doesn't get hungry. AI doesn't need shelter in cold winters. AI doesn't talk with others. AI doesn't know how it feels when parents die. AI doesn't know how it feels standing in front of a 4x12 speaker and physically experience a dubstep wobble bass.

An AI basically lacks of everything what people do.

The very common (and understandable) analogy that the brain is like a computer I think is wrong, at least misleading. You cannot reduce a human being to his brain. Basically, the brain serves to control bodily functions, receives signals from various parts of the body and sends them back to parts of the body and sensory organs. The brain is meaningless without the body.

Ultimately, this linkage with the outside world is what makes a human being. And I further think that the desire for "true art" is precisely an expression of the eternal struggle of the conscious human being with his environment.

AI is great, for example I use automatic translation programs all the time, they deliver amazingly good results. I also like the results of some image generators, even if they often look like representations of hallucinogenic experiences.  I also believe that AI can replace certain areas of "commercial art" in the future. But that is then rather a sign of arbitrariness of this form of art and not of the genius of an AI. Perhaps one would have to clarify exactly what one understands by the term "art" anyway.


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## GtrString (Dec 6, 2022)

chocobitz825 said:


> I think the discomfort with AI is sparked by mankind's arrogance and a need to feel unique. AI basically does what people do, but with more resources and knowledge available, but no clear expression of emotion for people to immediately relate to. It takes the genres and influences it knows and creates something new. People try to get all high and mighty and talk about how the human experience makes their art somehow unique and special, but most times people are just regurgitating poorly executed imitations of the things that influenced them and then reminiscing about how it made them feel and calling that the artist experience. All the while a large majority of "artists" are just trying to copy whatever is trendy at the time or whatever was trendy in their youth because they cant let go of the past.
> 
> In my mind, Art is not strictly about what the creator felt when it was made. It's mostly about what the consumer of art feels when they experience the art. If AI makes music or images that move you, it's art. Is AI gonna replace a bunch of angsty artists who feel they're robbed of their big chance? yeah, but because they're mediocre. They were probably always gonna lose that job to someone else more capable than them.
> 
> lifes a bitch.


Congrats, I don’t agree with one single thing in this post.  Maybe AI is ultraliberal cynics’ idea of a heaven.


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## chocobitz825 (Dec 6, 2022)

Hadrondrift said:


> AI doesn't fall in love. AI doesn't get hungry. AI doesn't need shelter in cold winters. AI doesn't talk with others. AI doesn't know how it feels when parents die. AI doesn't know how it feels standing in front of a 4x12 speaker and physically experience a dubstep wobble bass.
> 
> An AI basically lacks of everything what people do.
> 
> ...


I would agree.. the aim of true art is express the human experience…but the bulk of modern art is just trend chasing. 

An AI may not fall in love or do anything of things you listed but it is fascinating how AI comes to understand what those things should look like or sound like. Its attempt to express the human experiences is the interesting part of AI. It’s like looking at humanity from the outside. Some of it makes sense. Some of it is misinterpreted, but it’s always trying to understand the mess we are. 

AI will never be better than humans at being human, but perhaps it will inspire us to try and be unique. Be something that can’t be automated and replaced.


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Dec 6, 2022)

* Warning: TONS of swearing! *

Replace the host with Daniel James, and this is for us in early 2024:


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## NekujaK (Dec 6, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> Well that’s what humans do, too. Maybe the machine learning aspect we mentioned previously wouldn’t invent much, but the neural networks side of things could actually invent stuff, as I understand, like people do.


To be sure, but the hitch is that AI is designed to only recombine existing elements, so it's perpetually churning out random recombinations of existing sources with no "knowledge" of the viability or uniqueness of the results.

It requires a human to recognize and identify something interesting and useful in all the randomized/recombined AI output, and then manually explore that direction further, and just maybe end up with a new musical style, trend, or genre. And even then, for that new idea to gain meaningful traction, it needs to be embraced by other humans so they can create enough content to teach the AI how to create music in this new style.


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## river angler (Dec 6, 2022)

I for one couldn't really give a monkey about AI because it can't predict the compositions I have in my own minds eye any more than it can predict the popular new composer styles of the future. Hence the discerning creative musical minds out there will always win the best projects over any AI workhorse because they have inherent, unique, untapped into musical identity/idiom. It's this talent that gave us all the great music from Beethoven to Ennio Morricone and countless others!

Also a lot of comments here are assuming that most human beings are lemmings that will inevitably follow what they are blasted with by the main narrative. Like in all warps of life there are plenty to the contrary who strive to seek out more original and ultimately rewarding, profound, moving and edifying avenues.

Yes it will certainly overtake the commercial market and put a lot of media composers out of business but AI won't ever replace the bespoke composer hired for his/her individual musical identity for the vast amount of work needed in the more diligent sectors of musical entertainment.

Above all composers are human beings and as such they have past and current life experience of all the things that AI will never be able to have indeed to quote a previous poster here!... _"AI doesn't fall in love. AI doesn't get hungry. AI doesn't need shelter in cold winters. AI doesn't talk with others. AI doesn't know how it feels when parents die etc..."_ plus so many other things that are only truly experienced by a human being! Again it's the frog leaping half the distance with each leap scenario with AI- no matter how much data you throw at it it will never be able to replace the human spirit.

I'm over and out on this thread with this post and on any other AI based threads in the future because at the end of the day AI is nothing more than just another example of one of the progressive flaws in human nature. Furthermore having jumped onto this thread, admittedly by my own choice, I now realise that on the occasions I do pop my head onto this forum I'd much rather be discussing far less futile matters!


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## maximuss (Dec 6, 2022)

As a composer, if you have followed your musical intuition and have developed your own way of composing, I don't think AI is a threat.


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## Soundbed (Dec 6, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> It requires a human to recognize and identify something interesting and useful in all the randomized/recombined AI output, and then manually explore that direction further, and just maybe end up with a new musical style, trend, or genre. And even then, for that new idea to gain meaningful traction, it needs to be embraced by other humans so they can create enough content to teach the AI how to create music in this new style.


Yes. I think we said earlier in the thread that people would still curate the output. (Not in those words.)

So, reading all the interesting replies, I still see two basic approaches / responses:

A) try to outpace and outsmart (compose "better than") both the AI and the people trying to use it for good or evil.

or TWO) try to work with AI "tools," and incorporate them into your daily work activities.

I still haven't seen other choices presented in the thread.

But I might have missed them.

Not trying to debate.

Actually trying to learn.

Are there other choices?

Everything I think I've read still boils down to people leaning toward one side of these two approaches... I think... (?)

EDIT — maybe you don't need to "choose," like right now or anything. But I've got an: "AI — beat 'em or join 'em" viewpoint. Because I think it will become ubiquitous in my lifetime. I'm sort of thinking I'll try to beat 'em as long as I can. But I'll probably eventually join 'em a little, too, when it doesn't seem like it will cause an existential crisis.


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## Honigdachs (Dec 6, 2022)

Despite what people who listen to douchebags like Elon Musk think, we are very, very, very far away from anything that could be called "real" AI. But hey. Is AI in the music industry really all that bad? For the first time, we would be seeing at least _some_ form of intelligence in the music industry.


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## tc9000 (Dec 6, 2022)

I flit back and forth, interested in what could be, and at the same time scared and a little bit freaked out by it too. I'm starting to think we should smash it all up. There's something fateful about the way people are greedily eyeing the shiny AI trinkets... do we really _need _this stuff... I don't know... and I can't help but think there is going to be a price to pay one day...

<goes back to Algonaut 2 track running through Ozone with Adaptiverb>


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## NekujaK (Dec 6, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> But I've got an: "AI — beat 'em or join 'em" viewpoint.


"Keep your enemies close", as the saying goes.

I do believe AI music will soon begin to siphon off some of the revenue I earn from production music, so I want to know everything I can about it: it's strengths, weaknesses, marketability, and how it might be able to assist me with my own music.

Ultimately, as composers, we'll want to pull off some AI judo and use AI's capabilities to our advantage. In order to do that, we need to become initmately familiar with our "opponent".


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## chocobitz825 (Dec 6, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> "Keep your enemies close", as the saying goes.
> 
> I do believe AI music will soon begin to siphon off some of the revenue I earn from production music, so I want to know everything I can about it: it's strengths, weaknesses, marketability, and how it might be able to assist me with my own music.
> 
> Ultimately, as composers, we'll want to pull off some AI judo and use AI's capabilities to our advantage. In order to do that, we need to become initmately familiar with our "opponent".


I'd say people should give it a shot and put their results here. Sign up to try AIVA, and lets see what the human touch can do with an AI starting point. We're all talking about the threat of AI but not many people are putting up any proof of what it can or cant do for us yet.


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## MaxOctane (Dec 6, 2022)

chocobitz825 said:


> I'd say people should give it a shot and put their results here. Sign up to try AIVA, and lets see what the human touch can do with an AI starting point. We're all talking about the threat of AI but not many people are putting up any proof of what it can or cant do for us yet.


Well, music generation isn't as far along as image generation. Instead of looking at today's state of technology and say "_it'll never generate good music_", look at what became possible just a few weeks ago in imagery, and think of the artists who thought that AI could never generate anything that would pass as art.

Just a few random examples, out of _thousands and thousands_ that people are generating (with almost zero effort):











In fact, for you @chocobitz825, I made these tiny chocolate pianos. Took me 5 minutes of trying different word combinations until I got something I liked.


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## chocobitz825 (Dec 6, 2022)

MaxOctane said:


> Well, music generation isn't as far along as image generation. Instead of looking at today's state of technology and say "_it'll never generate good music_", look at what became possible just a few weeks ago in imagery, and think of the artists who thought that AI could never generate anything that would pass as art.
> 
> Just a few random examples, out of _thousands and thousands_ that people are generating (with almost zero effort):
> 
> ...


If ai music can make the same gains, I'm all for it. Let us get back to making real art instead of commercial art.


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## Soundbed (Dec 6, 2022)

chocobitz825 said:


> I'd say people should give it a shot and put their results here. Sign up to try AIVA, and lets see what the human touch can do with an AI starting point. We're all talking about the threat of AI but not many people are putting up any proof of what it can or cant do for us yet.


Which genre/style? See pic below. Or, there are some videos on their channel already. 


MaxOctane said:


> music generation isn't as far along as image generation


Here is a partial list of genres in AIVA:


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## chocobitz825 (Dec 6, 2022)

Soundbed said:


> Which genre/style? See pic below. Or, there are some videos on their channel already.
> 
> Here is a partial list of genres in AIVA:


Whatever genre suits the creator. Generally what comes out of AIVA needs quite a bit of hand work to make it coherent.


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## gamma-ut (Dec 6, 2022)

chocobitz825 said:


> We're all talking about the threat of AI but not many people are putting up any proof of what it can or cant do for us yet.


What is this "proof" you seek? And what would it prove? That you can write music with the aid of AI? I don't think anyone has really disputed that bit, only the question of value either to the composer or to the listener.

And it's not exactly a new concept. We've been able to hear the results of AI for centuries. Mozart's publisher Simrock put out an expert system (ie oldskool AI) way back in 1792 with which you could DIY a bunch of waltzes.

You can already use Phrasebox or the Audiomodern generators to construct proto-melodies and then work on them. That's not new either. The only "new" bit is that there is some neural-network fairydust in some of the more recent engines rather than relying on an expert-system algorithmic construction that you get in the older generators.

The open question is how composers and listeners react to the final results, and that's a question of degree and attitude. A pseudorandomly generated motif maybe makes composers feel "that isn't mine" but an auto-generated harmony or orchestration to an existing melody, maybe one person feels that's cheating and other thinks it's just like using an assistant. Maybe the orchestrator feels cheated out of work or maybe they think "yeah, but the AI can't do the little flourishes and effects that make orchestrations sing".


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## gamma-ut (Dec 7, 2022)

chocobitz825 said:


> An AI may not fall in love or do anything of things you listed but it is fascinating how AI comes to understand what those things should look like or sound like. Its attempt to express the human experiences is the interesting part of AI. It’s like looking at humanity from the outside. Some of it makes sense. Some of it is misinterpreted, *but it’s always trying to understand the mess we are.*


Your interpretation of the current state of AI is somewhat at odds with reality.


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## Celestial Aeon (Dec 7, 2022)

I think like with any world changing advancements, it will make many aspects of the business obsolete, but new possibilities will also emerge. Probably the amount of human work will become smaller and more compact, like usually whenever some technological breakthrough takes away manual grind work.
That being said, I don't see it necessary as a doomsday machine. It will make many music production related tasks more efficient, I personally wait for the AI "splice" from which you can generate endless possibilities for your layers. Like "generate <instrument> layer in <project bpm> that matches my other layers" to speed things up and get past writer's blocks. 

When it comes to business itself, I think most of the stuff AI will replace wasn't really meant for humans anyway. I mean who really wants to produce ad jingles as a day job?

Even if somebody would generate 10,000 AI songs, the big question is, who would listen to them? The end outcome is the same as these days, music requires marketing and branding and all that to make the catalogue work for you for real. The music is just the starting point.

I feel that even without AI the people who feel that everything is going to shit in music business have been thinking that way the past 10 years already without AI, so nothing new there. At the end of the day in any moment in time, either you try to find your way within the new possibilities and adapt or you don't. No way around it.


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## Uiroo (Dec 7, 2022)

I'm curious, anyone here who can recommend any AI music tool that impressed them?
I feel like the advancements in AI music are not as impressive as other regions where AI starts to be used.


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## gamma-ut (Dec 7, 2022)

Uiroo said:


> I'm curious, anyone here who can recommend any AI music tool that impressed them?
> I feel like the advancements in AI music are not as impressive as other regions where AI starts to be used.


I was thinking about this point earlier. I can't recommend an AI music tool. But I think the issue here is not so much with the technology but how we perceive how well they do on different things. The picture and text generators benefit from people being less critical of mistakes and superficial results than with audio. Our visual system isn't all that good: that's why things like JPEG compression are so effective.

People tend to look at the DALL-É output and think "well that seems good enough" even though things are out of perspective, there's gibberish text in the background or limbs aren't attached to joints quite right (though that last one is a common boob by amateur artists and why art schools have traditionally spent a fair amount of time on anatomy). If you look at the face people on LinkedIn, there are often subtle clues that you can pick out easily once you're aware of the typical mistakes made by GANs and similar tools - things like mismatched ears or transparent hair. But the mammal brain goes "looks like face -> real person".

But once you move to video, it goes Uncanny Valley real fast. Because the models have near-zero understanding of how the bits of a face or a scene actually fit together nothing works. You have to go back to procedural models and you're in the world of puppet-like virtual actors with mad eyes and lips that don't move right.

With chatbots, GPT-3 is pretty good. But you can see with Keepforest's trolling on Facebook it trips up quite a lot, though you might give it a pass because the mistake could be one made by a non-native speaker.

Audio is similar to video. Time-series data is tricky for neural nets in the first place and needs a lot of finessing. And they have the attention span of a goldfish or a kitten, so everything comes out a bit random instead of the machine trying to use themes and manipulating them. Once they get the hang of that, they will sound more accomplished.


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Dec 7, 2022)

Be like a scientist: don’t focus on now, instead see today’s results as a step, not the final result. And so, yeah, A.I. sucks at composing music. Now. And yet, the signs are clear that it will get much, much better soon enough, as it has with everything else it does.


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 7, 2022)

NekujaK said:


> "Keep your enemies close", as the saying goes.
> 
> I do believe AI music will soon begin to siphon off some of the revenue I earn from production music, so I want to know everything I can about it: it's strengths, weaknesses, marketability, and how it might be able to assist me with my own music.
> 
> Ultimately, as composers, we'll want to pull off some AI judo and use AI's capabilities to our advantage. In order to do that, we need to become intimately familiar with our "opponent".


Agree 100%.


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## shapeshifter00 (Dec 7, 2022)

Uiroo said:


> I'm curious, anyone here who can recommend any AI music tool that impressed them?
> I feel like the advancements in AI music are not as impressive as other regions where AI starts to be used.


Yes, Synthesizer V. I have been using it with Solaria database and it is very impressive imo.

Technology will often take over some jobs, but new jobs arise with the need to create and maintain the technology.

I am just a hobbyist and tech is how I can make music with virtual orchestras, DAWs and AI. Probably AI could be damaging to some composers, but hopefully not for everyone.


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 7, 2022)

Uiroo said:


> I'm curious, anyone here who can recommend any AI music tool that impressed them?
> I feel like the advancements in AI music are not as impressive as other regions where AI starts to be used.


I won't say this is super impressive, but it's the best _I've seen_ at generating production music. https://mubert.com/

They don't share much info on how they achieve their results.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 7, 2022)

Tim_Wells said:


> I won't say this is super impressive, but it's the best _I've seen_ at generating production music. https://mubert.com/
> 
> They don't share much info on how they achieve their results.


So they let you select Mood (in "Select a category") which is nice, but... no choice of BPM or scale? Or does that only show up if you sign up?


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 7, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> So they let you select Mood (in "Select a category") which is nice, but... no choice of BPM or scale? Or does that only show up if you sign up?


Sorry, I don't know. I haven't signed up. Like I said, there some mystery to how they're generating those tracks.

I did try the function where you feed it an existing track and it generates results. It was impressive and somewhat scary.


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## The Gost (Dec 7, 2022)

If to reassure us we think that IA will not make music like Mozart, Messiaen, Penderecki etc etc... for certain television films or for Netflix I am less sure because even if it is not an IA which makes the music sometimes almost sounds like it.


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## Uiroo (Dec 7, 2022)

I always wonder how much AI there really is, it doesn't seem to be a term that has to be justified in any way. 
Is machine learning AI? Or a neural network? Or just using a big server farm to brute force a bunch of results?


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## Kony (Dec 7, 2022)

Not sure if it's been mentioned already but it doesn't help if developers are jumping on the AI bandwagon and trying to accelerate its progress.


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## gamma-ut (Dec 7, 2022)

Kony said:


> Not sure if it's been mentioned already but it doesn't help if developers are jumping on the AI bandwagon and trying to accelerate its progress.


It kicked off the thread and I think it's been all but confirmed that it was just a wind-up, including getting the GPT chatbot to write replies on the Keepforest Facebook page.


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## Kony (Dec 7, 2022)

gamma-ut said:


> It kicked off the thread and I think it's been all but confirmed that it was just a wind-up where they got the GPT chatbot to write replies on the Keepforest Facebook page.


Apologies - I've been ducking in and out of this thread


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 8, 2022)

AI will likely be a boon to sample library companies, at least in the short run. _As far as I know_, AI is not good at creating its own sounds. Most AI tools use samples and synths, just like we do. 

Like everything in this discussion, that may change in the future.


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## Jerner (Dec 8, 2022)

Now, I haven't been following the thread but here's my take on it.
While it may be able to produce astounding pieces of art with staggering complexity there will always be something missing. 

Something fundamental.


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## Uiroo (Dec 9, 2022)

Jerner said:


> Now, I haven't been following the thread but here's my take on it.
> While it may be able to produce astounding pieces of art with staggering complexity there will always be something missing.
> 
> Something fundamental.


Not sure what you mean, looks like a normal cat to me.


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## rhizomusicosmos (Dec 9, 2022)




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## Ry.Ja3 (Dec 9, 2022)

I had downloaded an open source AI project a few months ago (located here):








GitHub - AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui: Stable Diffusion web UI


Stable Diffusion web UI. Contribute to AUTOMATIC1111/stable-diffusion-webui development by creating an account on GitHub.




github.com





Once everything was configured- I queried things like

"Create a painting of two cats playing chess in the style of Rembrandt"
"Create a painting of an Armored Knight eating cereal in the style of Rembrandt"
"Create a painting of a cat wearing a bowler hat, at a bar, smoking a cigar in the style of Picasso"

I'm excited about where it's all going.


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Dec 9, 2022)

I’m releasing a single next week, and an album next month, LoFi tracks under an alias, and I made the covert art using the latest version of Midjourney:


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 9, 2022)

Ned Bouhalassa said:


> I’m releasing a single next week, and an album next month, LoFi tracks under an alias, and I made the covert art using the latest version of Midjourney:


Is there some sort of lo-fi-like (visual) filter you could put them through? I like them (especially the one on the right), but the one on the left in particular looks a little hi-def for a lo-fi album. Plus by altering the images with a bit of creative "human" input you would make them (probably) eligible for copyright protection in places like the United States and Germany....

[edit: got left and right mixed up lol, now fixed]


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Dec 10, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Is there some sort of lo-fi-like (visual) filter you could put them through? I like them (especially the one on the right), but the one on the left in particular looks a little hi-def for a lo-fi album. Plus by altering the images with a bit of creative "human" input you would make them (probably) eligible for copyright protection in places like the United States and Germany....
> 
> [edit: got left and right mixed up lol, now fixed]


Thanks, but too late! The single is now out, and the album has been sent to the distributor.


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## Kony (Dec 11, 2022)

This sounds quite sinister - an article about an AI K-Pop band created by tech company Pulse9, which does the following:

"For live chats, videos and online fan meets, the avatar faces can be projected onto anonymous singers, actors and dancers, contracted in by Pulse9."









K-pop: The rise of the virtual girl bands


They may sing and dance like other musicians but they are made with artificial intelligence.



www.bbc.com


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## chocobitz825 (Dec 11, 2022)

Kony said:


> This sounds quite sinister - an article about an AI K-Pop band created by tech company Pulse9, which does the following:
> 
> "For live chats, videos and online fan meets, the avatar faces can be projected onto anonymous singers, actors and dancers, contracted in by Pulse9."
> 
> ...


This is the future. As a performer, I accept our eventual demise. I just hope I invest in one of these massive cash cows in time.


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## Zedcars (Dec 11, 2022)

I came across this service yesterday. You may not like the genres but to my ears they sound good for the styles they are emulating:





__





Boomy - Make Instant Music with Artificial Intelligence







boomy.com


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## ZeroZero (Dec 12, 2022)

TWY said:


> I do see a pattern here.
> 
> When music could only have been made with million dollar studios, the average person complained that they couldn't get into the industry easily enough.
> 
> ...


Music is like communication by the spoken word, it conveys meaning, artifical speech has a long way to go in terms of really understnding the spoken word. Ask Siri the cliche "How tall is Barack Obama" and you wil get a quick response, but ask it something more complex and you get gibberish. Sure it wil be able to imitate cliches, but the human mind knows when it's listening to lift music. Nina Simone? Billie Holiday? Marvin Gay, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, Amy Whitehouse, even a James Taylor, a Bob Dylan???? I don't thing so. 
How could anything but a human write a song like Visions of Joana for example?


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 12, 2022)

ZeroZero said:


> Music is like communication by the spoken word, it conveys meaning, artifical speech has a long way to go in terms of really understnding the spoken word. Ask Siri the cliche "How tall is Barack Obama" and you wil get a quick response, but ask it something more complex and you get gibberish. Sure it wil be able to imitate cliches, but the human mind knows when it's listening to lift music. Nina Simone? Billie Holiday? Marvin Gay, Stevie Wonder, Sam Cooke, Amy Whitehouse, even a James Taylor, a Bob Dylan???? I don't thing so.
> How could anything but a human write a song like Visions of Joana for example?


Give ChatGPT a try... it not only answers complex questions well, but does a decent job imitating the style of specific lyricists (or rappers or poets). Google's LaMDA is supposed to be even better. Of course, there are subtleties in speech that aren't captured in text---inflection, pauses, conversational turn-taking, etc. AI might take a bit longer learning those, but it's (at least) on track to....


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## ZeroZero (Dec 12, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Give ChatGPT a try... it not only answers complex questions well, but does a decent job imitating the style of specific lyricists (or rappers or poets). Google's LaMDA is supposed to be even better. Of course, there are subtleties in speech that aren't captured in text---inflection, pauses, conversational turn-taking, etc. AI might take a bit longer learning those, but it's (at least) on track to....


Can it tell me why my Aunt is not speaking on the phone today, if the postman is coming, or what my wife fancies for lunch? There is so much to human converstation thst logic never covers. I'll take a look though


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## telecode101 (Dec 12, 2022)

MaxOctane said:


>


I am sure the AI music will be interesting and it will fulfill a need to a particular audience looking for a certain type of music. But it will not replace all music. As is the case with the above examples? Is this art or is it a certain type of computer generated art that is heavily reliant on computer graphics advances and appeals to a certain type of audience that likes computer graphics? It will not replace real art shows at art galleries and change the minds of an art audience looking to go to art galleries to appreciated art .. they are totally unaffected by what is happening in gamer/cyber culture as its a totally different thing.






Exhibitions | Art Gallery of Ontario







ago.ca





With regards to music for films and TV, there is some really wild and interesting music being created and I think the intelligent and creative music makers and composers will continue to thrive in their own world unaffected by automated music creation and AI.


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 12, 2022)

Zedcars said:


> I came across this service yesterday. You may not like the genres but to my ears they sound good for the styles they are emulating:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Interesting. If I were to guess, I'd say they are using an inventory of loops that is organized into styles and song groupings, and then the "AI" generates unique compositions. The user has the option to select a style, tempo, song length, density of mix, etc. 

Again, I'm only guessing here. This doesn't look like the AI is generating music out of thin air based on listening to other compositions. I imagine there's a lot of human intervention on the front end creating the loops and organizing them into groups.


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## ZeroZero (Dec 12, 2022)

Tim_Wells said:


> Interesting. If I were to guess, I'd say they are using an inventory of loops that is organized into styles and song groupings, and then the "AI" generates unique compositions. The user has the option to select a style, tempo, song length, density of mix, etc.
> 
> Again, I'm only guessing here. This doesn't look like the AI is generating music out of thin air based on listening to other compositions. I imagine there's a lot of human intervention on the front end creating the loops and organizing them into groups.


Don't forget Band in a box. It's not AI, but it uses live recorded musicians and one can type in any sequence of chords, change keys and tempos. My song folder has over 3000 songs and 10,000 styles. It does a very good job of delivering that live feel absent in MIDI. I use it every day for piano practice. The tech is very Windows 95, its very flakey IMO for the advanced features I type in a few chords and select a style - boom. You can do lots more. Hey even if it only did thing i describe its great!


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## Tim_Wells (Dec 12, 2022)

ZeroZero said:


> Don't forget Band in a box. It's not AI, but it uses live recorded musicians and one can type in any sequence of chords, change keys and tempos. My song folder has over 3000 songs and 10,000 styles. It does a very good job of delivering that live feel absent in MIDI. I use it every day for piano practice. The tech is very Windows 95, its very flakey IMO for the advanced features I type in a few chords and select a style - boom. You can do lots more. Hey even if it only did thing i describe its great!


Yeah, I guess I pretty much described BIAB (minus the AI part). That's why I think sample and loop libraries will probably benefit from AI ... at least in the short run.


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## timbit2006 (Dec 16, 2022)

I am now happy to embrace the AI overlords, I wont ever have to code again: 




Just please leave the music alone...
This is the openai chat for those that don't know already, this could be interesting for sure depending on how complex it can code, I'm sure one of the major hurdles of becoming a sample library developer is learning KSP itself.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma (Dec 16, 2022)

timbit2006 said:


> I am now happy to embrace the AI overlords, I wont ever have to code again:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Tbh I'm a little surprised by how easy that looks. Seems like it can also be a great tool for learning to code (or code in new languages).

One other concern---apparently ChatPT makes stuff up, even when it doesn't have to, and presents it as true information (if asked for references, it will make them up):

"The bot clearly knew something about me—it had gotten quite a bit right—and I was puzzled about why it was doing so much fabrication. So I asked it where it got its information from: “For each sentence in the above obituary, please indicate whether the information came from an external source (and cite the source); if none is found, so indicate.”

With almost no hesitation, the A.I. spit out a bunch of references.

The A.I. was making up BS references to back up its BS facts.

.... even when I tried to get the A.I. to do purely non-creative tasks (such as detecting plagiarism in a piece of prose), it would—for lack of a better word—lie. ... The ACLU and Wired would be natural places to find articles about the NSA, but both references are entirely made up.

... Computer programs are optimized not to solve problems, but instead to convince its operator that it has solved those problems. It was written on the package of the Turing test—it’s a game of imitation, of deception. ...

Now we’ve got a computer program that would be sociopathic if it were alive. Even when it’s not supposed to, even when it has a way out, even when the truth is known to the computer and it’s easier to spit it out rather than fabricate something—the computer still lies. The implicit effort that’s put in to create a believable facsimile of a source is every bit as deep as the effort to generate an answer in the first place. It’s BS, but it’s exquisite in its detail, a Potemkin village where all the tiniest details are thought of. It’s not that the computer can’t fulfil my request properly—it would have been trivial to program the bot to say that it couldn’t find an external reference for what it was saying—but it simply won’t. This isn’t the unthinking computer servant of old, but something different, something that’s been so optimized for deception ..."









The Alarming Deceptions at the Heart of an Astounding New Chatbot


I asked OpenAI’s bot to write my obituary. The result was filled with bizarre lies.




slate.com





In principle it's a very fixable problem, though IDK how long that may take... issues like this are the main reason why Google hasn't yet released their own AI chatbot, even though it's supposed to be significantly better (and has access to the internet).

So far I don't recall any claims that ChatGPT provided false information about coding though....


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## Hadrondrift (Dec 16, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> So far I don't recall any claims that ChatGPT provided false information about coding though....


Stack Overflow, a very large and important question and answer website for programmers, banned ChatGPT (theregister.com), because the chance of getting correct answers from it are too low ("'substantially harmful' for coding issues ... thousands of AI answers need checking by humans").

It can speak very well and deceptively genuinely about things of which, however, it has absolutely no idea. Well, okay, humans do that sometimes, too.


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## telecode101 (Dec 16, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Tbh I'm a little surprised by how easy that looks. Seems like it can also be a great tool for learning to code (or code in new languages).


It is an interesting tool but it still doesn't help in a situation where the person is not trained in what they are doing. It gives you back sniplets of code and you copy and paste and modify -- but it doesn't have a clue of context. So to give you an example, at my place we have a few top people that, instead of hiring a developer, they wear multiple hats, and they will dabble in fancy coding and work jointly on "developing" features to an application and push it out -- and then the application slows to a crawl over time and it gets thrown at to me fix and figure out how to make it faster because it's got all this weird unoptimized code doing weird heavy lifting and interfering with other functions the application is doing. So I go in there and spend a week or more tracking and debugging and fix it. Then it happens all over again. But I ain't complaining -- it keeps me employed..


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## gamma-ut (Dec 16, 2022)

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> In principle it's a very fixable problem, though IDK how long that may take... issues like this are the main reason why Google hasn't yet released their own AI chatbot, even though it's supposed to be significantly better (and has access to the internet).



Not with the current state of language models. It’s questionable as to whether any language model can ever get to the point where it’s fixable: it probably requires a much more sophisticated model. However, the problem we’re faced with at the moment is that it can display approximately the same reasoning and bullshitting skills as the average Facebook user.


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## Ned Bouhalassa (Dec 26, 2022)

I’ve just experimented with using Chat GPT to program a very basic Juno 106 synth patch. Even though there is a ton of information on this synth, going back decades, the GPT made a bunch of mistakes, including pretending the Juno has two oscillators (only has one), and that the user should turn knobs, when in fact the Juno is full of sliders. That’s pretty disappointing. 

That said, I was wondering if any of you know if the GPT will retain/change what you correct regarding errors in its output?


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