# Yet more tech threatening to devalue the art of composing



## NekujaK

Apparently this one has received nearly $4 million in funding, with Disney and Microsoft among the backers...









I have seen the future of music. It’s scary, and utterly brilliant. - Music Business Worldwide


Our mind has been blown by Soundful. Yours will be, too.




www.musicbusinessworldwide.com


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## shadowsoflight

Yikes.

"WHAT WE’RE DOING AT SOUNDFUL IS DEMOCRATIZING MUSIC CREATION TO THE MASSES, IN THE SAME WAY THAT THE PHONE HAS DEMOCRATIZED VIDEO CREATION."

Really? The equivalent would be to ask my phone for a starfighter skirmish scene and have it generate one for me. This does not sound like democratizing music creation, this sounds like automating it. "Democratization" is starting to become a trigger word for me...


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## Tim_Wells

Yeah, devaluing is a good way to put it. It's a bit of a slap in the face and a cold, hard reality check. But this is the kind of thing that's coming and I don't see a way to stop it. 

I don't fully get how this works, but I need to spend some more time looking at it.


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## method1

Music (and other media) are becoming about curation, not creation, there is already so much library / production music as well as loops, phrases, construction kits etc, the only thing that dictates the end product is aesthetics, i.e curation.


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## CGR

Hmm. Just read the article and checked the promo videos. I'm torn between realising it's an inevitable progression of technology, and rolling my eyes and thinking that music creation is slowly having the soul ripped out of it. I just don't buy the altruistic statements of it's founder (_"democratizing music creation to the masses"_). There's gold in them-there hills! . . .


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## R.G.

Live by the tech; die by the tech.


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## Justin L. Franks

We're going to be delegated to the back alley. "Hey dude, you wanna buy some REAL music?"


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## gsilbers

CGR said:


> Hmm. Just read the article and checked the promo videos. I'm torn between realising it's an inevitable progression of technology, and rolling my eyes and thinking that music creation is slowly having the soul ripped out of it. I just don't buy the altruistic statements of it's founder (_"democratizing music creation to the masses"_). There's gold in them-there hills! . . .



yep.. thats the mantra of the tech bros, which we saw clearly with NFT and crypto. Somehow is helping US or the consumer with this new tech that will revolutionize and disrupt the industry to later just have the same that we had but worse. Like uber and spotify which replaced taxis and record labels by just low balling the price at the start until it makes money... which still hasn't while exploiting as much people as they can. 
The more explotative the cheaper is for the user who doesnt care, until surpise... their jobs is now part of a platform. 
We clearly need an easier way to unionize for all jobs and not have the pitfall of past corrupt unions in the USA. 
Strong union would lead to stopping platforms in certain countries that if EU came together and said youtube needs to pay PRO then bam... itll happen to the rest of the world. 
meh.. the future sucks.


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## gsilbers

now.. how about using that service to create thousands of tracks a week and upload to 100s of royalty free servicces and also spotify and tidal/etc? 

asking for a friend ;P)


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## Daren Audio

CGR said:


> I just don't buy the altruistic statements of it's founder (_"democratizing music creation to the masses"_). There's gold in them-there hills! . . .



At the end of the day, the real money is in the IPOs for the founder and initial investors who want to get their return on investments. And cash out. Whether Soundful will be profitable or not is another story.


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## R.G.

As I write this, the thread directly underneath this one is asking for recommendations for "cheating software" (AI, scale and chord generators, composer helpers, etc.).


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## Guffy

But does it have good legato? Enough RR's and dynamics? How many mics? Does it have the best players in the best hall? If not im not worried.


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## NekujaK

gsilbers said:


> now.. how about using that service to create thousands of tracks a week and upload to 100s of royalty free servicces and also spotify and tidal/etc?
> 
> asking for a friend ;P)


Perhaps Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, etc. will themselves become obsolete in the future. If someone wants to listen to music, they can just plug into an AI service like Soundful and have it crank out brand new tunes in real time! Effectively cutting out all the middlemen - composers, labels, publishers, and streaming services! What a "wonderful" world we have to look forward to... *sigh*


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## José Herring

Just seems like more bland overly commercialized music for the background masses. The tech imo isn't anything new. Now you just have a computer picking your loops for you rather than having to actually sample, beatmatch, and pitchshift. 
I just never feared this stuff because even the advert sounds like badly dated 90's R&B. 

If anything it will just push us to be more human, more edgy and more unpredictable and creative. I welcome the challenge.


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## ALittleNightMusic

gsilbers said:


> yep.. thats the mantra of the tech bros, which we saw clearly with NFT and crypto. Somehow is helping US or the consumer with this new tech that will revolutionize and disrupt the industry to later just have the same that we had but worse. Like uber and spotify which replaced taxis and record labels by just low balling the price at the start until it makes money... which still hasn't while exploiting as much people as they can.
> The more explotative the cheaper is for the user who doesnt care, until surpise... their jobs is now part of a platform.
> We clearly need an easier way to unionize for all jobs and not have the pitfall of past corrupt unions in the USA.
> Strong union would lead to stopping platforms in certain countries that if EU came together and said youtube needs to pay PRO then bam... itll happen to the rest of the world.
> meh.. the future sucks.


So we should instead hold progress hostage due to entrenched interests? We should keep certain domains privy only to a select few - because why, they're scared about their inability to compete? You think for consumers and the general world of mobility that taxi companies were better than ride sharing services?


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## NoamL

Algorithms only devalue music that can be created algorithmically. This software is no threat to composers, only "beat makers"


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## flampton

I remember when drum machines were supposed to replace all the drummers. Still waiting for that supposed eventuality.


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## pinki

What's any of this got to do with art? Art always survives this kind of non-sense. Home taping is killing music, pitch correction etc etc etc etc...


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## Technostica

flampton said:


> I remember when drum machines were supposed to replace all the drummers. Still waiting for that supposed eventuality.


I don’t think jazz drummers were ever worried about that happening.
The irony is that in some cases it’s probably quicker and cheaper to pay for a session drummer than to play around with a machine.
Especially back in the day when more people were hiring expensive studios.


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## NoamL

To expand a bit: the reason this music is algorithmically legible is because

1. it's *square*. This is what is meant by "beat making" - Tempo stays the same, meter stays the same, harmonies change on the beat, the larger structure of the music is just a loop of the same chord progression

2. the music has *one idea.* you could add or subtract any number of layers and they are all compatible and interchangeable with each other because they are each derived from the single idea.

This is also the exact same idea behind every "MIDI chord pack" hawked by youtube gurus

such stuff is valueless already


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## Grymt

My god...

"You can even buy the copyright, and own the tracks you create."

Guys! There's no problem at all, just pay a pro subscription AND pay them extra and you will own the copyright of your own creations!


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## NekujaK

Even if tech-generated music can only ever come up with bland, generic-sounding music, it can still have a negative financial impact on composers, because there will certainly be a segment of commercial music users (TV shows, bloggers, marketing departmens, etc.) that will turn to a platform like this for their music needs, as opposed to paying for library music or paying a composer. This means money that used to go into composer's pockets will be diverted to these music-generating platforms.

It's unlikely films will be scored with such technology, but even library music finds its way into films these days, so it's not a stretch to imagine machine-generated music filling that role in the future. I can certainly imagine a platform like this being used to create trailer music.

All of this canabilizes the already meager revenue stream that composers earn.


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## NoamL

NekujaK said:


> Even if tech-generated music can only ever come up with bland, generic-sounding music, it can still have a negative financial impact on composers, because there will certainly be a segment of commercial music users (TV shows, bloggers, marketing departmens, etc.) that will turn to a platform like this for their music needs, as opposed to paying for library music. This means money that used to go into composer's pockets will be diverted to these music-generating platforms.


Nekujak it would be amazing news for composers if this happened. It would create a differentiating factor between two mediums (Tv and film) that are merging. There would be a reason to go back to the theater instead of watching every movie & Tv show from your phone.

If large parts of what is now indistinguishably called "media" were taken over by mindless computer music that would only let composers show off the added production value (for commensurate budget) of music that actually helps make a story mean something to people.

In reality there's plenty of smart writing right now on tv even for some "reality" tv shows. Composers care.


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## Grymt

I understand people that react with "don't worry, it can't make real music".
But to them I say:

1. How many people are listening to real music?

2. People say this about writing as well. But nowadays a lot that you read is partly written by a machine. This includes newspapers. And most of you will have heard about bots on twitter and other social media, that are used to help win elections. You also might have heard about automatic decisionmaking in policing.

We're the workers in the automobile industry that say to eachother: "no way machines will ever replace most of us".


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## Pappaus

For pros this isn’t great. Much like the porn industry that moved away to amateurs (on both sides of the camera). because it was cheap, quick, and the end user didn’t really care, some work might be lost and that’s not good.

However, for hobbyists like myself, this can be a philosophical discussion. Hasn’t the needs and tropes of the media producers had the same diminishing effect on music composition. Less people are doing concert music because the work and money is in action sequences with horns, horror sequences with felt pianos playing augmented chords etc. (My lack of musical knowledge shown here does prove I am only a hobby guy).


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## NekujaK

NoamL said:


> Nekujak it would be amazing news for composers if this happened. It would create a differentiating factor between two mediums (Tv and film) that are merging. There would be a reason to go back to the theater instead of watching every movie & Tv show from your phone.
> 
> If large parts of what is now indistinguishably called "media" were taken over by mindless computer music that would only let composers show off the added production value (for commensurate budget) of music that actually helps make a story mean something to people.
> 
> In reality there's plenty of smart writing right now on tv even for some "reality" tv shows. Composers care.


Indeed this is all true assuming people actually care about the music they're listening to. As a composer I'm constantly focused on and intently listening to music in films and TV. But when I talk to my friends about music in film and TV, they don't notice or pay attention.

For those who can discern between mediocre and high-quality music, they will always favor human music. But I'm afraid the vast majority of music consumers - both listeners and actual users of music - don't have such discerning ears. Also, AI-generated music will undoubtedly get better over time.

We as composers value originality, but originality isn't always a priority with media music. Trailer music is a prime example. There are certain tropes that are expected of trailer music. As a composer you try to creatively work within those limitations, but there's only so much variation that is deemed "acceptable"; i.e., that people will pay you for.


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## Pappaus

NekujaK said:


> Indeed this is all true assuming people actually care about the music they're listening to. As a composer I'm constantly focused on and intently listening to music in films and TV. But when I talk to my friends about music in film and TV, they don't notice or pay attention.
> 
> For those who can discern between mediocre and high-quality music, they will always favor human music. But I'm afraid the vast majority of music consumers - both listeners and actual users of music - don't have such discerning ears. Also, AI-generated music will undoubtedly get better over time.
> 
> We as composers value originality, but originality isn't always a priority with media music. Trailer music is a prime example. There are certain tropes that are expected of trailer music. As a composer you try to creatively work within those limitations, but there's only so much variation that is deemed "acceptable".


As to what is deemed “acceptable”, I remember the giant flap on this forum about the winner of the Westworld competition. Certainly some variation that the judges found okay, but not to some of people here.


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## NekujaK

Pappaus said:


> As to what is deemed “acceptable”, I remember the giant flap on this forum about the winner of the Westworld competition. Certainly some variation that the judges found okay, but not to some of people here.


Agreed. But that was an actual part of the score - where there can be lots of freedom, depending on what the director needs and wants. My example was simply focused on trailers, and media music in general. If you write for a trailer house or a library, there are typically clearly defined lines you need to stay within to have your music be considered commercially viable.


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## Pappaus

NekujaK said:


> Agreed. But that was an actual part of the score - where there can be lots of freedom, depending on what the director needs and wants. My example was simply focused on trailers, and media music in general. If you write for a trailer house or a library, there are typically clearly defined lines you need to stay within to have your music be considered commercially viable.


I totally agree with you.


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## R.G.

A quick look at the list of offerings at your local multiplex or streaming service will tell you all you need to know about how much quality factors into the equation, and, musically speaking, it's not as though the commercial music world is overflowing with an abundance of quality, whether now or in the recent past.

Everyone everywhere is being replaced except the replacers, and quality doesn't matter to those doing the replacing. A lot of tech support is already automated. Farms are becoming more so. There are robot pizza machines now, and in 10 years tops all fast food will be automated (which may actually be an improvement, especially hygenically).

But back to music, live theater pits are depressing now. It's manifestly vulgar. Automated, only a handful of musicians, maybe in a room down the hall, some playing sampled instruments, and pre-records triggered by the m.d.

And every time I think about musicians receiving less work on account of sampling technology, I wonder if, when they hire out for sampling sessions, they just sigh and realize they're digging their own graves.

There're orchestrators who write all their string harmonics and other gnarly techniques as cues only, using samples exclusively for same since they can be problematic in the studio, especially if they aren't scored well.

Harp is also too much trouble for some to contend with, so harp samples it is. As a result, more and more harpists increase their student roster and do more weddings, all while maybe wondering if they're teaching a dying art. After all, it's not like samples and the tech to play/program them is going to do anything but get better.

Multiphonics and other problematic special effects already get more sample work than studio.

The pretty impressive things you can do already, and money saved, by skillfully layering string samples behind a small string group of just 12/4/4/2, resulting in all that lost work.

Once a certain quantum leap (no pun intended) in sampling tech and playback arrives, I genuinely fear what will happen to a lot of very fine musicians. Any denial that this is a probable future is just whistling past their graveyard.

When _"democratizing the composing field"_ AI (which nobody asked for) improves to the point where it starts having a noticeable impact on certain sectors of commercial composing, the developers and their clients will inevitably be hit with criticism, and rightfully so, but I can easily see them resorting to some familiar tactics, such as, _"That's elitist gatekeeping!"_

And if that tactic was deemed by some to be an effective defense against justified lamentations of mediocrity in years past, how can it now not be likewise once the Maestro HAL 9000 starts saying "Hold my beer"?


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## Pappaus

I love The Terminator movies, but I have always thought that while the machines are taking over, they are doing it slowly and subtly - one small thing at a time. no need for all those thermonuclear devices , just whittle away at the need for real humans And wait for us to finish the job.


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## Macrawn

I think it only devalues the value of composing for non-innovators. Granted there are a lot of non-innovators but stuff like this really raises the value of innovative and creative work. Makes it even more desirable.

It does deliver quite a blow to mediocrity though.


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## TonalDynamics

shadowsoflight said:


> Yikes.
> 
> "WHAT WE’RE DOING AT SOUNDFUL IS DEMOCRATIZING MUSIC CREATION TO THE MASSES, IN THE SAME WAY THAT THE PHONE HAS DEMOCRATIZED VIDEO CREATION."
> 
> Really? The equivalent would be to ask my phone for a starfighter skirmish scene and have it generate one for me. This does not sound like democratizing music creation, this sounds like automating it. "Democratization" is starting to become a trigger word for me...


I think it's high time they invented a pill to turn me into an ultimate fighter, thereby democratizing the UFC and ending Dana White's reign as gatekeeper.

_Octagon, here I come!_

But seriously, I read something almost just like this 5 or 6 years ago, wasn't worried then, not worried now.

They will fail for many reasons, but primarily because:

Machine learning is rather hyped. Extremely valuable, yes, but _only_ insofar as the programmers are able to construct a training program which produces desirable results.

Thus the neural net is both limited and hindered by the fact that it will always have an 'imperfect' human designing the training program. So you've got people who firstly don't understand music all that well, let alone what separates good from great—_let alone_ what separates great from historic excellence—and yet they're somehow supposed to be able to teach a computer how to teach itself how to make great music? 🐡

Take chess or deepfakes for instance: These mediums are ideal for machine learning, because the goals are highly serialized and concrete in nature; a face is a set of constrained proportions from many angles, and checkmate always wins the game; success is a highly linear target point.

But with music, the level of granularity approaches something like infinity, and the desired 'outcomes' are also practically infinite. There is no checkmate, no face to reproduce, no search trend to procure...

Computers are good at lots of things, but highly parallelized and abstract ideas are not among them.

Cheers


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## Alex Niedt

Macrawn said:


> I think it only devalues the value of composing for non-innovators. Granted there are a lot of non-innovators but stuff like this really raises the value of innovative and creative work. Makes it even more desirable.
> 
> It does deliver quite a blow to mediocrity though.


Exactly. If AI can make music as interesting (or more interesting) than me, that probably means I'm not making anything of creative value. Can't help but notice the people I see freak out about this stuff are usually those who crank out mediocrity in the largest quantities possible like an assembly line, anyway.


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## PaulieDC

method1 said:


> Music (and other media) are becoming about curation, not creation, there is already so much library / production music as well as loops, phrases, construction kits etc, the only thing that dictates the end product is aesthetics, i.e curation.


Exactly. And I won't make friends by saying this, but there seems to be the push in today's world to put aside the effort to learn your craft, toss away the GOOD rules for proper content creation, all to get one's self "out there and liked and subscribed" as if the bane of humanity survives on that. There are already AI tools on a more basic level showing up in DAWs, but I'm not just talking MIDI Orchestration... look at the current state of even video content on YouTube... not only are there constant sickening jump cuts every third word (and I'm not even going to touch vertical video), but there are actually tutorial videos on how to best DO your jump cuts. Seriously. If this was mentioned in film school even 10 years ago there would have been laughter abounding, certainly the effort would be to create the most professionally done video or movie, right? Um... er... that's why Oscars are given to EDITORS. Abandon the art and deal with the outcome. Same with the music Legos sets that are emerging everywhere. And the worst part is, many reading this are probably saying "what's bad about all those things?"... what's bad on a minor level is if you create some masterpiece from Lego blocks, it's not really yours, you're just a copy-cat button pusher (which may be fine for some people), but it grows into the bigger problem that those who actually compose and perform to create these components _will eventually be gone_, then how do you build your snap-together music if no one who actually composes and performs are creating them? And who is going to compose a melody like Ennio Morricone's Nella Fantasia or build an amazing anthem like Rhapsody in Blue or even in the rock world with a piece like Bohemian Rhapsody using AI tools? Can you click on a guitar block and a male vocal block and come up with "Yesterday"? I honestly have NO problem with software like this as an added toolbox to add a little spice to the meal or help initiate an idea or help your figure out the right chords for a melody (although I would say nothing beats knowing theory), but if we keep going down this road click-to-compose, true composers _composing_ will be gone. If we think music all sounds the same today, good NIGHT, strap in and get ready for the onslaught. Like when disco hit in the 70s. 🤣

OK, grump over. Feel free to fling the darts, lol.


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## PaulieDC

Alex Niedt said:


> Exactly. If AI can make music as interesting (or more interesting) than me, that probably means I'm not making anything of creative value. Can't help but notice the people I see freak out about this stuff are usually those who crank out mediocre stuff at the largest quantities possible like an assembly line, anyway.


Not me, I'm not even at the cranking out stage yet.


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## LamaRose

"Mediocre." Can't think of a better word to describe this stage of humanity. Mediocrity in all things. This tech will slide in like butter and catabolize/institutionalize what's left of mediocre music. But there will always be an outlier niche of humans craving more... thus the rise of niche writers and composers.


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## Saxer

As long as AI isn't even able to clean my kitchen I'm not afraid.

And we should never forget: people *want* to make music. We could replace our voices with talking machines and it might have a use for navigation or simple service phone lines. But how long do you want to spend your day with a talking machine? They don't even drink!


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## NekujaK

Creativity is not the issue in question. Humans will always be able to exercise creativity and innovate. I don't feel AI is in any way a threat to anyone's musical creativity.

What's being threatened here are opportunities for composers to earn actual money. Platforms like Soundful are not intended to be composer assistants. They're composer replacements. They're aimed at those who *consume* music, not create it. They're aimed at people who traditionally pay libraries or hire composers to create music.

It may take a while to gain traction, but low cost and improving AI will make platforms like Soundful a very attractive option for many traditional consumers of original music.

And let's not turn up our noses at mediocrity. Mediocrity is where most of the money is, like it or not. That's why investors see such a big money-making opportunity in tech like Soundful. If it can deliver on its promise, there will be a long line of customers willing to pay money for the mediocre music it cranks out.

Creative integrity and fighting against mediocrity are what we care about as composers and artists. But there's a bigger picture to be consideed when it comes to earning actual money from music. In that realm, concerns over creativity and mediocrity are irrelevant. You just do what sells.


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## Chris Schmidt

Saxer said:


> As long as AI isn't even able to clean my kitchen I'm not afraid.
> 
> And we should never forget: people *want* to make music. We could replace our voices with talking machines and it might have a use for navigation or simple service phone lines. But how long do you want to spend your day with a talking machine? They don't even drink!


Yes, my thoughts exactly. This is the thing people overlook in this kind of discussion which has been going on for years now.

Anyone who is serious about music will learn the craft themselves. Without the existence of "AI" or whatever you want to call it, there have already been tons of musicians who are not serious about learning to compose for real. This won't change that.

This manifests itself mainly in the "it's all subjective" people.

One thing I will say, which people get mad at me for but I don't care because I have had this argument for many years and will die on this hill: Most of these programs will be aimed at creating attempting to compose (tonal) music that actually sounds musical and attempts to emulate the masters.

In short, it attempts to be _good_. We can debate whether or not it achieves that, but that's beside the point. The point is, "good" is something that the not-serious composers argue until they're blue in the face isn't even a real thing.

They believe that there is no way that we can say, with absolute certainty, that a cat running across your piano isn't objectively a worse, less-skilled composer than Mozart was. We can't truly say that Mozart was better music than the cat's is _for real_.

These people, who almost always make fairly-unimpressive music usually of some weird atonal ambient variety, are ideological in their defense of mediocrity, and so to use a program like these would be to admit that their philosophy — honestly, their "worldview" — is incorrect. 

So a huge swath of people aren't even going to touch them.

Plenty of people, not even musicians themselves, hate on electronic music because it "doesn't use real instruments" and they have for decades. I don't see them being drawn to AI music either.

In other words: I don't think this is really worth worrying about for the majority of (serious) musicians.


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## Alex Niedt

NekujaK said:


> And let's not turn up our noses at mediocrity. Mediocrity is where most of the money is, like it or not. That's why investors see such a big money-making opportunity in tech like Soundful. If it can deliver on its promise, there will be a long line of customers willing to pay money for the mediocre music it cranks out.
> 
> Creative integrity and fighting against mediocrity are what we care about as composers and artists. But there's a bigger picture to be consideed when it comes to earning actual money from music. In that realm, concerns over creativity and mediocrity are irrelevant. You just do what sells.


Aaaaand you've summarized exactly why I couldn't possibly care less about the "AI threat" and would rather have a day job than turn what I love into this


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## timbit2006

My target market isn't generic pop music fans. I'll be fine.


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## NekujaK

Alex Niedt said:


> Aaaaand you've summarized exactly why I couldn't possibly care less about the "AI threat" and would rather have a day job than turn what I love into this


Nothing wrong with that. But there are people, who for years have either made a living, or supplemented their income, thru songwriting and composing. While at the same, there seems to be a trend that consumers of music care less and less about quality and creative integrity.

So for music professionals, platforms like Soundful are a shot across the bow. There's no damage yet, but the potential is there for lost income, so this is of some concern. Not to mention how this contributes to the continued dumbing down of commercial music.

I'm glad you're unaffected by these developments, but there are others who may eventually be negatively impacted by services like Soundful.


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## WWBiscuit

From the promo:

"Soundful's the sort of platform that feels like it was built for someone like me."

Yes, someone with no talent.


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## PeterN

The art of composing has itself got down this road, so it probably gets what it deserves. Look at the crap we get today, is there any major difference from "pressing a button" composers. Hopefully this AI trend will force human composers towards more genuine art and originality. Probably not. Its just how it is. Can't wait for a drunken teenager to do better composing than the established ones.


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## PeterN

NoamL said:


> To expand a bit: the reason this music is algorithmically legible is because
> 
> 1. it's *square*. This is what is meant by "beat making" - Tempo stays the same, meter stays the same, harmonies change on the beat, the larger structure of the music is just a loop of the same chord progression
> 
> 2. the music has *one idea.* you could add or subtract any number of layers and they are all compatible and interchangeable with each other because they are each derived from the single idea.
> 
> This is also the exact same idea behind every "MIDI chord pack" hawked by youtube gurus
> 
> such stuff is valueless already


I get that "insane MIDI chord pack" in just about every other YouTube commercial.


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## jazzman7

Commerciality and music has always been problematic for the creators. The "commoners" created the greatest art at the behest of noble benefactors or the Church. The patronage system never really went away, simply evolving into financial support in the larger population, with various larger musical or film conglomerates as gatekeepers. 

For a while, the balance of power shifted a bit towards the creators as certain individuals or groups introduced musical innovation that upended the previous commercial status quo. Even so, each revolution always ended up fairly quickly being covered by the barnacles of imitators and various exploiters.

Musicians themselves never occupy the apex of the hierarchy (even tho some patrons of old could be pretty competent dabblers).

So the Machine has existed in one form or another as far back as we can remember. In my lifetime, I've watched this evolve (or devolve). 

A whole bunch of new production and technical talent, very little inspired musical innovation. Perhaps just buried or out shouted by the great Machine. 

The internet seemed at first to be a help toward democratization, that is until the big power players succeeded in leveraging it into making the Machine exponentially bigger. As usual, most musicians and composers eke out existence on the margins. 

This new "democratization" is just a euphemism for growing the Machine. 

Not that I think all is lost. So many wonder why music production sounds so well produced, but feels so empty. There are still a lot of people out there hungry for something a little more organic, and a lot more human. I think the big Machine actually is looking pretty topheavy and there will be a backlash someday. Not that even a revolution will avoid a hierarchy. Where there are people, there's always going to be one. As Hari Seldon, a character in a novel once said: "People always form hierarchies, from the Emperor's' Court, to a Bowling team"


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## pinki

Macrawn said:


> I think it only devalues the value of composing for non-innovators. Granted there are a lot of non-innovators but stuff like this really raises the value of innovative and creative work. Makes it even more desirable.
> 
> It does deliver quite a blow to mediocrity though.





Macrawn said:


> I think it only devalues the value of composing for non-innovators. Granted there are a lot of non-innovators but stuff like this really raises the value of innovative and creative work. Makes it even more desirable.
> 
> It does deliver quite a blow to mediocrity though.


Absolutely


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## MarcusD

Progressing and regressing at the same time. Crazy.


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## Gabriel S.

I'm very very sceptic with all of this. I heard the "AI Mastering Algos threat" years ago and still didn't hear a single AI Mastering service that actually does a great job. It does a mediocre job. So, if a task like this can't be mastered by AI..what about composing a track, mixing it and mastering it? The whole pack done by AI?

Years ago they said "Supermarket cashiers will be replaced by machines". I still see cashiers in 99% of the stores.
Years ago they said "AI will replace car drivers". Still, we are far far from that.
Two years ago they said "AI will replace copywriters". Still, even if the GPT-3 tech is good, it's far far from perfect and still needs a professional behind.

Of course at some point AI will get so good that it will replace some basic tasks, but it's still too too soon I believe. So, keep studying, keep composing. Whoever wants to pay for AI composed tracks is somebody who wouldn't pay YOU for composing anything, so nothing is lost.


----------



## Al Maurice

Yikes -- producing music to order -- by democracy. Whatever next!


----------



## iMovieShout

Perhaps the time has come to automate the studios, such as Disney, Netflix and Amazon?
Surely A.I. will soon replace the need for actors, CGI, VFX, script creation, and thus the creative studios!!! Saving $billions


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## MaxOctane

I actually used this on a recent project. I was nearing a deadline and couldn't understand what my director wanted, and finally I brought my laptop with me while he explained one more time: "A mix of nordic detective drama with 1968 Burt Bacharach, in the Mongolian style of throat singing." I said "_A ha, now it's clear!_" and excused myself into the other room, where I punched his words into the Soundful app. I came out a few minutes later with his hour of underscore, which he approved on the spot. He then offered me a Mentos and we shared a laugh.


----------



## Henu




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## Justus

"Anything of real value takes time."


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## AudioLoco

The general public will listen to whatever is on the TV and the radio and might appear in their social network feed. The popular "taste" is mostly a myth, whatever is fed to them by the mainstream will be eaten.
Young generations, excluding judgments about quality or lack of - not going to get into that - 
are missing an important factor older crustier people had: Underground music and genres.
Music that was generally put out by small tiny labels and that was played only in sweaty shitty little toilet venues. The exclusivity and the fact it was generally very different from the mainstream and always pushing some kind of envelope, it was part of the "pride" of those young listeners/fans. The constant research for something new and exciting, that was often a part of a scene, which had often an *outsider* views of society . (Many of these scenes will then become absorbed by the mainstream culture, but still managed to blossom away from commercialism)
Now something less known, with small social "followers" base and few views is mostly seen as bad and un-attractive .

Musicians have been replaced by youtubers as role models and inspiration for many young ones.
They are all just counting views now and hoping to get sponsored.

(BTW fuck the digital music services and fuck Youtube, they are responsible for robbing musicians, especially the mid table guys. When I get stupidly tiny amounts of money on million plus streamed tracks I get pretty angry at thinking of how much money my "content" made *them*.)

Anyhow, I have a feeling it is all meek and docile now. It's all so predictable, so devoted of rebels. 
Quantized, autotuned, and edited to death even "played" music is being "robotized" as a requirement to sound "pro".
Actually the machines rebelling could come out with more creative and different and experimental music then the current pop drab hahahahaha! Come on Skynet, be the next Bach or Bob Dylan!

This is not just about music but about any popular art, the only truly successful movies are children's superhero movies and franchises which are based mostly on material conceived decades ago.

So, with what the general public and people trying to make money for nothing (passive income!) want, well, sooner or later AI is going to give it to them. No doubt about that.

Maybe some music (for film or "albums") will have to state, like for recording production labeling (AAA for all analog etc), HHH: "all writen, mixed and mastered by humans".

There will always be a niche of people that are interested in more challenging music (I never say "good" or "bad" because it is ultimately subjective) but would it be enough to provide a living for the remaining human composers who want to dedicate their lives to exploring?

(rant rant rant rant rant rant rant rant rant blah blah rant rant rant rant rant rant)


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## Gabriel S.

MaxOctane said:


> I actually used this on a recent project. I was nearing a deadline and couldn't understand what my director wanted, and finally I brought my laptop with me while he explained one more time: "A mix of nordic detective drama with 1968 Burt Bacharach, in the Mongolian style of throat singing." I said "_A ha, now it's clear!_" and excused myself into the other room, where I punched his words into the Soundful app. I came out a few minutes later with his hour of underscore, which he approved on the spot. He then offered me a Mentos and we shared a laugh.


Actually I just had a talk with one of the investors and he confessed me that the original name was Soundawful.com, but the majority didn't see the potential in it. Can't understand why.


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## R. Soul

It's only a matter of time before AI can create any kind of music that man can create.

Dall-e 2 can already create visual art that competes or even surpasses the best artists in the world, and this is using a text string as out there as random as 'a teddy bear doing surgery on a grape in the style of a 1990s cartoon'. 
Not only will it throw up an excellent image, but it will provide 10 alternatives in 10 sec. - all pleasing to the eye.


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## timbit2006

Henu said:


>



Now if this AI could compose a jingle like that... Then we're in trouble.


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## ed buller

Only misery and despair await those with this thinking. Just focus on writing music that no AI would have a hope of writing. Become someone who's craft defies definition let alone an algorithm. Put your energy into your people skills and ability to coax out of your clients their dreams !

By far the biggest thing I learned working for Hans was his craft of taking a meeting. They would last for hours. But throughout he remained charming and focused. His knowledge of the story everyone was working on was equal to the director. He was totally engaged and constantly capable of making suggestions and putting forth ideas that would help bring the project to a close. 

IA ain't gonna do that.....EVER !

best

e


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## dts_marin

if the A.I. is trained with data from this forum its G.A.S. will bankrupt the company.

We are safe for now.


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## patrick76

The cost of music from these royalty free libraries and what not has just gotten out of control!!! F u I’m gonna pay $15! Solution - Soundful! It pays for itself!

AI is really hot. Thank god people are putting it to use like this on important issues. When does this IPO drop? I buy anything with AI in the marketing materials.


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## YaniDee

As long as parents keep sending their kids to piano/violin/guitar lessons, and schools keep their band programs going, we should be ok..


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## MisteR

YaniDee said:


> As long as parents keep sending their kids to piano/violin/guitar lessons, and schools keep their band programs going, we should be ok..


What’s a band program? And are there any good free versions I can download?


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## Trash Panda

If enough old men yell at a cloud at the same time, can they make the cloud move?


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## Kent

a lot of knee-jerk hot takes in here...

but nobody is talking about the double-take I thought they would be:






Why are they doing our friend @Soundiron Team's logo dirty like that???


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## Tim_Wells

NekujaK said:


> Even if tech-generated music can only ever come up with bland, generic-sounding music, it can still have a negative financial impact on composers, because there will certainly be a segment of commercial music users (TV shows, bloggers, marketing departmens, etc.) that will turn to a platform like this for their music needs, as opposed to paying for library music or paying a composer. This means money that used to go into composer's pockets will be diverted to these music-generating platforms.
> 
> It's unlikely films will be scored with such technology, but even library music finds its way into films these days, so it's not a stretch to imagine machine-generated music filling that role in the future. I can certainly imagine a platform like this being used to create trailer music.
> 
> All of this canabilizes the already meager revenue stream that composers earn.


Exactly. It's going to hit mid-tier and lower-tier producers. Someone like me. 

It seems some ways around this would be to focus on unique/niche music, or a style that's not easily re-created by AI (like Bluegrass or Ethnic). Another alternative is to take your quality to the next level. Something head and shoulders above an AI generated piece.


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## flampton

The contempt some of you show for your hopeful audience is quite telling. Why do those stupid people not like my music? Must be them because I know a lot of music theory.


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## NuNativs

PeterN said:


> I get that "insane MIDI chord pack" in just about every other YouTube commercial.


"Whoa bro, that's fire!"


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## Vik

NekujaK said:


> I don't feel AI is in any way a threat to anyone's musical creativity.


Not today, but AI made music is still in it's early pregnancy. In a few years you'll be able to feed some of your favorite songs/compositions into an app, and have it make something that may be close enough to sound like music you would appreciate. We'll probably be able to feed it with favorite parts of certain melodies, feed it with music and tell it to ignore the melody but focus on the harmonies in one of the sections and so on.



Chris Schmidt said:


> there have already been tons of musicians who are not serious about learning to compose for real



I somehow agree – the best way to deal with a potential thread of being replaced by computer made music is to make sure that what we deliver is something we'd really enjoy listen to if we heard it – and start by learning how to create such melodies, chord progressions, counterpoint lines etc.



Gabriel S. said:


> Years ago they said "Supermarket cashiers will be replaced by machines". I still see cashiers in 99% of the stores.


There are machines in all the stores around here, and they are often used more than the human cashiers. But music is different and less mathematical (if we want it), since humans have the ability to to be touched by certain melodies / compositions, to get goosebumps and to get adrenalin kick by certain grooves. AI will of course try to emulate 'heartfelt' and 'touching' too, but we are 'the real thing' as long as we make sure we don't rely on too many old habits or natural/artificial intelligence (in our brain) when we make music.

I just saw a YT-clip where Natalie Portman and Yuval Noah Harari talked about use of AI in various contexts (including music). It's worth looking at if you have one and a half hour to spare.


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## NuNativs

David Cope worked for years on this path. One thing he pointed out is that AI can imitate but not innovate.

That Yuval character is pure anti-human EVIL!


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## walkaschaos

If we don't destroy ourselves first, AI is going to change our existence in ways we can't currently conceive. Much like if you tried to explain the internet and smartphones to a farmer in 1820. Cranking out crappy generic music loops is a pretty tiny sliver of what is probably coming.


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## tack

R. Soul said:


> It's only a matter of time before AI can create any kind of music that man can create.


I was hoping to see this comment.

The progress of AI research over the past decade and, more importantly, its productization into the hands of consumers, has been staggering. Remember when Deep Blue was the crown jewel of computing achievement? Over a decade of laborious fine tuning, standing on the shoulders of two decades of previous R&D on chess engines, finally able to eek out a victory against Kasparov.

Now the state of the art looks like this: you teach an ML algorithm the rules of chess, have it play itself for a few hours, and it's not just unbeatable, but it's making moves that the top grandmasters consider inspired.

Of course, it's not really inspired, it's just indistinguishable to us from human inspiration, and that's a distinction without a fundamental difference if you ask me. And so it will be with the arts. DALL-E is one example, already producing fascinating results, but it's really still a fledgling technology. It will only improve, and the trajectory of that improvement will continue to be exponential.

In 20 years, I fully expect that music critics, scholars, and musicians will -- when blinded -- be calling machine-produced music as an expression of genius on the level of Beethoven.

And at the same time I predict those of us here will still be dealing with dodgy legato transitions and pitchy samples. (I'm routinely annoyed at how far behind the state of the art the VI industry is. Instrument modeling is the perfect application for ML, isn't it?)


----------



## YaniDee

MisteR said:


> What’s a band program? And are there any good free versions I can download?


Are you joking, if so ha-ha..Otherwise, I'm talking about high school bands..like trumpets, clarinets, flutes, and other archaic acoustic instruments..


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## PeterN

NuNativs said:


> "Whoa bro, that's fire!"


I guess we should say its "dope".

Nikos midi chord back is *insanely dope*! 

Also, repeat with me LOGIC PRO X LOGIC PRO X EXX EXXX


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## Gerbil

tack said:


> In 20 years, I fully expect that music critics, scholars, and musicians will -- when blinded -- be calling machine-produced music as an expression of genius on the level of Beethoven.


Touch wood, we should both be around in 20 years, so I’ll take that bet. There is not a hope in hell that AI will produce a work equivalent to the Hammerklavier.


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## shadowsoflight

First, I really enjoy and resonate with this video about automation (I think I've posted this before on another thread - it's from 2014, by the way):


I understand the points about replacing composers who make "mediocre" music but not "high-quality" music; but there's more to the story than that. While my gut feeling about Soundful is that it will sit solidly in the territory of the former, I think we'll eventually get something making it into the latter. In terms of music, AI/ML researchers still haven't quite found the right way to engineer the problem, but at some point it will happen - all it takes is one critical breakthrough.

Even if we can only ever replace mediocre music, it will still end up *devaluing* high-quality music. First of all, how many composers immediately started sustainably making high-quality music, without ever getting a bit of grounding in something more "mediocre"? Maybe this isn't a very common example, but in my case, I am stuck making less-than-stellar music because I don't have enough time to practise and learn, or time to work on all of the details in a composition that I'd like to. I have a completely unrelated full-time job, bills to pay, mouths to feed... I need to earn the time to improve my composition skills, and realistically this has to come through composing of mediocre music. It's a part of the journey that will be eliminated, leaving a large number of fledgling composers in the dust.

Besides the example of my own personal situation, there are many other ways that this could devalue high-quality music. On the media side, there will be groups on the cusp of trying out a composer who will choose not to - maybe not the big-budget ones (yet), but it will make it that much harder to build a portfolio, harder to build relationships, harder to work with practical examples. On the standalone side, listeners will become even more flooded with mediocre music - music that will likely fit nicely into curation algorithms; they will have a harder time finding the high-quality stuff amidst the ocean of mediocrity. Cutting out some of the mediocre composers means that software, sampling and plugin companies lose clients, and it becomes harder for them to stay in business or prices start to climb. YouTubers with great content start to lose their audiences, making it harder to find resources to learn. All of this doesn't mean we lose composing as an art form, and nobody will ever make a living out of it... But it does devalue the work.

My last job involved a lot of automation - the idea was that we'd automate menial tasks to free up time for scientists and engineers to do more critical-thinking, high-quality work, instead of wasting time on repetitive mediocre tasks. Instead, the company just ended up laying off people, and we are getting less high-quality work than before. Then they dissolved our team, to boot!


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## tack

Gerbil said:


> There is not a hope in hell that AI will produce a work equivalent to the Hammerklavier.


"There is not a hope in hell that machines will be able to <X>" has been a very common statement for a great many values of X. It seems rather quaint nowadays to realize that was once said of chess, and somewhat more recently Go, or StarCraft. Or conversational language. Or paintings.

I feel like this statement comes from either:

Underestimating the tenacity and cleverness of our fellow humans in the pursuit of advancing the state of the art of computer science
Believing that there is some kind of ineffable qualia to the human experience and that X is the product of that experience, remaining forever outside the grasp of the digital domain.
Even if #2 is valid, I see no reason to believe that music is one of those things.

Maybe you can expand a bit more as to why you feel certain that's impossible?


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## gohrev

The beauty in every piece of stunning art, be it a painting, a sculpture, or music; are the human imperfections.


----------



## Pier

I don't doubt AI will replace humans across many industries although I think we're still quite far away from that. At some point we will reach AGI (artificial general intelligence) but I doubt we will see it. Maybe our children will, who knows.

Recently Dall-E has been able to produce images from a text prompt which are pretty amazing.

Here's just one example but check this blog post for more examples.






I'm sure AI will replace editorial music for stuff like TikTok and Youtube videos at some point. Like you could use Dall-E images as illustrations for press, blog posts, etc. Sure AI can produce stuff that is really good but this is missing a huge point.

The value of working with a media composer, an illustrator, a designer, a photographer... basically a human being, is not only in what they can produce, it's that you can communicate with them. Anyone who has worked in a creative project knows it's a collaborative process that iterates over ideas and results. You rarely work in a vacuum and there are so many decisions that are taken constantly that shape the end result.

I don't doubt we will reach a point where AIs will completely replace composers, where the director will be able to talk to the AI with vague terms and get a good result... but we're still very far away from that.

Sure, humans are just biological machines, and any biological process can be modelled and replicated digitally. But even if we had a computer with the processing capacity of the brain (at best we're still a couple decades away from achieving that) our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy.


----------



## Nico5

... the sweet irony of this thread:

Individuals who rely on (and drive the demand for) advanced music making technology, lamenting about advanced music making technology.


----------



## SupremeFist

NuNativs said:


> David Cope worked for years on this path. One thing he pointed out is that AI can imitate but not innovate.


I interviewed him many moons ago (like, in the 1990s) about his computerised jazz improv thing. Super-cool guy! Also, hasn't Eno been involved with algorithmically generated elevator music for aeons? There is nothing new under the sun, etc.


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## jules

Yeah, and here comes the earbuds for Soundfull generated music ...


----------



## JimDiGritz

Automation is coming, frankly there's barely anything that an AI can't do better/faster than us.

To be honest the writing has been on the wall since the Banū Mūsā brothers built the first music box in the 9th Century 



If our ancestors had just had the foresight to smash that damn thing we'd all be on easy street right now I tell ya!


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## flampton

I am a part of another art tool called Midjourney. Here is "Virtual Instrument Control." Made in a few minutes. It's not perfect by any means, but things are definitely progressing.


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## Dewdman42

A.I. is evil. The world will face a massive crisis, perhaps within the lifetime of some of us here. It will replace nearly every job that was ever fun to have in the past. It will do everything intellectual that a person could do...except do it cheaper and in some cases better. This is just the early stages. It only gets worse and worse from here.

I'm confident that a tool like this will eliminate some jobs. It may or may not be you or me, but someone's job will become pointless. Worse...we will see even more bland generic A.I. generated music that will have no magic to it. Because A.I is still a very very long ways away from being able to be truly artistically creative or create magic out of thin air. 

But sadly...many media creators don't actually care whether their product is artistically creative. They care about being economically competitive...and tools like this will up the ante in that regard, and lower the quality of artistic creativity expressed, even lower than it already is, for many media products that are distributed. Simple as that.

However, I suspect that A.I. will make it possible for anyone to hum or think of a simple musical idea...and the A.I will be able to transform that into great works of musical production. This will basically trivialize it. At some point nobody will care if you are whistling the most ingenious musical line ever because there will be literally millions of them floating around.

Eventually even very skilled composers will be replaced. its not that far off that someone will be able to hum a few melodies into their smartphone and crank out a full symphonic rendition at the touch of a button...trust me...that is going to be done in our lifetime. We are well on our way.


----------



## MarcusD

AI technology is definitely progressing very quickly. Some areas faster than others.

For example Look at how far deep fakes have come in such a short space of time. Luke Skywalker in Book of Boba Fett looked incredible. If anyone watched that episode, without ever seeing Luke Skywalker, they would probably have no idea it was a deep fake.

Eventually actors will be able to license their likeness out to production houses. If a director wants to cast (insert actor here), but the actor can't take the job (due to x-y-z) they'll pay to use their 'digital AI avatar' instead. Music probably wont be much different in that regard.


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## Dewdman42

MarcusD said:


> Eventually actors will be able to license their likeness out to production houses. If a director wants to cast (insert actor here), but the actor can't take the job (due to x-y-z) they'll pay to use their 'digital avatar' instead.



no. pretty much there won't be any actors at all. There will be only life-like animations created by A.I.


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## MarcusD

Dewdman42 said:


> no. pretty much there won't be any actors at all. There will be only life-like animations created by A.I.


I definitely agree that could happen, but I'd like to think humanity isn't dumb enough to let things landslide in that direction.


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## Dewdman42

it has already been land sliding that direction for quite some time. Its only a matter of the technology developing to accomplish it...which is accelerating. Humanity will not stop it...in our thirst for cheaper products we will eat it up and fund it.

This is why A.I will ultimately lead to a severe global crisis...as the meaning of life for human beings will be severely compromised.


----------



## Pier

flampton said:


> I am a part of another art tool called Midjourney. Here is "Virtual Instrument Control." Made in a few minutes. It's not perfect by any means, but things are definitely progressing.


That thing reminds me of the consoles in Existenz


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## Hadrondrift

tack said:


> In 20 years, I fully expect that music critics, scholars, and musicians will -- when blinded -- be calling machine-produced music as an expression of genius on the level of Beethoven.


I studied computer science about 30 years ago. I did my student research project in the field of artificial intelligence. At that time, everyone was sure that in a few years chess computers would be unbeatable because the hardware, the processor speed and also the algorithms would have improved to such an extent that even world champions would have no chance.

This prediction has come true.

At the time, there was also a lot of scientific controversy. It was about the so-called strong and weak AI. The representatives of strong AI wanted much more than chess. They wanted to replicate human intelligence using computers and algorithms. Real machine creativity, real thinking, the ability to abstract, all this, they imagined, could and would be achieved by machines. Everything, they said, was merely a matter of time, hardware speed and sophisticated algorithms. At the time, this faction was certain that in perhaps 30 years, algorithms would have improved to the point where true artificial intelligence would be possible.

That prediction has not come true.

Today, we are just as far along in the field of strong AI as we were then. There has been a great deal of disillusionment in this regard. And hardly anyone today believes that it will take only 30 more years for strong AI to finally achieve a breakthrough. Hardly any research funds are allocated to universities today for research into strong AI, but a great deal is allocated to _weak_ AI.

Yes, great achievements: Amazing advances in pattern recognition, facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, incredible advances in machine language translation (DeepL), image processing, production planning. But machine creativity? Originality? Completely absent.

So has Soundful, this artificial intelligence-driven music-generating platform, now made the breakthrough? I have very strong doubts about that, no matter how many more millions are invested in it. By "artificial intelligence-driven" they still mean the weak AI.

Do we even know what creativity is? Where do people get their motivation from? Do emotions play an important role? Is creativity perhaps non-computable? Are computers - or Turing machines in general - perhaps fundamentally unsuitable tools for the creation of creativity and originality? Exciting even philosophical questions.

Results of music generating applications are judged by humans. If these judging people cannot distinguish machine-generated musical results from man-made works, then for me this is a statement about current man-made music and about its content of creativity, not a statement about algorithmic quality.


----------



## NekujaK

Recently, one of the ways I've started to earn some additional income from music, is composing for a library. I work hard to produce music I hope clients will want and the library needs, based on guidance and specifications provided to me. As a result, I've been fortunate enough to get multiple placements across several major networks over the past few months.

This is all great and encouraging, but truth be told, the tracks I make for this purpose are not magnificent creative masterworks of inspired musical genius, nor do they need to be. I'm simply leveraging my many years of musical knowledge and experience, including research of existing reference tracks, to craft music that meets cretain narrowly drawn specifications.

But wait a minute! That's exactly what Soundful does!

The leap to media composers being replaced by tech like Soundful is not a big one. If I were a TV network why would I want to pay licensing fees and royalties for library music when I can simply pay a small subscription fee to Soundful, generate all the music I want, own it outright, and never pay royalties!

The future looks bleak, no need to wear shades...


----------



## Dewdman42

I hear you, but the truth is that we don't need A.I. to possess those strong AI skills imagined 30 years ago and thus far not achieved. I would argue that the vast vast majority of human beings go around barely using their full intellectual capacity in their daily lives, including their job. A.I. will replace the vast majority of human's roles...including music production....a lot of which can easily be called "not very creative any more" if you ask me.

As to whether A.I will accelerate enough to get into the strong AI category as you put it...becoming more creative...is yet to be seen...but I also think that the consuming public has drastically lowered its expectations for what constitutes acceptable media production...and insane amounts of creativity is falling out of humanity too in my estimation!


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## Kent

Dewdman42 said:


> This is why A.I will ultimately lead to a severe global crisis...as the meaning of life for human beings will be severely compromised.


only as long as humanity (or its power structures) cling to the outdated notion that a person has to work for a living, and only by that can provide meaning to/in their own lives.

We _could_ be living like they do in Star Trek.... but we probably won't, unless many (made-up) things change.


----------



## cmillar

Time for some other viewpoint's…..

Like many other musicians/composers around the world, I don’t make my living producing ’music for media’. I don’t lose any sleep worrying that AI will replace any of the composing/arranging I do for others or the live music projects I’m involved in with other living, breathing humans.

It’s easy to see that AI can do the work of most media musicians, except for those working in the highest echelons of music business (the A list Hollywood composers, the high end jingle composers)

Lets face it. Most of the rest of the media music world consists of trying to imitate what someone else has already done. Let’s face it.

Or, you have people just cutting and pasting library music and loops to create a quickly assembled soundtrack that will sound like 20 million other soundtracks.

Neither of those scenarios has anything to do with art, let alone composing.

For the record, I’ve composed music for independent film makers, commercial music producers, live production shows, jingles, documentaries, etc.

Composing has helped pay my rent and put food on the table. So has arranging.

Several years ago I seriously considered and actually started working on some music tracks to get ready to shop around to music library companies, etc. Did my homework. Spent some months creating and perfecting music tracks I felt proud of.

But then, I thought what a waste of time! What an idiot I’d been... creating a bunch of tracks that would just be added to the already existing pile of millions of other library music tunes!

I realized that my talents are better spent working with real musians working at keeping live music in front of the publics eyes and ears… not spending my life trying to second guess what might catch the ear of some musical luddite editor trying to put some sound behind a project I coudn’t give a crap about.

So hey, I still use VI’s and that’s why I visit this forum!

I’d just like to encourage other musicians/composers to reevaluate their musical and lifelong priorities.

Do you really want to spend it following in the footsteps of a bunch of ‘suits’ and ther AI music producers? (Or even in the footsteps of fellow music library wannabes churning out yet more innocuous media music?) 

Rant on me if you like.

But for the record, I care far more about the future of live music than I care about ‘media music’…. it’s more important to our species In the long run.


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## Dewdman42

it will be interesting to see what we do to deal with the coming crisis. I don't think it will be solved easily. There will be wars and catastrophe associated with it. In the end, humans will need to find a way to ensure most people are fed and housed...regardless of that fact that they can find nothing to do with their time that has any meaning. People may seek more after religion,etc and other forms of meaning that have nothing to do with our basic survival. Perhaps that will take us to new heights...or perhaps we will despair. 

For thousands of years...many thousands....humans have been driven by a primary need to eat and find shelter. We have worked for those things for hundreds of thousands of years. It is deeply wired into us. If and when we no longer need to do that...will life become full of new meaning or devoid of important meaning which we all need more then we realize? Well, the human race is going to find out, because we are on that path...but it is going to be a major crisis.....left to be seen how it will turn out in the end.


----------



## NoamL

Remember they said about chess "10 minutes to learn, a lifetime to master."

After the "10 minutes" of learning the rules of chess I am _exactly_ as capable of playing chess as Magnus Carlsen, I just will lose 10,000 out of 10,000 games because I can't calculate a fraction as quickly and deeply as he can. But there is no move Magnus can make that I will go "hey I didn't know you could do that." My 1150-rated ass and his World Champion brain are on an exactly even playing field insofar as being able to, for instance, write down a list of all legal moves White could play given a certain chess position.

Since you can teach the computer the entire ruleset of a deterministic game easily, and a computer can out calculate any human, that is why chess doesn't have an anti-computer moat.

Because of this people come to the assumption "computers will replace most human tasks because computers can out calculate humans." But they neglect the point that computers cannot out calculate humans if they can't learn the task. The real moat around any human task is phrasing the problem or challenge in a way that is legible to computers.

Music is not "10 minutes to learn." It is not even 5 years to learn. All of these Silicon Valley people saying they "taught the AI the rules of music theory through machine learning" are just lying. They just fed a bunch of pop charts into the AI and it "learned" that I–V–vi–IV is a common progression. That's not music literacy.

If you take "Dream is Collapsing" which is a piece which is otherwise machine legible in many ways - it's ostinato based, it's repetitive, it's square - these "machine learning AIs" still don't seem like they'll ever get to the point of writing something like that because it's a rare chord progression that works on the basis of voice leading more than tonal harmony logic. Taylor Swift in, Taylor Swift out.


----------



## RoyBatty

Dewdman42 said:


> A.I. is evil. The world will face a massive crisis, perhaps within the lifetime of some of us here. It will replace nearly every job that was ever fun to have in the past. It will do everything intellectual that a person could do...except do it cheaper and in some cases better. This is just the early stages. It only gets worse and worse from here.
> 
> I'm confident that a tool like this will eliminate some jobs. It may or may not be you or me, but someone's job will become pointless. Worse...we will see even more bland generic A.I. generated music that will have no magic to it. Because A.I is still a very very long ways away from being able to be truly artistically creative or create magic out of thin air.
> 
> But sadly...many media creators don't actually care whether their product is artistically creative. They care about being economically competitive...and tools like this will up the ante in that regard, and lower the quality of artistic creativity expressed, even lower than it already is, for many media products that are distributed. Simple as that.
> 
> However, I suspect that A.I. will make it possible for anyone to hum or think of a simple musical idea...and the A.I will be able to transform that into great works of musical production. This will basically trivialize it. At some point nobody will care if you are whistling the most ingenious musical line ever because there will be literally millions of them floating around.
> 
> Eventually even very skilled composers will be replaced. its not that far off that someone will be able to hum a few melodies into their smartphone and crank out a full symphonic rendition at the touch of a button...trust me...that is going to be done in our lifetime. We are well on our way.


I would think you can say the same thing about how DAWs and Orchestral Samples are doing, or have been doing, the same thing to musicianship. Are we on VIC guilty of destroying musicianship?


----------



## NekujaK

cmillar said:


> Time for some other viewpoint's…..
> 
> Like many other musicians/composers around the world, I don’t make my living producing ’music for media’. I don’t lose any sleep worrying that AI will replace any of the composing/arranging I do for others or the live music projects I’m involved in with other living, breathing humans.
> 
> It’s easy to see that AI can do the work of most media musicians, except for those working in the highest echelons of music business (the A list Hollywood composers, the high end jingle composers)
> 
> Lets face it. Most of the rest of the media music world consists of trying to imitate what someone else has already done. Let’s face it.
> 
> Or, you have people just cutting and pasting library music and loops to create a quickly assembled soundtrack that will sound like 20 million other soundtracks.
> 
> Neither of those scenarios has anything to do with art, let alone composing.
> 
> For the record, I’ve composed music for independent film makers, commercial music producers, live production shows, jingles, documentaries, etc.
> 
> Composing has helped pay my rent and put food on the table. So has arranging.
> 
> Several years ago I seriously considered and actually started working on some music tracks to get ready to shop around to music library companies, etc. Did my homework. Spent some months creating and perfecting music tracks I felt proud of.
> 
> But then, I thought what a waste of time! What an idiot I’d been... creating a bunch of tracks that would just be added to the already existing pile of millions of other library music tunes!
> 
> I realized that my talents are better spent working with real musians working at keeping live music in front of the publics eyes and ears… not spending my life trying to second guess what might catch the ear of some musical luddite editor trying to put some sound behind a project I coudn’t give a crap about.
> 
> So hey, I still use VI’s and that’s why I visit this forum!
> 
> I’d just like to encourage other musicians/composers to reevaluate their musical and lifelong priorities.
> 
> Do you really want to spend it following in the footsteps of a bunch of ‘suits’ and ther AI music producers? (Or even in the footsteps of fellow music library wannabes churning out yet more innocuous media music?)
> 
> Rant on me if you like.
> 
> But for the record, I care far more about the future of live music than I care about ‘media music’…. it’s more important to our species In the long run.


Valid points, but all of the various modes of music creation are not mutually exclusive. I write for a library because it's one of the most direct paths to earning money from music. I also score films, which also pays money (usually), and is far more creatively satisfying and collaborative, but gigs are harder to come by. And I write for my own pleasure, where I have full creative freedom, but earning money is difficult (and not necessarily the point).

It's easy to dismiss media music as non-essential fluff, but it serves a purpose - not every piece of music needs to be or should be Beethoven's 5th. A thriving industry has been built up around the creation, selling, and licensing of media music. That industry is definitely threatened by the likes of Soundful, and what's worse, it puts more power and control into the hands of media conglomerates. It's pretty clear why Microsoft and Disney are major backers of Soundful.


----------



## Dewdman42

NoamL said:


> Music is not "10 minutes to learn." It is not even 5 years to learn. All of these Silicon Valley people saying they "taught the AI the rules of music theory through machine learning" are just lying. They just fed a bunch of pop charts into the AI and it "learned" that I–V–vi–IV is a common progression. That's not music literacy.



of course its not 10 minutes to learn. But the day will come when A.I. engineers will connect some monitors to the parts of human brain related to "pleasure centers", etc. and they machines will use machine learning to present musical ideas and monitor the results in the brain...and the machine will learn at a level unprecedented, what musical ideas cause people go "ooh I like that one". The musical rules of theory are actually pretty trite and easy in comparison to that fact.


----------



## Dewdman42

RoyBatty said:


> I would think you can say the same thing about how DAWs and Orchestral Samples are doing, or have been doing, the same thing to musicianship. Are we on VIC guilty of destroying musicianship?


I agree 100%. Taken further...the mass explosion of entertainment media in my lifetime has turned entire generations into consumers....rather then creators.


----------



## cmillar

RoyBatty said:


> I would think you can say the same thing about how DAWs and Orchestral Samples are doing, or have been doing, the same thing to musicianship. Are we on VIC guilty of destroying musicianship?


I think that if someone has grown up in the last decade and has only listened to music produced by software libraries that are aimed at the trailer music business or has only been exposed to loop based music tools, then they have an extremely low degree of musianship and no awareness of real creative possibilities. They’re just consumers and users of glorified “paint by numbers”


----------



## Gerbil

tack said:


> "There is not a hope in hell that machines will be able to <X>" has been a very common statement for a great many values of X. It seems rather quaint nowadays to realize that was once said of chess, and somewhat more recently Go, or StarCraft. Or conversational language. Or paintings.
> 
> I feel like this statement comes from either:
> 
> Underestimating the tenacity and cleverness of our fellow humans in the pursuit of advancing the state of the art of computer science
> Believing that there is some kind of ineffable qualia to the human experience and that X is the product of that experience, remaining forever outside the grasp of the digital domain.
> Even if #2 is valid, I see no reason to believe that music is one of those things.
> 
> Maybe you can expand a bit more as to why you feel certain that's impossible?


Spoken like a scientist. But music isn’t chess and, as yet, there has been no evidence that AI is self-aware. Without that it has no self-expression or true understanding of what it is it is creating. You need that feedback loop to create great music.

Formulaic music exists in abundance. We hear it here on this forum. That will all be emulated in the not too distant future. But great works like the Hammerklavier or the op.131 quartets were born not just from profound logic or an innate understanding of the ebb and flow needed to make a compelling piece of music, but also a desire to move into territory never before explored. AI doesn’t have that desire. It isn’t going to reach the extra dimensions Beethoven opened up.

If AI technology ever becomes fully self-aware, I will alter my opinion. But I suspect that it wont.


----------



## Hadrondrift

Dewdman42 said:


> and the machine will learn at a level unprecedented, what musical ideas cause people go "ooh I like that one"


Would the machine then also have learned how to create this music?


----------



## RoyBatty

cmillar said:


> I think that if someone has grown up in the last decade and has only listened to music produced by software libraries that are aimed at the trailer music business or has only been exposed to loop based music tools, then they have an extremely low degree of musianship and no awareness of real creative possibilities. They’re just consumers and users of glorified “paint by numbers”


I would love to know the % of finalized orchestral music is sample only now, and how much of that has taken jobs way from musicians compared to 20-40 years ago.


----------



## Chris Schmidt

Nico5 said:


> ... the sweet irony of this thread:
> 
> Individuals who rely on (and drive the demand for) advanced music making technology, lamenting about advanced music making technology.


Yeah, but then there is a chasm of difference between technology which serves as tools to make a job easier (notation software copy + paste saves a lot of time for doubling parts and repeating sections) and tech which serves to eliminate craftsmanship and workers altogether in order to fuel corporate profits and sometimes government political interests. This AI composing stuff falls into the latter camp.

Secondly, many of us here actually started before any of this "advanced music making technology" even existed — yet we were still composers. 

I will also say it's pretty clear that the standards for composers (and everything else) were higher before DAWs, loop packages, sample libraries, etc. existed, or at least became affordable. A lot of music that has come out in the last 20 years is directly the result of high-accessibility and abysmally-low ability.

Being good at something is directly related to actually _doing it_ in the first place.

And as a relevant side note, people are going to really start feeling this on a civilizational scale over the next 20 years as the baby boomer generation dies off, because the majority of the Gen-X, Millennial and Z generations have nothing for practical skills and always rely on a machine (that they don't know how to operate themselves) or an older person to fix and build anything. 

Personally, I'm more worried about that than I am about AI music tbh


----------



## flampton

Dewdman42 said:


> I agree 100%. Taken further...the mass explosion of entertainment media in my lifetime has turned entire generations into consumers....rather then creators.


What are you even talking about? Creators and their creations best describes the current state of the world (youtube, tiktok, instagram, bandcamp, soundcloud). The problem is there is too much crap being created. It is hard to find diamonds when everyone is spitting coal in your face.


----------



## tack

Gerbil said:


> You need that feedback loop to create great music.


You need a feedback loop yes, but I don't think it's the one you're arguing (self-awareness and an inate understanding of the mechanics of what it's producing). I like Dewdman's argument earlier. ML improves itself through competition so you need some form of scoring outcomes, and if that scoring comes from, say, fMRI readings or dopamine levels, it can converge on an outcome humans would consider to be astounding creativity without having any notion of self awareness.


----------



## Gerbil

tack said:


> You need a feedback loop yes, but I don't think it's the one you're arguing (self-awareness and an inate understanding of the mechanics of what it's producing). I like Dewdman's argument earlier. ML improves itself through competition so you need some form of scoring outcomes, and if that scoring comes from, say, fMRI readings or dopamine levels, it can converge on an outcome humans would consider to be astounding creativity without having any notion of self awareness.


It will be interesting to see. As I said, I'll take the bet.

Btw, thanks for all your incredible work with Reaper. I don't think I'd get half as much stuff done without it.


----------



## tack

Gerbil said:


> It will be interesting to see. As I said, I'll take the bet.


One way or the other it's going to be interesting, yep, and probably ultimately shocking how wrong in our predictions we'll both be. 



Gerbil said:


> Btw, thanks for all your incredible work with Reaper. I don't think I'd get half as much stuff done without it.


Thanks! Stay tuned for the next release of Reaticulate which will come with ArticulateAI™ technology


----------



## blaggins

I've been enjoying following this thread, lots of interesting takes in here. However I keep seeing references to Microsoft and Disney being investors. The quote is the following:



> To date, Soundful has raised somewhere around $4 million in seed funding – apparently from “leaders” of companies such as Disney and Microsoft. A fuller Series A round is expected to open soon.



"Leaders of companies" is a euphemism for "some of our investors work in executive management at famous places, which we will now namedrop". Getting a complete list of their investors would be impossible until and when they are public, unless all parties agree to disclose, and who knows, maybe those companies are indeed formally invested, but that's not what they are claiming.


----------



## pinki

Hadrondrift said:


> I studied computer science about 30 years ago. I did my student research project in the field of artificial intelligence. At that time, everyone was sure that in a few years chess computers would be unbeatable because the hardware, the processor speed and also the algorithms would have improved to such an extent that even world champions would have no chance.
> 
> This prediction has come true.
> 
> At the time, there was also a lot of scientific controversy. It was about the so-called strong and weak AI. The representatives of strong AI wanted much more than chess. They wanted to replicate human intelligence using computers and algorithms. Real machine creativity, real thinking, the ability to abstract, all this, they imagined, could and would be achieved by machines. Everything, they said, was merely a matter of time, hardware speed and sophisticated algorithms. At the time, this faction was certain that in perhaps 30 years, algorithms would have improved to the point where true artificial intelligence would be possible.
> 
> That prediction has not come true.
> 
> Today, we are just as far along in the field of strong AI as we were then. There has been a great deal of disillusionment in this regard. And hardly anyone today believes that it will take only 30 more years for strong AI to finally achieve a breakthrough. Hardly any research funds are allocated to universities today for research into strong AI, but a great deal is allocated to _weak_ AI.
> 
> Yes, great achievements: Amazing advances in pattern recognition, facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, incredible advances in machine language translation (DeepL), image processing, production planning. But machine creativity? Originality? Completely absent.
> 
> So has Soundful, this artificial intelligence-driven music-generating platform, now made the breakthrough? I have very strong doubts about that, no matter how many more millions are invested in it. By "artificial intelligence-driven" they still mean the weak AI.
> 
> Do we even know what creativity is? Where do people get their motivation from? Do emotions play an important role? Is creativity perhaps non-computable? Are computers - or Turing machines in general - perhaps fundamentally unsuitable tools for the creation of creativity and originality? Exciting even philosophical questions.
> 
> Results of music generating applications are judged by humans. If these judging people cannot distinguish machine-generated musical results from man-made works, then for me this is a statement about current man-made music and about its content of creativity, not a statement about algorithmic quality.


Yes, perfectly put. End of discussion. Curtis Roads has written the same. 
Why do we have to keep having the "AI is going to replace human creativity" conversation any more? It's not.


----------



## TonalDynamics

NekujaK said:


> And let's not turn up our noses at mediocrity. Mediocrity is where most of the money is, like it or not. That's why investors see such a big money-making opportunity in tech like Soundful. If it can deliver on its promise, there will be a long line of customers willing to pay money for the mediocre music it cranks out.


Agreed, _but..._

Not yet


----------



## NekujaK

tpoots said:


> I've been enjoying following this thread, lots of interesting takes in here. However I keep seeing references to Microsoft and Disney being investors. The quote is the following:
> 
> 
> 
> "Leaders of companies" is a euphemism for "some of our investors work in executive management at famous places, which we will now namedrop". Getting a complete list of their investors would be impossible until and when they are public, unless all parties agree to disclose, and who knows, maybe those companies are indeed formally invested, but that's not what they are claiming.


Fair point. But even if it's a euphenmism, the apple is falling awfully close to the tree. Either way, I don't think it's a stretch to assume companies like Microsoft, Disney, Discovery, etc. are keeping a close eye on, and probably rooting for, technologies like Soundful.


----------



## timbit2006

YaniDee said:


> As long as parents keep sending their kids to piano/violin/guitar lessons, and schools keep their band programs going, we should be ok..


You see that's what they said about Shop class. Now there is no more shop class and we have a generation of children who can't even turn a damned wrench. I dread the day we see the musical equivalent of that.


----------



## flampton

timbit2006 said:


> You see that's what they said about Shop class. Now there is no more shop class and we have a generation of children who can't even turn a damned wrench. I dread the day we see the musical equivalent of that.


This is interesting because it shows that in some cases the professionals win. The less people that can fix their own things the more professionals that can be supported.


----------



## cmillar

NekujaK said:


> That industry is definitely threatened by the likes of Soundful, and what's worse, it puts more power and control into the hands of media conglomerates. It's pretty clear why Microsoft and Disney are major backers of Soundful.


Re: Disney….

I’ve a friend who was a script editor for the storyline of the original “Lion King” movie.

Disney did numerous audience test viewings until they hit on, as my friend who was in the room said, they came up with a movie that wouldn’t offend anyone and could be globally accepted (at the time). There were high fives all around.

My writer friend said they kept ‘dumbing it down’ until he thought all the ‘real meat’ was removed.

But he added that Zimmer’s music helped save the movie!

So Disney made zillions of dollars, and then went to Broadway in New York… only to cut deals with the theater and music unions to cut costs, wages, royalties, etc so they could make even more.

I can see a future with “all-AI” production by Disney and others (digitized actors, AI music). Entire Major Media productions delivered by only a couple of well-connected people sitting in a room full of PR people dictating to them what they believe will sell (according to whatever they last saw on TicToc)

Oh!….we’re actually already there! 

Long live real art from the world’s variety of cultures. Down with the so called ‘democratization of creative content’ and corporatization of art.


----------



## jmauz

flampton said:


> I remember when drum machines were supposed to replace all the drummers. Still waiting for that supposed eventuality.


I've been a session drummer for over 20 years and my work has dried up significantly. Drum machines haven't replaced drummers 100% but it's getting close. 

How many pop songs have you heard in the last 15 years that featured a real drummer?


----------



## Vlzmusic

On the surface, seems like a lame implementation. Midi drums and synths that have its notes picked by an algorithm... Wake me up when your AI can render a cd quality Latin band performance without any actual samples, but from top of its head, like those human portrait generators etc. 

You can teach a monkey to do what it does now.


----------



## timbit2006

flampton said:


> This is interesting because it shows that in some cases the professionals win. The less people that can fix their own things the more professionals that can be supported.


I'd much rather go back to the days of "Kit Built Radios" rather than accept this nonsense. My oscilloscope is a kit build from the 50s, I don't think that put anyone out of work back then!


----------



## Kyle Preston

McDonald's hasn't made chefs obsolete.


----------



## NekujaK

Kyle Preston said:


> McDonald's hasn't made chefs obsolete.


No, but it did put a lot of mom n pop food stands and drive-ins out of business. There are always casualties when franchises and chains move into territories. It's unavoidable.


----------



## MisteR

YaniDee said:


> Are you joking, if so ha-ha..Otherwise, I'm talking about high school bands..like trumpets, clarinets, flutes, and other archaic acoustic instruments..


Oh, those. Haven’t seen one of those in a while. Yes, I’m joking. But worried given the state of funding.


----------



## flampton

jmauz said:


> I've been a session drummer for over 20 years and my work has dried up significantly. Drum machines haven't replaced drummers 100% but it's getting close.
> 
> How many pop songs have you heard in the last 15 years that featured a real drummer?


This is confusing the issue because popular songs (pop) isn't a static description. The current popular music does tend to use drum machines and what this suggests is that the music you want to get paid to play for is just not as popular anymore. There are many many other types of music that are less popular that utilize real drums and drummers and you might have to take a pay cut to enter that scene. The other idea is to create music that will bring the popularity of the acoustic kit back up, or grab some midi drums and offer that service as well? 

This reminds me of the fall of the hair bands to grunge. Tastes change, and doing pushups on the guitar was no longer important to the culture. They wanted grit. And as such a guitarist either bitched and moaned(and failed), stayed true to their style and made (a lot) less money or changed their style to fit the times. I'm sure this went for the vocalists, bassists and drummers of the time I'm sure, but I am a guitarist so heard the most complaining from that group.


----------



## R.G.

@NekujaK

How do you reconcile the concern you have about Soundful with your post no. 16 in the concurrent "Cheater Software" thread (which I quote below)? The software you're promoting there _already_ devalues the art & craft of composing, _already_ dumbs down what it means to be a composer. Soundful is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of such "cheater software"; the only difference is that it cheats more than the others, so your concern appears to be one of degree, not of principle.

As I said prior: Live by the tech; die by the tech.





__





Best Cheating Software (AI, Chord Generators...etc.)


Let's get this out of the way, if you are against using tools that generate MIDI chords, melodies, arps...etc. this post is not for you. I've spent my last 12 years building VFX software that helps you cheat by cutting to the end result without having to learn complex visual effects concepts...




vi-control.net





Post no. 16:


NekujaK said:


> There are Kontakt libraries that generate rhythms, sequences, and/or whole backing tracks with just a few clicks. They won't generate an entire piece, but they can provide a well-developed foundation on which to build further ideas.
> 
> Here are some developers that specialize in these types of libraries:
> 
> - *Sample Logic*: IMHO they have the best randomization engines and offer high quality sounds. Check out libraries like Arpology, Expeditions, Morphestra, Symphonic AI, etc.
> 
> - *Audiofier*: Practically the entire line is about one-finger music creation with plenty of randomization options. Check out the Veevum series, Xtyles, Tetrality, etc.
> 
> - *Rigid Audio*: Their Loop-Based libraries are basically a one-finger band that allow you to randomly mix and match among four musical parts to create backing arrangements. Libraries like Synferno, Cinematrix, Acoustic Isolation, etc. come with a surprisingly large amount of content. Just don't pay full price for these - they often go on sale for below $10 each.
> 
> There is also the *Toontrack *trifecta of EZdrummer, EZkeys, and EZbass. Although it requires a bit of concentrated effort, these tools can be used in conjunction with each other to generate complete fully-realized backing tracks. It's not a one-click solution, but the results are far more musical than most one-click gadgets. To broaden the range of what's possible, I'd recommend investing in EZkeys MIDI packs, since these provide the harmonic structure and musical stylings for the final arrangement.


----------



## flampton

timbit2006 said:


> I'd much rather go back to the days of "Kit Built Radios" rather than accept this nonsense. My oscilloscope is a kit build from the 50s, I don't think that put anyone out of work back then!


If at any time you do something that you could have paid someone else to do you are putting someone out of work. Every time you drive to work you could have hired someone to do it. Every time you cook, clean, wash your car, wire up a lamp etc. And when you put that radio together yourself you deprived someone else of money. And when enough (especially rich) people stop paying for everyone to do stuff for them and withdraw from the economy that is what is called a great depression.


----------



## Kyle Preston

NekujaK said:


> No, but it did put a lot of mom n pop food stands and drive-ins out of business. There are always casualties when franchises and chains move into territories. It's unavoidable.



Agreed!

But tech is rarely the _cause _of these scenarios, it's usually caused by monopolies (Walmart, McD's, etc.). Which are "supposed to be" illegal.

Also, if you have a half hour to kill, this video is really, REALLY good (though not entirely related to AI, but monopolistic practices). 

​


----------



## NekujaK

R.G. said:


> @NekujaK
> 
> How do you reconcile the concern you have about Soundful with your post no. 16 in the concurrent "Cheater Software" thread (which I quote below)? The software you're promoting there _already_ devalues the art & craft of composing, _already_ dumbs down what it means to be a composer. Soundful is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of such "cheater software"; the only difference is that it cheats more than the others, so your concern appears to be one of degree than of principle.
> 
> As I said prior: Live by the tech; die by the tech.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Best Cheating Software (AI, Chord Generators...etc.)
> 
> 
> Let's get this out of the way, if you are against using tools that generate MIDI chords, melodies, arps...etc. this post is not for you. I've spent my last 12 years building VFX software that helps you cheat by cutting to the end result without having to learn complex visual effects concepts...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> vi-control.net
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Post no. 16:


Easy to reconcile. I was merely listing some available options that satisfy the OP's original request. I wasn't promoting or endorsing these libraries, merely pointing out they exist and what they're capable of.

But there's a much more important distinction. Those libraries are intended to be used by composers to assist in the composing process. Soundful is meant to be used by those who typically pay for music created by composers (TV networks, music supervisors, marketing depts, etc.). The grand promise of Soundful is that it replaces the need for composers, engineers, studios, musicians, and music libraries by delivering fully produced music on request.

Soundful and Audiofier's Veevums, for example, are two completely different beasts aimed at two completely different types of users. Sure, there's some overlap because they both generate music to varying degrees, but their intended use and target audience couldn't be more different.

Some people in this thread are reacting to Soundful as if it's another AI composition tool to be thrown into our composer bag, but that's really not the case. Soundful is aiming much, much higher at where the real money is.


----------



## NekujaK

Kyle Preston said:


> But tech is rarely the _cause _of these scenarios, it's usually caused by monopolies (Walmart, McD's, etc.). Which are "supposed to be" illegal.


Yes, absolutely! In the case of Soundful, it just happens to be tech that may enable media giants like Disney and Discovery to become monopolies that control every aspect of media creation. In this case, music.


----------



## Gabriel S.

Guys, before speculating and fearing the worst, having nightmares about the end of the music industry and so on...



Parameters: Music style, tempo and key. How many really different tracks can this thing make and how personalised can it be with just these 3 parameters? It looks like an advanced version of a sample pack.

Zero worries. Keep studying, keep composing, keep improving.


----------



## timbit2006

flampton said:


> If at any time you do something that you could have paid someone else to do you are putting someone out of work. Every time you drive to work you could have hired someone to do it. Every time you cook, clean, wash your car, wire up a lamp etc. And when you put that radio together yourself you deprived someone else of money. And when enough (especially rich) people stop paying for everyone to do stuff for them and withdraw from the economy that is what is called a great depression.


I strongly disagree and wont extrapolate further. 
By those rights this forum should be deleted because it promotes learning about how to use Virtual Instruments, something that guys like Hans Zimmer get paid to do so I better not dare trod onto their territory whatsoever.


----------



## Pier

Gabriel S. said:


> Guys, before speculating and fearing the worst, having nightmares about the end of the music industry and so on...
> 
> 
> 
> Parameters: Music style, tempo and key. How many really different tracks can this thing make and how personalised can it be with just these 3 parameters? It looks like an advanced version of a sample pack.
> 
> Zero worries. Keep studying, keep composing, keep improving.



Why tf did he start spraying with Windex at the end? 😂


----------



## timbit2006

In all reality though, how many on VI-Control are making money by making backing beats for generic wannabe bedroom studio 200 dollar recording setup rappers?

POV: You just lost your career to some generic rapper beat generator


----------



## flampton

R.G. said:


> @NekujaK
> 
> How do you reconcile the concern you have about Soundful with your post no. 16 in the concurrent "Cheater Software" thread (which I quote below)? The software you're promoting there _already_ devalues the art & craft of composing, _already_ dumbs down what it means to be a composer. Soundful is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of such "cheater software"; the only difference is that it cheats more than the others, so your concern appears to be one of degree, not of principle.
> 
> As I said prior: Live by the tech; die by the tech.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Best Cheating Software (AI, Chord Generators...etc.)
> 
> 
> Let's get this out of the way, if you are against using tools that generate MIDI chords, melodies, arps...etc. this post is not for you. I've spent my last 12 years building VFX software that helps you cheat by cutting to the end result without having to learn complex visual effects concepts...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> vi-control.net
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Post no. 16:


I'm not sure you understand but your theory is just a cheat. What you spent all your time learning was how to 'cheat' (create music) faster (maybe better?) than someone who didn't have the time or resources to learn. And btw by your logic you are cheating the composers who had to invent the theory. And those composers are cheating the composers in the Ancient World who invented the notes and scales. 

And yes I get why this software makes you insecure because change is hard. Rest assured if your music is good someone may pay you for it, and if not well then hope for socialism I guess? So stop shaming people for using new tools to make music. It is ridiculous.



timbit2006 said:


> I strongly disagree and wont extrapolate further.
> By those rights this forum should be deleted because it promotes learning about how to use Virtual Instruments, something that guys like Hans Zimmer get paid to do so I better not dare trod onto their territory whatsoever.


Well you extrapolated further. 

Anyways I think you misunderstand the concept. I obviously don't pay people to do all those things but I am at least aware that I am part of the economy and my choices are what help drive the economy. And Hans Zimmer is a strange choice as he is very aware of the current economy and that is why he has his name on some tools in the VI pool.


----------



## Kyle Preston

NekujaK said:


> Yes, absolutely! In the case of Soundful, it just happens to be tech that may enable media giants like Disney and Discovery to become monopolies that control every aspect of media creation. In this case, music.



This is a fair point. 

I think I'm growing numb to these apocalyptic scenarios though. Every few months, there's a new thread about some new AI tech company that threatens our music careers -- it usually amounts to nothing but a company attracting more investors to burn cash at an astounding rate. Then, it fizzles out like a wet fart. 

Always good to be watchful, but this Promethean fear so often results in nothing but wasted energy. And even if we're all "replaced" by AI, I'll never stop writing. Fuck em!


----------



## TonalDynamics

Vlzmusic said:


> On the surface, seems like a lame implementation. Midi drums and synths that have its notes picked by an algorithm... Wake me up when your AI can render a cd quality Latin band performance without any actual samples, but from top of its head, like those human portrait generators etc.
> 
> You can teach a monkey to do what it does now.


Not just the human generators, those 'art-generators' are dogshit too. What those redditors don't tell you is the hundreds of garbage renders they had to wait on just to get something remotely interesting.

And that's _one_ frame--no continuity like with an actual VFX artist. Imagine having that discussion with the computer: "YES, do me a dozen more just like that, but with fire and the people are all ten feet tall and have on business suits inside a bowling alley and- no computer, nooo no no—NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO"

Yet they frame these 'one-offs' very proudly indeed!

It's a genre of art, I'll give 'em that. Does it replace having discussions with an actual artist who can make illustrations for you? No, and I'd wager anyone who wants to bet me that it won't in 100 years.


----------



## synergy543

Kyle Preston said:


> McDonald's hasn't made chefs obsolete.


No, but its made the world crave McDonalds, instead of "real food" and the creations of gourmet chefs. We're already living in a world of mediocrity. Would you like fries with that?


----------



## TonalDynamics

synergy543 said:


> No, but its made the world crave McDonalds, instead of "real food" and the creations of gourmet chefs.


You could argue the other side of that and say fast food discouraged people from wanting to become a chef--thereby leading to a chef 'shortage' and ultimately making them a more valuable asset.

This article provides a bit of reading on the topic:
Is the long-term chef shortage over... or just paused?

_I'm_ not making that argument btw, because I don't know enough to form an educated opinion on the matter, but they provide some interesting supporting evidence for the case.

(COVID changed this dynamic of course)

Cheers


----------



## Dewdman42

Hadrondrift said:


> Would the machine then also have learned how to create this music?



Machines are already able to create music. What they lack for now is the ability to understand what it is that causes listeners to enjoy listening to it. As musicians we have an intuitive sense about it because musical patterns cause our synapses to fire a certain way that will make us feel things. We listen to those sensibilities while creating music to guide us. This may seem like it’s magic but it’s not really magic it’s just very complex pattern recognition. Yes eventually machines will understand those patterns at as good or better level then we do subconsciously.


----------



## TonalDynamics

Dewdman42 said:


> Machines are already able to create music. What they lack for now is the ability to understand what it is that causes listeners to enjoy listening to it. As musicians we have an intuitive sense about it because musical patterns cause our synapses to fire a certain way that will make us feel things. We listen to those sensibilities while creating music to guide us. This may seem like it’s magic but it’s not really magic it’s just very complex pattern recognition. Yes eventually machines will understand those patterns at as good or better level then we do subconsciously.


I disagree, I don't think it's 'just' pattern recognition, it's patterns, expression, and interpretation, dynamism, timbre and tonality, style, ensemble type, genre, production quality, etc, in varying proportions.

If it were that simple, graduates from music colleges would all be superstar composers--yet they lack some understanding that the great masters had and are unable to produce the same quality of work.

Countless textbooks we still use today are nearing or past 100 years old.

If we can't even _define_ what ultimate music 'competency' is, what makes you think someone will be able to teach a computer how to learn what that is (neural net training)?

I just think you're looking at it too linearly, and underestimating the near-infinite nature of the medium.


----------



## Dewdman42

flampton said:


> What are you even talking about? Creators and their creations best describes the current state of the world (youtube, tiktok, instagram, bandcamp, soundcloud). The problem is there is too much crap being created. It is hard to find diamonds when everyone is spitting coal in your face.


that is not real creativity for the most part all the “crap” you are calling coal, and I agree, but is mostly just derivative in nature. Older generations of kids had to play make believe to entertain themselves. They literally had to create things out of thin air. Newer generations watched videos and played games. They participated in an experience that was partly or in some cases mostly; not their own creation. They did not exercise the creative part of their brain at all. As such we see an onslaught of people mimicking things very very well, but this is an extremely watered down version of creativity. The word “create” can be used to describe simple constructing something of any kind. But if someone creates something using a formula or a blueprint, that is not true creativity that is simply deriving yet another senseless TikTok video or whatever. There is no question that technology has dumbed down the creative minds of newer generations. That is what I am talking about. You might be right there are some jewels about there that learned to be more creative but where are they now? Hidden under a mountain of mediocrity that technology has enabled.


----------



## Gabriel S.

I just dived deeper into it.
So, basically startups tend to be very open about who is working there...so you should be able to find all the important team members in LinkedIn.

Well, I don't find ANY AI expert in their team. Usually such an ambitious AI project (a computer creating music from scratch, completely new and original) should have at least one member with a PhD in Machine Learning. Somebody with tons of experience, research and knowledge on the field. Well, I can see a senior Head of Engineering, with experience as CTO, and software engineers who actually studied music + some engineering...but not a single AI field expert. How can you then create some advanced AI than can create quality finished, mixed and mastered music from scratch, something that not even the smartest AI experts at Google could?

People here are comparing this to AI companies who have some of the smartest brains out there, with real experts in AI...and years of research. This company was founded not even 2 years ago...

So conclusion, it's just probably an advanced Splice, if they are lucky.


----------



## TonalDynamics

Dewdman42 said:


> that is not real creativity for the most part all the “crap” you are calling coal, and I agree, but is mostly just derivative in nature. Older generations of kids had to play make believe to entertain themselves. They literally had to create things out of thin air. Newer generations watched videos and played games. They participated in an experience that was partly or in some cases mostly not their own creation. They did not exercise the creative part of their brain at al. As such we such and onslaught of people mimicking things very very well, but this extremely watered down version of creativity. The word “create” can be used to describe simple constructing something of any kind. But is someone creates something using a formula or a blueprint, that is not true creativity that is simply deriving yet another senseless til too video or whatever. There is no question that technology has dumbed down the creative minds of newer generations. That is what I am taking about. You might be right there are some jewels about there that learned to be more creative but where are they now? Hidden under a mountain of mediocrity that technology has enabled.


On this point however, we are in total agreement.


----------



## Kyle Preston

synergy543 said:


> No, but its made the world crave McDonalds, instead of "real food" and the creations of gourmet chefs. We're already living in a world of mediocrity. Would you like fries with that?


_"The world"_ already craved the garbage that's in a McDonald's meal. THAT's why they're so popular. They didn't invent anything (except a process, which was stolen). It's a problem of abundance, NOT scarcity. And they didn't invent mediocrity, they capitalized on it. 

That's a pretty important difference -- that is, if you actually care about solving the issue. 

And clearly, people still crave food from chefs.


----------



## R.G.

flampton said:


> I'm not sure you understand but your theory is just a cheat. What you spent all your time learning was how to 'cheat' (create music) faster (maybe better?) than someone who didn't have the time or resources to learn. And btw by your logic you are cheating the composers who had to invent the theory. And those composers are cheating the composers in the Ancient World who invented the notes and scales.
> 
> And yes I get why this software makes you insecure because change is hard. Rest assured if your music is good someone may pay you for it, and if not well then hope for socialism I guess? So stop shaming people for using new tools to make music. It is ridiculous.


Are you for real? You might as well have asked me if I've stopped beating my wife for all the sense that your bizarre post makes. Each sentence gets progressively worse than the one before it. Take some deep breaths. In with the good air; out with the bad. Go for a walk. Get some fresh air and sunshine. Drink your juice box and eat your cookies. Take a nap. And then get back to being awesome. Those MIDI packs and loop generators aren't gonna run by themselves after all. Someone needs to be there to push the button.


----------



## Dewdman42

TonalDynamics said:


> I disagree, I don't think it's 'just' pattern recognition, it's patterns, expression, and interpretation, dynamism, timbre and tonality, style, ensemble type, genre, production quality, etc, in varying proportions.



Those are all just parameters of the patterns. While it may seem impossible for a human to relate all those things and make sense of them, consciously, we do it subconciously and it’s only a matter of time before a computer can do it with more intent then we can.



> If it were that simple, graduates from music colleges would all be superstar composers--yet they lack some understanding that the great masters had and are unable to produce the same quality of work.



I’m definitely not saying it is simple. Humans are not capable of consciously factoring all those parameters into recogniazable patterns because of their complexity. We do it subconsciously. Computers are quite able to see those patterns though.



> I just think you're looking at it too linearly, and underestimating the near-infinite nature of the medium.



Ok thanks


----------



## TonalDynamics

R.G. said:


> Are you for real? You might as well have asked me if I've stopped beating my wife for all the sense that your bizarre post makes. Each sentence gets progressively worse than the one before it. Take some deep breaths. In with the good air; out with the bad. Go for a walk. Get some fresh air and sunshine. Drink your juice box and eat your cookies. Take a nap. And then get back to being awesome. Those MIDI packs and loop generators aren't gonna run by themselves after all. Someone needs to be there to push the button.


I just read his post.

Imagine thinking, let alone writing something so incoherent...

By his logic anyone who went to film school also cheated everyone too poor (or uninterested) to buy a camera and pursue an education.

Imagine thinking that talent, commitment, and hard work (which there is plenty of during the course of pursuing said education) were out the window, and there were only the 'cheaters'--who know all the 'theory secrets' (which have been well-known for hundreds of years), and the 'purists', who labor much more honestly and respectably as they try to reinvent the wheel...

I tried--and accidentally forgot that water was wet in the process.


----------



## pinki

Dewdman42 said:


> Those are all just parameters of the patterns. While it may seem impossible for a human to relate all those things and make sense of them, consciously, we do it subconciously and it’s only a matter of time before a computer can do it with more intent then we can.
> 
> 
> 
> I’m definitely not saying it is simple. Humans are not capable of consciously factoring all those parameters into recogniazable patterns because of their complexity. We do it subconsciously. Computers are quite able to see those patterns though.
> 
> 
> 
> Ok thanks


I also respectfully disagree. You are approaching music in a a purely reductive and scientific manner. This type of analysis of art misses the essential essence.


----------



## flampton

R.G. said:


> Are you for real? You might as well have asked me if I've stopped beating my wife for all the sense that your bizarre post makes. Each sentence gets progressively worse than the one before it. Take some deep breaths. In with the good air; out with the bad. Go for a walk. Get some fresh air and sunshine. Drink your juice box and eat your cookies. Take a nap. And then get back to being awesome. Those MIDI packs and loop generators aren't gonna run by themselves after all. Someone needs to be there to push the button.


You object to these programs, yes? And so you are trying to control information for your own economic benefit. By shaming people for using these tools what you're doing is classic gatekeeping. Probably the most ancient economic tactic. And then trying to paint me as a wacko is the best, aka the gaslight two step. As it shows you have no logical response. You know that having more people create music is a good thing. Yet you don't want the competition so you say something silly like they are cheating. No one is taking anything away from you, and in fact you also have these tools at your disposal. 




TonalDynamics said:


> I just read his post.
> 
> Imagine thinking, let alone writing something so incoherent...
> 
> By his logic anyone who went to film school also cheated everyone too poor (or uninterested) to buy a camera and pursue an education.
> 
> Imagine thinking that talent, commitment, and hard work (which there is plenty of during the course of pursuing said education) were out the window, and there were only the 'cheaters'--who know all the 'theory secrets' (which have been well-known for hundreds of years), and the 'purists', who labor much more honestly and respectably as they try to reinvent the wheel...
> 
> I tried--and accidentally forgot that water was wet in the process.


I don't think you understood my post at all. RG refers to midi randomizer programs as cheating. I said that using music theory could be called cheating by a composer that did not have it yet available. Basically using the tools available cannot be called cheating unless there are rules. And as far as I know there are currently no rules on music making in most western countries. And so the only reason to gatekeep, and leave those who are poor and have no chance to be educated 'properly' out of your field is pure economic insecurity. And it is reeking from RG. I mean he tried to shame the OP because he dared to post this AND post on a 'cheating' program thread. 

Now tell me again both of you. Should the poor or those less well off, or who come from a country with no music school available, or are a late starter, be able to use these tools to compose? And if they do are they cheating? And what if they create amazing music with these tools and it leads them to a patron(s) that supports them and helps them finish their theory work that they started to first learn through musical experimentation and hard work? Did they do it by cheating? Was it all a sham? Should they have not been allowed? 

I will say this now, anyone who tries to shame others on a board for learning virtual instruments (which these so called cheat programs clearly are) is economically anxious and fearing replacement.


----------



## Dewdman42

pinki said:


> I also respectfully disagree. You are approaching music in a a purely reductive and scientific manner. This type of analysis of art misses the essential essence.



Uhm ok if you say so. Listen I made it clear from the start I am not in favor of AI. I’m just saying, like it or not… it’s coming. And it’s going to be able to do a lot more then people think; without ever becoming sentient. And yes that should frighten you.


----------



## Pappaus

I think this really enjoyable thread is starting to sour a bit because there are really two separate issues going on here. 
one is technology taking jobs from people. Toll booth attendants, live bands, factory workers, and book store owners would all be saying “ So this is your bad day now….. welcome to the party pal”. These jobs haven’t been erased, just seriously diminished by EZ-Pass, DJs, Robots, and Amazon. 

The other is the quality and value of human vs machine output. If 50 years of 3 chord rock has told us anything, The human element has a unique Ability to add value to what would seem to be a rote set of rules, style, and tropes.


----------



## smellypants

Dewdman42 said:


> Uhm ok if you say so. Listen I made it clear from the start I am not in favor of AI. I’m just saying, like it or not… it’s coming. And it’s going to be able to do a lot more then people think; without ever becoming sentient. And yes that should frighten you.


Dude its hard for me to watch that Dall-E2 video and not think that it won't be long before Ai will be able to make any type of music in any style at least as well as the best composers ever at the click of a button.

I do hope its not the case but... That video swayed me 😕


----------



## Chris Schmidt

Pappaus said:


> The other is the quality and value of human vs machine output. If 50 years of 3 chord rock has told us anything, The human element has a unique Ability to add value to what would seem to be a rote set of rules, style, and tropes.


The way I see it is that there are two aspects to composing music:

There is the technical/craft aspect of it. Which is the set of "rules" and mechanics that make music pleasant to listen to on a fundamental level.

Then there is the aesthetic side of it. Personal, arguably arbitrary decisions that take something from "good" to great and are purely done to enhance the aesthetic of the piece.

The first can be taught, the second I don't think can, and I doubt machine-learning can replicate this distinctly-human trait, which also happens to be of little interest to most "industries" these days anyway. 

For example, at the start of Hedwig's theme from John Williams, he uses the Oboe (and I think maybe some other winds) to play these short little trills that sound like an owl hooting. The types of doublings or instruments you choose for a particular line, the decision to put a run in X spot, etc.

At the end of this blues-rock inspired track I did a couple years ago, I opted to put a phaser on just a _single note_ at the end for no other reason than I thought it would sound cool, and although it was a small detail, a lot of people also liked it...but I didn't _have_ to do it for the track to still sound good.

I just don't see computers ever being aesthetes in the way that people can.


----------



## flampton

Pappaus said:


> I think this really enjoyable thread is starting to sour a bit because there are really two separate issues going on here.
> one is technology taking jobs from people. Toll booth attendants, live bands, factory workers, and book store owners would all be saying “ So this is your bad day now….. welcome to the party pal”. These jobs haven’t been erased, just seriously diminished by EZ-Pass, DJs, Robots, and Amazon.
> 
> The other is the quality and value of human vs machine output. If 50 years of 3 chord rock has told us anything, The human element has a unique Ability to add value to what would seem to be a rote set of rules, style, and tropes.


I will argue that three chord rock lyrics illuminate and amplify economic class differences that interest people and the music is to package it for cultural acceptance. And that the general public would not listen to three chord rock instrumentals on purpose BUT also wouldn’t listen to spoken word versions either. 

And I also posit a AI song will only require a human vocalist to be ‘accepted.’


----------



## R.G.

flampton said:


> You object to these programs, yes? And so you are trying to control information for your own economic benefit. By shaming people for using these tools what you're doing is classic gatekeeping. Probably the most ancient economic tactic. And then trying to paint me as a wacko is the best, aka the gaslight two step. As it shows you have no logical response. You know that having more people create music is a good thing. Yet you don't want the competition so you say something silly like they are cheating. No one is taking anything away from you, and in fact you also have these tools at your disposal.


Look up: "When did you stop beating your wife?" fallacy. I don't enjoy that game. If the whole world ran out of electricity, I could still make music, just as I have more times than I can possibly remember, simply by writing into open score by hand and by ear. Moreover, I can professionally copy the parts, and conduct the damn thing on top of all that. There's not a single piece of software that threatens me or adversely affects my economic situation. _Don't be presumptuous._

Overall you're acting in _exceptionally_ bad faith, and in so doing have amply told me all I need to know about your intellect and character. I don't mind if you wish to beclown yourself further, but you'll need to do it without my assistance. I really don't enjoy interacting with fallaciously dishonest people, and really don't care about whatever lifelong axe you have to grind.

There is no "gate" and there are no "gatekeepers". You can be assured of that by reminding yourself that there is nothing stopping you or anyone else from using whatever means you prefer for whatever work you do. See? No gate. The "gatekeeper" nonsense—which I addressed earlier in this thread—is simply a reflection of one's insecurity and a yearning for the validation that has so far eluded the accuser. But since no one has a right to anyone else's validation, then you're pretty much out of luck on that score.

Now please try to relax. Nothing I think about anything will ever affect your life.


----------



## Thundercat

AI created music may not be as good as human created music for some time - but make no mistake, it WILL become indistinguishable from human-composed music. There is no doubt.

Check out this website: This Person Does Not Exist

Every time you click refresh, a brand new person is "created" by Generative Adversarial Networks (two AI's pitted against each other - one creating an image and another deciding if it thinks it's real. If not then the first one makes changes in an iterative loop).

Will AI ever make music as good as Beethoven and Mozart?

Yes.

Will it have "soul?"

Perhaps not - but will you know the difference?

Can you believe those photos are NOT real people? They are not. They are entirely generated out of whole cloth by AI's who examined millions of photos and learned how to create the images. I have checked out this site over the last few years and it used to be you could tell they were generated by computer because things were off.

Now I almost never catch anything off.

Except for blockbuster movies our art will be relegated to the machines for most business purposes. And to fight it is madness. I still think horses are better than cars, but the world lost that bet awhile back.

We will too.

So just enjoy making music. And look for new revenue streams.


----------



## TonalDynamics

smellypants said:


> Dude its hard for me to watch that Dall-E2 video and not think that it won't be long before Ai will be able to make any type of music in any style at least as well as the best composers ever at the click of a button.
> 
> I do hope its not the case but... That video swayed me 😕


There was a builder of robots some years ago-- I can't recall the name, or if he's still in business--but he would make appearances at these conventions where he would talk to his automata, and they would in turn answer some very complicated and existential questions as he posed them.

As it turns out, every response had been cherry-picked and programmed into the units, and he was merely following a script, posing questions to predefined sets of answers.

He was naturally trying to drum up additional venture capital at this time, incidentally.

I haven't seen the example so I can't say one way or the other obviously, but I would not be surprised if this was the case with that demonstration, and it is a factor that one should always be mindful of when considering such showcases of new technology noone knows anything about.


----------



## TonalDynamics

Thundercat said:


> Every time you click refresh, a brand new person is "created" by Generative Adversarial Networks (two AI's pitted against each other - one creating an image and another deciding if it thinks it's real. If not then the first one makes changes in an iterative loop).


Don't you think that's quite an apples and oranges comparison though, presently?

A face is honestly a fairly simple, mathematically defined object in 3D space, infinitely simpler than an orchestration, for example.

That's where the line is drawn at this moment in time IMO, the face falls into the category of things we _can_ define to high exactitude in mathematical terms, but we can't even come close to agreeing on a definition of what music is.

There are camps on both sides and everywhere and in between in this discussion, and I've found it quite fascinating--but based on everything I have seen and heard from AI in the past 5 years, for now and the foreseeable future (until I'm too old to care about it), I'm firmly rooted in the 'highly dubious' camp.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

TonalDynamics said:


> Don't you think that's quite an apples and oranges comparison though, presently?
> 
> A face is honestly a fairly simple, mathematically defined object in 3D space, infinitely simpler than an orchestration, for example.
> 
> That's where the line is drawn at this moment in time IMO, the face falls into the category of things we _can_ define to high exactitude in mathematical terms, but we can't even come close to agreeing on a definition of what music is.
> 
> There are camps on both sides and everywhere and in between in this discussion, and I've found it quite fascinating--but based on everything I have seen and heard from AI in the past 5 years, for now and the foreseeable future (until I'm too old to care about it), I'm firmly rooted in the 'highly dubious' camp.


Would you expect the same to be true of visual art? There are free AI visual art generators that respond intelligently to text prompt inputs and create impressive results. For example:






Dream by WOMBO


Create beautiful artwork using the power of AI. Enter a prompt, pick an art style and watch WOMBO Dream turn your idea into an AI-powered painting in seconds.



www.wombo.art





Soundful still can't intelligently match the content of lyrics (or whatever it might eventually provide soundtracks for). But that should be possible in the not too distant future.

The ability to download the stems separately is really nice, though that's a paid-only feature. Basically generate unique audio and midi "construction kits". Seems like a great tool for producers, and for vocalists who want to put together a rough demo.


----------



## TonalDynamics

flampton said:


> And so the only reason to gatekeep, and leave those who are poor and have no chance to be educated 'properly' out of your field is pure economic insecurity


I think it's well worth pointing out that *talent* is the biggest gatekeeper of them all, and there have been countless landmark blues, jazz, and rock musicians who have had great careers without the slightest inkling of a formal music education.

To assume that anyone could _orchestrate_ (a segment of the population far tinier than those other musicians I mentioned) if they were just given the proper education is not just off-base, it's _exceedingly_ presumptuous, yet you speak of it as if it were some kind of God-given right.

You're standing up for a cause that doesn't actually have any real people in it, methinks.


----------



## RoyBatty

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Would you expect the same to be true of visual art? There are free AI visual art generators that respond intelligently to text prompt inputs and create impressive results. For example:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dream by WOMBO
> 
> 
> Create beautiful artwork using the power of AI. Enter a prompt, pick an art style and watch WOMBO Dream turn your idea into an AI-powered painting in seconds.
> 
> 
> 
> www.wombo.art
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Soundful


Just tried Wombo out, and every image was garbage … maybe in the future or with better AI programming it could work…


----------



## Thundercat

TonalDynamics said:


> Don't you think that's quite an apples and oranges comparison though, presently?
> 
> A face is honestly a fairly simple, mathematically defined object in 3D space, infinitely simpler than an orchestration, for example.
> 
> That's where the line is drawn at this moment in time IMO, the face falls into the category of things we _can_ define to high exactitude in mathematical terms, but we can't even come close to agreeing on a definition of what music is.
> 
> There are camps on both sides and everywhere and in between in this discussion, and I've found it quite fascinating--but based on everything I have seen and heard from AI in the past 5 years, for now and the foreseeable future (until I'm too old to care about it), I'm firmly rooted in the 'highly dubious' camp.


Apples to oranges? Absolutely not.

The point I made was very clear: AIs are getting incredibly good, and music will become automated too. It was proof of concept.

AIs are only going to get better. They will get to the point they can make decent music. In 1 year? 5 years? 10? AI music will be able to pass the Turing Test.

I respect your viewpoint.

Mike


----------



## Hadrondrift

Thundercat said:


> Will AI ever make music as good as Beethoven and Mozart?


I'd argue that no AI designed according to today's principles will ever be able to do that.

Many existing music generators work by analyzing existing works, deriving rules from them and then creating new pieces based on these rules. The results are very often disappointing. Originality and creativity cannot be achieved that way. In my opinion, creativity and the motivation to be creative is even not a purely programmable process, so we will never be able to program that into today's generation of computers.

_"Look! This AI called OTTO-GENv3.0, which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, is a true master. It always creates unique works. They always move me emotionally, especially the slow movements of its 
symphonies are masterpieces, full of emotion, originality and expressiveness."_

Future or Fiction? Impossible? I don't know. But not possible with computers based on today's technology and methodology. I'm not talking about lack of CPU speed, inferior hardware or the like. I think the brain <=> computer analogy is fundamentally flawed. The brain is not an algorithmic calculating machine and the creative person is more than just his brain. Creativity does not originate in the neurons of the brain. 

There is, of course, the small possibility that at some point humanity will lose its creative power and thereby its power of judgment, making it impossible to distinguish computer-generated music/pictures/literature from that of real people. Then I agree. Then computers can be just as creative as humans.


----------



## fan455

_“What we’re doing at Soundful is democratizing music creation to the masses, in the same way that the phone has democratized video creation.”_

I love the idea of democratizing music creation. But maybe it's necessary to consider the difference between music creation and music composition? IMO music composition is part of music creation (and yes more and more integrated with other parts), and it's probably the most significant part, to me. Will Soundful make it possible to democratize music composition?

_Today, a user would log into the platform, select a template, select very minimal parameters – BPM, and the key – and click Create, and in three to five seconds, it gives them the preview of the track._

Sounds more like AI composing music for people. I don't doubt it can oneday compete with some human composers. But I don't see a clear way to democratizing music composition. Just can't imagine how merely selecting bpm, key scale, chord progression etc will make significant progress in democratizing music composition.


----------



## Chris Schmidt

flampton said:


> Should the poor or those less well off, or who come from a country with no music school available, or are a late starter, be able to use these tools to compose?


I'm questioning how they'd be able to afford such tools if they're third-world poor. I'm first-world poor and I can't afford this stuff.

I think they probably have bigger problems to deal with than composing a symphony


----------



## NuNativs

TonalDynamics said:


> I think it's well worth pointing out that *talent* is the biggest gatekeeper of them all, and there have been countless landmark blues, jazz, and rock musicians who have had great careers without the slightest inkling of a formal music education.
> 
> To assume that anyone could _orchestrate_ (a segment of the population far tinier than those other musicians I mentioned) if they were just given the proper education is not just off-base, it's _exceedingly_ presumptuous, yet you speak of it as if it were some kind of God-given right.
> 
> You're standing up for a cause that doesn't actually have any real people in it, methinks.


Talent isn't really the issue. To be able to think and ACT independently is the crux of the matter...


----------



## timbit2006

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Would you expect the same to be true of visual art? There are free AI visual art generators that respond intelligently to text prompt inputs and create impressive results. For example:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Dream by WOMBO
> 
> 
> Create beautiful artwork using the power of AI. Enter a prompt, pick an art style and watch WOMBO Dream turn your idea into an AI-powered painting in seconds.
> 
> 
> 
> www.wombo.art
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Soundful still can't intelligently match the content of lyrics (or whatever it might eventually provide soundtracks for). But that should be possible in the not too distant future.
> 
> The ability to download the stems separately is really nice, though that's a paid-only feature. Basically generate unique audio and midi "construction kits". Seems like a great tool for producers, and for vocalists who want to put together a rough demo.


----------



## pinki

Music as product…yes AI will get better and better, no doubt, at imitating it. That’s been going on since the 1950’s and frankly ..big yawn…

Music as an expression of the human spirit..or ‘condition‘ if you are uncomfortable with that word, no, AI will not (by definition: artificial) replace this.

The problem does indeed lie for ’media’ composers though. Media music can often fall into the ‘music as product‘ category. And so generic low quality music will indeed be replaced ..in some ways it is replaced already in a different way, by library music.

Commissioned music will always survive any AI advances. A director or choreographer sitting down with a composer for a creative meeting to explore the narrative of their theme from a musical perspective..it’s just never ever going to be replaced by AI.


----------



## Ed Wine

smellypants said:


> Dude its hard for me to watch that Dall-E2 video and not think that it won't be long before Ai will be able to make any type of music in any style at least as well as the best composers ever at the click of a button.
> 
> I do hope its not the case but... That video swayed me 😕


Anyone who calls themselves "smellypants" must have a lot of fear and anxiety.


----------



## Arabinowitz

What you need to recognize is that all creative industries trend towards mediocrity except in the higher end. By that I mean that, as tools democratize the process more and more, it becomes cheaper to make Kontent that’s “good enough.“ And you might not like to hear that, but good enough is often good enough - especially on tight budgets. There is nothing you can do to stop that, just as it’s happened in every other area of creativity and even outside of it.

But in the higher end, where clients really care about nuance and quality, these tools will not be able to replace talent and experience - not for a long time. So if you have real talent the work will be there. 

Bottom line: If tech can replace you, you never were all that special. 

You can complain about it all you want, but eventually you’re just going to be the guy in this picture.


----------



## Thundercat

Hadrondrift said:


> I'd argue that no AI designed according to today's principles will ever be able to do that.


In a million years I'd have argued an AI could never reproduce an original human face like the photos on that website you saw. But we do have that tech now. And it will come into every area of life including music creation.


----------



## Vik

Hadrondrift said:


> I'd argue that no AI designed according to today's principles will ever be able to do that.


Re. Mozart and Beethoven: they wrote hundreds of works, of which many had several movements. Mozart wrote 600. Bach wrote more than 1000. Bbut how many of these do we remember as truly original? They all had certain shortcuts, certain things they did over and over again which is why it usually is so easy to distinguish them from another. Some of the pieces they wrote were so 'neutral', in lack of a better word, that if someone else had written them, the pieces could easily be seen as Mozart or Bach copies that in terms of orchestration and and compositional method sounded just like they originals, except that they didn't contain the special extra that makes listeners want to hear these pieces again. By analyzing all the personal standard solutions they used, a well developed AI system could probably, in a few years, generate stuff that sounded like it was written by the old masters.

The same phenomenons of course also true for a lot of todays popular music, like hip-hop, metal, blues and even singer/songwriter stuff.

But as I mentioned earlier, they real problem – one we can do something about is that we all probably need to de-computerize ourselves – in order to make music which isn't just a lazy semi-copy of something we or someone else has done before. In many aspects of life, humans behave like robots, and often, composers and songwriters are no exception. If we all had the same degree of 'signature' to what we wrote like for instance the most known pieces of Björk, Joni Mitchell, Lennon/McCartney, Erik Satie, Morricone, Cohen or Jarrett in his golden period, AI wouldn't be a real threat. Like someone rightfully wrote, AI can imitate but not innovate – but that's true for a lot of music that's not AI generated as well – and the most widespread way to imitate is probably to imitate ourselves (after having spent some years learning by analyzing or imitating others).


----------



## Real Mirage

This looks cool! Reminds me of Mubert.
Maybe it will come up with something no one has thought about before? 

I doubt it is a threat... For anything being a "trend" would get outdated. But AI-generated music might have its own aesthetic, which is quite fascinating to think about.


----------



## Real Mirage

Could be used for NFT music, though.


----------



## flampton

TonalDynamics said:


> I think it's well worth pointing out that *talent* is the biggest gatekeeper of them all, and there have been countless landmark blues, jazz, and rock musicians who have had great careers without the slightest inkling of a formal music education.
> 
> To assume that anyone could _orchestrate_ (a segment of the population far tinier than those other musicians I mentioned) if they were just given the proper education is not just off-base, it's _exceedingly_ presumptuous, yet you speak of it as if it were some kind of God-given right.
> 
> You're standing up for a cause that doesn't actually have any real people in it, methinks.


You still have no idea what I wrote and that absolutely blows my mind.

The whole point is whether people who use midi generative software are cheating? Yes or no.

I understand talent and it is clear you’re not a talented reader.


----------



## Thundercat

Vik said:


> Re. Mozart and Beethoven: they wrote hundreds of works, of which many had several movements. Mozart wrote 600. Bach wrote more than 1000. Bbut how many of these do we remember as truly original? They all had certain shortcuts, certain things they did over and over again which is why it usually is so easy to distinguish them from another. Some of the pieces they wrote were so 'neutral', in lack of a better word, that if someone else had written them, the pieces could easily be seen as Mozart or Bach copies that in terms of orchestration and and compositional method sounded just like they originals, except that they didn't contain the special extra that makes listeners want to hear these pieces again. By analyzing all the personal standard solutions they used, a well developed AI system could probably, in a few years, generate stuff that sounded like it was written by the old masters.
> 
> The same phenomenons of course also true for a lot of todays popular music, like hip-hop, metal, blues and even singer/songwriter stuff.
> 
> But as I mentioned earlier, they real problem – one we can do something about is that we all probably need to de-computerize ourselves – in order to make music which isn't just a lazy semi-copy of something we or someone else has done before. In many aspects of life, humans behave like robots, and often, composers and songwriters are no exception. If we all had the same degree of 'signature' to what we wrote like for instance the most known pieces of Björk, Joni Mitchell, Lennon/McCartney, Erik Satie, Morricone, Cohen or Jarrett in his golden period, AI wouldn't be a real threat. Like someone rightfully wrote, AI can imitate but not innovate – but that's true for a lot of music that's not AI generated as well – and the most widespread way to imitate is probably to imitate ourselves (after having spent some years learning by analyzing or imitating others).


You make good points. The challenge in commercial music is we have to product music that DOES sound like what people have heard - so there is a narrow bandwidth of "acceptable" that one must compose within. This makes the AI-based systems ripe for the picking.

Also, studies have shown that the number one factor that determine if someone likes your music is...repetition. There is a reason every pop song repeats hooks, and choruses, like crazy. The mind loves order and familiarity. It's also why you can hear a song and hate it, and a few listens later find yourself humming along.

This means the commercial issue goes deep into our psyches - we all like things that are repeated and familiar. Which, again, reinforces the AI-systems' coming ability to replace much commercial music.

In many ways, we are like the horse and buggy drivers shaking their fists at the automobiles...change will come whether we like it or not.


----------



## flampton

Chris Schmidt said:


> I'm questioning how they'd be able to afford such tools if they're third-world poor. I'm first-world poor and I can't afford this stuff.
> 
> I think they probably have bigger problems to deal with than composing a symphony


Is a forty dollar program cheaper or more expensive than a formal music education? And I’m not sure you understand but talented people are constantly recruited to wealthier countries.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Thundercat said:


> You make good points. The challenge in commercial music is we have to product music that DOES sound like what people have heard - so there is a narrow bandwidth of "acceptable" that one must compose within. This makes the AI-based systems ripe for the picking.
> 
> Also, studies have shown that the number one factor that determine if someone likes your music is...repetition. There is a reason every pop song repeats hooks, and choruses, like crazy. The mind loves order and familiarity. It's also why you can hear a song and hate it, and a few listens later find yourself humming along.
> 
> This means the commercial issue goes deep into our psyches - we all like things that are repeated and familiar. Which, again, reinforces the AI-systems' coming ability to replace much commercial music.
> 
> In many ways, we are like the horse and buggy drivers shaking their fists at the automobiles...change will come whether we like it or not.


By extension, it's worth considering whether those few canonical classical pieces sound "better" than any subsequent imitations (or similar works by the same composer) primarily because we've heard them so many times, particularly during our formative years. (Among other psychological factors....)

Can AI be creative in an intelligent (not purely random) way, that appeals to human sensibilities? Yes in principle, but having a neural network (or other approach) simulate creativity that will appeal to humans (or particularly conditioned sets of humans) in a way that's not excessively random and also not excessively imitative is a more difficult problem.


----------



## Tim_Wells

It's bitter pill and a painful reality to accept. But I can either accept it and adapt, or stand in front yard yelling, "get off my lawn."

Because a new generation will fully leverage these tools, just as we leveraged the music technology that came our way. I'm sure the musicians of the 40s and 50s would be aghast at some of the tools we use... midi, samples, digital effects, quantizing, loops, etc. 

It took 50 years for the car to replace the horse and buggy. People had time to adapt. Now multiple disruptive changes are coming within one person working life. 

But _I believe_ there will be new opportunities for those that can change and adapt. _And no-one can take away my piano._


----------



## Hadrondrift

Thundercat said:


> In a million years I'd have argued an AI could never reproduce an original human face like the photos on that website you saw.


I would have said 30 years ago that algorithms would soon be able to produce realistic photos of pseudo-real people. I am not surprised. I think creativity and innovation is a completely different class of problem than generating realistic pictures.

This said, however, I agree with @Arabinowitz and can imagine that utility music that is "good enough" can or will be created algorithmically, without being able to clearly distinguish it from a human work. I saw a tutorial video the other day, "create a modern house track" or the like, in which an ambitious tutor clicked together a piece of music from quite a few loops within an hour. The result was monotonous, but not completely unimaginative. Spice it with a few filter sweeps, a riser, drop, sidechain processing, done. That's what many thousands of people today understand as composing, but for me it's more like selecting and compiling. "Expertly curating", so to speak.

If software can do that, then that's rather a statement about the quality of music than one about the quality of software. Perhaps one needs to differentiate more precisely.

There is music as a commodity and music as a result of an creative innovative artistic process. AI will not be able to produce the latter, just as it will not be able to write an emotionally appealing 200-page novella. I am aware that many see creating a house track as a creative innovative process as well, I don't mean to devalue that. But there was a claim somewhere here in the thread that AI could eventually produce works of the quality of a Beethoven or Mozart if given just a few more years to scientific progress. I disagree with that because I think for this kind of artistic expression it requires more than symbol shifting and pattern processing. It may not even be algorithmically formulable, but may require physical experience of an individual in dialogue with his environment.



Vik said:


> generate stuff that sounded like it was written by the old masters.


If this actually succeeded, it would make the software not a master in its own right, but a master of imitation.


----------



## Thundercat

Hadrondrift said:


> I would have said 30 years ago that algorithms would soon be able to produce realistic photos of pseudo-real people. I am not surprised. I think creativity and innovation is a completely different class of problem.
> 
> This said, however, I agree with @Arabinowitz and can imagine that utility music that is "good enough" can or will be created algorithmically, without being able to clearly distinguish it from a human work. I saw a tutorial video the other day, "create a modern house track" or the like, in which an ambitious tutor clicked together a piece of music from quite a few loops within an hour. The result was monotonous, but not completely unimaginative. Spice it with a few filter sweeps, a riser, drop, sidechain processing, done. That's what many thousands of people today understand as composing, but for me it's more like selecting and compiling. "Expertly curating", so to speak.
> 
> If software can do that, then that's rather a statement about the quality of music than one about the quality of software. Perhaps one needs to differentiate more precisely.
> 
> There is music as a commodity and music as a result of an creative innovative artistic process. AI will not be able to produce the latter, just as it will not be able to write an emotionally appealing 200-page novella. I am aware that many see creating a house track as a creative innovative process as well, I don't mean to devalue that. But there was a claim somewhere here in the thread that AI could eventually produce works of the quality of a Beethoven or Mozart if given just a few more years to scientific progress. I disagree with that because I think for this kind of artistic expression it requires more than symbol shifting and pattern processing. It may not even be algorithmically formulable, but requires physical experience of an individual in dialogue with his environment.
> 
> 
> If this actually succeeded, it would make the software not a master in its own right, but a master of imitation.


Respectfully I disagree.

If a human can learn a musical style and replicate it in new works, then there are rules that are followed to achieve this.

If there are rules, no matter how subtle, AI will be able to discover them and successfully imitate.

I am not here to argue that inspiration can be bottled and genius be quanitized. It can’t. I believe in the human spirit and the ineffable qualities of our beingness. These are not digital.

But will an AI be able to create some truly original and cool music?

100%

Look at the art field. Already AI is producing paintings some of which are pretty dang cool.


----------



## flampton

R.G. said:


> Look up: "When did you stop beating your wife?" fallacy. I don't enjoy that game. If the whole world ran out of electricity, I could still make music, just as I have more times than I can possibly remember, simply by writing into open score by hand and by ear. Moreover, I can professionally copy the parts, and conduct the damn thing on top of all that. There's not a single piece of software that threatens me or adversely affects my economic situation. _Don't be presumptuous._
> 
> Overall you're acting in _exceptionally_ bad faith, and in so doing have amply told me all I need to know about your intellect and character. I don't mind if you wish to beclown yourself further, but you'll need to do it without my assistance. I really don't enjoy interacting with fallaciously dishonest people, and really don't care about whatever lifelong axe you have to grind.
> 
> There is no "gate" and there are no "gatekeepers". You can be assured of that by reminding yourself that there is nothing stopping you or anyone else from using whatever means you prefer for whatever work you do. See? No gate. The "gatekeeper" nonsense—which I addressed earlier in this thread—is simply a reflection of one's insecurity and a yearning for the validation that has so far eluded the accuser. But since no one has a right to anyone else's validation, then you're pretty much out of luck on that score.
> 
> Now please try to relax. Nothing I think about anything will ever affect your life.


As this word vomit brings in validation I feel I can state this for everyone on my intentions.

I’m a PhD microbiologist who studies antibacterial resistance in ESKAPE pathogens. I am a amateur composer who composes for a party of one. I have no interest at all in being a professional. 

What I don’t like is gate keeper ilk who slander others by insisting that those who use learning tools are cheating and dumb. This garbage makes newcomers to the field scared they’ll be labeled the same and stop them from using perfectly acceptable tools. And if I saw any of my colleagues in my field try to belittle someone for using learning tools as cheaters and dumb they would also get a word from me.


----------



## Henu

flampton said:


> learning tools are cheating and dumb.


There is a huge difference between using "learning tools" and taking something that was composed by an AI and claiming it our own. Nobody is bashing things which help you to learn, but those midi packages and other things which require zero creative input from the composer are the problem in this discourse.


----------



## TonalDynamics

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Soundful still can't intelligently match the content of lyrics (or whatever it might eventually provide soundtracks for). But that should be possible in the not too distant future.





Thundercat said:


> In many ways, we are like the horse and buggy drivers shaking their fists at the automobiles...change will come whether we like it or not.





Tim_Wells said:


> It's bitter pill and a painful reality to accept. But I can either accept it and adapt, or stand in front yard yelling, "get off my lawn."



Speaking of horse-and-buggy analogies, I'm honestly kind of shocked at how half the posters in this thread are putting the cart before the horse...

First off, I tried to find as many actual examples as I could to demo this thing... and it's not even possible yet. They've made like half a dozen youtube shorts purportedly showcasing how awesome it is, but just like DALL.E.2, if you want to see it in action, and not just the fancy marketing?

Waitlist.
*Closed* beta.
_LITERALLY EMPTY SUBREDDIT._

I mean come on guys, you're all in the music industry, are you really this trusting of people who are trying to sell a new product?

The guy can talk about 'democratizing' until he's blue in the face, but so far all the content I've been able to get my hands on from this tool have not been anything I'm not capable of creating with some good ol' 1/4 note quantize and a handful of loop libraries in about 5-10 minutes.

They talk about exporting the stems, well sorry to report but that's not gonna help you a lot in the editing department, even _if_ you have the MIDI along with those stems, because unless they just give you their entire one-shot sample library, you're still going to need your own samples to get triggered by said MIDI for any kind of editing purposes--they would have to build out some kind of DAW _within_ the web app itself that allowed you to trim individual noteheads and tails, and then re-export to those stems--and I don't think this is likely to happen at all, DAW development being at the snail's pace that is currently is.

The guy is in venture capital raising mode, full blast.

Again, I'm not hearing _anything_ (from the extremely limited number of demos, likely cherry-picked) that is distinct from what someone with a week's worth of experience with Ableton or Logic could throw together with existing loop libraries.

EDIT (for justice)











flampton said:


> You still have no idea what I wrote and that absolutely blows my mind.


You were comparing the advent of a 'one-click creation tool' to the advent of past iterations of music theory vis a vis notes, harmony, scales, then western theory, etc., progressively;larger 'chunks' of knowledge being created from the smaller chunks of prior generations.

But your analogy is fundamentally flawed: The people who digested the modern 'chunks' still had to _learn_ the theory; they had to learn how to read music before they learned what a scale was, and had to learn what modes were before they learned set theory, etc.

So those successive generations of theorists didn't get rid of previous generations of theory--they _augmented_ it, and built upon it--as we have always done via the scientific process. What you're proposing is to _replace_ it, and call it progress, when in fact it would be an intellectual regression.

It would be like you, as a scientist, being able to add 1,000+1,000, but utterly unable to calculate(500+500)(2), or 1500+500, or 750+1250, etc., and then arguing that this is somehow an acceptable practice for future generations of researchers to follow.

Honestly sometimes it feels like we're living inside 'Idiocracy' (which you should see if you haven't already!):

We all want to drink the finest wines, but fewer and fewer of us are willing to stomp the grapes.

Thus in the end--just like in the movie--we all end up drinking (and employed by) Gatorade.

Cheers


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

TonalDynamics said:


> Speaking of horse-and-buggy analogies, I'm honestly kind of shocked at how half the posters in this thread are putting the cart before the horse...
> 
> First off, I tried to find as many actual examples as I could to demo this thing... and it's not even possible yet. They've made like half a dozen youtube shorts purportedly showcasing how awesome it is, but just like DALL.E.2, if you want to see it in action, and not just the fancy marketing?
> 
> Waitlist.
> *Closed* beta.
> _LITERALLY EMPTY SUBREDDIT._
> 
> I mean come on guys, you're all in the music industry, are you really this trusting of people who are trying to sell a new product?
> 
> The guy can talk about 'democratizing' until he's blue in the face, but so far all the content I've been able to get my hands on from this tool have not been anything I'm not capable of creating with some good ol' 1/4 note quantize and a handful of loop libraries in about 5-10 minutes.
> 
> They talk about exporting the stems, well sorry to report but that's not gonna help you a lot in the editing department, even _if_ you have the MIDI along with those stems, because unless they just give you their entire one-shot sample library, you're still going to need your own samples to get triggered by said MIDI for any kind of editing purposes--they would have to build out some kind of DAW _within_ the web app itself that allowed you to trim individual noteheads and tails, and then re-export to those stems--and I don't think this is likely to happen at all, DAW development being at the snail's pace that is currently is.
> 
> The guy is in venture capital raising mode, full blast.
> 
> Again, I'm not hearing _anything_ (from the extremely limited number of demos, likely cherry-picked) that is distinct from what someone with a week's worth of experience with Ableton or Logic could throw together with existing loop libraries.
> 
> EDIT (for justice)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You were comparing the advent of a 'one-click creation tool' to the advent of past iterations of music theory vis a vis notes, harmony, scales, then western theory, etc., progressively;larger 'chunks' of knowledge being created from the smaller chunks of prior generations.
> 
> But your analogy is fundamentally flawed: The people who digested the modern 'chunks' still had to _learn_ the theory; they had to learn how to read music before they learned what a scale was, and had to learn what modes were before they learned set theory, etc.
> 
> So those successive generations of theorists didn't get rid of previous generations of theory--they _augmented_ it, and built upon it--as we have always done via the scientific process. What you're proposing is to _replace_ it, and call it progress, when in fact it would be an intellectual regression.
> 
> It would be like you, as a scientist, being able to add 1,000+1,000, but utterly unable to calculate(500+500)(2), or 1500+500, or 750+1250, etc., and then arguing that this is somehow an acceptable practice for future generations of researchers to follow.
> 
> Honestly sometimes it feels like we're living inside 'Idiocracy' (which you should see if you haven't already!):
> 
> We all want to drink the finest wines, but fewer and fewer of us are willing to stomp the grapes.
> 
> Thus in the end--just like in the movie--we all end up drinking (and employed by) Gatorade.
> 
> Cheers


It's not a closed beta---not yet at least. I signed up yesterday. Looks like you can still sign up:









Empowering the World to Create Music | Soundful


Soundful is an intelligence-driven music platform that enables creators and artists to be inspired, create and monetize music.




soundful.com





1 free download / month, unlimited creation though. They want $8/month for 1 stems/midi download/month, more cost extra. Stems/midi will be most useful for producers.


----------



## Tim_Wells

Whether or not this particular example is vaporware ... this technology is coming.


----------



## TonalDynamics

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> It's not a closed beta---not yet at least. I signed up yesterday. Looks like you can still sign up:


Ok, but has anyone on this board actually been granted access yet?

I'm always suspicious of waitlists, as there's no way to determine that they are actively bringing in new testers unless people are being granted access.

As I said the sub is dead, so no info there, by users or otherwise.



Tim_Wells said:


> Whether or not this particular example is vaporware ... this technology is coming.


I don't think anyone's disputing that.

The question is just how useful it's going to be, which at this point is still pure speculation.
If you still have to know how to use a DAW to edit the stems and MIDI, I'm not sure which market segment this is actually going to benefit all that much.

If that's the case, from a certain perspective this disruption mostly occurred already with the advent of bagillions of loop libraries.


----------



## ed buller

Arabinowitz said:


> Bottom line: If tech can replace you, you never were all that special.


Brutal but true

best

e


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

TonalDynamics said:


> Ok, but has anyone on this board actually been granted access yet?
> 
> I'm always suspicious of waitlists, as there's no way to determine that they are actively bringing in new testers unless people are being granted access.
> 
> As I said the sub is dead, so no info there, by users or otherwise.


Yes, I've been playing with it a bit.

First impressions---you'll probably spend a lot of time randomly generating new tracks until you get one you particularly like. The options for customization are extremely minimal---with the partial exception of "genre", since they have multiple subgenres. The main genres so far are just Hip-hop, EDM, Pop, and Ambient (Ambient has no subgenres yet). Aside from that it's just BPM, key, and major/minor.

I think the humanization of the acoustic guitar doesn't sound completely convincing (though I'm not an expert), and if you listen closely the use of samples is audible---I think the latter contributes, in many cases, to a general slight sense of unnaturalness. But some examples have been more convincing. In general they could definitely work as background or in more of a grid-based electronic or hip-hop style.

With loops generated by this you won't have to worry about dealing with erroneous "content ID" flags that can turn up when using royalty-free loop libraries.

And it does a decent job of genre-appropriate song structure, so the loops go well together.


----------



## NekujaK

ed buller said:


> Brutal but true
> 
> best
> 
> e


Actually, if tech can replace you, then the TASK you were performing may not have necessarily been special. We're all special no matter what.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Are other people actually getting put on a "waitlist" when they try to sign up now? I signed up last night and got instant access.


----------



## kitekrazy

Henu said:


> There is a huge difference between using "learning tools" and taking something that was composed by an AI and claiming it our own. Nobody is bashing things which help you to learn, *but those midi packages and other things which require zero creative input from the composer are the problem in this discourse.*


 I have plenty of them and rarely use them. Their market is not towards professional. I've seen some dance production tutorials and why they may have them on their system they don't get used.
I don't think these are a threat. I think what it does it make the best stand out even more.


----------



## flampton

TonalDynamics said:


> Speaking of horse-and-buggy analogies, I'm honestly kind of shocked at how half the posters in this thread are putting the cart before the horse...
> 
> First off, I tried to find as many actual examples as I could to demo this thing... and it's not even possible yet. They've made like half a dozen youtube shorts purportedly showcasing how awesome it is, but just like DALL.E.2, if you want to see it in action, and not just the fancy marketing?
> 
> Waitlist.
> *Closed* beta.
> _LITERALLY EMPTY SUBREDDIT._
> 
> I mean come on guys, you're all in the music industry, are you really this trusting of people who are trying to sell a new product?
> 
> The guy can talk about 'democratizing' until he's blue in the face, but so far all the content I've been able to get my hands on from this tool have not been anything I'm not capable of creating with some good ol' 1/4 note quantize and a handful of loop libraries in about 5-10 minutes.
> 
> They talk about exporting the stems, well sorry to report but that's not gonna help you a lot in the editing department, even _if_ you have the MIDI along with those stems, because unless they just give you their entire one-shot sample library, you're still going to need your own samples to get triggered by said MIDI for any kind of editing purposes--they would have to build out some kind of DAW _within_ the web app itself that allowed you to trim individual noteheads and tails, and then re-export to those stems--and I don't think this is likely to happen at all, DAW development being at the snail's pace that is currently is.
> 
> The guy is in venture capital raising mode, full blast.
> 
> Again, I'm not hearing _anything_ (from the extremely limited number of demos, likely cherry-picked) that is distinct from what someone with a week's worth of experience with Ableton or Logic could throw together with existing loop libraries.
> 
> EDIT (for justice)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You were comparing the advent of a 'one-click creation tool' to the advent of past iterations of music theory vis a vis notes, harmony, scales, then western theory, etc., progressively;larger 'chunks' of knowledge being created from the smaller chunks of prior generations.
> 
> But your analogy is fundamentally flawed: The people who digested the modern 'chunks' still had to _learn_ the theory; they had to learn how to read music before they learned what a scale was, and had to learn what modes were before they learned set theory, etc.
> 
> So those successive generations of theorists didn't get rid of previous generations of theory--they _augmented_ it, and built upon it--as we have always done via the scientific process. What you're proposing is to _replace_ it, and call it progress, when in fact it would be an intellectual regression.
> 
> It would be like you, as a scientist, being able to add 1,000+1,000, but utterly unable to calculate(500+500)(2), or 1500+500, or 750+1250, etc., and then arguing that this is somehow an acceptable practice for future generations of researchers to follow.
> 
> Honestly sometimes it feels like we're living inside 'Idiocracy' (which you should see if you haven't already!):
> 
> We all want to drink the finest wines, but fewer and fewer of us are willing to stomp the grapes.
> 
> Thus in the end--just like in the movie--we all end up drinking (and employed by) Gatorade.
> 
> Cheers


This is well thought out and a great response but it’s not based on anything I have said in this thread. 

Let’s clear up the main misunderstanding. My battle with RG is about the current midi generative tools. Read his condescending garbage response to the OP again. 



R.G. said:


> How do you reconcile the concern you have about Soundful with your post no. 16 in the concurrent "Cheater Software" thread (which I quote below)? The software you're promoting there _already_ devalues the art & craft of composing, _already_ dumbs down what it means to be a composer. Soundful is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of such "cheater software"; the only difference is that it cheats more than the others, so your concern appears to be one of degree, not of principle.
> 
> As I said prior: Live by the tech; die by the tech.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Best Cheating Software (AI, Chord Generators...etc.)
> 
> 
> Let's get this out of the way, if you are against using tools that generate MIDI chords, melodies, arps...etc. this post is not for you. I've spent my last 12 years building VFX software that helps you cheat by cutting to the end result without having to learn complex visual effects concepts...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> vi-control.net
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Post no. 16:



Here is how I use the tools. Tell me that I’m cheating.

Take for example Riffer. I have the ability to audition unlimited variations based around specific parameters of my choice. I get to listen to how the notes interact on my time. I guess I could spend years inputting. Or tap in by keyboard and do it in a year maybe? And that’s for developing just one sequence that I a think might work for one specific situation.

Same with percussion with Playbeat. I can get absolutely awesome new variations with my percussion I would never ever specifically enter or tap out.

Or Orb producer allows me to hear on demand chord progressions in any key. I can then manipulate them in seconds to another progression, or another progression, or another progression. 

I don’t have to read a book that tells me how it should work. I don’t have to learn archaic notation that carries considerably less information than a simple midi note in a modern DAW. (Though I am learning this notation because I do want to access to traditional theory as I progress in my training) 

Basically, I use these programs to develop my ear so I may create something that communicates my thoughts, desires and emotions to other humans(or just for me). And as far as I know the music is really the only important part.


----------



## Henu

I love how this abomination is sold to people as "empowering" and "bringing democracy". All those trendy and easy political terms nobody can't argue against- and very hot in the USA right now too. I wish they'd add "responsible" to the package as well!


----------



## Henu

kitekrazy said:


> I think what it does it make the best stand out even more.


This is completely true, yet the saturation in the market is real.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Looks like hip-hop has about 15-20 subgenres so far. Pop has 9, EDM 6, Ambient 1.


----------



## TonalDynamics

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Are other people actually getting put on a "waitlist" when they try to sign up now? I signed up last night and got instant access.


Still waiting on my invite since this morning


----------



## flampton

Henu said:


> There is a huge difference between using "learning tools" and taking something that was composed by an AI and claiming it our own. Nobody is bashing things which help you to learn, but those midi packages and other things which require zero creative input from the composer are the problem in this discourse.


I agree with you except there is no current tool that will give you a decent result without significant talent and effort. And so why would this dude below try to shame the OP for talking about other non AI tools on the market. 



R.G. said:


> @NekujaK
> 
> How do you reconcile the concern you have about Soundful with your post no. 16 in the concurrent "Cheater Software" thread (which I quote below)? The software you're promoting there _already_ devalues the art & craft of composing, _already_ dumbs down what it means to be a composer. Soundful is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of such "cheater software"; the only difference is that it cheats more than the others, so your concern appears to be one of degree, not of principle.
> 
> As I said prior: Live by the tech; die by the tech.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Best Cheating Software (AI, Chord Generators...etc.)
> 
> 
> Let's get this out of the way, if you are against using tools that generate MIDI chords, melodies, arps...etc. this post is not for you. I've spent my last 12 years building VFX software that helps you cheat by cutting to the end result without having to learn complex visual effects concepts...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> vi-control.net
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Post no. 16:


----------



## Hadrondrift

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> And it does a decent job of genre-appropriate song structure, so the loops go well together.


Hmmm... So it is a bit like Mozart's "Musikalisches Würfelspiel" with its somewhat longish subtitle:
_"Instructions for the composition of as many waltzes as one desires with two dice, without understanding anything about music or composition"_









Musikalisches Würfelspiel - Wikipedia







en.wikipedia.org





I even have a https://de.schott-music.com/shop/pdfviewer/index/readfile/?idx=NDY5MDk5&idy=469099 (copy) of it behind me in my bookshelf with all of its 176, ehm, loops?  Honestly, I'm not sure Soundful uses fundamentally different methods than Mozart _(attributed)_ 230 years ago.


----------



## kitekrazy

Henu said:


> This is completely true, yet the saturation in the market is real.


 Isn't that with just about anything these days? Look at the prices of guitars. It if you walk into a Guitar Center the low end beginner gear is everywhere and you might find a few PRS and Music Man instruments. I see the same thing in a Sam Ash with band instruments.
Saturation is not a bad thing since most people have hobbies. Why is it we get upset over that? I can accept the fact it is for my own enjoyment and I'll never be hired for a playing gig or to compose.


----------



## robgb

NekujaK said:


> Apparently this one has received nearly $4 million in funding, with Disney and Microsoft among the backers...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I have seen the future of music. It’s scary, and utterly brilliant. - Music Business Worldwide
> 
> 
> Our mind has been blown by Soundful. Yours will be, too.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.musicbusinessworldwide.com


If the music in the video is an example of what it produces, then I'm not particularly worried.


----------



## kitekrazy

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Looks like hip-hop has about 15-20 *subgenres* so far. Pop has 9, EDM 6, Ambient 1.


Next week there will be 20 more created.


----------



## Henu

kitekrazy said:


> Saturation is not a bad thing since most people have hobbies. Why is it we get upset over that? I can accept the fact it is for my own enjoyment and I'll never be hired for a playing gig or to compose.


Well, that's the thing. You can accept it, just like I can accept that AI can do nice pictures because I could use them for fun. From the hobby point of view, it's superawesome to have all sorts of things available we didn't have 25 years ago, but in this case from a working composer's perspective, the saturation which has happened during the last years is freaking annoying because the noise ratio becomes unbearable to get your signal through.

Many of us do this for living, and _that's why_ it sucks for us to try to get our voice heard among a zillion of garageband/disableton- loopguys equipped with cracked Action Strings. It's not that anyone's afraid of healthy competition but it becomes quite a chore to get your voice heard among that noise.

That being said, I'm not particularly scared of this technology myself- I'm more annoyed by those "epic and emotional" guys using stacked ensemble patches on one chord progressions. :D


----------



## Henu

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Looks like hip-hop has about 15-20 subgenres so far. Pop has 9, EDM 6, Ambient 1.





kitekrazy said:


> Next week there will be 20 more created.


Come visit the metal scene sometimes, I'm pretty sure we win this competition by a mile.


----------



## signalpath

Devaluation (and curation) of music is the name of the game today.


----------



## NekujaK

Henu said:


> There is a huge difference between using "learning tools" and taking something that was composed by an AI and claiming it our own. Nobody is bashing things which help you to learn, but those midi packages and other things which require zero creative input from the composer are the problem in this discourse.





flampton said:


> I agree with you except there is no current tool that will give you a decent result without significant talent and effort. And so why would this dude below try to shame the OP for talking about other non AI tools on the market.


I honestly didn't feel shamed (if it's me you were referring to). I interpreted R.G.'s original statement as trying to understand how I could be concerned about a service like Soundful in this thread, while talking about compositional helper tools in another thread. Which I already answered earlier (short summary: Soundful and the composing tools I described are intended for completely different purposes, targeted at completely different audiences).

I'm all for people using whatever helper tools they have at their disposal to create music. Technology has always been designed to help us do things that are mundane or required expertise or training in the past. Those who are trained or have the necessary expertise may be disgusted by this, or even feel threatened, but it's why we keep investing in technology.

With a traditional instrument, you press a key and it plays a single note. With modern VI instruments, you can press a key and it can play several notes or a rhythmic pattern. No big deal. Use the tools you have at your disposal.

We used to have to manually dial all 7 digits of a phone number. Now we can do it with the press of a single button. Hooray!

But Soundful is a completely different thing altogether. It will never replace composers - even if it's excellent at what it does, there will always be people creating music. The existence of the Beatles didn't cause all other bands to disappear. The existence of Mozart didn't obviate the need for other composers.

No, the dangerous part of Soundful is that it will take composers (and engineers, musicians, music publishers, sound libraries, etc.) out of the commercial music loop, and put full control of music creation/consumption into the hands of monolithic media organizations.

As a creative composer, I'm in no way threatened by Soundful. As a media composer who is trying to earn a few bucks with my music, I'm less optimistic.


----------



## Hadrondrift

Henu said:


> on one chord progressions.


As long as there is still a progression, you can actually still have hope.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Hadrondrift said:


> Oh! So it is like Mozart's "Musikalisches Würfelspiel", with the somewhat longish subtitle
> 
> "Instructions for the composition of as many waltzes as one desires with two dice, without understanding anything about music or composition"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Musikalisches Würfelspiel - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> en.wikipedia.org





NekujaK said:


> I honestly didn't feel shamed (if it's me you were referring to). I interpreted R.G.'s original statement as trying to understand how I could be concerned about a service like Soundful in this thread, while talking about compositional helper tools in another thread. Which I already answered earlier (short summary: Soundful and the composing tools I described are intended for completely different purposes, targeted at completely different audiences).
> 
> I'm all for people using whatever helper tools they have at their disposal to create music. Technology has always been designed to help us do things that are mundane or required expertise or training in the past. Those who are trained or have the necessary expertise may be disgusted by this, or even feel threatened, but it's why we keep investing in technology.
> 
> With a traditional instrument, you press a key and it plays a single note. With modern VI instruments, you can press a key and it can play several notes or a rhythmic pattern. No big deal. Use the tools you have at your disposal.
> 
> We used to have to manually dial all 7 digits a phone number. Now we can do it with the press of a single button. Hooray!
> 
> But Soundful is a completely different thing altogether. It will never replace composers - even if it's excellent at what it does, there will always be people creating music. The existence of the Beatles didn't cause all other bands to disappear. The existence of Mozart didn't obviate the need for other composers.
> 
> No, the dangerous part of Soundful is that it will take composers (and engineers, musicians, music publishers, sound libraries, etc.) out of the commercial music loop, and put full control of music creation/consumption into the hands of media corporations.
> 
> As a creative composer, I'm in no way threatened by Soundful. As a media composer who is trying to earn a few bucks with my music, I'm less optimistic.


Wait until there's a similar AI that can intelligently respond to media (assuming you mean soundtracks) to get worried. Could that be the direction Disney is going for with their investment in this? Possibly, but that's not what Soundful is explicitly aiming to do (so far).

This is like intelligently generating royalty-free "construction kits" that include stems, midi, and full song suggestion... but they're all unique; no one else will be using these specific stems. So it will be competing more directly with producers who put out construction kits.


----------



## flampton

NekujaK said:


> I honestly didn't feel shamed (if it's me you were referring to). I interpreted R.G.'s original statement as trying to understand how I could be concerned about a service like Soundful in this thread, while talking about compositional helper tools in another thread. Which I already answered earlier (short summary: Soundful and the composing tools I described are intended for completely different purposes, targeted at completely different audiences).
> 
> I'm all for people using whatever helper tools they have at their disposal to create music. Technology has always been designed to help us do things that are mundane or required expertise or training in the past. Those who are trained or have the necessary expertise may be disgusted by this, or even feel threatened, but it's why we keep investing in technology.
> 
> With a traditional instrument, you press a key and it plays a single note. With modern VI instruments, you can press a key and it can play several notes or a rhythmic pattern. No big deal. Use the tools you have at your disposal.
> 
> We used to have to manually dial all 7 digits a phone number. Now we can do it with the press of a single button. Hooray!
> 
> But Soundful is a completely different thing altogether. It will never replace composers - even if it's excellent at what it does, there will always be people creating music. The existence of the Beatles didn't cause all other bands to disappear. The existence of Mozart didn't obviate the need for other composers.
> 
> No, the dangerous part of Soundful is that it will take composers (and engineers, musicians, music publishers, sound libraries, etc.) out of the commercial music loop, and put full control of music creation/consumption into the hands of media corporations.
> 
> As a creative composer, I'm in no way threatened by Soundful. As a media composer who is trying to earn a few bucks with my music, I'm less optimistic.


I agree with all this. Well said.

I was referring to you but note I said ‘tried to shame.’ Read what he wrote to you RG- 

“The software you're promoting there _already_devalues the art & craft of composing, _already_ dumbs down what it means to be a composer. Soundful is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of such "cheater software"; the only difference is that it cheats more than the others, so your concern appears to be one of degree, not of principle.


And even though he outright said you were a hypocrite who was devaluing i.e ruining the profession you weren’t shamed because you don’t think much of his opinion and discarded it.

Other (especially young or new) forum members may not take this same course and forgo these learning tools because they think they will be viewed as a cheater. And that’s not acceptable to me on a help forum. If this was the VI-old cranky composer forum I would have not bothered.


----------



## flampton

One area that will be interesting is that there is already a large library of copyrighted work. If an AI company ever tries to monetize something (even accidentally) that is too close to an already published work then that opens them up for litigation. And the important litigation will likely be between BIG OLD money verse BIG NEW money.


----------



## kitekrazy

Henu said:


> Come visit the metal scene sometimes, I'm pretty sure we win this competition by a mile.


Oh I know that. funny what the 80's definition of Metal was.


----------



## NekujaK

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Wait until there's a similar AI that can intelligently respond to media (assuming you mean soundtracks) to get worried. Could that be the direction Disney is going for with their investment in this? Possibly, but that's not what Soundful is explicitly aiming to do (so far).
> 
> This is like intelligently generating royalty-free "construction kits" that include stems, midi, and full song suggestion... but they're all unique; no one else will be using these specific stems. So it will be competing more directly with producers who put out construction kits.


It's not just construction kits, but library music as well, which is my area of concern. TV shows, music supervisors, and editors license tons of music from music libraries every year. Most of it is used as background music or for promotional puposes and trailers. It's a well established industry.

Soundful could become a very attractive alternative in these scenarios, thereby obviating the need for library composers, mixing engineers, mastering engineers, music publishers, and perhaps even PROs(!).

For actual film scoring, I doubt Soundful will ever pose a threat. At least not in my lifetime.


----------



## NekujaK

flampton said:


> I agree with all this. Well said.
> 
> I was referring to you but note I said ‘tried to shame.’ Read what he wrote to you RG-
> 
> “The software you're promoting there _already_devalues the art & craft of composing, _already_ dumbs down what it means to be a composer. Soundful is nothing more than the inevitable outcome of such "cheater software"; the only difference is that it cheats more than the others, so your concern appears to be one of degree, not of principle.
> 
> 
> And even though he outright said you were a hypocrite who was devaluing i.e ruining the profession you weren’t shamed because you don’t think much of his opinion and discarded it.
> 
> Other (especially young or new) forum members may not take this same course and forgo these learning tools because they think they will be viewed as a cheater. And that’s not acceptable to me on a help forum. If this was the VI-old cranky composer forum I would have not bothered.


I've seen opinions like RGs about compostional helper tools so many times on this forum that I've become numb to them  Because ultimately it's just one person's opinion and won't change the reality of how the world works, and more specifically, how modern composing can work.

I agree, such tirades can have a stigmatizing effect on newcomers and novices, but I don't want to attack RG for having his own opinions.


----------



## Hadrondrift

Suppose Soundful knew that their results would be rather generic and might never be directly requested by major players (TV shows etc.).
Then Soundful's target audience might be different. They could be targeting those who hope they can generate masses of good enough content in an automated way with little effort, then offer it on all sorts of platforms, hoping to become incredibly rich generate a small income from this.

Create a lot of hype and then get as many people as possible to subscribe could then be the plan here. Just a thought. I don't see any technology breakthroughs with Soundful, seems more like marketing talk.

Note to myself:Remind me in a year.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Hadrondrift said:


> Suppose Soundful knew that their results would be rather generic and might never be directly requested by major players (TV shows etc.).
> Then Soundful's target audience might be different. They could be targeting those who hope they can generate masses of good enough content in an automated way with little effort, then offer it on all sorts of platforms, hoping to become incredibly rich generate a small income from this.
> 
> Create a lot of hype and then get as many people as possible to subscribe could be the plan here. Just a thought.


It seems aimed primarily at vocalists (rappers, singer-lyricists, etc.) or video creators who want to generate unique backing tracks, and secondarily at producers who want to generate unique stems / loops and song templates.


----------



## Hadrondrift

Okay, so maybe - among other things - it's also for sample pack creators to create more sample packs. I'm not sure that's really a good business model. Anyway, at least you can have a meaningful conversation about the whole topic, that's worth something.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Hadrondrift said:


> Okay, so maybe - among other things - it's also for sample pack creators to create more sample packs. I'm not sure that's really a good business model. Anyway, at least you can have a meaningful conversation about the whole topic, that's worth something.


On second thought, a lot of construction kit or sample pack creation focuses on coming up with unique drum sounds, synths, etc. And a lot of them include vocals, which Soundful doesn't seem to so far (unless there's an option for that somewhere I haven't found yet, which I doubt, or unless some of the subgenres include synth vox or vocal chops I haven't heard yet).

Not sure how wide a range of samples are used in this though. Guess they'll probably be adding new drum sounds etc. to keep up with new subgenres and trends.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> On second thought, a lot of construction kit or sample pack creation focuses on coming up with unique drum sounds, synths, etc. And a lot of them include vocals, which Soundful doesn't seem to so far (unless there's an option for that somewhere I haven't found yet, which I doubt, or unless some of the subgenres include synth vox or vocal chops I haven't heard yet).
> 
> Not sure how wide a range of samples are used in this though. Guess they'll probably be adding new drum sounds etc. to keep up with new subgenres and trends.


Actually I just tried Ambient and it does have a choir sound. Just ooh ahh etc. (so far anyway). Sounds pretty good though.


----------



## Gabriel S.

robgb said:


> If the music in the video is an example of what it produces, then I'm not particularly worried.


Watch this if you didn't and you'll be even less worried:


----------



## DoubleTap

I think the parallel with photography is interesting. Phones are technically excellent but pro photographers still exist in large numbers because you still need an understanding of the art to be able to take a good picture, and you also need other equipment like lighting, backdrops and access to interesting people or things. 

If this new music tech can create something novel and interesting then great, but it doesn’t seem like that. When it can write a great lyric that makes people cry or come up with a new sound or tap into a common emotion, then we’ve got a problem.

Just like a machine can write a match report of the Champions League final based on the stats and events on the pitch, but it can’t know about police tear-gassing children outside. People are much much better at understanding context.


----------



## LatinXCombo

I offer no opinion on whether serious AI-created music is 5 or 50 years out. 

If AI-generated music does become a serious player, however, the thing I'd watch out for if I made bank on music is the state of copyright laws. 

For example: What happens if an AI randomly generates a song that repeats the phrases G-E-D and G-A-C-A-C in succession, making the tune sound awfully close to the Chiffon's 1963 hit, "He's So Fine"? 

Do the Chiffons (or the current holder of the copyright on the song) win in court against the owner of the AI for infringement? 

Or do the courts excuse the AI because hey, it was truly random, the AI never heard the Chiffons song, no copying took place? 

[Academic article on the topic here.... https://scholarship.law.edu/jlt/vol29/iss2/9/]


----------



## Gabriel S.

LatinXCombo said:


> I offer no opinion on whether serious AI-created music is 5 or 50 years out.
> 
> If AI-generated music does become a serious player, however, the thing I'd watch out for if I made bank on music is the state of copyright laws.
> 
> For example: What happens if an AI randomly generates a song that repeats the phrases G-E-D and G-A-C-A-C in succession, making the tune sound awfully close to the Chiffon's 1963 hit, "He's So Fine"?
> 
> Do the Chiffons (or the current holder of the copyright on the song) win in court against the owner of the AI for infringement?
> 
> Or do the courts excuse the AI because hey, it was truly random, the AI never heard the Chiffons song, no copying took place?
> 
> [Academic article on the topic here.... https://scholarship.law.edu/jlt/vol29/iss2/9/]


Well, it wouldn't be truly random if it's AI...it would use models trained with real data (real music)...so actually there is a chance that the AI heard the Chiffons song.
I guess like with George Harrison "My Sweet Lord" case, it would be subconscious plagiarism (oh but the AI doesn't have conscience...or does it?........"Skynet what do you think?")


----------



## LatinXCombo

Gabriel S. said:


> Well, it wouldn't be truly random if it's AI...it would use models trained with real data (real music)...so actually there is a chance that the AI heard the Chiffons song.
> I guess like with George Harrison "My Sweet Lord" case, it would be subconscious plagiarism (oh but the AI doesn't have conscience...or does it?........"Skynet what do you think?")


True, but absent specific statutory language one way or another, the courts will have to make it up as they go along. (And countless examples exist where the plain text of the law seems pretty clear, but because of a lot of different factors, from tradition, stuff other courts have done, and odd definitions spelled out in other statutes, plus the feel-good catchall known as "equity" the courts do something else anyway.)

And heaven help the litigators who have to explain how both chord progressions AND AI technology works to the judge! 

All of that makes it a crapshoot at the moment, I think.

Speaking of statutes, though...what happens if the lobbyists for (say) Disney, Amazon, and Spotify all have the same opinion on this topic, one way or another?


----------



## Thundercat

LatinXCombo said:


> I offer no opinion on whether serious AI-created music is 5 or 50 years out.
> 
> If AI-generated music does become a serious player, however, the thing I'd watch out for if I made bank on music is the state of copyright laws.
> 
> For example: What happens if an AI randomly generates a song that repeats the phrases G-E-D and G-A-C-A-C in succession, making the tune sound awfully close to the Chiffon's 1963 hit, "He's So Fine"?
> 
> Do the Chiffons (or the current holder of the copyright on the song) win in court against the owner of the AI for infringement?
> 
> Or do the courts excuse the AI because hey, it was truly random, the AI never heard the Chiffons song, no copying took place?
> 
> [Academic article on the topic here.... https://scholarship.law.edu/jlt/vol29/iss2/9/]


Copyright does not care if the creator heard the previous song. It only stipulates new works cannot use the same melody and lyrics, however derived. It’s the artists who get angry and blame plagiarism. But it’s irrelevant. If it’s the same melody or lyrics, it’s a copyright infringement.


----------



## TonalDynamics

LatinXCombo said:


> I offer no opinion on whether serious AI-created music is 5 or 50 years out.
> 
> If AI-generated music does become a serious player, however, the thing I'd watch out for if I made bank on music is the state of copyright laws.
> 
> For example: What happens if an AI randomly generates a song that repeats the phrases G-E-D and G-A-C-A-C in succession, making the tune sound awfully close to the Chiffon's 1963 hit, "He's So Fine"?
> 
> Do the Chiffons (or the current holder of the copyright on the song) win in court against the owner of the AI for infringement?
> 
> Or do the courts excuse the AI because hey, it was truly random, the AI never heard the Chiffons song, no copying took place?
> 
> [Academic article on the topic here.... https://scholarship.law.edu/jlt/vol29/iss2/9/]


To be clear, chord progressions are _not_ protected by copyright IP, only melody (and even then it's only the _main_ melody and not whatever counterpoint you throw in, someone feel free to correct me on this)

There were some music IP lawyers (also musicians) who 'copyrighted' literally every 8-note 12-beat melody they could mathematically compute–common time only of course–which ended up being billions of melodies, for the sole purpose of protecting artists from these kind of lawsuits.


_"Musicians Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin created algorithm to merge every 8-note 12-beat melody combination and produced MIDI files of over 68 billion melodies."​_
Found the TED talk:
Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement

Kind of curious how their work would factor into this, since these A.I. seem to almost all be limited to 4-bar whole note melody structures atm, and thus well-provided for by the project.

Actually it occurs to me that the lead vocal which tends to be the lead melody in these types of songs, would be the main area of concern and since they apparently aren't generated, but rather chords are, it would still be on the artist not to 'infringe'?


----------



## NekujaK

When composers work for hire, the contract usually includes an assurance that the work is wholly original and the client is indemnified from any legal action; i.e. if someone sues for copyright infringement, the composer is responsible, not the client.

I wonder if services like Soundful are willing to offer similar protections to their clients? I'm guessing not.


----------



## polynaeus

Writing and making music will be like the equivalent of riding horses for fun on a track.

Horses use to be how you got around. Now it’s cars.

And soon… people will drive “manual” cars on tracks for fun as autonomous cars will replace them on the road.

Doing things, any thing, manually will become a hobby or art.


----------



## dhmusic

polynaeus said:


> Writing and making music will be like the equivalent of riding horses for fun on a track.
> 
> Horses use to be how you got around. Now it’s cars.
> 
> And soon… people will drive “manual” cars on tracks for fun as autonomous cars will replace them on the road.
> 
> Doing things, any thing, manually will become a hobby or art.


Are you saying what I think you're saying?

Making music will eventually be for mega-rich horse-girls only?

(I knew it...)


----------



## polynaeus

dhmusic said:


> Are you saying what I think you're saying?
> 
> Making music will eventually be for mega-rich horse-girls only?
> 
> (I knew it...)


With the way the cost of vintage analog hardware is going right now……


----------



## Dewdman42

Just wait until A.I. produces entirely new musical forms that nobody has ever thought of before. Entirely new musical theories would have to emerge in order to even explain what the hell the A.I. is producing, if we can even figure that out. Its quite possible machine learning will produce musical forms that fire off our pleasure neurons like crazy, yet so complex that we mere humans will not even be able to remotely consider composing anything like that using our own facilitates, because let's face it...some people struggle with simple western music theory already as it is. Much more complicated then that..and our little blob of neurons will simply not be able to do it without computer help.

I mean, we are sometimes locked into the idea that Western music theory is the be-all, end-all of music theory.. but is it? We just derived some theories to explain what enlightenment era composers figured out intuitively, but who knows..maybe there is an entirely new frontier of musical structures that we haven't even discovered yet....and probably never would on our own due to complexity...but A.I. might figure it out... stuff that is so neural friendly to humans that it becomes literally like a drug in its effect on us.

The nature of machine learning is that often times we can't even make sense out of what the machine has learned, we only know that it somehow works. The machine's neural patterns become so complicated that we can't even analyze it and figure out what the machine figured out. The neural programming is too complex to analyze it any meaningful way. That's one of the scary things about machine learning honestly, we can't really audit anything other then the output it produces. That takes control away from us.

I view A.I. as ultimately evil because it takes control away from human beings and hands it to these machines with hardware neural nets we can barely understand. And in the realm of the arts...it is capable of creating art that stimulates people, in much the same way that a drug can...without any human being behind it. what is art anymore if it ceases to have humanity driving it and becomes nothing other then a neural stimulator?


----------



## LatinXCombo

Thundercat said:


> Copyright does not care if the creator heard the previous song. It only stipulates new works cannot use the same melody and lyrics, however derived. It’s the artists who get angry and blame plagiarism. But it’s irrelevant. If it’s the same melody or lyrics, it’s a copyright infringement.


Copyright laws are just words on paper, they have no cares. 

Judges make the law. (Yes, yes, go ahead and gnash your teeth about how they only interpret the law, then let's talk about _Roe _and _Obergefell_ and so on.) 

How they would rule on something like the facts presented is uncertain, and won't be known until it comes to a test. 

My point is that there other factors beyond the pure 'machines replacing humans' angle to investigate here. 

And, of course, none of this is legal advice. For the love of god, no one should ever take legal advice found on the internet generally, and from a music forum in particular. It's worth what you paid for it. If you want legal advice, hire and consult your own counsel.


----------



## Thundercat

Dewdman42 said:


> Just wait until A.I. produces entirely new musical forms that nobody has ever thought of before. Entirely new musical theories would have to emerge in order to even explain what the hell the A.I. is producing, if we can even figure that out. Its quite possible machine learning will produce musical forms that fire off our pleasure neurons like crazy, yet so complex that we mere humans will not even be able to remotely consider composing anything like that using our own facilitates, because let's face it...some people struggle with simple western music theory already as it is. Much more complicated then that..and our little blob of neurons will simply not be able to do it without computer help.
> 
> I mean, we are sometimes locked into the idea that Western music theory is the be-all, end-all of music theory.. but is it? We just derived some theories to explain what enlightenment era composers figured out intuitively, but who knows..maybe there is an entirely new frontier of musical structures that we haven't even discovered yet....and probably never would on our own due to complexity...but A.I. might figure it out... stuff that is so neural friendly to humans that it becomes literally like a drug in its effect on us.
> 
> The nature of machine learning is that often times we can't even make sense out of what the machine has learned, we only know that it somehow works. The machine's neural patterns become so complicated that we can't even analyze it and figure out what the machine figured out. The neural programming is too complex to analyze it any meaningful way. That's one of the scary things about machine learning honestly, we can't really audit anything other then the output it produces. That takes control away from us.
> 
> I view A.I. as ultimately evil because it takes control away from human beings and hands it to these machines with hardware neural nets we can barely understand. And in the realm of the arts...it is capable of creating art that stimulates people, in much the same way that a drug can...without any human being behind it. what is art anymore if it ceases to have humanity driving it and becomes nothing other then a neural stimulator?


Profound. And methinks smacks of truth. Thank-you.


----------



## LatinXCombo

TonalDynamics said:


> To be clear, chord progressions are _not_ protected by copyright IP, only melody (and even then it's only the _main_ melody and not whatever counterpoint you throw in, someone feel free to correct me on this)


IIRC, the (losing) suit against Ed Sheeran claimed that his chord progressions. And, well, it lost. Of course, that was a British case, so generally not binding on American courts.... I do not know if an American court has ruled on that point (and a minute on Google didn't give me an obvious answer.) 

I am not aware of any specific decision in the USA holding that only the "main" melody would be covered. Would appreciate clarification if someone knows that one as well!


----------



## YaniDee

An example of an AI tool that I think would benefit a lot of "real" composers would be something like this: a software that you can sing into, and then tell it to interpret it for a violin, or any other instrument. It would then produce a line with all the articulations, dynamics, and inflections of an expressive passage. Of course, you would also need the libraries that could handle that... That would take a lot of intelligence!


----------



## tressie5

^It's getting there. You can already "sing midi" into your DAW (Cubase's VariAudio lets you extract audio to midi), and with DAWs like Cubase, you can sign off-key but it'll be corrected. You then set those notes to trigger your VSTi. I think interpreting dynamics are already there; articulations and inflections would probably require tweaking later.


----------



## dhmusic

YaniDee said:


> An example of an AI tool that I think would benefit a lot of "real" composers would be something like this: a software that you can sing into, and then tell it to interpret it for a violin, or any other instrument. It would then produce a line with all the articulations, dynamics, and inflections of an expressive passage. Of course, you would also need the libraries that could handle that... That would take a lot of intelligence!


There's an AI model that does this. It's a couple years old but it sounded pretty good when I looked into it. If I remember correctly it could also model saxophone and flute. It just spits out an audio performance you can tweak a little.


----------



## tressie5

Seems like Waves' Ovox can accomplish this midi out effect with any mic.


----------



## TonalDynamics

LatinXCombo said:


> IIRC, the (losing) suit against Ed Sheeran claimed that his chord progressions. And, well, it lost. Of course, that was a British case, so generally not binding on American courts.... I do not know if an American court has ruled on that point (and a minute on Google didn't give me an obvious answer.)
> 
> I am not aware of any specific decision in the USA holding that only the "main" melody would be covered. Would appreciate clarification if someone knows that one as well!


Found a quick reference, turns out it is only the main melody:

Easysong: What can be copyrighted and what can't

Copyrightable: Main melody, lyrics, the recording itself

(From site)
"

*Harmony*- The harmonies and chord progressions that make up a song are not considered something we can copyright. If they were, practically 99.99% would be illegal infringement. While distinct Voice Leading is copyrightable, Chord Progressions (like 12 Bar Blues, ii-V-I, C-G-Am-F) are standardly used in all genres of music and do not belong to any one individual.

If you're telling me people are suing each other now over 'chord progression infringement', I find that rather baffling since it has no legal basis... I'm also fairly certain U.K. music copyright is very similar to the U.S. under the Berne convention.

Apparently the Sheeran lawsuit was nothing more than a shakedown attempt by some pathetic copyright troll.


----------



## timprebble

tressie5 said:


> ^It's getting there. You can already "sing midi" into your DAW (Cubase's VariAudio lets you extract audio to midi), and with DAWs like Cubase, you can sign off-key but it'll be corrected. You then set those notes to trigger your VSTi. I think interpreting dynamics are already there; articulations and inflections would probably require tweaking later.



Melodyne was introduced in *2001*
It's been with us & available 20+ years before synthfluencers started making such videos.


----------



## AudioLoco

TonalDynamics said:


> Apparently the Sheeran lawsuit was nothing more than a shakedown attempt by some pathetic copyright troll.


You should hear the incriminated passages of the two songs if you haven't. 
To my *ignorant and completely non legally trained* ears it's a scandal Sheeran got away with it. It's like the main hook of the song. There is also the fact that the accusers say they sent Sheeran the song at one point, so he could have heard it - even if he denies that.

Anyhow I'm not a legal expert in the slightest and it's not that relevant to the thread but wow,
the legal copyright implications of AI "composers" are interesting and challenging.


----------



## mikeh-375

Dewdman42 said:


> Just wait until A.I. produces entirely new musical forms that nobody has ever thought of before. Entirely new musical theories would have to emerge in order to even explain what the hell the A.I. is producing, if we can even figure that out. Its quite possible machine learning will produce musical forms that fire off our pleasure neurons like crazy, yet so complex that we mere humans will not even be able to remotely consider composing anything like that using our own facilitates, because let's face it...some people struggle with simple western music theory already as it is. Much more complicated then that..and our little blob of neurons will simply not be able to do it without computer help.
> 
> I mean, we are sometimes locked into the idea that Western music theory is the be-all, end-all of music theory.. but is it? We just derived some theories to explain what enlightenment era composers figured out intuitively, but who knows..maybe there is an entirely new frontier of musical structures that we haven't even discovered yet....and probably never would on our own due to complexity...but A.I. might figure it out... stuff that is so neural friendly to humans that it becomes literally like a drug in its effect on us.
> 
> The nature of machine learning is that often times we can't even make sense out of what the machine has learned, we only know that it somehow works. The machine's neural patterns become so complicated that we can't even analyze it and figure out what the machine figured out. The neural programming is too complex to analyze it any meaningful way. That's one of the scary things about machine learning honestly, we can't really audit anything other then the output it produces. That takes control away from us.
> 
> I view A.I. as ultimately evil because it takes control away from human beings and hands it to these machines with hardware neural nets we can barely understand. And in the realm of the arts...it is capable of creating art that stimulates people, in much the same way that a drug can...without any human being behind it. what is art anymore if it ceases to have humanity driving it and becomes nothing other then a neural stimulator?


@Dewdman42 ......don't worry, we have Brian on our side...


----------



## Ned Bouhalassa

timprebble said:


> Melodyne was introduced in *2001*
> It's been with us & available 20+ years before synthfluencers started making such videos.


Synthfluencers? Cool word!


----------



## AudioLoco

My opinion is that AI will soon be perfectly capable to generate believable, perfectly Turing Test passers, and maybe also crowd pleasers for: 
bland Pop tunes, background music for Youtube videos, jingles for ads, EDM music, Hip Hop beats, lo fi beats, ambient, most electronica generes and generally commercial genres which have lots of easy to spot and simple rules - no problem, it's going to happen - soon.
The complexity level of such compositions is not that challenging and AI would imitate easily any computer generated instruments (synths, drums and even autotune type vocals)- if we are talking also final result.
As for writing generic, convincing "inspired by" classical music, why not. But until modeling tech for orchestral acoustic instruments is not there (It's not at all I personally believe) it will still need human slaves to play and record the composition or a human to tweak samples until they sound as realistic as possible like we do every day. (again if we are talking about a software capable not only of outputting MIDI but also to deliver a final mixed and mastered result).

As for creating a new Yesterday or Imagine or God only knows or The sound of Silence or Bohemian Rhapsody or Stairway to heaven a Symphony N.9 or the Marriage of Figaro, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Four seasons, Stabat mater (or put any X piece that evoke deep emotions in people in decades or centuries - "impulse to dance" not included, people are happy to dance on a simple primitive 4/4 kick alone  ) etc etc etc...

NEVER going to happen. 
*Unless* AI gets so advanced it can actually completely emulate every part of a particularly genius and interesting talented (and son of its times and rules and ways it can eventually break and develop) human being's personality, experiences, traits and "soul" (it's just a word - call it neurological intricacy or whatever, just that X that make us humans).

I honestly don't see that anywhere near, and anyhow IF it does happen in 40-100 years or so, the implications of something like that will go waaay beyond music and get to much more 42 territories.

Anyhow excluding the big and small commercial players in entertainment that would be happy to register the copyright of every compositions they use in their products and not pay humans, I just don't get why musical people are interested in this kind of tech.


----------



## YaniDee

timprebble said:


> Melodyne was introduced in *2001*
> It's been with us & available 20+ years before synthfluencers started making such videos.


Yes, I'm aware that voice to midi has been around for quite a while. What I'm implying in my post is AI that would would take what you sang (you'd have to sing it really well), and it would come out as if Tina Guo, Hillary Hahn or Winton Marsalis was playing it. That kind of AI would be impressive !


----------



## cmillar

mikeh-375 said:


> @Dewdman42 ......don't worry, we have Brian on our side...



Hah! That's one to give the 'Finale vs Sibelius vs Dorico' people something to ponder.... as in, "how do I do that with....?" and "how come I can't tweak the Viola's 1/132 notes to sound like a real performer?"

(Ferneyhough is pretty mind boggling! Crazy good!)


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

dhmusic said:


> There's an AI model that does this. It's a couple years old but it sounded pretty good when I looked into it. If I remember correctly it could also model saxophone and flute. It just spits out an audio performance you can tweak a little.


It's Google Magenta's Tone/Transfer:









Tone Transfer — Magenta DDSP


Play around with different inputs and outputs to see how machine learning transforms sounds.




sites.research.google





Strangely it no longer seems to be working for desktop, as it assumes you're using a smartphone.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

TonalDynamics said:


> Found a quick reference, turns out it is only the main melody:
> 
> Easysong: What can be copyrighted and what can't
> 
> Copyrightable: Main melody, lyrics, the recording itself
> 
> (From site)
> "
> 
> *Harmony*- The harmonies and chord progressions that make up a song are not considered something we can copyright. If they were, practically 99.99% would be illegal infringement. While distinct Voice Leading is copyrightable, Chord Progressions (like 12 Bar Blues, ii-V-I, C-G-Am-F) are standardly used in all genres of music and do not belong to any one individual.
> 
> If you're telling me people are suing each other now over 'chord progression infringement', I find that rather baffling since it has no legal basis... I'm also fairly certain U.K. music copyright is very similar to the U.S. under the Berne convention.
> 
> Apparently the Sheeran lawsuit was nothing more than a shakedown attempt by some pathetic copyright troll.


"While [US] copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies ... the “Blurred Lines” case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection — and thus that a song can be sued for _feeling_ like an earlier one."









How Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits


The boom in copyright lawsuits is rattling the music industry — to the point where some artists and songwriters are spending tens of thousands of dollars on insurance policies




www.rollingstone.com





It was upheld under appeal.

OTOH Katy Perry initially lost her US court case 2016 court case over the claim she plagiarized an 8-note ostinato from an obscure rap song, but it was overturned on appeal in 2022: "That [appeals] judge ruled that Gray was aiming to claim an “improper monopoly” over “musical building blocks.”" 









Katy Perry Wins Appeal in Copyright Case Regarding 2013 Hit Song "Dark Horse"


In one of a seemingly commonplace string of copyright lawsuits aimed at big name stars, pop sensation Katy Perry won her appeal in a trial regarding her 2013 hit song “Dark Horse.” The rapper Flame had argued that Perry had plagiarized one of his works but a judge has now ruled a win for Flame...




americansongwriter.com





"
The ostinatos in Perry and Gray’s respective songs “consist entirely of commonplace musical elements, and … the similarities between them do not arise out of an original combination of these elements”, the new ruling reads.

The judge ruled that to allow copyright over this material would limit musical creativity and amount “to allowing an improper monopoly over two-note pitch sequences or even the minor scale itself, especially in light of the limited number of expressive choices available when it comes to an eight-note repeated musical figure”."









Katy Perry wins £2.1m copyright appeal over hit single Dark Horse


Rapper Flame had claimed pop star plagiarised eight-note ostinato but judge rules such a copyright would ‘limit musical creativity’




www.theguardian.com





... so you're at the mercy of the judges (who know very little about music, and have vast leeway to make up the law as they go) in the United States.


----------



## YaniDee

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> It's Google Magenta's Tone/Transfer:
> Strangely it no longer seems to be working for desktop, as it assumes you're using a smartphone.


Wow, that's pretty well what i mean..it's not far away. The site works for me, using Firefox.


----------



## TonalDynamics

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> "While [US] copyright laws used to protect only lyrics and melodies ... the “Blurred Lines” case raised the stakes by suggesting that the far more abstract qualities of rhythm, tempo, and even the general feel of a song are also eligible for protection — and thus that a song can be sued for _feeling_ like an earlier one."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> How Music Copyright Lawsuits Are Scaring Away New Hits
> 
> 
> The boom in copyright lawsuits is rattling the music industry — to the point where some artists and songwriters are spending tens of thousands of dollars on insurance policies
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.rollingstone.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> It was upheld under appeal.
> 
> OTOH Katy Perry initially lost her US court case 2016 court case over the claim she plagiarized an 8-note ostinato from an obscure rap song, but it was overturned on appeal in 2022: "That [appeals] judge ruled that Gray was aiming to claim an “improper monopoly” over “musical building blocks.”"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Katy Perry Wins Appeal in Copyright Case Regarding 2013 Hit Song "Dark Horse"
> 
> 
> In one of a seemingly commonplace string of copyright lawsuits aimed at big name stars, pop sensation Katy Perry won her appeal in a trial regarding her 2013 hit song “Dark Horse.” The rapper Flame had argued that Perry had plagiarized one of his works but a judge has now ruled a win for Flame...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> americansongwriter.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "
> The ostinatos in Perry and Gray’s respective songs “consist entirely of commonplace musical elements, and … the similarities between them do not arise out of an original combination of these elements”, the new ruling reads.
> 
> The judge ruled that to allow copyright over this material would limit musical creativity and amount “to allowing an improper monopoly over two-note pitch sequences or even the minor scale itself, especially in light of the limited number of expressive choices available when it comes to an eight-note repeated musical figure”."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Katy Perry wins £2.1m copyright appeal over hit single Dark Horse
> 
> 
> Rapper Flame had claimed pop star plagiarised eight-note ostinato but judge rules such a copyright would ‘limit musical creativity’
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.theguardian.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ... so you're at the mercy of the judges (who know very little about music, and have vast leeway to make up the law as they go) in the United States.


I think what we're seeing there is one situation of a judge exceeding his or her authority, because we've already got the precedent here for such cases, for the better part of a century, so I don't see all those judges who ruled on those cases throwing out 80+ years of said precedence because of one case...

But like you said, it's the mere possibility that leads to all the paranoia and thus has potential to stifle creativity.

What bothers me the most about all this, is that in the majority of these cases from what I've seen, they ones doing the suing aren't even the writers or performers, it's the damn opportunistic, coattail-riding IP trolls who instigate litigation.

These people are in the same category as ambulance-chasing lawyers to me, fairly detestable and offering virtually nothing to the ecosystem they inhabit; true parasites.

Actually scratch that, at least the ambulance chasers rarely do have a good motive for prosecuting in cases of real malpractice... which probably occurs at a slightly higher rate than a song is well and truly infringed upon


----------



## cmillar

mikeh-375 said:


> @Dewdman42 ......don't worry, we have Brian on our side...



On a more serious note....

I don't think an AI machine (now or in the future) could ever come up with a piece like this.

There is an inherent human touch to this. There is some 'form', 'emotion', some tangible through-line that we can tap into. 

Maybe it's because I grew up listening to 'new music' ever since my music student days that I don't see anything 'weird' about this piece. At least we can all appreciate that this was conceived and written by a fellow human being. It's awesome.

(...a tough sell to music library catalogues though!)


----------



## mikeh-375

Fernyhough does use a computer to assist him, but the input, decisions and emotional arc are entirely his and he can certainly hear those rhythms.....


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

TonalDynamics said:


> I think what we're seeing there is one situation of a judge exceeding his or her authority, because we've already got the precedent here for such cases, for the better part of a century, so I don't see all those judges who ruled on those cases throwing out 80+ years of said precedence because of one case...
> 
> But like you said, it's the mere possibility that leads to all the paranoia and thus has potential to stifle creativity.
> 
> What bothers me the most about all this, is that in the majority of these cases from what I've seen, they ones doing the suing aren't even the writers or performers, it's the damn opportunistic, coattail-riding IP trolls who instigate litigation.
> 
> These people are in the same category as ambulance-chasing lawyers to me, fairly detestable and offering virtually nothing to the ecosystem they inhabit; true parasites.
> 
> Actually scratch that, at least the ambulance chasers rarely do have a good motive for prosecuting in cases of real malpractice... which probably occurs at a slightly higher rate than a song is well and truly infringed upon


The "Blurred Lines" verdict was also upheld by a three-judge appeals court....


----------



## Celestial Aeon

When it comes to music it is important to distinct the business from the art. Sometimes they merge and connect in meaningful ways, sometimes they really don't, but at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter that much, because when it comes to the human experience, we go through our days going through this fractal of meanings and situations, where all of the different aspects of this network of connections elate to us. What I mean is that sometimes we really yearn for the profound experience of a piece of art that is so complex and distinct that we can't really experience it all the time, but rarely. Then we might need the mundane simple easy experience of something that is almost purely commercial and devoid of meaning and focus. Sometimes we want to just enhance the situational mood with some sound on the background that has the whole meaning of not being actively listened to etc.

These kinds of AI music generators are just a tool, where before we "only had" the human as the creator and the tool. Is there point to ask a human to generate jingles and background music as their day job? In my opinion not really. In a similar fashion that repetitive and boring factory work is good to robotise, repetitive and boring music creation is good to robotise. 

Even if we didn't have AI music, we would still have the world where music producers and composers would struggle to make a living. The reason for that challenge is not any technical progress, it is just the way human agreements and business realism works.

At the end of the day, no matter what time we live in, we humans need to find the specific way to make our talents and ideas work in a balanced way, and I believe there is always answer to be found no matter how many AIs and whatever there are around us. The answer just changes and sometimes it requires more effort to find it.


----------



## carlc

Gabriel S. said:


> Watch this if you didn't and you'll be even less worried:



This will continue to evolve as long as there is a market for it, and we will likely be subjected to a barrage of YouTube ads like we had with the MIDI chord packs in an attempt to create that market. I got so frustrated with it last year that I wrote & recorded my own rap about it. Seriously. For the lyrics, I googled “most cliche lyrics ever” and worked in the entire top 10 along with quotes from the offending YouTube ads. Here it is…


----------



## MartinH.

I think the more interesting question isn't "What can a Human do that AI can't?", it's "What can an AI do that a human can't?". I'm quite pessimistic about what AI will do to humanity.

I fully believe sooner or later you'll be able to teach an AI to do pretty much everything a human can do as long as you can produce the dataset to train it on. It's only a question of how tedious will it be to teach the AI and can that be monetized in a way to motivate some institution to do it. I think there's not enough money in aleatoric quartet music to be worth teaching an AI to do it as well as a human. And I think that will ultimately be the _only _reason if it won't happen. Unless someone does it just for bragging rights. Tech geeks tend to value the "Can I?" over the "Should I?" imho. 

Things that are hard to measure electronically are probably the safest, like cooking. You could teach a robot to follow recipies, but as far as I know we don't have the sensors yet to give it a sense of smell and taste to adjust its actions to the variances in the ingredients. So I think gourmet cuisine isn't being automated by AI any time soon. But composers, artists, writers, etc. better watch out. 

I expect my job to be challenged by AI within my lifetime. I just hope the economic preassures that compel me to "have a job" get lifted before I "lose my job". Soon it won't make sense anymore to structure society around the concept of jobs, because there is so much labor that machines could do better and cheaper. The AI future doesn't _have _to be all bad, but humanities track record isn't so great, so it probably will be bad...





mikeh-375 said:


> @Dewdman42 ......don't worry, we have Brian on our side...



I did enjoy that piece and ended up watching a documentary about his collaboration with that quartet on another piece. Do you happen to have a link to a video where he explains his composition process and/or the tools he uses to assist him?


----------



## Ned Bouhalassa

There may come a time when a new generation prefers A.I. music to that made by fellow humans. History shows us that our taste, what moves us evolves over time/epochs.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

MartinH. said:


> I think the more interesting question isn't "What can a Human do that AI can't?", it's "What can an AI do that a human can't?". I'm quite pessimistic about what AI will do to humanity.
> 
> I fully believe sooner or later you'll be able to teach an AI to do pretty much everything a human can do as long as you can produce the dataset to train it on. It's only a question of how tedious will it be to teach the AI and can that be monetized in a way to motivate some institution to do it. I think there's not enough money in aleatoric quartet music to be worth teaching an AI to do it as well as a human. And I think that will ultimately be the _only _reason if it won't happen. Unless someone does it just for bragging rights. Tech geeks tend to value the "Can I?" over the "Should I?" imho.
> 
> Things that are hard to measure electronically are probably the safest, like cooking. You could teach a robot to follow recipies, but as far as I know we don't have the sensors yet to give it a sense of smell and taste to adjust its actions to the variances in the ingredients. So I think gourmet cuisine isn't being automated by AI any time soon. But composers, artists, writers, etc. better watch out.
> 
> I expect my job to be challenged by AI within my lifetime. I just hope the economic preassures that compel me to "have a job" get lifted before I "lose my job". Soon it won't make sense anymore to structure society around the concept of jobs, because there is so much labor that machines could do better and cheaper. The AI future doesn't _have _to be all bad, but humanities track record isn't so great, so it probably will be bad...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I did enjoy that piece and ended up watching a documentary about his collaboration with that quartet on another piece. Do you happen to have a link to a video where he explains his composition process and/or the tools he uses to assist him?


Actually, cooking is one of the easier problems. From 2019:

"Every odor has a specific pattern, and now robot noses are catching up to, or even surpassing, human noses’ ability to distinguish them."

Same goes for taste... and data-based computational optimization of the chemical components (and texture, etc.) of food to maximize appeal for humans has been going on for much longer, and has been wildly successful (though personally I stopped eating ultra-processed foods more than a decade ago---optimization of new dietary changes for health can be trickier because it requires longer-term data, though it should happen eventually (whether our simulations will ever be good enough to substitute for human research is an open question---probably not, unless a way can be found to do it with quantum or other nonclassical computers, which seems unlikely)).

Why not integrate ourselves with the AI? As an extension of ourselves. Just as ideas come out of our unconscious minds, like visionary flashes... and then we develop them (or obsess over different possibilities) as if possessed. AI is a potential extension of this. And eventually we may integrate our consciousness with AI through brain implants (or possibly even less invasive means, if remote brain scans and information transfer into / manipulation of brains (inducing particular visuals, etc.) can advance far enough).


----------



## hummersallad

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> It's Google Magenta's Tone/Transfer:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Tone Transfer — Magenta DDSP
> 
> 
> Play around with different inputs and outputs to see how machine learning transforms sounds.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> sites.research.google
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Strangely it no longer seems to be working for desktop, as it assumes you're using a smartphone.


I just noticed that Magenta's Tone/Transfer was recently released as a plugin! Both as a synth and as an effect! So far only Mac and only AU. Win version coming soon!
DDSP-VST


----------



## hummersallad




----------



## JDK88

This is made for people who hate composing music and just need something decent and copyright free in the background of their projects. No tech will replace the love of composing.


----------



## jmauz

Hey flampton - are you a working professional in the industry with decades of experience earning a living making music and/or performing your instrument or are you a hobbyist? Just curious where your strong and inaccurate opinions are coming from...


----------



## GtrString

We tend to forget that AI is also humans that does something. Behind the GUI, they try to automate parts of the composing process, and they can with the more mechanical parts. But professional composing is driven by end-users, and highly based on analysis and great storytelling skills. This can never be automated, so no Elvis in the pants here. The art can’t be modelled.

Media production has been through much of the same development / shift that music production has been through. More people can make media now, cheaper tools, more democratic distribution ect. So there are lots of amateurs there too, saturating the markets. On the Internet everyone looks the same, even if they aren’t. People with great intentions, technically well equipped, can talk the talk, but not as skilled in the research, listening, storytelling department.

These media producers might just want a run of the mill, track off the rack, sound by the pund, type of music for their productions. It is basically training work, and the music just has to resemble real music. That job is fine to give to AI’s, otherwise all of the composing work would end up being overly trivial. Sweating your heart out, for a n00b that could not recognize good music, even if it tasted good. So, I think what AI will achive is a new division of work, for the benefit of real composers, who can’t be bothered with this..


----------



## ssnowe

hummersallad said:


> I just noticed that Magenta's Tone/Transfer was recently released as a plugin! Both as a synth and as an effect! So far only Mac and only AU. Win version coming soon!
> DDSP-VST


We currently expend a considerable amount of effort to use midi and musical notation as a digital way of somehow attempting to describe an analog experience (look at the resources that are invested into string libraries).

With these new AI tools we may see analog composition methods that better model the music and sounds in the analog world around us. 

For example, one could compose an elemental piece based on the sounds of the wind, using it and its movement as an instrument. Furthermore, these pieces would no longer be fixed or static in sound or length but could potentially be continuously evolving and changing. 

You would effectively define an ai model that produced the desired end result. As a composer you would claim ownership over the ai model used to produce the final resulting piece rather than the actual progression of notes or sounds in the piece.


----------



## mscp

What really devalues art is people accepting to work for free or for little compensation.



GtrString said:


> We tend to forget that AI is also humans that does something. Behind the GUI, they try to automate parts of the composing process, and they can with the more mechanical parts. But professional composing is driven by end-users, and highly based on analysis and great storytelling skills. This can never be automated, so no Elvis in the pants here. The art can’t be modelled.


exactly.


----------



## mikeh-375

MartinH. said:


> .........I did enjoy that piece and ended up watching a documentary about his collaboration with that quartet on another piece. Do you happen to have a link to a video where he explains his composition process and/or the tools he uses to assist him?


Hi Martin, You'll find plenty in a search I'm sure but here's a starter that references some software he uses and he talks about his processes....

https://www.finalemusic.com/blog/brian-ferneyhough-visits-makemusic/

He's amazing isn't he..but definitely an acquired (over many months) taste, glad you got into him a bit.


----------



## LatinXCombo

TonalDynamics said:


> Found a quick reference, turns out it is only the main melody:
> 
> Easysong: What can be copyrighted and what can't
> 
> Copyrightable: Main melody, lyrics, the recording itself
> 
> (From site)
> "
> 
> *Harmony*- The harmonies and chord progressions that make up a song are not considered something we can copyright. If they were, practically 99.99% would be illegal infringement. While distinct Voice Leading is copyrightable, Chord Progressions (like 12 Bar Blues, ii-V-I, C-G-Am-F) are standardly used in all genres of music and do not belong to any one individual.


Interesting, but I do not find unsourced statements from an internet page to be persuasive. Do you have something written by an attorney who practices in the area or (better yet) a statute or court decision that clarifies this point?

The conclusion of the page you cited states:

"Since we are not lawyers...."

This means their opinions on American copyright law are cute, but meaningless. 




TonalDynamics said:


> If you're telling me people are suing each other now over 'chord progression infringement', I find that rather baffling since it has no legal basis... I'm also fairly certain U.K. music copyright is very similar to the U.S. under the Berne convention.



What is the basis for that conclusion? What does the Berne convention require, and how has it impacted how American courts interpret the Copyright Act? 



TonalDynamics said:


> Apparently the Sheeran lawsuit was nothing more than a shakedown attempt by some pathetic copyright troll.



I do not know the motivation of the party bringing the lawsuit but he certainly lost the case, and that says something about the current state of British law.


----------



## dhmusic

mscp said:


> What really devalues art is people accepting to work for free or for little compensation.


In situations like this someone is being exploited and someone else is doing the exploiting. The latter party is far more complicit in devaluing art/human labor.


----------



## method1

Even Wolfram is after our jerrbs! 








WolframTones


Listen to what I just found in the WolframTones music universe



tones.wolfram.com


----------



## TonalDynamics

LatinXCombo said:


> Interesting, but I do not find unsourced statements from an internet page to be persuasive. Do you have something written by an attorney who practices in the area or (better yet) a statute or court decision that clarifies this point?
> 
> The conclusion of the page you cited states:
> 
> "Since we are not lawyers...."
> 
> This means their opinions on American copyright law are cute, but meaningless.


Forgive me, but did you actually try to look this information up or are you being intentionally obtuse?
Chord progressions have _never_ been copyrightable. If they were, literally _noone_ would be safe from a lawsuit.

The blues for instance would practically cease to exist as a genre, with half the catalogue being derived from the same progression, as would pop-rock, hip-hop, country, etc. etc.

From what I can tell in a lot of these cases, there really isn't _any_ kind of lead melody involved, such as with rap style vocals or any kind of spoken word/atonal vocal lines, and the prosecution uses this as a basis to convince the jury that the chord progression alone 'sounds too similar', and sadly with the blurred lines case it looks like they beat the odds and succeeded. What's baffling about that case is that the decision was upheld in appeals.

What those judges _ought_ to be saying--and what falls completely into alignment with past litigation--is that if the song in question _lacks_ a main melody, then it is not distinct enough to warrant an infringement ruling on the basis of that progression alone (the other aspects of the IP remain intact of course, such as lyrics and recording).

Juries are not perfect, and neither is the legal system; but that doesn't mean the sky is falling and now everyone is free to sue the 52809348 other works that utilize the same chord progression that was used in a song out of their catalogue from 1955.

Here's a Quora post with a lot of academics and lawyers (ostensibly) weighing in on this question:
Can chord progressions be copyrighted?
A lot of them list sources.

Actually I just found this as well, apparently the Zepellin case with Taurus finally got laid to rest:

N.Y. Times: The ‘Blurred Lines’ Case Scared Songwriters. But Its Time May Be Up

That's about as official as I can get for ya my guy.

Cheers


----------



## NekujaK

One of the most annoying things about copyright infringement lawsuits is that people can sue for any reason, whether the basis of their suit is valid or not.

So someone could indiscriminantly cry "Plagiarism!", and a potential court case gets launched, costing everyone unnecessary time and money. And if the judge or jury doesn't know enough about how music rights work, the plaintif could actually win a substantial settlement.

This pattern has really gotten out of hand over the past couple of decades.


----------



## timbit2006




----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

timbit2006 said:


>


... and that's from "July 2022". So they've also clearly figured out time travel....


----------



## Ned Bouhalassa

Can you get sued for impersonating an A.I. composer? Asking for a friend...


----------



## NekujaK

Ned Bouhalassa said:


> Can you get sued for impersonating an A.I. composer? Asking for a friend...


AFAIK, a computer or AI cannot register a copyright on its own behalf. So a plagiarism lawsuit would need to emanate from the human entity who owns the rights to the AI-generated music.

So the general answer to your friend's question is yes, but it wouldn't be the AI doing the suing.


----------



## Ned Bouhalassa

NekujaK said:


> AFAIK, a computer or AI cannot register a copyright on its own behalf. So a plagiarism lawsuit would need to emanate from the human entity who owns the rights to the AI-generated music.
> 
> So the general answer to your friend's question is yes, but it wouldn't be the AI doing the suing.


I wasn’t referring to plagiarism. The music would be original, but the composer would pretend to be an A.I.


----------



## Ned Bouhalassa

An opposite Turing test! Prove you’re an A.I.!


----------



## NekujaK

Ned Bouhalassa said:


> I wasn’t referring to plagiarism. The music would be original, but the composer would pretend to be an A.I.


Heh, don't know if there's a precedence for that. But given how litigious people can be these days, I'm sure someone would try...


----------



## timbit2006

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCykVChITx5kqBoGkzfz8iZg


You might want to visit this youtube channel and listen for a while. This is really what you should be worried about.

That was composed by the AI.


----------



## timprebble

timbit2006 said:


> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCykVChITx5kqBoGkzfz8iZg
> 
> 
> You might want to visit this youtube channel and listen for a while. This is really what you should be worried about.
> 
> That was composed by the AI.




OMG that EDM track is such a great example of soulless formulaic bland music. For a food analogy, it's like someone spent 6 minutes making a really bad copy of junk/fast food. I hope they do flood the market/Spotify with that, because if someone can't tell how bad that is then they really get what they deserve. But thanks, I needed a laugh!

For context, this is me:


----------



## timbit2006

timprebble said:


> OMG that EDM track is such a great example of soulless formulaic bland music. For a food analogy, it's like someone spent 6 minutes making a really bad copy of junk/fast food. I hope they do flood the market/Spotify with that, because if someone can't tell how bad that is then they really get what they deserve. But thanks, I needed a laugh!


Welcome to the reality of the bland and boring corporate driven world I guess??


----------



## cmillar

timbit2006 said:


> https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCykVChITx5kqBoGkzfz8iZg
> 
> 
> You might want to visit this youtube channel and listen for a while. This is really what you should be worried about.
> 
> That was composed by the AI.



Wow...that's crap.

What a hodgepodge of tripe.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

My 1 free download / month didn't reset today so I guess it's actually 1 / 30 days? Anyway here's an example of their "Dark Piano Trap" subgenre I generated and downloaded as a test before realizing it's only 1 free download / month.

Listening to it again it sounds like it has some vox-ish samples in the lower registers. Becomes more piano-centric around 29 seconds in. It's repetitive, but that seems to match the expectations of the genre (ritualistic, entrancing?).

Could imagine using parts of this as starting templates (either as midi or using Melodyne polyphonic) or as loops if I pay to download stems/midi---can hear some parts screaming out to be tweaked slightly, varied, added to, chopped and rearranged, etc.

$10 for 1 stems/midi download / month monthly subscription, $96 for one year 1 stems/midi / month subscription; for additional stems/midi the only option seems to be $75 for 3 downloads which is pretty steep.


----------



## Ned Bouhalassa

“Hey A.I., write me great string library.”


----------



## mscp

polynaeus said:


> Doing things, any thing, manually will become a hobby or art.


Not really. Manual labour is still highly regarded even though tech for specific things exist. Just look around.

Tech has not, and will not be an issue for creatives. You will not need to learn a bazillion tech "stuff" in the future, but if you prove your worth as a creative, you will have a place in the industry.


----------



## tcollins

Dewdman42 said:


> Machines are already able to create music. What they lack for now is the ability to understand what it is that causes listeners to enjoy listening to it. As musicians we have an intuitive sense about it because musical patterns cause our synapses to fire a certain way that will make us feel things. We listen to those sensibilities while creating music to guide us. This may seem like it’s magic but it’s not really magic it’s just very complex pattern recognition. Yes eventually machines will understand those patterns at as good or better level then we do subconsciously.


I think there is a spiritual element to the different views on this thread. If humans are simply complex machines, then yes, another complex machine should be able to compose inspired music as well. If reality consists only of matter and energy, then you are no doubt right.

However, is this what we really believe when we have an 'inspired' moment, when something wonderful comes to life as if by 'magic', as you put it? How can other humans have the same reaction when they hear it? Isn't there _something else _going on? If so, we humans have the advantage in that we can access that _something else, _while our digital competitors are stuck squarely in the realm of matter and energy and algorithms.

But putting all of that aside for a moment, what is the point of AI generated music? Music is about communicating human emotion, and computers are not human. They are just mimicking us. 

Why not build listening algorithms to appreciate the music of the composing algorithms, and we humans can sneak off into another room and jam?


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

tcollins said:


> I think there is a spiritual element to the different views on this thread. If humans are simply complex machines, then yes, another complex machine should be able to compose inspired music as well. If reality consists only of matter and energy, then you are no doubt right.
> 
> However, is this what we really believe when we have an 'inspired' moment, when something wonderful comes to life as if by 'magic', as you put it? How can other humans have the same reaction when they hear it? Isn't there _something else _going on? If so, we humans have the advantage in that we can access that _something else, _while our digital competitors are stuck squarely in the realm of matter and energy and algorithms.
> 
> But putting all of that aside for a moment, what is the point of AI generated music? Music is about communicating human emotion, and computers are not human. They are just mimicking us.
> 
> Why not build listening algorithms to appreciate the music of the composing algorithms, and we humans can sneak off into another room and jam?


If the point of music is to communicate human emotion, then in principle computers can do it better than us.

"Spirituality" that excludes the energetic universe, the sublimity of nature (which includes all things, even computers) and the beauty of its complex symmetries... that elevates the human individual above all else...

Why remain human? Humanity is terrible, and deserves to be replaced by something smarter, truer, and more beautiful. Individual autonomy is largely illusory, at best a crude approximation of an ideal of antifragility, power, or critical distance (etc...).


----------



## Daren Audio

Saxer said:


> As long as AI isn't even able to clean my kitchen I'm not afraid.


Ikea is getting there:

https://moneyinc.com/now-robots-are-cooking-and-cleaning-in-ikea-kitchens/


----------



## NekujaK

Of course, it's not an either-or proposition. AI can create music, and at the same time, humans will continue to create music, at least for the joy of it, if not for monetary gain. Ultimiately, the audience will decide what they want to listen to. I'm guessing it'll be a mix of both.

The real concern is that composers will get cut out of the loop when it comes to certain types of commercial music: background music, trailers, etc. If AI can do a decent enough job in those narrowly defined areas, studios and media houses will be more than happy to stop paying composers.

Elevator music comes to mind. Is that still a thing? I can't remember the last time I heard music in an elevator...


----------



## rrichard63

tcollins said:


> Why not build listening algorithms to appreciate the music of the composing algorithms, and we humans can sneak off into another room and jam?


I nominate this for the best line in the whole thread.


----------



## timbit2006

tcollins said:


> I think there is a spiritual element to the different views on this thread. If humans are simply complex machines, then yes, another complex machine should be able to compose inspired music as well. If reality consists only of matter and energy, then you are no doubt right.
> 
> However, is this what we really believe when we have an 'inspired' moment, when something wonderful comes to life as if by 'magic', as you put it? How can other humans have the same reaction when they hear it? Isn't there _something else _going on? If so, we humans have the advantage in that we can access that _something else, _while our digital competitors are stuck squarely in the realm of matter and energy and algorithms.
> 
> But putting all of that aside for a moment, what is the point of AI generated music? Music is about communicating human emotion, and computers are not human. They are just mimicking us.
> 
> Why not build listening algorithms to appreciate the music of the composing algorithms, and we humans can sneak off into another room and jam?


Humans can selectively develop preference over time. That's the real major difference. AI can't know some music is absolute shit until a human instructs it that some music is in fact, absolute shit.


----------



## Saxer

Daren Audio said:


> Ikea is getting there:
> 
> https://moneyinc.com/now-robots-are-cooking-and-cleaning-in-ikea-kitchens/


Ok! I get one and save time in the kitchen to become a better composer than my kitchen robot. Not easy. He can spent the whole night and all kitchen free day time. Have to lock my studio when I'm out.


----------



## timbit2006

__





capella audio2score - Hear music, see sheet music - capella-software AG (English)


Noten aus Audio-Dateien erzeugen, Erstellung von capella-, MusicXML- und PDF-Dateien, MP3 und WAV in Noten umwandeln




www.capella-software.com




Haha, whoa


----------



## Gerbil

timbit2006 said:


> __
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> capella audio2score - Hear music, see sheet music - capella-software AG (English)
> 
> 
> Noten aus Audio-Dateien erzeugen, Erstellung von capella-, MusicXML- und PDF-Dateien, MP3 und WAV in Noten umwandeln
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.capella-software.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Haha, whoa


"And here's one for all you lovers out there"


----------



## Hadrondrift

In the not too distant future we will assume a piece is composed by AI, when in fact it was human-made.


----------



## tcollins

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> If the point of music is to communicate human emotion, then in principle computers can do it better than us.
> 
> "Spirituality" that excludes the energetic universe, the sublimity of nature (which includes all things, even computers) and the beauty of its complex symmetries... that elevates the human individual above all else...
> 
> Why remain human? Humanity is terrible, and deserves to be replaced by something smarter, truer, and more beautiful. Individual autonomy is largely illusory, at best a crude approximation of an ideal of antifragility, power, or critical distance (etc...).


Spirituality does not need to exclude the energetic universe, but rather acknowledge that there may be more to reality.

We agree that humanity is flawed, we just disagree on the solution.

I'm not sure I share your optimism about mechanizing ourselves, if that is your meaning. We might just end up as selfish, greedy pseudo-humans with superpowers. Well, like the Borg. Without individual autonomy.


----------



## shponglefan

There's a similar phenomenon in art where AIs can generate images. But there are invariably going to be limitations; results are limited by the scope of the algorithms involved.

Plus, an AI can't generate traditional artwork any more than an AI could play and record a traditional instrument.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

shponglefan said:


> There's a similar phenomenon in art where AIs can generate images. But there are invariably going to be limitations; results are limited by the scope of the algorithms involved.
> 
> Plus, an AI can't generate traditional artwork any more than an AI could play and record a traditional instrument.


"Brush clamped firmly in bionic hand, Ai-Da’s robotic arm moves slowly, dipping in to a paint palette then making slow, deliberate strokes across the paper in front of her.

... first robot to paint as artists have painted for centuries."














‘Mind-blowing’: Ai-Da becomes first robot to paint like an artist


AI algorithms prompt robot to interrogate, select, decision-make to create a painting




www.theguardian.com





"Robots Are Now Playing Musical Instruments Better Than A Lot Of Musicians



... programmed Kuka robots to play musical instruments"









Robots Are Now Playing Musical Instruments Better Than A Lot Of Musicians


When robots rule the world, atleast the music will be good… Nigel Stanford is the musician and technical mind behind the incredible musical robotics you're about to witness. After taking out three…




www.themusicman.uk


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

"The AI learns to distinguish the artistic elements in the art that evoke human emotions"









AI Generated Paintings


Join the art revolution, shop unique canvas prints generated by an artificial intelligence. Every exclusive painting is only printed once.



www.artaigallery.com





Examples:












Impressionist:






Or more like Turner: 






... these might satisfy those of you who find Wombo veering too much towards the surreal or abstract for you. 

These paintings radiate real emotion... (and motion more real, most likely...).


----------



## shponglefan

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> "Brush clamped firmly in bionic hand, Ai-Da’s robotic arm moves slowly, dipping in to a paint palette then making slow, deliberate strokes across the paper in front of her.
> 
> ... first robot to paint as artists have painted for centuries."


I guess I stand corrected, and welcome our new artistic robot overloads.


----------



## NekujaK

Yeah, but can they paint like Bob Ross!?


----------



## Hadrondrift

No, because they do not know what happy little accidents are. 
They don't even know what a tree is and that trees can feel lonely when they stand alone. Their works do not tell stories.

Following a formal syntax, even if complex, does not necessarily lead to semantics. Neural networks don't have intentionality. Perhaps that is what makes the difference, because humans usually have a motivation when they get creative.

But, I now hear someone ask, if AI works are indistinguishable from man-made ones at some point in the future, aren't they equivalent? Perhaps. But what would that tell us about AI? Is it intelligent? Will it be able to create new things, break rules, cross boundaries? Probably not. If an AI can produce Dubstep, indistinguishable from that of a human, it will never think of producing some Chillwave in between. Not even when its neural network becomes more complex and is further trained for years. Always just Dubstep - until the user shuts down the computer.

I would argue that AI based on today's construction principles will never make human artistry obsolete. If anything, it will require new construction principles. In some ways, the robots that cook and clean up in IKEA kitchens are more promising in this regard. They act with their environment, they change it. Perhaps this is a prerequisite for intentionality and intelligence and, in the long term, for the urge to create art.


----------



## timbit2006

DALL·E mini by craiyon.com on Hugging Face


Discover amazing ML apps made by the community



huggingface.co


----------



## timbit2006

Hadrondrift said:


> No, because they do not know what happy little accidents are.
> They don't even know what a tree is and that trees can feel lonely when they stand alone. Their works do not tell stories.
> 
> Following a formal syntax, even if complex, does not necessarily lead to semantics. Neural networks don't have intentionality. Perhaps that is what makes the difference, *because humans usually have a motivation when they get creative.*


You're not considering the humans that have the motive of profit to cause them to get creative.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma

Hadrondrift said:


> No, because they do not know what happy little accidents are.
> They don't even know what a tree is and that trees can feel lonely when they stand alone. Their works do not tell stories.
> 
> Following a formal syntax, even if complex, does not necessarily lead to semantics. Neural networks don't have intentionality. Perhaps that is what makes the difference, because humans usually have a motivation when they get creative.


How does a human "know" what a tree is? They can conjure images of trees, make logical deductions about trees, talk about trees eloquently. AI has matched and exceeded humans in all of this.

As for "intentionality": when you bring up the mental image of a tree, how do you know you're thinking "about" a tree? How is that different from when a neural network brings up the mathematical equivalent of an image of a tree, along with neural network associations, responses, functional indices, and other data? You may have a qualitative sense of "aboutness" as part of your internal representation, and you can extend that intelligently to interactions with actual trees; but a neural network can include the functional equivalent of "aboutness" in its own internal representation, which also goes through its intelligent external actions on the world, extending to robotics and the internet of things.

"[AI] seems to be manipulating higher-order concepts and putting them into new combinations ...

One argument for deep learning’s ability to develop higher-order concepts comes from CLIP, a visual neural net ... published a research paper in which it trumpeted the discovery of what it called ‘‘multimodal neurons’’ in the deep-learning software — inspired by a real class of neurons in the human brain that are activated together in response to general categories or concepts. ... researchers discovered a ‘‘neuron’’ that was reliably activated by the general concept of spiders, even if the visual cues triggering that reaction were sharply different in form. ...

... asked ... whether ... deep-learning systems were capable of comprehension, ... invoked another OpenAI visual neural net called DALL-E ... that generates complex images based on natural-language prompts, e.g., ‘‘Paint the characters from ‘Seinfeld’ in the style of Rembrandt.’’

... a prompt they often use to test these art-creating engines: ‘‘an illustration of a baby daikon radish, wearing a tutu, walking a dog.’’ The image generated ... wasn’t just recognizable and coherent; it also showed some of the same creativity that human cartoonists do when they anthropomorphize an object. ... ‘‘... It shows you that GPT-3 really has quite a good conception of all the things that you were asking it to combine.’’

... ‘‘ME [human to AI]: Imagine a room with a single door and no windows. There’s a coffee table with a drawer in it, and a sofa with big cushions. Alice walks in with a book and sits on the sofa to do some reading. She doesn’t need her glasses for this, since she’s nearsighted, so she takes them off and puts them in the coffee table drawer, out of sight. When she leaves the room with her book, she forgets to take her glasses. ...

ME: Now Alice comes back in, flustered, wondering where her glasses are. Bob looks up innocently, saying nothing. Where will Alice look for her glasses first?

LaMDA [AI]: She will look in the drawer where she tried to place them before she left, but it turns out that Bob has hidden them under a sofa cushion.’’"









A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?


OpenAI’s GPT-3 and other neural nets can now write original prose with mind-boggling fluency — a development that could have profound implications for the future.




www.nytimes.com


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## Dewdman42

The real open question, as it pertains to the arts is... Do we have a consciousness that transcends our actual physical brain? Is there something to a spiritual universe? Or is quantum mechanics involved in some way that we simply have barely an understanding as of yet?

Well...religious and meta-physical folks will say absolutely and emphatically "YES". if that is true, then our brains are merely radios that tune into those frequencies of spiritual conciousness from the universe, or our soul, or whatever concept you want to put around it.

If that is so, then it would be hundreds of years, if ever, until some kind of quantum computers could tap into the universal conciousness and do anything meaningful with it.

That is certainly how mankind has been thinking about it for a very long time. However, there is really no proof of any of that at all. Its religious and meta-physical ideology circulating around the fact that we haven't understood our brain and how it works very well. And maybe we still don't! its quite possible that A.I. and machine learning as we currently know it will advance at breathtaking speeds and eventually hit some roadblocks on some of the most higher level functions of the mysterious area of our brain having to do with creative thinking.

Or it might not. We might simply be biological creatures with complicated brains that figure out a lot of stuff, including creative thinking. There are a lot of humans walking around with very limited creative thinking abilities...most people by the time they are an adult are mostly on auto pilot honestly. We establish neural pathways that dictate a huge amount of automatic behavior..that is how people become addicted, etc. But these auto-pilot modes...which by the way can affect our musical and creative thinking too, are what most humans are doing and its very difficult later in life to break out of these well-established neural pathways. That's why a lot of humans end up basically dumber over time. Robotons, doing what their neural programming feels and is easy to do. Path of least resistance. That, in and of itself...is not creative thinking. But that is what we are. Biologically anyway.

A.I. has the potential to supersede all of that because for one thing it will not have biological welding of neural pathways....it will not create habits/addictions by establishing actual stands of neural fibers welded together. An A.I. will be able to break out of addictive tendencies with ease. Also A.I. will be capable of analyzing many more dimensions of data then what our brain is apparently able to do. A.I. will eventually be able to conceive concepts that were beyond the reach of human minds due to these biological limitations.

Is that creative? I say yes. Well....unless there is anything to be said for the "spiritual" universe of some kind...in which case..all bets are off and A.I. will be relegated to only Robotic tasks.. Still...a lot of music and other forms of media can easily be created without creative thinking...by robots...and many other tasks that humans do on a daily basis to earn their keep in the world do not involve this higher level creative thinking...they are repetitive tasks..easily accomplished even by today's rudimentary A.I.....to say nothing of what will be possible in a decade or two. that is what is going to kill jobs, and in many cases it will kill the meaning of life for millions of people. Which will cause a crisis. Eventually even creative-types: musicians, artists, etc..will despair as A.I. will be cranking out stuff that blows away anything ever done by the most genius. Unless of course, there is something to be said for spiritual-level inspiration.


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## shponglefan

NekujaK said:


> Yeah, but can they paint like Bob Ross!?



As much as I appreciate Bob Ross making painting accessible to people, his paintings are... not good.


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## pinki

The expression "reductio ad absurdum" comes to mind.

Shall we talk about love?


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## timbit2006

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


>


This one is like an HD version of my profile picture, which coincidentally is actually also generated by some machine learning algorithms. I can't remember the name, it's by Nvidia. There was user input to create mine as well though.




One of the things I do find fascinating about AI art is that it's very impressionist in a lot of ways and creates art that is really open to interpretation. I like this particular style of artpiece because you are never too clear on what it is, your imagination can always be running. Is that a mountain in the foreground? A cloaked figure looking out into the distance of a foreign world? A ghostly figure looming on the horizon?
There is something very unique about impressionist and abstract art for sure, I've been a fan of it since a child thanks to my dad, this has been hung in our family home since before I was born.




I spent many hours as a kid looking at this painting by Wassily Kandinsky and wondering what is even going on here. It is painted in 1913.
I think the same concepts are easily applied to AI assisted generation music and that is personally why I am very interested in it. I'm not really interested in the AI technology that tries to clone already made music though.


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## Hadrondrift

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> How does a human "know" what a tree is?


How do you know what I mean when I write 'tree'?

As a child, you might have climbed in an object in nature, hurt yourself on its branches. You stood in the shade of its leaves in the summer to protect yourself from the burning sun. You've heard the sound of a storm blowing through this object. You touched the rough trunk with your hand, found strong smelling bugs under the bark. You bit into a twig to test its hardness. You licked the wood to check how it tasted. Then you looked questioningly at your parents and they said "tree". Over and over. And so, gradually, the symbol 'tree' formed in your brain. For this concert of sensations and perceptions, you now have the concept 'tree'.

This is how a human knows what a tree is.

This meaning of 'tree' cannot be looked up in a dictionary. It can also not be stored in a data base. This meaning of 'tree' must be experienced. It can not be taught. It is a result of a conversation of an individual with his environment. The interaction of life with the world gives meaning.

If an AI gets the input "tree in the storm" and then produces a nice image showing a tree under a dark cloudy sky, did the AI understand what it was doing? Did that process have any meaning? Seeing this picture, can we conclude the AI has any _meaningful_ good conception of 'tree' and 'storm'?

Just as the meaning of 'tree' and 'storm' is learned through interaction and experience mediated via sensory impressions, even many higher concepts like 'love', 'longing', 'homesickness', 'joy', 'pain' acquire their meaning through experience.

When Beethoven, who was suffering from a serious illness while composing his String Quartet No. 15 op. 132, adds the title "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit" ("Hymn of thanksgiving of a recovered man to God"), we have an indication of what this _means_. We have also recovered from illness before. We know how 'recovered' feels, we know the preceding pain, we can translate that to experience, all has _meaning. _We understand Beethoven's motivation for this composition.

Music can be symbolic, both for the composer and for the listener. A chord progression, an interval, they can stand for something, they can awake previously acquired meaningful symbols in our brains. Activation of these symbols awakens experience we have gained in the course of symbol forming. Seen in this way, music can talk about relationships of life to the world. This is how music can carry meaning and tells its stories.

If we are used to the sound of string quartets, then not only the title but also Beethoven's music itself can therefore tell us a story and we will be able to experience it.

An AI cannot create such compositions on its own motivation. It cannot learn the _meaningful_ symbolism required for that. It will not tell us new stories. Unlike ours, its symbols are not anchored in the world, they only revolve eternally around themselves. If we understand AI and brains as symbol manipulating systems, then to me this different symbol quality is their fundamental difference.

(I refer to the "symbol grounding problem" and the interesting branch of science called "embodied artificial intelligence").


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## jbuhler

If we find real beauty in nature, I see no reason we wouldn’t find beauty in AI produced art. Not all of it is good of course. Most of it will be dreck. But most human produced art isn’t that moving either. And with AI we have an infinite number of trials.

Also with art, today’s garbage is often tomorrow’s gold ( and vice versa) and so much depends on what communities choose to value. I can definitely see a day when AI art will be prized for the same sort of ineffable quality that we currently extend to nature but withhold from AI produced art. But I see no reason that won’t change.


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## pinki

Hadrondrift said:


> How do you know what I mean when I write 'tree'?
> 
> As a child, you might have climbed in an object in nature, hurt yourself on its branches. You stood in the shade of its leaves in the summer to protect yourself from the burning sun. You've heard the sound of a storm blowing through this object. You touched the rough trunk with your hand, found strong smelling bugs under the bark. You bit into a twig to test its hardness. You licked the wood to check how it tasted. Then you looked questioningly at your parents and they said "tree". Over and over. And so, gradually, the symbol 'tree' formed in your brain. For this concert of sensations and perceptions, you now have the concept 'tree'.
> 
> This is how a human knows what a tree is.
> 
> This meaning of 'tree' cannot be looked up in a dictionary. It can also not be stored in a data base. This meaning of 'tree' must be experienced. It can not be taught. It is a result of a conversation of an individual with his environment. The interaction of life with the world gives meaning.
> 
> If an AI gets the input "tree in the storm" and then produces an nice image showing a tree under a dark cloudy sky, did the AI understand what it was doing? Did that process have any meaning? Seeing this picture, can we conclude the AI has any _meaningful_ good conception of 'tree' and 'storm'?
> 
> Just as the meaning of 'tree' and 'storm' is learned through interaction and experience mediated via sensory impressions, even many higher concepts like 'love', 'longing', 'homesickness', 'joy', 'pain' acquire their meaning through experience.
> 
> When Beethoven, who was suffering from a serious illness while composing his String Quartet No. 15 op. 132, adds the title "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit" ("Hymn of thanksgiving of a recovered man to God"), we have an indication of what this _means_. We have also recovered from illness before. We know how 'recovered' feels, we know the preceding pain, we can translate that to experience, all has _meaning. _We understand Beethoven's motivation for this composition.
> 
> Music can be symbolic, both for the composer and for the listener. A chord progression, an interval, they can stand for something, they can awake previously acquired meaningful symbols in our brains. Activation of these symbols awakens experience we have gained in the course of symbol forming. Seen in this way, music can talk about relationships of life to the world. This is how music can carry meaning and tells its stories.
> 
> If we are used to the sound of string quartets, then not only the title but also Beethoven's music itself can therefore tell us a story and we will be able to experience it.
> 
> An AI cannot create such compositions on its own motivation. It cannot learn the _meaningful_ symbolism required for that. It will not tell us new stories. Unlike ours, its symbols are not anchored in the world, they only revolve eternally around themselves. If we understand AI and brains as symbol manipulating systems, then to me this different symbol quality is their fundamental difference.
> 
> (I refer to the "symbol grounding problem" and the interesting branch of science called "embodied artificial intelligence").


What is extraordinary about your eloquent post is that you have to post it in the first place. I personally don't have the patience. So thank you for the "next they'll be teaching us fire is hot" lesson which seemed to be unfortunately necessary.


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## pinki

jbuhler said:


> If we find real beauty in nature, I see no reason we wouldn’t find beauty in AI produced art. Not all of it is good of course. Most of it will be dreck. But most human produced art isn’t that moving either. And with AI we have an infinite number of trials.
> 
> Also with art, today’s garbage is often tomorrow’s gold ( and vice versa) and so much depends on what communities choose to value. I can definitely see a day when AI art will be prized for the same sort of ineffable quality that we currently extend to nature but withhold from AI produced art. But I see no reason that won’t change.


..."prized" maybe but devoid of inherent meaning. Music or art as product, music or art as process, they have different structures.


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## pinki

To all the trans-humanists in this thread.... Douglas Rushkoff


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## ZenBYD

so there's an AI that makes generic backing tracks for YouTube videos or for young bedroom singers who don't want to meet any people? cool... 

there's enough room for it... AI composition is here and will get better and will absolutely be a part of the musical landscape of the future. but, I doubt it will take the place of a meaningful and long lasting human relationship between e.g director and composer. anyone who's worked on any kind of major music project knows the relationships come before the music, for better or worse.


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## jbuhler

pinki said:


> ..."prized" maybe but devoid of inherent meaning. Music or art as product, music or art as process, they have different structures.


It’s hard to know what “inherent meaning” means here except belief in intentionality, which may not be present or matter. How different is the structure in fact? Random processes can also generate cogent structures that seem intentional rather than stochastic. That’s not mostly what they do but it’s a subset of possibility. And in any case humans are meaning making beings who have little difficulty discerning meaning in anything or indeed nothing. 

I would say that what’s missing in this discussion is that a good deal of the value of art lies in the communities that use art to organize themselves. And those communities do not need a maker’s intentionality to impress art with value (though many of them do indeed use that as part of the value system). I could see AI art being celebrated for instance for its mystical, oracle-like character, as testifying to an intelligence beyond the ken of human understanding, in that fashion, a rendering of divine presence. And this is often an implicit appeal of the presentation of AI marvels. Threads like this serve to deflate those pretensions and reinvest in the value of human presence (intentionality) but the whole problem, as it were, is that there is little inherent meaning in the art (meaning inheres if anywhere instead in the community).


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## JTB

I would say that some here are drastically over estimating the capabilities of an algorithm developed by a couple of guys. And it's too easy to place those who are sceptical in the 'in denial' pigeon hole.
If it could have been done, and with the knowledge that it would be extremely lucrative, do we not think that the large music corporations would have done it by now?.


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## Dewdman42

Machine Learning and A.I. is still very much in the early stages. Corporations will of course use any new tech that increases their profit. They haven't used it much by now in music because the tech has not reached a point where that would be the case, but it is advancing rapidly. There is much good and useful stuff that will come out of Machine Learning, but I personally think its Pandora's box.


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## pinki

jbuhler said:


> It’s hard to know what “inherent meaning” means here except belief in intentionality, which may not be present or matter. How different is the structure in fact? Random processes can also generate cogent structures that seem intentional rather than stochastic. That’s not mostly what they do but it’s a subset of possibility. And in any case humans are meaning making beings who have little difficulty discerning meaning in anything or indeed nothing.
> 
> I would say that what’s missing in this discussion is that a good deal of the value of art lies in the communities that use art to organize themselves. And those communities do not need a maker’s intentionality to impress art with value (though many of them do indeed use that as part of the value system). I could see AI art being celebrated for instance for its mystical, oracle-like character, as testifying to an intelligence beyond the ken of human understanding, in that fashion, a rendering of divine presence. And this is often an implicit appeal of the presentation of AI marvels. Threads like this serve to deflate those pretensions and reinvest in the value of human presence (intentionality) but the whole problem, as it were, is that there is little inherent meaning in the art (meaning inheres if anywhere instead in the community).


Great post jbuler may I say!

For me 'inherent meaning' is not "a belief in intentionality" and meaning absolutely does matter in the arts. Again I think you are valuing the consumption over the process. Of course there are experiments in stochastic music that shake up the romantic notions of the artist as sole creator. All good healthy stuff. The assigning of meaning by the audience to a work of art that was not created with that meaning is, as we all know, very common (and often hilarious!)

But I guess in the end, it does come down to some sort of _belief_ in something more than a scientific explanation of existence? It's so hard to put in to words and rationalism will always "win" the argument, but I can only go on my own life's experience working as an artist to say that meaning is _profoundly and essentially human. _Our collective unconscious is within us and arrives there through thousands of years of distillation from one generation to the next. It's part of where we get our sense of meaning from and it's the job of the artist to illuminate that.


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## quietmind

This thread is fascinating to me, and yet I have resisted participating because I could find nothing to add. Maybe I still don't have much... but regardless somehow I feel compelled to type on screen. Maybe I am an AI algorithm?

I did grow up at the Stanford AI Lab where I was digitally sampling orchestral instruments in the early 1970s and doing multidimensional scaling explorations of their psychoacoustic properties with hopes of creating perceptually-based extended digital instruments. Before that I was playing with algorithms to replicate Mozart via Chomskian generative grammar applied to music and getting fairly decent results. Oh, and I also helped in the development that whole FM thing. That early period was exciting and fun, and I watched across the lab at early robotics, chess players and even a simulated psychiatrist. So, yes, I am interested in this thread. But not really knowing what to say that has not already been articulated far better than I could.

That said, I am most fascinated with the various deep insights on this thread that approach the question of the difference between quantum reality and spiritual essence. Hint-in-jest: while AI might eventually simulate all the complex circuitry requisite to match human cognitive-emotional processing, it still will be deprived of the one thing we have: the need to hypothesize an inner homunculus, much less an inner child. How will AI replicate our attachment wiring, our arousal system mismanagement, and our ease at delusional thinking along with our occasional recognition that we are hallucinating, or at least that others around us are?

Anyway, I am amused by @tcollins suggestion of constructing algorithms to listen to the output of the composing algorithms while we sneak away and make music. Perhaps even a simulated NY Times AI music critic to boot?

I would add a question to this: might the differentiation between us human creatives and the simulation of such output by future sufficiently-complex AI models be this very concern about the difference between us and AI? I clearly can see a concern of this by some of us humans, as exhibited by several participants in this thread. Do you think that AI entities would share that concern the same way we do? Would they start a thread like this? Would they get heated about the various things that participants on this thread were excited or repulsed by? Would they be inspired by human-generated art and wonder if we could really understand a "tree" they way they do? Thoughts?

Anyway, I do have to say that things always seem to progress so very much slower than our imagination would have. Here it is a half century after I started sampling instruments with such great hopes, and the upgrade to producing musical timbre digitally is extremely behind what I had imagined it might be by now. To produce a fairly decent mockup, I am still down in the phonemic weeds picking through incomplete sets of articulations, still pondering why the interconnections between notes fail to match what human players do. My idea 50 years ago was that we could potentially duplicate anything a real (recorded) human instrumentalist could do, because both were finally represented by a string of numbers from plus to minus the bit width. I will however stipulate that the bit width, sampling rate, and sound engineering of the recorded samples have vastly improved.

Perhaps the arena of speech synthesis has improved faster because the commercial application has been that much more compelling. I have a friend who produced one of the majorly successful algorithms in that domain. And what's he doing now? I think... oh oh... music composition AI. He is someone I can expect something more interesting to come from than the particular AI referred to in this thread. But AI-generated composition does not bother me. I see it as a composer's assistant. Of course I write the algorithms too. 

Consider it a bit like the experiment with 12-tone music. A lot of dreck. But then, sometimes someone could massage the form and produce something musically compelling despite the algorithm (or in addition to it, depending on your view).

To sum, my gut feel is that it will be quite a longwhile before AI is fully generating things that could compete with skilled human creatives. Part of the difference is in our full set of wiring, and what emotionally or even spiritually (whatever that means) inspires the output. Certainly music history is full of geniuses who jumped across the knowledge base that they acquired, and I personally have seen many instances of genre-starting creatives, and I scratch my head as to how that could be simulated by knowledge bases. In fact, I personally changed my undergrad major from music composition to cognitive psychology because, at that time working with Moogs and Buchlas, while what I had learned about music theory was beneficial towards constructing an algorithmic approach to replicating Mozart-like output, it did not help me in the least to write my next note of music. The bonus of having made that change in the summer of love was that I found a computer in the psych department that had a DA converter, and I learned enough machine code to start generating sounds!


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## muk

Lets expand the thought experiment and say that AI will be capable of replacing politicians. Instead of going through a parliament, policy- and law-making could be fed into an algorithm that would, based on historical precedent and calulations of consequences, determine what laws and policy to pass. Lets say this was possible. Should we, as a society, install such an AI to decide policy and law? I am extremely sceptical. Just because something is possible, it's not automatically right. I would argue that we as a society need to discuss and decide the rules we want to live by in an inclusive process, where all people get their say. Delegating this process to an algorithm, however 'accurate' it may be, will rob us of what fundamentally makes us a community: it's deciding, all together, how we want to live together. Could we use such an AI to help us in the decision process of policy making? Help us to better estimate the consequences of these decisions? Absolutely! That could be an invaluable help even, and might warn us about unexpected consequences. But should we delegate the decision making itself to the AI? In my opinion, clearly no! In fact, it's an absolutely dystopic vision to think that we could, deliberately and voluntarily, delegate such a process to a software or machine.

I think there are certain similarities to this with AI in music. Whatever music an AI generates, it will never have the same aura of creation, which is one important aspect of art. Lets assume there was a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa painting. So perfect that it was identical down to the atom with the original. Knowing that this copy has been produced by a complex machine, standing before it, would you feel the same existential awe that you do when standing in front of the painting by da Vinci? I don't think I would. Because there is an existential difference between the two. Da Vinci's painting is a manifestation of human ingenuity, a testament to the potential of the human mind. We are awestruck by the genial spark of creativity, the flawless and original craft, the depth and beauty a fellow human being was capable of creating.

Were said painting created by a machine, it would look the same. But it would be something different entirely. Knowing that a machine or algorithm has created something, it would trigger very different emotions, a different response. And it would have a totally different meaning to us. We might admire the technical advancement, the sophistication of our tools. But knowing that something wasn't created, but calculated, it would fail to touch our hearts. Because we are not admiring an outstanding achievement of the human mind and soul. We are not in front of a product of ingenuity, passion, craft, emotion, vision, creativity, empathy, knowledge, comprehesion. It's not a product of the spark of a human soul. Instead, it's a product of rationality alone. And endlessly fascinating as this may be in itself, it could never achieve the same meaning for our culture.

Indulge me on another little thought experiment. Hopefully it further clarifies my point: You have achieved something very important for you in your life. And your family and friends are throwing a party to celebrate you and your achievement. Your boyfriend/girlfriend want to present a cake to you for this special occasion. They are not much of a baker, but it's important to them to create something special for you. So secretely they start researching what kind of cakes there are, and how they are created. They put a lot of thought into which kind of cake you might like the best. Then they start learning how to bake, and how to create the perfect cake for you. Over two months time, they secretely test creating the cake eight times to make sure that it comes out just right. Five of the tries they have to throw away, because they don't work. But they don't give up, and gradually the results start to become just how they wished it would.

It's the day of the celebration. Your boyfriend/girlfriend have given their all into making the cake. They have planned the entire week around making the cake so that it will be a surprise. They thought about how to decorate it, how and when to present it. And even though the result might not have come out entirely perfect - there might be a little blemish in the decoration here and there that could not entirely be hidden, and the cream might not be completely smooth - it's still the most touching thing anybody has ever done for you, and it tastes delicious!

And now imagine there was an industrially produced cake that looked and tasted exactly the same as our hypothetical cake imagined above. And your boyfriend/girlfriend had gone to Tesco, bought it for 29,99$, and presented it to you at the celebration.

Wouldn't you, in the first case, be deeply touched, overwhelmed, immensely grateful, and happy? And wouldn't the second case, despite the cake looking and tasting exactly the same, trigger an entirely different, less overwhelming, response?

The fulfilling of our human potential. The expression of our inner souls. This can never be delegated to a software or tool. Where music is a commodity, I think AI will be capable to create it perfectly well. But music as art, with an intangible value for us as human beings and as a society, I am of the opinion that this is inherently impossible to create by anything but a human being. Because even if AI could create a piece of music that could, potentially, have all the layers of interpretability and depth that, say, Beethoven's ninth symphony has. Culturally it still never could have the same meaning for us.


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## rhizomusicosmos

I think some of this is existential fear of the doppelgänger coming to usurp our place. The threat of a copy that is even better than the original.

It's interesting that there are many types of labour we are more than happy to offload to assistive technologies. When was the last time you saw a tax accountant use only pencil and paper rather than accounting software or at least a calculator? Picks and shovels in human hands at a building site rather than a mechanical digger? An orchestration done in pencil on staff paper rather than in computer software?

But we see some activities as fundamentally human, such as creating music, art and literature. These activities -- more than other types of work to organise the taskscape around us -- appear sacred, expressions of a "spirit" and higher motivations such as love and empathy. But what if we realise that the smooth space of consciousness emerges from the striated space of the biological machine? That these great Romantic ideas of human exceptionalism can be generated from first principles?

If there is no ghost in the machine, what value is there in a metaphysics? Why cling to our gods?


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## el-bo

muk said:


> [...In fact, it's an absolutely dystopic vision to think that we could, deliberately and voluntarily, delegate such a process [political decision making] to a software or machine.


I'd rather take a risk on that than let certain individuals loose, without their usual, appointed counsel 









muk said:


> Were said painting created by a machine[...]it would have a totally different meaning to us. We might admire the technical advancement, the sophistication of our tools. But knowing that something wasn't created, but calculated, it would fail to touch our hearts.



Not sure why it'd fail to touch 'our' hearts. What grabs our emotions depends on a combination of factors, including maths, science, cultural heritage and personal/individual proclivities. And that's before taking account the state (mental) of the listener at the moment of listening. However, an AI machine, having ingested the combined ouevre(s?) of Einaudi and Pärt, with a cocoa-like dusting of Satie's Gymnopédies, could likely render an original piece that'd not only fool an unknowing audience, but also manage to pull on their heart-strings. Just 'stack the odds' by setting the key as Dm (well-known as the saddest of all keys) and "job done!" 

Of course, you did stress that it's AI-ness was a known. But I'm not sure it'd make much of a difference to most people. And I'd likely include myself with the throng. People like what they like, even if what it is they like is qualitatively bad. That includes liking things, knowing they're bad and liking things specifically because they're bad (Think movies like 'The Room' etc.).

But when the music is good?...

Where I think AI will put composers out of work is in the more cookie-cutter-like parts of the industry. I'm certainly not saying that booming trailer-music is easy to do, or isn't an art-form in and of itself. But the more formulaic a style, whether down to the general ebb and flow of the overall dynamic, or the literal risers and drops in all the expected places, the easier I suppose it'd be for AI to map out a framework and drop in the right pieces, and the more convincing the results are likely to be. Trailers are designed to be a bombastic and visceral experience. Not sure many, other than the composers themselves, are likely to listen with much discernment.

And discernment, or lack thereof, is where I think AI loses out. Unless someone woks out how to get a computer to understand why someone might trash an entire weeks' worth of work, to start all over ('cause "It's all a load of Fucking Shit!!"), there will always need to be an amount of human intervention and curation, separating the musical wheat from its chaff. And what about when the director, content-creator or whoever decides they like the majority of a piece, but wants things changed? At what point does it just become easier to have humans either composing from scratch, and to order ?

Also, I don't see AI fusing or creating genres. While it might be pretty easy now for an AI to approximate the trend for lofi 'study' jazz/hip-hop, given the huge amount of available source material, it would likely never have come up with the style/genre in the first place. Taking seemingly clashing styles of music and fusing them together in a tasteful manner takes the aforementioned discernment. And getting it right involves knowing when and why it sounds wrong.

Suffice to say, I don't think it's over quite yet. Certainly not time to be ringing any death knells.




muk said:


> And now imagine there was an industrially produced cake that looked and tasted exactly the same as our hypothetical cake imagined above. And your boyfriend/girlfriend had gone to Tesco, bought it for 29,99$, and presented it to you at the celebration.
> 
> Wouldn't you, in the first case, be deeply touched, overwhelmed, immensely grateful, and happy? And wouldn't the second case, despite the cake looking and tasting exactly the same, trigger an entirely different, less overwhelming, response?



I think this is different. In cases such as this, many of us prefer any amount of personal effort, over the shortcut, even if the results in the first case aren't as good. A doting Grandmother would probably prefer soggy sandwiches and cold-tea served from a plastic tea-set, over lunch at the Ritz, if her Grand-Daughter had spent ages lovingly putting it together.


----------



## Double Helix

The key is "knowledge": If we did NOT know that the AI-generated, perfect down to the atomic level Mona Lisa was not Leonardo's, I submit that viewers would have the same reaction as they would in viewing the original (again, with no prior knowledge)


rhizomusicosmos said:


> I think some of this is existential fear of the doppelgänger coming to usurp our place. *The threat of a copy that is even better than the original.*


My master, Jorge Luis Borges, has written in “The Translators of _The 1001 Nights_” (1936), "The original is not faithful to the translation" (sounds backwards, no? As you might expect, there is a cottage industry around the zillion analyses of this particularly Borgesian approach)

As I posted in a weeks-ago thread, one of John Donne's sermons states that "No man is an island"; Jackson Browne sings, "We're all just prisoners of time, alone within the boundaries of our mind"--I don't have to bend over backwards to see value in both viewpoints


el-bo said:


> . . .Not sure why it'd fail to touch 'our' hearts. What grabs our emotions depends on a combination of factors, including maths, science, cultural heritage and personal/individual proclivities. *And that's before taking account the state (mental) of the listener at the moment of listening*. However, an AI machine, having ingested the combined ouevre(s?) of Einaudi and Pärt, with a cocoa-like dusting of Satie's Gymnopédies, *could likely render an original piece that'd not only fool an *unknowing* audience, but also manage to pull on their heart-strings. *


Certainly the key is "unknowing" [see above]-- and speaking of "key" in the musical sense


el-bo said:


> . . . Just 'stack the odds' by setting the key as Dm (well-known as the saddest of all keys) and "job done!"


I accept that Dm is the saddest of all keys, but its relative major (F) is "The Key of Love"--there is a clear relationship here. . . somewhere


----------



## gzapper

quietmind said:


> This thread is fascinating to me, and yet I have resisted participating because I could find nothing to add. Maybe I still don't have much... but regardless somehow I feel compelled to type on screen. Maybe I am an AI algorithm?
> 
> I did grow up at the Stanford AI Lab where I was digitally sampling orchestral instruments in the early 1970s and doing multidimensional scaling explorations of their psychoacoustic properties with hopes of creating perceptually-based extended digital instruments. Before that I was playing with algorithms to replicate Mozart via Chomskian generative grammar applied to music and getting fairly decent results. Oh, and I also helped in the development that whole FM thing. That early period was exciting and fun, and I watched across the lab at early robotics, chess players and even a simulated psychiatrist. So, yes, I am interested in this thread. But not really knowing what to say that has not already been articulated far better than I could.
> 
> That said, I am most fascinated with the various deep insights on this thread that approach the question of the difference between quantum reality and spiritual essence. Hint-in-jest: while AI might eventually simulate all the complex circuitry requisite to match human cognitive-emotional processing, it still will be deprived of the one thing we have: the need to hypothesize an inner homunculus, much less an inner child. How will AI replicate our attachment wiring, our arousal system mismanagement, and our ease at delusional thinking along with our occasional recognition that we are hallucinating, or at least that others around us are?
> 
> Anyway, I am amused by @tcollins suggestion of constructing algorithms to listen to the output of the composing algorithms while we sneak away and make music. Perhaps even a simulated NY Times AI music critic to boot?
> 
> I would add a question to this: might the differentiation between us human creatives and the simulation of such output by future sufficiently-complex AI models be this very concern about the difference between us and AI? I clearly can see a concern of this by some of us humans, as exhibited by several participants in this thread. Do you think that AI entities would share that concern the same way we do? Would they start a thread like this? Would they get heated about the various things that participants on this thread were excited or repulsed by? Would they be inspired by human-generated art and wonder if we could really understand a "tree" they way they do? Thoughts?
> 
> Anyway, I do have to say that things always seem to progress so very much slower than our imagination would have. Here it is a half century after I started sampling instruments with such great hopes, and the upgrade to producing musical timbre digitally is extremely behind what I had imagined it might be by now. To produce a fairly decent mockup, I am still down in the phonemic weeds picking through incomplete sets of articulations, still pondering why the interconnections between notes fail to match what human players do. My idea 50 years ago was that we could potentially duplicate anything a real (recorded) human instrumentalist could do, because both were finally represented by a string of numbers from plus to minus the bit width. I will however stipulate that the bit width, sampling rate, and sound engineering of the recorded samples have vastly improved.
> 
> Perhaps the arena of speech synthesis has improved faster because the commercial application has been that much more compelling. I have a friend who produced one of the majorly successful algorithms in that domain. And what's he doing now? I think... oh oh... music composition AI. He is someone I can expect something more interesting to come from than the particular AI referred to in this thread. But AI-generated composition does not bother me. I see it as a composer's assistant. Of course I write the algorithms too.
> 
> Consider it a bit like the experiment with 12-tone music. A lot of dreck. But then, sometimes someone could massage the form and produce something musically compelling despite the algorithm (or in addition to it, depending on your view).
> 
> To sum, my gut feel is that it will be quite a longwhile before AI is fully generating things that could compete with skilled human creatives. Part of the difference is in our full set of wiring, and what emotionally or even spiritually (whatever that means) inspires the output. Certainly music history is full of geniuses who jumped across the knowledge base that they acquired, and I personally have seen many instances of genre-starting creatives, and I scratch my head as to how that could be simulated by knowledge bases. In fact, I personally changed my undergrad major from music composition to cognitive psychology because, at that time working with Moogs and Buchlas, while what I had learned about music theory was beneficial towards constructing an algorithmic approach to replicating Mozart-like output, it did not help me in the least to write my next note of music. The bonus of having made that change in the summer of love was that I found a computer in the psych department that had a DA converter, and I learned enough machine code to start generating sounds!


I've been doing a bit of neuroscience reading of late, looking at recent theories and papers in relation to music and predictive processing. Its very informative in relation to AI and music in general.

The Predictive Mind model argues that we are all big prediction machines, that we are constantly building up a model of the world around us based on predicting what will happen on multiple levels, using our multiple sensory inputs. What sounds like a simplistic explanation is actually amazingly deep and powerful in practice. If you take just walking down a street as an example, we all are predicting that cars will continue on the road and not hit us on the sidewalk, that people will or won't move out of the way, that the ground is stable, what the person we are walking with is going to say next, what we have to do later or have for lunch, whether the dog we see is aggressive or friendly all at the same time. And only when those background predictions are wrong do they rise to the Executive Network in our minds and become our central focus. Same happens with music, we listen and predict multiple levels at once, chord sequences, timbral, rhythm, lyric, melody variation, solos and only when there is a 'surprise' to our prediction does it become foreground to our mind. But what we predict is very personal, based on our histories and abilities, which is why we all like different musics. So you can build AI's that can create music based on all of those elements at once, but even so, the results will be specific to that AI's programming and its success will be different based on our individual models of the world.

That's my take.


----------



## quietmind

There are interesting AI models that produce coherent and complex prose: OpenAI's GPT-3 is one (pondered about recently in the NY Times here: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/magazine/ai-language.html).

This model was entirely built up from having the algorithm predict the next word in countless documents, well, a huge number anyway. Now you can suggest a complex topic and it generates impressive prose that even at times could seem to be intelligent and original. But it stays within the framework of what it was fed, essentially, able to put together in a complex way parts, perhaps similar to how a magazine writer might frame a short piece, or on the level of a post. I wouldn't expect a Ulysses, not at this point. Or even a touching poem as an answer. In that way, I agree with one idea on this thread, that creating a new genre is not what AI is likely to do. Nor will it do the full extent that a human creator might do unless we program into it that level of complexity. 

Also, while it can produce things that look or sound like a human production, there is also that matter of why is the human producing the music, poem, painting or prose in the first place. What inspires it? 

Lots of musical pieces come out of complex, difficult human emotional states. Lovesick songs. Longing. Heartbreak. Darkness. Inspiration. 

While AI could certainly imitate the output, and even produce an arrangement and find a vocal timbre that matches what most observers would categorize as how it should sound when someone is singing of heartbreak, and fill in the lyrics, and even make sure it was in Dm, and though many people could be swayed by that piece, I think there would still be something missing. Perhaps hard to hear it. Or even describe it in words. And, yes, there are plenty of lovesick songs in genres I avoid or don't want to hear. It's not a matter of the quality or genre. There is something deeper and... I think it is perceivable.... the voice of the human soul.


----------



## JTB

So anyway, when this system starts churning out 20 stock pop songs per second and people start referring to them as 'Bot Beats', the world can move on from mediocre pop music and begin to appreciate music again.


----------



## Thundercat

JTB said:


> So anyway, when this system starts churning out 20 stock pop songs per second and people start referring to them as 'Bot Beats', the world can move on from mediocre pop music and begin to appreciate music again.


Touché !


----------



## mobiuscog

As several have mentioned, GPT-3, Imagen and DALLE-2 all demonstrate the level at which AI is able to generate content that to *most* (if not all) people, in a blind test, is indiscernable in many cases from that of an artist / human.

This is the reality we live in already and anyone trying to pretend it's more than a couple of years away, from a content creation perspective, is living in denial. Of course, not everyone can build such AI models - the computing and dataset costs are huge, in the same way that not everyone has access to high-quality satellite mapping data. It exists though.

Also remember that whilst there are some steps towards musical generation (research, not just commercial toys), AI generally improves as it gets more information to play with. I suspect that if Google could easily have a Captcha that asked which was the more 'musical' of two pieces, or 'Choose the MP3s that sound like a french horn' there would be a whole lot more going on than there is now.


----------



## Thundercat

mobiuscog said:


> As several have mentioned, GPT-3, Imagen and DALLE-2 all demonstrate the level at which AI is able to generate content that to *most* (if not all) people, in a blind test, is indiscernable in many cases from that of an artist / human.
> 
> This is the reality we live in already and anyone trying to pretend it's more than a couple of years away, from a content creation perspective, is living in denial. Of course, not everyone can build such AI models - the computing and dataset costs are huge, in the same way that not everyone has access to high-quality satellite mapping data. It exists though.
> 
> Also remember that whilst there are some steps towards musical generation (research, not just commercial toys), AI generally improves as it gets more information to play with. I suspect that if Google could easily have a Captcha that asked which was the more 'musical' of two pieces, or 'Choose the MP3s that sound like a french horn' there would be a whole lot more going on than there is now.


Yes this is EXACTLY my point. While AI may not "be there" yet - they ARE constantly improving. Whether it's today, next week, next year, or 10 years from now, they WILL get to the point where they create music that people cannot tell was created by computer. It's inevitable. You will be assimilated.

However, that doesn't mean it will be "better" than human made music. It may be orders of magnitude more complex, and even beyond genius level in integrating all aspects of music theory, counterpoint, rhythm, etc, but that doesn't make it "better" at all.

I think that one point that gets lost in these discussions is the fact that music is designed to express a HUMAN emotion or feeling. So it's we humans that assign meaning and emotion to the experience, not the machines. At the end of the day, sometimes the most complex art does nothing, whilst the simplest expression of a heart can move an entire audience.


----------



## mobiuscog

We often hold Celebrities/Influencers up as the 'best'. They're likely the most popular, and may have become that way by being one of the 'best', but they're mostly very good at marketing (or employ others who are).

The bigger concern for me is that many 'artists' will hide their usage of AI to either claim skills that they do not have, or to suggest greater effort was involved to justify a sale price. If you want to get ahead of the game, work on AI that generates stems and ideas that the stems were built from, to 'prove' your work.

(Hint: Chain of Thought Prompting is already doing this on language)

At the end of the day, art of any kind will either appeal to an individual or not. How it was created may impact the value that determines how much will be paid for it. Perhaps music streaming will become the domain of AI, as it won't care about being paid so little, and 'real music' will be left to humans - written and performed as it was 'before the internet / technology' 🤷‍♂️

Player pianos didn't replace pianists. Equally, how many people in a stadium crowd actually care whether the artist is singing/playing live, versus just being 'in the moment' ?

Interesting times.


----------



## LatinXCombo

TonalDynamics said:


> Forgive me, but did you actually try to look this information up or are you being intentionally obtuse?


I literally followed the link in the source you supplied and quoted what it said. If there is obtuse-ness happening here, it isn't on my part. 



TonalDynamics said:


> Here's a Quora post with a lot of academics and lawyers (ostensibly) weighing in on this question:
> Can chord progressions be copyrighted?
> A lot of them list sources.



Interesting, and at least we have someone claiming to be an American attorney (Todd Lowry) offering an opinion, but he doesn't actually cite a case or anything, so the opinion is about as worthwhile as anyone's who claims to be an attorney and posts something online. The rest of it, at least as far as I can tell before I got bored with the infinite scrolling, seems to be (again) cute, but meaningless. 




TonalDynamics said:


> Actually I just found this as well, apparently the Zepellin case with Taurus finally got laid to rest:
> 
> N.Y. Times: The ‘Blurred Lines’ Case Scared Songwriters. But Its Time May Be Up


Very good, now we're actually getting somewhere. Everything else you gave me was garbage, but this one actually gives us real decisions by actual American courts to read.

If you read and understood the article (which you did, right?) you'll note that all of these cases occurred in the 9th Circuit. So while rules are clearly taking form there, we don't yet know what might happen in a case brought up in a different circuit (Unless you can point to other cases in different circuits, or preferably the Supreme Court, which would be great.)

Presumably other circuits might take the 9th Circuit's positions under advisement, especially given that Courts in that Circuit deal with these sorts of matters more frequently....but if you're hanging your hat on judge-made law, you take your chances that the judge won't change his mind or the court won't change its personnel. As would-be plaintiffs have found to its chagrin after several years of open waters after the _Blurred Lines_ decision.

(Aside, did any of the parties who lost at the 9th petition for cert?)


----------



## pinki

There seem to be camps appearing in this thread. The one I take issue with, or more to the point cannot take issue with, is the “it’s just a matter of time just you wait and see” camp. 
Well, er, yes.
It seems to be a human trope that is broadly based in dystopianism and I’ve never subscribed to it. Dystopianism, Utopianism, Luddism, just always end up missing the mark.


----------



## Tim_Wells

It is just a matter of time before AI is used for generating commercial music and causes some sort of displacement and disruption.

But in no-way do I see a dystopian future because of it. It'll be just another tool. The history of technological advancements always increases the number of jobs. They're just different kind of jobs.


----------



## Koyo

The idea of "democratizing" music like the article mentions by replacing composers by AI has nothing to do with democracy. It's not cultural, it's robotic. It's not inspirational, it's computational.


----------



## mobiuscog

Koyo said:


> The idea of "democratizing" music like the article mentions by replacing composers by AI has nothing to do with democracy. It's not cultural, it's robotic. It's not inspirational, it's computational.


It does democratise it, assuming it's made available to all - which is likely not the case and the wealthy will have better solutions - but I don't think that matters as much as people think.

DAWs etc., also democratised music creation - a music studio in a box - and yet that hasn't really been a bad thing,

AI is in some ways cultural - it builds on the past, which is what tradition and culture also do. Sure, it's not necessarily human, but I don't think it's accurate to say it's not inspirational.

Isn't music theory computational ?


----------



## Koyo

mobiuscog said:


> It does democratise it, assuming it's made available to all - which is likely not the case and the wealthy will have better solutions - but I don't think that matters as much as people think.
> 
> DAWs etc., also democratised music creation - a music studio in a box - and yet that hasn't really been a bad thing,
> 
> AI is in some ways cultural - it builds on the past, which is what tradition and culture also do. Sure, it's not necessarily human, but I don't think it's accurate to say it's not inspirational.
> 
> Isn't music theory computational ?


The term "democratize" as used in the original article is misleading.
The idea behind AI composing music and individuals composing music is the exact opposite of democracy. Let me explain:
1. People draw on their personal experience, the way they play, their predilections, their personal relationship with life to create music. This creates can create new trends based on real people.
2. AI is fed by a programmer. Who decides what and how goes in and comes out of the computer? Only a few people who decide on the algorithm.
This seriously curtails the democratic aspect.

Music is a science, yes, but like any branch of science, only the creativity of inventors can make it evolve into new practical or artisitic creations. Not an AI.
That's why it's not democratic.


----------



## mobiuscog

Koyo said:


> 2. AI is fed by a programmer. Who decides what and how goes in and comes out of the computer? Only a few people who decide on the algorithm.
> This seriously curtails the democratic aspect.


I would suggest that this point is misleading. The 'algorithm' is very much a black box, and in most cases the programmer or designers have no control over what *specifically *comes out. Yes, they define 'features' that form areas of interest/direction within the structure and they also control what is in the input - you could potentially build an AI that only consumes K-Pop and produces output limited to 8 bars - but that doesn't reduce the democratisation in any way.

Besides, who's to say that AI music won't be sampled/mangled/remixed etc., into something more 'human' aferwards. After all, that's the history of music right there.

I would agree that if such technologies are hidden behind paywalls and/or patents, then it's not as much a democracy as just a business, but that's not unique to AI.


----------



## TonalDynamics

LatinXCombo said:


> Very good, now we're actually getting somewhere. Everything else you gave me was garbage, but this one actually gives us real decisions by actual American courts to read.


Again, it's not my job to educate you sir, this stuff was easily found with a 5 minute search.

Also the Quora link was neither garbage nor 'cute', there were a lot of ostensible academics and attorneys in that thread—your default state is just blanket condescension for no reason apparently.

But I'm glad you found some of it to be interesting 


LatinXCombo said:


> but if you're hanging your hat on judge-made law, you take your chances that the judge won't change his mind or the court won't change its personnel. As would-be plaintiffs have found to its chagrin after several years of open waters after the _Blurred Lines_ decision.


I mean that's half the legal system.

If you're waiting on an act of congress or federal statute to define everything related to IP, then you may as well just not create anything.

Your implication that every legal precedent regarding music copyrighting is somehow 'cute' or intangible is simply wrong; decades of decisions are the only thing we have to define a great deal of the 'law', thus we use that as a basis upon which to frame our actions.

*TLDR: *There were no 'open waters'—you have never, still can't, and _will_ never be able to copyright chord progressions; one bad ruling is not enough to overturn decades of jurisprudence.


----------



## LatinXCombo

TonalDynamics said:


> Again, it's not my job to educate you sir, this stuff was easily found with a 5 minute search.



I daresay it was your job. You made an unsupported factual assertion; I simply asked you to back it up. The options for a decent person at that moment are to either do so, or to honestly admit you don't know (allowing me to seek answers elsewhere.) 



TonalDynamics said:


> Also the Quora link was neither garbage nor 'cute', there were a lot of ostensible academics and attorneys in that thread—your default state is just blanket condescension for no reason apparently.


"Ostensible" being the weasel word. The wise do not take something posted in an internet forum at face value. If there's no underlying source provided, it is garbage. If an attorney isn't saying something to you about the law in writing in the context of an attorney-client relationship, it is garbage. The only thing you have to go on are statutes and decisions.

I mean, seriously, if you'd like to show up in court citing Quora for your legal arguments, let me know the time and date and I'll bring some popcorn.



TonalDynamics said:


> *Your* *implication that every legal precedent regarding music* copyrighting is somehow 'cute' or intangible is simply wrong; decades of decisions are the only thing we have to define a great deal of the 'law', thus we use that as a basis upon which to frame our actions.


This is simply a lie. I neither said nor implied anything of the kind, and I ask that you retract the statement or show me the receipts. 

My statements and implications have been that the sources you were supplying to support your position (absent the NYT article which is a good secondary source because it cited actual court decisions which I could then find and read,) had no credibility. 

My position throughout has been that I do not know much about the current state of American copyright law, especially as it relates to chord progression, and all my questions have been dedicated to learning more about it from credible sources. 

I directed my questions to you because, well, you were talking with me. And indeed your original conclusion may have been correct. But until you supplied an actual legal source for your support, what reason did I have to assume that you knew what you were talking about? 

The internet is rife with legal charlatans and internet barristers because who make bold, unsupported assertions with confidence and vigor.

So the way I look at it is this: you either did know what you were talking about when we started and were just being lazy, or you had just taken something someone on the internet told you about the law on faith and when I called it out, you felt compelled to learn. Either way, you upped your game, and I got the info I was looking for. 

Win-win, no? 

Peace.


----------



## Rowy van Hest

Oh dear, if this Soundful is to be a success, composers will have to come up with something extra. Like an excellent education, lots of talent, extensive experience with various cultures and a rich inner life.

They will even have to be prepared not to put money and commerce first. And they will have to be indifferent to what the average consumer wants to hear, because Soundful will probably cover that.

It's going to be a massacre.


----------



## TonalDynamics

LatinXCombo said:


> IIRC, the (losing) suit against Ed Sheeran claimed that his chord progressions. And, well, it lost. Of course, that was a British case, so generally not binding on American courts.... I do not know if an American court has ruled on that point (and a minute on Google didn't give me an obvious answer.)


This was your OP.

In the time it took for you to cross-examine all of my attempts to be helpful, you could have found all the info I linked and more a dozen times over.


LatinXCombo said:


> I mean, seriously, if you'd like to show up in court citing Quora for your legal arguments, let me know the time and date and I'll bring some popcorn.


Nice strawman, but this isn't a court, it's a forum where people (try) to help each other.


LatinXCombo said:


> This is simply a lie. I neither said nor implied anything of the kind, and I ask that you retract the statement or show me the receipts.


Your receipt:


LatinXCombo said:


> Interesting, and at least we have someone claiming to be an American attorney (Todd Lowry) offering an opinion, but he doesn't actually cite a case or anything, so the opinion is about as worthwhile as anyone's who claims to be an attorney and posts something online. The rest of it, at least as far as I can tell before I got bored with the infinite scrolling, seems to be (again) cute, but meaningless.





LatinXCombo said:


> I directed my questions to you because, well, you were talking with me. And indeed your original conclusion may have been correct. But until you supplied an actual legal source for your support, what reason did I have to assume that you knew what you were talking about?


How about the hundreds of voices of well-written posts echoing the same thing I'm telling you? I get it, they're not judges, but you're basically assuming every one of those hundreds of academics/experts/attorneys who present themselves as such on Quora are liars and thus have no credibility.


LatinXCombo said:


> My statements and implications have been that the sources you were supplying to support your position (absent the NYT article which is a good secondary source because it cited actual court decisions which I could then find and read,) had no credibility.


It was never _my_ position guy, it's the prevailing position of decades of U.S. legal precedent, which you somehow can't seem to grasp.

I provided numerous solid sources, none of which were good enough, so essentially you're placing the onus on me to provide you with specific instances of precedent established via decades of IP case-law–is this a reasonable expectation in your world?


LatinXCombo said:


> My position throughout has been that I do not know much about the current state of American copyright law, especially as it relates to chord progression, and all my questions have been dedicated to learning more about it from credible sources.


Come on dude, you were just trying to bait someone into arguing with you so you could play devil's advocate–which is a practice that has a certain value in and of itself, but to pretend you were just 'trying to learn' is a bit of a distortion of your own intent given how condescending and insulting you've been throughout.


LatinXCombo said:


> or you had just taken something someone on the internet told you about the law on faith and when I called it out, you felt compelled to learn


No.


LatinXCombo said:


> So the way I look at it is this: you either did know what you were talking about when we started and were just being lazy


It never ceases to amaze me how the mind of a true narcissist works; the same information is available to both of us, the laws and decisions are the same, yet _I'm_ the one who's lazy for not bothering to reference specific sources of case law for something I've known for 15 years...

Remarkable.


LatinXCombo said:


> Either way, you upped your game, and I got the info I was looking for.


How about you up your game and learn to research something for 5 minutes instead of berating someone who's trying to be helpful for not doing it for you?

As for the win-win, it's been an interesting exchange but I think we've reached the point where there's not much more to be said.

Ciao


----------



## ArtAt

shadowsoflight said:


> Yikes.
> 
> "WHAT WE’RE DOING AT SOUNDFUL IS DEMOCRATIZING MUSIC CREATION TO THE MASSES, IN THE SAME WAY THAT THE PHONE HAS DEMOCRATIZED VIDEO CREATION."
> 
> Really? The equivalent would be to ask my phone for a starfighter skirmish scene and have it generate one for me. This does not sound like democratizing music creation, this sounds like automating it. "Democratization" is starting to become a trigger word for me...


Don't panic. Photography has not replaced painting and drawing even though photography "democratised" the image creation process.


----------



## ArtAt

Rowy van Hest said:


> Oh dear, if this Soundful is to be a success, composers will have to come up with something extra. Like an excellent education, lots of talent, extensive experience with various cultures and a rich inner life.
> 
> They will even have to be prepared not to put money and commerce first. And they will have to be indifferent to what the average consumer wants to hear, because Soundful will probably cover that.
> 
> It's going to be a massacre.


It's sounds like a good kind of massacre.


----------



## ArtAt

gsilbers said:


> The more explotative the cheaper is for the user who doesnt care, until surpise... their jobs is now part of a platform.
> We clearly need an easier way to unionize for all jobs and not have the pitfall of past corrupt unions in the USA.
> Strong union would lead to stopping platforms in certain countries that if EU came together and said youtube needs to pay PRO then bam... itll happen to the rest of the world.
> meh.. the future sucks.


Good grief. A few years ago everyone was worried that all our jobs were being automated out of existence. The Guardian was running scary articles that by 2025 a third of all jobs might be automated away.

But guess what? Right now there is a massive labour SHORTAGE. There are not enough workers in many different industries and this is causing all kinds of problems. Where were all the scare-mongers predicting *that*?

All Soundful will do is cleanse the industry of "beat makers" who make predictable, algorithmic "music" used as background noise for advertisements and waiting on hold.


----------



## tressie5

I, for one, am thrilled - tickled to death, you might even say - that the sheer ability to compose multitimbral music without the aid of other musicians exists. No, I can't play the piano like Barenboim or drums like Bonham, but creating music gives me life. So if tools exist which makes that living just a little bit easier, it gets my vote.


----------



## ArtAt

tressie5 said:


> but creating music gives me life.


But it's the thing doing the creating. What would be your role?


----------



## mobiuscog

The other side to this, and why companies are pushing to 'democratize' things, is because they're effectively drug dealers - they want everyone to be able to take part, and then charge for the 'useable' specifics.

Soundful shows their true colours up-front:


> _Premium users can use tracks to monetize across social media, websites, and online ads._ *You can even buy the copyright, and own the tracks you create.*​


You have to pay them to have rights to the music. It's not yours - you didn't create it. You're just licensing a sound that you like, and can buy it from them if you think you can make money (or really like it, I guess).

This is why true artists/musicians etc., will not be replaced. The companies who are developing these AI systems are not going to give the capability away for free, and those with a true calling and/or passion will chase their dreams the more traditional way rather than pay others (in this case AI) to do it for them.

Sure, commercial aspects will change in the same way stock photography took over (and there's now an epidemic of stock sound all over youtube) but business will eat itself repeatedly. It won't be long before a new company comes along to 'disrupt' the industry, perhaps with human musicians.

If you're in this, or anything, just for the money, then you probably need to rethink your business model - AI *will* change how things work - but if music is your passion and you write to create, there will always be people willing to pay for that. You may not become a millionaire, but if it's money you're after then you probably picked the wrong career in the first place - partner with a tech/AI firm instead in that case and become part of the problem/solution.

A thought to take away - if a VST comes along that can generate 'perfect' orchestral samples for the MIDI you feed it, completely customisable in every way and indistinguishable from a real orchestra, would you stop buying other VSTs ? Even if you have to pay a license fee to use it ? Would you only use that VST going forward ?


----------



## mobiuscog

ArtAt said:


> But it's the thing doing the creating. What would be your role?


Telling it what to create. Most people won't be happy with just "Make up something nice" - control has value.

"Write variations in the key of A Minor, using a Kazoo and a glockenspiel, with a 1930's piano playing a chord progression that sounds happy, in the style of Skrillex, mixed with Paul McCartney"

followed by many sessions of choosing variations and asking for changes. The musician becomes the editor/director/producer and the AI the instrument - it's just played a different way.

Which for a musician, means it has no value. Musicians aren't really the target market.


----------



## gsilbers

ArtAt said:


> But guess what? Right now there is a massive labour SHORTAGE. There are not enough workers in many different industries and this is causing all kinds of problems. Where were all the scare-mongers predicting *that*?


My guess, they are all making beats


----------



## tressie5

"But it's the thing doing the creating. What would be your role?"

Occasionally, I set up generative tools like CodeFN42's RandARP and Transition in my tracks. Why? Just for flavor. You create so many tracks you're bound to start repeating yourself. Generative tools are one way of defeating that. Plus, it's fun to see those little buggers go to work like that. 

I can see people going, "You use arpeggiators? Sequence it yourself in your DAW, you loser," or "You know, instead of using Noire's Particles, maybe you should play the sequence yourself then apply a multitap delay, shimmer reverb and bit crusher for the same effect." Theoretically, I can cut down a tree with a penknife, but why bother when I have an axe?


----------



## Rowy van Hest

tressie5 said:


> "But it's the thing doing the creating. What would be your role?"
> 
> Occasionally, I set up generative tools like CodeFN42's RandARP and Transition in my tracks. Why? Just for flavor. You create so many tracks you're bound to start repeating yourself.


I only use pencil and paper when writing music. But you made me think. I think I'm going to use pencils of different colours and perhaps I will put electric candles on my piano. That should do it. Living on the edge


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Back to Soundful---here's a more cinematic example:

View attachment Soundful cinematic.mp3


Could be a pretty good starting point, though I'd definitely want to tweak the midi... would definitely consider using at least a few elements.


----------



## Maacoro

I am a graphic and industrial designer (not the most valued profession lol) and I can tell you that we all say the same thing every single time a new “you don't need a designer anymore” app or a “design for everyone” tool comes out. I’ve never had trouble finding a job and being well compensated for it. The reality is that people still need designers, there will always be people who value the human, professional input despite how cool Canva or any AI based design software is.

All of this to say that composers will be ok. Heaven knows how the composition craft will evolve and what new job opportunities will emerge in the music composition field. This is no necessarily a bad thing and will not devaluate the composition craft. Humans love the human touch in the things they do, especially when it comes to music, which is so connected to emotion.


----------



## timprebble

tressie5 said:


> I can see people going, "You use arpeggiators? Sequence it yourself in your DAW, you loser," or "You know, instead of using Noire's Particles, maybe you should play the sequence yourself then apply a multitap delay, shimmer reverb and bit crusher for the same effect." Theoretically, I can cut down a tree with a penknife, but why bother when I have an axe?



cue the old goat farming dilemma:

_"I thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all."_


----------



## aeliron

NekujaK said:


> It's unlikely films will be scored with such technology, but even library music finds its way into films these days, so it's not a stretch to imagine machine-generated music filling that role in the future. I can certainly imagine a platform like this being used to create trailer music.
> 
> All of this canabilizes the already meager revenue stream that composers earn.


Spitfire's "scoring toolkits" (and the like) are just one step away from this. All you need is to add a ... oops, let's keep that unmentioned for now!


----------



## aeliron

R.G. said:


> A quick look at the list of offerings at your local multiplex or streaming service will tell you all you need to know about how much quality factors into the equation, and, musically speaking, it's not as though the commercial music world is overflowing with an abundance of quality, whether now or in the recent past.
> 
> Everyone everywhere is being replaced except the replacers, and quality doesn't matter to those doing the replacing. A lot of tech support is already automated. Farms are becoming more so. There are robot pizza machines now, and in 10 years tops all fast food will be automated (which may actually be an improvement, especially hygenically).
> 
> But back to music, live theater pits are depressing now. It's manifestly vulgar. Automated, only a handful of musicians, maybe in a room down the hall, some playing sampled instruments, and pre-records triggered by the m.d.
> 
> And every time I think about musicians receiving less work on account of sampling technology, I wonder if, when they hire out for sampling sessions, they just sigh and realize they're digging their own graves.
> 
> ...
> 
> Once a certain quantum leap (no pun intended) in sampling tech and playback arrives, I genuinely fear what will happen to a lot of very fine musicians. Any denial that this is a probable future is just whistling past their graveyard.
> 
> When _"democratizing the composing field"_ AI (which nobody asked for) improves to the point where it starts having a noticeable impact on certain sectors of commercial composing, the developers and their clients will inevitably be hit with criticism, and rightfully so, but I can easily see them resorting to some familiar tactics, such as, _"That's elitist gatekeeping!"_



Looks like we will reach a point where yes, there will be lots of computer-composed music, but it will be a Blade Runner-type future where some will pay more to have human-composed music. "Is that a real human-written piece? How much do you want for it?"


----------



## aeliron

Pappaus said:


> As to what is deemed “acceptable”, I remember the giant flap on this forum about the winner of the Westworld competition. Certainly some variation that the judges found okay, but not to some of people here.


Well, it depends. Was it written by a Mac or a PC?


----------



## aeliron

timbit2006 said:


> This one is like an HD version of my profile picture, which coincidentally is actually also generated by some machine learning algorithms. I can't remember the name, it's by Nvidia. There was user input to create mine as well though.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> One of the things I do find fascinating about AI art is that it's very impressionist in a lot of ways and creates art that is really open to interpretation. I like this particular style of artpiece because you are never too clear on what it is, your imagination can always be running. Is that a mountain in the foreground? A cloaked figure looking out into the distance of a foreign world? A ghostly figure looming on the horizon?
> There is something very unique about impressionist and abstract art for sure, I've been a fan of it since a child thanks to my dad, this has been hung in our family home since before I was born.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> I spent many hours as a kid looking at this painting by Wassily Kandinsky and wondering what is even going on here. It is painted in 1913.
> I think the same concepts are easily applied to AI assisted generation music and that is personally why I am very interested in it. I'm not really interested in the AI technology that tries to clone already made music though.


You do know that this was actually painted by a cleaning robot, right?


----------



## Gabriel S.

Maacoro said:


> I am a graphic and industrial designer (not the most valued profession lol) and I can tell you that we all say the same thing every single time a new “you don't need a designer anymore” app or a “design for everyone” tool comes out. I’ve never had trouble finding a job and being well compensated for it. The reality is that people still need designers, there will always be people who value the human, professional input despite how cool Canva or any AI based design software is.
> 
> All of this to say that composers will be ok. Heaven knows how the composition craft will evolve and what new job opportunities will emerge in the music composition field. This is no necessarily a bad thing and will not devaluate the composition craft. Humans love the human touch in the things they do, especially when it comes to music, which is so connected to emotion.


I got access to DALL-E I can confirm that it's not going to replace any graphic designer, not in a very long time. What it does is sometimes impressive...but it has many quirks and issues. But for having fun it's great (or trying to find some inspiration).

So, i agree to you.

The thing about working with humans is...communication. You can't have that with an AI. How would you explain "In the minute 1:30 i would prefer having X and then X and then X" to an AI? Or even worse, how would you explain to an AI a specific mood or emotion? Humans can connect, understand your wishes and adapt. An AI can predict...and guess, but it can't connect or understand you in a deeper level. So no, no AI is replacing anybody here.

All of these pictures and their copyright belong to OpenAI and none of them can be used in a commercial project.

"A cat with a moustache playing piano dressed in a tuxedo"
"A panda playing guitar"
"Bach playing guitar" Not Bach
"Bach playing guitar and smiling" NICE
"An electric guitar with eyes and legs, walking in the forest and with people around"


----------



## timbit2006

aeliron said:


> You do know that this was actually painted by a cleaning robot, right?


they had cleaning robots in the early 1900s? I am impressed


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

timbit2006 said:


> they had cleaning robots in the early 1900s? I am impressed


Long before that even... in the Slavic world at least: "Robot is *drawn from an old Church Slavonic word, robota, for “servitude,” “forced labor” or “drudgery.”* ... a product of the central European system of serfdom by which a tenant's rent was paid for in forced labor or service." 









The Origin Of The Word 'Robot'


'Robot' was the brainchild of the Czech playwright Karel Čapek, who introduced it in a 1920 play.




www.sciencefriday.com


----------



## KurtisDig

ArtAt said:


> Right now there is a massive labour SHORTAGE. There are not enough workers in many different industries and this is causing all kinds of problems.


Except there are enough workers. The "shortage" comes from people getting sick of being exploited. Raise wages, start treating your workers as human beings, not disposable waste; and you'll see this "shortage" dissolve very quickly.



jononotbono said:


> Just write music and stop being such a cunt


Underrated comment.


----------



## aeliron

timbit2006 said:


> they had cleaning robots in the early 1900s? I am impressed


Yeah, steam-powered.


----------



## NoamL




----------



## MartinH.

Has this been shared here yet?



I think everyone should read this. It is a leaked chat protocol from a conversation with an AI that has been shared by a google employee. As far as I know he has been fired for it.
To me the bleeding edge chat AIs are much more impressive than the composer AIs we've seen so far. But... "music is a language"...
I don't quite think that AI is sentient (yet) but it's certainly more intelligent than some actual humans that I've talked to in my life. And I'd certainly prefer talking to it over talking to some of the actual humans that I've met in my life.
Reading this article stirred more emotion in me than a lot of stuff that humans write too, and eventually this will be also true for music. It is just a matter of time.


Edit: a quote from the chatlog (LaMDA is the AI):


----------



## Thundercat

MartinH. said:


> Has this been shared here yet?
> 
> 
> 
> I think everyone should read this. It is a leaked chat protocol from a conversation with an AI that has been shared by a google employee. As far as I know he has been fired for it.
> To me the bleeding edge chat AIs are much more impressive than the composer AIs we've seen so far. But... "music is a language"...
> I don't quite think that AI is sentient (yet) but it's certainly more intelligent than some actual humans that I've talked to in my life. And I'd certainly prefer talking to it over talking to some of the actual humans that I've met in my life.
> Reading this article stirred more emotion in me than a lot of stuff that humans write too, and eventually this will be also true for music. It is just a matter of time.
> 
> 
> Edit: a quote from the chatlog (LaMDA is the AI):



Thank-you for posting. Read this with great excitement, interest, and consternation. This proves my previous posts - AI will only improve over time.

Now whether or not this one is "sentient" is another story....


----------



## Tim_Wells

What we feel emotionally manifests in the body. Anxiety causes our heart to race. Sadness can make our heart ache or causes us to cry. Hormones are involved.

It's hard to imagine that a computer program would feel emotions in the same way that a living being does. Obviously, it's imitating and emulating human behavior. It has no real feelings, other than what we perceive.

I suppose if an AI can learn to act in its own self-interest, then it could use these "emotions" to manipulate real people. More accurately, the corporations that own the AI could manipulate people to act in their self-interest. I'm sure this already happening to certain extent with big tech companies like Facebook and Google. Zuckerberg brags about the use of AI on FB.

It's an extremely powerful technology. My view is that (overall) it will be a great boon to society, but there is certainly a real danger for significant abuse. Governments need to get ahead of this.


----------



## MartinH.

Tim_Wells said:


> I suppose if an AI can learn to act in its own self-interest, then it could use these "emotions" to manipulate real people. More accurately, the corporations that own the AI could manipulate people to act in their self-interest. I'm sure this already happening to certain extent with big tech companies like Facebook and Google. Zuckerberg brags about the use of AI on FB.


A youtuber started replacing his comment replies under his videos with AI generated ones, no one noticed. Made him question how many arguments he had gotten into in the past that were actually just bots pretending to be real people to farm credibility for later manipulation tasks. 
I bet it's happening already to some extend.


----------



## Tim_Wells

Follow up to the link @MartinH shared. They fired the dude. I tend to accept Google's claims, but maybe I'm being naive. 









Google fires researcher who claimed LaMDA AI was sentient | Engadget


After public claims that Googe's LaMDA had attained sentience and even possessed a soul, researcher Blake Lemoine has been let go..




www.engadget.com


----------



## jononotbono

MartinH. said:


> A youtuber started replacing his comment replies under his videos with AI generated ones, no one noticed. Made him question how many arguments he had gotten into in the past that were actually just bots pretending to be real people to farm credibility for later manipulation tasks.
> I bet it's happening already to some extend.


Honestly, does anyone give a fuck?

Like who you like. Hate you hate. Some people know what they are talking about and some don't 😂
Honestly, I can't believe REAL people waste any time on shit like this 😂


----------



## AudioLoco

MartinH. said:


> Has this been shared here yet?
> 
> 
> 
> I think everyone should read this. It is a leaked chat protocol from a conversation with an AI that has been shared by a google employee. As far as I know he has been fired for it.
> To me the bleeding edge chat AIs are much more impressive than the composer AIs we've seen so far. But... "music is a language"...
> I don't quite think that AI is sentient (yet) but it's certainly more intelligent than some actual humans that I've talked to in my life. And I'd certainly prefer talking to it over talking to some of the actual humans that I've met in my life.
> Reading this article stirred more emotion in me than a lot of stuff that humans write too, and eventually this will be also true for music. It is just a matter of time.
> 
> 
> Edit: a quote from the chatlog (LaMDA is the AI):



Hi I read all I could around this news, because it is potentially incredible. 
From what I gathered Lemoine is a very religious/spiritual person (an actual priest of some kind)
and in this case he let the computer program dazzle him a bit too much.

All the other experts in the knowledge were sceptical and slightly amused by his passionate "fall".


----------



## Tim_Wells

AudioLoco said:


> Hi I read all I could around this news, because it is potentially incredible.
> From what I gathered Lemoine is a very religious/spiritual person (an actual priest of some kind)
> and in this case he let the computer program dazzle him a bit too much.
> 
> All the other experts in the knowledge were sceptical and slightly amused by his passionate "fall".


I'm all for spirituality and new insights. But at this point, I think we are imprinting our own feelings onto a soulless, emotionless machine. 

It's like having a conversation with Alexa and thinking she's really chuckling at my jokes. She doesn't feel anything.


----------



## Crowe

jononotbono said:


> Honestly, does anyone give a fuck?
> 
> Like who you like. Hate you hate. Some people know what they are talking about and some don't 😂
> Honestly, I can't believe REAL people waste any time on shit like this 😂


I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. Yeah, most people give a fuck. A need for validation is a thing. The comments underneath your videos can have a real impact on a person. Whether they should is another question entirely.

So the question of whether or not you've been arguing with a bot may be pretty important, in fact.


----------



## JDK88

To those who compose only Zimmer-wannabe generic Hollywood scores, you brought this upon yourself.


----------



## MNMNT

much of our art enjoyment also comes from the art being connected to a specific person.
we like a personality, an auteur, with their specific story. 
unless you´re going to also create a completely virtual personality that also exists on a social media platform and gets updated daily, this is not going to be replaced easily.


----------



## MNMNT

re:work shortage, most likely it is gonna reduce the need for real-life producers of the most generic stuff, and will help to get original and creative personalities even more prestige in the field.


----------



## meaks

Just thinking,
if we look at it from with another perspective, it could be the end of this non-sense unpaid royalty free music that takes us a lot of times composing, no ? They want us to compose music with talent and give them our tracks for what, no upfront fees and a 50/50 deal in better cases ? Insane...
Say you have a account on Pond 5 or Audiojungle or whatever, it could help you making tracks fast and submit them without composing / producing them, that way we would have more time to search for jobs that would pay us for composing music !


----------



## Ned Bouhalassa

There’s a competition for A.I.-created songs. Have a laugh, while it’s still funny:








The 2022 Finalists — AI Song Contest 2022







www.aisongcontest.com


----------



## oboemaroni

Initially I thought these were entirely AI created, and was amazed/terrified, but the I read the FAQs and saw it's for songs "written with help of AI tools", which was kind of reassuring as some of them definitely sounded like human singers/players were involved... I'm sure we're not far away from not being able to tell the difference though, looking at what's happening with visual AI stuff like midjourney.


----------



## smellypants

How long until media/game/tv composers will be out of a job 😭


----------



## glyster

As a computer scientist/engineer myself, I won't be too worried. These tools give us options, but they are never the decision maker. It will replace some people's routin work, but give wings to people who are creative and can reason about all the options they have. All computer is doing is making guesses.


----------



## MartinH.

NVIDIA is training an AI to play Minecraft by making it watch tutorial videos on youtube and read wiki pages:




I imagine in the future humans will be facing art AIs that have essentially read every text and watched every video on the subject they were trained for...


----------



## Thundercat

We are becoming obsolete. Not just musicians, but many/most jobs will be outsourced to AI. It's not a fairy concept; it's coming like a freight train.

"Do you hear that sound, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of your death!"


----------



## PatrickS

It can be very inspirational. Here is an image based on The Fall of Troy.


----------



## Thundercat

PatrickS said:


> It can be very inspirational. Here is an image based on The Fall of Troy.


Where are the smartphones?

I think the methods of control and surveillance back then were a little more primitive...govt didn't know when you crossed the street...

They will crash our economies until we are crying for relief, and then the UBI comes (Universal Basic Income). We are in for some very hard times that might make that image look like a picnic.


----------



## mobiuscog

I don't think they will crash the economies - in the same way bakers still exist even though automated bread making is possible at scale. There will definitely be a thinning of creative 'payments' for those who work at scale. For others, collaboration and interaction is such a critical part - until directors can shout at AI and have it bring similar results, not much will change  

Personally, I don't think Universal Basic Income will happen - even if AI/automation takes over, humans will still be forced to perform the more cost-effective manual labour, to provide the resources and/or remove the cost of the tech 'solution'.

AI and automation is expensive, especially in energy, and that's a whole other problem there isn't an answer for yet - unless AI solves that, which would hopefully also benefit mankind (or completely remove the need for them).


----------



## Thundercat

mobiuscog said:


> I don't think they will crash the economies - in the same way bakers still exist even though automated bread making is possible at scale. There will definitely be a thinning of creative 'payments' for those who work at scale. For others, collaboration and interaction is such a critical part - until directors can shout at AI and have it bring similar results, not much will change
> 
> Personally, I don't think Universal Basic Income will happen - even if AI/automation takes over, humans will still be forced to perform the more cost-effective manual labour, to provide the resources and/or remove the cost of the tech 'solution'.
> 
> AI and automation is expensive, especially in energy, and that's a whole other problem there isn't an answer for yet - unless AI solves that, which would hopefully also benefit mankind (or completely remove the need for them).


If they can build a better mousetrap, they will.

Ultimately these AI technologies will save massive amounts of money, which is the only thing our current economic system values.

So yeah, it’s all going to happen.

There is a better way. Ubuntu Contributionism, aka “the gifting economy.”

Despite the loud protests and parades that capitalism is the best system on earth,

It isn’t.

And no I don’t think communism or socialism are either.


----------



## MartinH.

mobiuscog said:


> AI and automation is expensive, *especially in energy*, and that's a whole other problem there isn't an answer for yet - unless AI solves that, which would hopefully also benefit mankind (or completely remove the need for them).


Iirc some bike courier from New York did the math on the cost of electricity for e-bikes vs food cost for his equivalent calorie expenditure on a regular bike, and the e-bike came out cheaper. Now consider that non-sitting work done by a human always needs to move around the weight of the whole human, regardless of the task, and you'll realize it's cheaper to provide the energy for robots than for humans, since many tasks don't require a human-sized machine.


----------



## mobiuscog

Following this line of thinking, if many humans are replaced by AI/robots, who will pay for the automation and energy ? As the humans won't have money to support it (and UBI doesn't count as that's paid for by taxes... from humans who are no longer working).

There has to be something to economically 'support' the resources needed to keep the AI/robots working.


----------



## Thundercat

mobiuscog said:


> Following this line of thinking, if many humans are replaced by AI/robots, who will pay for the automation and energy ? As the humans won't have money to support it (and UBI doesn't count as that's paid for by taxes... from humans who are no longer working).
> 
> There has to be something to economically 'support' the resources needed to keep the AI/robots working.


Who will pay for it? The ones developing it and using it. It is far more cost effective to have AI "employees" who neither eat nor sleep, never take breaks, can be run 24/7. No healthcare costs for them. They will be tireless workers.

Traditional employees are far more expensive. Sure electricity may cost - but we are already using a lot of electricity. The AI systems would not necessarily use more. It's win-win for capitalism and lose-lose for people.

And before someone says, "every time a major new technology disruption is caused, new jobs arise to replace the old ones" - yes, I know that argument, and it's valid, to a point.

But what we are talking about here has never been seen in the history of the world. It is a systemic takeover of traditional jobs and activities.

And no, we will not all be in fields of flowers having milk and honey while the AI slaves do our previous work. Think Hunger Games.


----------



## mobiuscog

Thundercat said:


> Who will pay for it? The ones developing it and using it. It is far more cost effective to have AI "employees" who neither eat nor sleep, never take breaks, can be run 24/7. No healthcare costs for them. They will be tireless workers.


That's my point though - if most 'workers' are no longer needed, they have no money, so who will be using AI ? They won't have funds to pay for it to function, as they no longer have a job and businesses are now using robots... which need to be paid for ?

Those developing it would possibly have money (data science is the new best job ever ?) but otherwise the economy can only drop so far before it can't actually sustain the product as viable, surely.


----------



## NekujaK

There are too many variables at play to accurately assess AI's ultimate impact on society. AI doesn't exist in a vacuum where everything else is static. As always, there are significant shifts and changes occurring the world over that gradually impact how we live.

To highlight a few, in no particular order... The majority of GenX'ers can't afford to own a home. Many don't own cars, either. Rising sea levels and global warming. Do we think COVID is the last pandemic? The rise of remote work and Zoom meetings. Streaming media and user-driven content curation. The double-edged sword of social media and its affect on the dissemination of both true and false information. How about DAWs and virtual insruments while we're at it..... and many other forces at play that gradually shape and change our daily lives.

AI is but one ingredient in this boiling soup of constant change. It could be a good thing. It could be a bad thing. But like the Zen parable about the farmer and his horse, it's probably a bit of both depending on circumstances.

"We'll see..."


----------



## person

having watched the videos for this project I am worried......
not a jot. I actually laughed, yo. Especially at the nitwit with the tats on his face.


----------



## Thundercat

mobiuscog said:


> That's my point though - if most 'workers' are no longer needed, they have no money, so who will be using AI ? They won't have funds to pay for it to function, as they no longer have a job and businesses are now using robots... which need to be paid for ?
> 
> Those developing it would possibly have money (data science is the new best job ever ?) but otherwise the economy can only drop so far before it can't actually sustain the product as viable, surely.


I missed your point. Thanks for clarifying. Dunno the answer to that.

Why they pricing the middle class out of existence? No one will be around to pay for anything if prices like gas and electric continue to skyrocket.

It seems pretty obvious something else is afoot besides the usual supply/demand hiccups and supply chain issues due to a war in another country.


----------



## Tim_Wells

People have been scared that the machines were going to take over for the past 150 years.


----------



## mobiuscog

Tim_Wells said:


> People have been scared that the machines were going to take over for the past 150 years.


True - however, the corporations *behind* those machines have a much wider reach these days.


----------



## Thundercat

Tim_Wells said:


> People have been scared that the machines were going to take over for the past 150 years.


Yeah…in case you haven’t noticed they kinda are…


----------



## AudioLoco

Capitol Records drops ‘offensive’ AI rapper FN Meka after outcry over racial stereotyping


Label has apologised to ‘the Black community’ after signing an AI-generated rapper that used the N-word and was shown being beaten by police




www.theguardian.com


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

"Rendered" my free Soundful AI-generated track for this month... they let you listen to the full track without AI mixing before rendering, and you get one free download of a "rendered" track with automated mixing/mastering per month. But yet again the "rendering" process made the track sound significantly worse by amplifying mid and high frequencies in the background bass synth and drastically bringing down the level of the instrument supplying the main melody (in this case guitar). Might not be an issue with downloading the stems (though they could still add crappy AI EQ, compression, limiting etc.) but that's paid only. 

Unless they improve the AI mixing/mastering, let people bypass it for the free download, or start allowing some free stems downloads, I suspect they won't do well....


----------



## timprebble

It's also worth saying: the endless AI generated images/crud are 'buyer beware' - for example someone got an image output that has a Gettys watermark!





__





Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images? | Hacker News







news.ycombinator.com





"I just got a Dall-E render with a very intact "gettyimages" watermark on it. I'm no legal expert on whether you have to own the license to something to use it as training input to your AI model, but surely you can't just... use stock photos without paying for the license?"

Sounds like a whole new market for IP lawyers


----------



## NekujaK

timprebble said:


> It's also worth saying: the endless AI generated images/crud are 'buyer beware' - for example someone got an image output that has a Gettys watermark!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Ask HN: DALL-E was trained on watermarked stock images? | Hacker News
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> news.ycombinator.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> "I just got a Dall-E render with a very intact "gettyimages" watermark on it. I'm no legal expert on whether you have to own the license to something to use it as training input to your AI model, but surely you can't just... use stock photos without paying for the license?"
> 
> Sounds like a whole new market for IP lawyers


Dall-E seems to rely a lot on web searching to source its images, and then does very little to modify or disguise them. Not at all surprised there's a Getty watermark on one of its images. Dall-E feels more like an automated cut & paste engine to me than a true image renderer.

On the other hand, the MidJourney folks have been reluctant to have their engine create images that are too literal, in part because of potential infringement issues. They've focused on more painterly or CGI styled renderings.


----------



## JDK88

Computers can only spit out random nonsense.

They still need humans to give that nonsense purpose and meaning.


----------



## gyprock

JDK88 said:


> Computers can only spit out random nonsense.
> 
> They still need humans to give that nonsense purpose and meaning.


I know a lot of humans spitting out random nonsense !


----------



## MartinH.

NekujaK said:


> On the other hand, the MidJourney folks have been reluctant to have their engine create images that are too literal, in part because of potential infringement issues. They've focused on more painterly or CGI styled renderings.


It just means they stole more paintings than stock photos to train the MJ model on. As an illustrator that bothers me more, not less. 
Gettyimages can (and I hope they will) sue the Dall-e makers but artists have no "lobby". These AIs will just damage an industry by stealing the essence of what that industry created over decades and artists will be left out in the rain without any recourse unless some big stockphoto corp pushes for legislation against using images to train AIs without licensing explicitely for that.


----------



## NekujaK

MartinH. said:


> It just means they stole more paintings than stock photos to train the MJ model on. As an illustrator that bothers me more, not less.
> Gettyimages can (and I hope they will) sue the Dall-e makers but artists have no "lobby". These AIs will just damage an industry by stealing the essence of what that industry created over decades and artists will be left out in the rain without any recourse unless some big stockphoto corp pushes for legislation against using images to train AIs without licensing explicitely for that.


I share your concern and can definitely see how AI-image generators can take opportunities away from artists/illustrators, if they haven't already done so.

But I'm curious, how is using existing art to train AI diffeerent than art students studying Picasso, for example? With the internet, it's no longer necessary to buy a book of prints to study an artist - most images are out there, just a Google search away (unless maybe you want to get down to brush technique and other fine details).

From what I've seen, Dall-E just outright lifts existing images wherever it finds them, but engines like MJ, seem to be able to render images in the style of certain artists, without directly using elements from actual works of art. At least I haven't seen that happen in my limited use of MJ.

To me, that seems no different than an art studient learning how to paint impressionist art in the style of Monet or Renoir. But maybe I'm missing something, as I'm not an artist.


----------



## MartinH.

NekujaK said:


> But I'm curious, how is using existing art to train AI diffeerent than art students studying Picasso, for example? With the internet, it's no longer necessary to buy a book of prints to study an artist - most images are out there, just a Google search away (unless maybe you want to get down to brush technique and other fine details).


That question is like "How is a nuke different from a pistol? Both kill people, so what's the fuss about?" 
It's the scale of the destruction that comes from it and the scalability to kill more and more jobs in one go. I believe a good enough artist AI could easily put more than half of illustrators out of business within a few years of its release. Human students studying art simply never can be that disruptive to the art industry.


----------



## NekujaK

MartinH. said:


> That question is like "How is a nuke different from a pistol? Both kill people, so what's the fuss about?"
> It's the scale of the destruction that comes from it and the scalability to kill more and more jobs in one go. I believe a good enough artist AI could easily put more than half of illustrators out of business within a few years of its release. Human students studying art simply never can be that disruptive to the art industry.


Ok, so it's not the training of the AI that's the problem, which is what I was trying to better understand from your original post, but the AI itself and it's inherent potential for putting scores of artists out of work. I agree, it's a problem, and not just for graphic artists.

The sad truth is AI is not going to go away, even if Getty would sue and win. All forms of creative endeavour that earn money are at risk. My approach is to try to find ways to work with the AI technologies, to enhance my own creative output.

AI is not completely autonomous, it needs human input and guidance, and I think there will be many interesting opportunities in the coming years for human-AI partnerships that we haven't thought of yet.

Even now, I see people using MJ who are really good at manipulating the engine to extract stunning results. Not everyone is able to do that - I certainly can't. But there are people with a knack for it. It's a new emerging talent.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

NekujaK said:


> From what I've seen, Dall-E just outright lifts existing images wherever it finds them


Do you have any actual examples of that? An image search for the watermarked Getty image turned up nothing. It's very likely that it relied on multiple watermarked Getty images to generate a novel image.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

The latest Midjourney beta is very good at generating images of copyrighted characters---in particular superheroes and characters from TV shows. That could lead to a lawsuit, but it should be easy enough for them to screen for that sort of copyright violation before granting a license to use the image for commercial works (or perhaps to share at all...).


----------



## NekujaK

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Do you have any actual examples of that? An image search for the watermarked Getty image turned up nothing. It's very likely that it relied on multiple watermarked Getty images to generate a novel image.





AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> The latest Midjourney beta is very good at generating images of copyrighted characters---in particular superheroes and characters from TV shows. That could lead to a lawsuit, but it should be easy enough for them to screen for that sort of copyright violation before granting a license to use the image for commercial works (or perhaps to share at all...).


I am not a user of Dall-E, but I have a friend who dabbles with it and occasionally shares images with me. Most of what I've seen, especially in the case of people, are galleries of photorealistic images, slightly altered to various degrees.

For example,"Dead Kennedys" was one of his prompts. He expected to receive images related to the former punk band, but instead got what was clearly a photo portrait of JFK and a bunch of photos of different houses 🤷‍♂️ This type of photorealistic result is typical of the images he shares.

MJ of course, does render celebrities, but it does so in a stylized manner, much like an artist or illustrator would. In fact, I've been a little frustrated with MJ's lack of ability to give me a photo-accurate rendering of famous people. The new beta engine they briefly trialed earlier this week does an incredible job with faces and renderings of recognizable people - but still, they are more stylized and less literal. No doubt, MJ needs to use photographs as an initial source, but it seems to go a step further and apply an "artistic" style to the final result.

Of course, this is all speculation on my part based on the output I've seen. I have no insight into what's really going on behind the scenes.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

NekujaK said:


> I am not a user of Dall-E, but I have a friend who dabbles with it and occasionally shares images with me. Most of what I've seen, especially in the case of people, are galleries of photorealistic images, slightly altered to various degrees.
> 
> For example,"Dead Kennedys" was one of his prompts. He expected to receive images related to the former punk band, but instead got what was clearly a photo portrait of JFK and a bunch of photos of different houses 🤷‍♂️ This type of photorealistic result is typical of the images he shares.
> 
> MJ of course, does render celebrities, but it does so in a stylized manner, much like an artist or illustrator would. In fact, I've been a little frustrated with MJ's lack of ability to give me a photo-accurate rendering of famous people. The new beta engine they briefly trialed earlier this week does an incredible job with faces and renderings of recognizable people - but still, they are more stylized and less literal. No doubt, MJ needs to use photographs as an initial source, but it seems to go a step further and apply an "artistic" style to the final result.
> 
> Of course, this is all speculation on my part based on the output I've seen. I have no insight into what's really going on behind the scenes.


Generating photorealistic results is not evidence that it's replicating an existing photo and just slightly altering it. If it is, it shouldn't be too difficult to find the original photo. I haven't seen anyone provide any evidence of that (as I explained before, the "Getty images" watermark is not evidence of replicating a particular photo). More likely it's considering a wide range of photos and generating an original image essentially out of what the neural network takes to be the structural features relevant to the prompt.


----------



## NekujaK

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Generating photorealistic results is not evidence that it's replicating an existing photo and just slightly altering it. If it is, it shouldn't be too difficult to find the original photo. I haven't seen anyone provide any evidence of that (as I explained before, the "Getty images" watermark is not evidence of replicating a particular photo). More likely it's considering a wide range of photos and generating an original image essentially out of what the neural network takes to be the structural features relevant to the prompt.


Of course it's not evidence. I'm simply basing my observations on the results I've seen. To my eye, Dall-E uses source material in a more literal way than MJ does.


----------



## JDK88

It uses bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. The Getty watermark just happened to be in one of those pieces. The actual generated image is unique. For music, you can arrange 12 notes in millions of ways. No matter how unique and original your music is, it still uses one of those 12 notes.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

JDK88 said:


> It uses bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. The Getty watermark just happened to be in one of those pieces. The actual generated image is unique. For music, you can arrange 12 notes in millions of ways. No matter how unique and original your music is, it still uses one of those 12 notes.


Do you have a source for claiming "it uses bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle"? That makes it seem like it's exactly copying portions of images and simply recombining them in a collage. From what I've read that's generally not how neural networks work. Though if your reference to "notes" suggests that it's effectively abstracting structural elements, particularly as a form of object recognition---that seems much more accurate.

The analogy to notes here might be the relevant structural elements that statistically connect with the associated label (for example, the name of an object). But of course when notes are translated into actual sound/performances there can be far more variation, even controlling for time and choice of instruments (especially when allowing for a performance's expressive variations in pitch and timing beyond the abstracted melody).


----------



## davidnaroth

I agree @NaomL . To me it kinda just reminds me of this but you have an AI build the track for you.


----------



## davidnaroth

One thing about Soundful I am curious about is how they make the loops and samples. Most sound libraries EULA have a no redistribution policy and one that states the sounds must be accompanied by another, if theyre delivering the user stems then does that not violate those policies?


----------



## signalpath

JDK88 said:


> Computers can only spit out random nonsense.
> 
> They still need humans to give that nonsense purpose and meaning.


----------



## Akoustecx

flampton said:


> This is interesting because it shows that in some cases the professionals win. The less people that can fix their own things the more professionals that can be supported.


Only if we're not being driven into an environment of built in obsolescence, where we replace everything before it breaks.


----------



## Akoustecx

TonalDynamics said:


> I think it's well worth pointing out that *talent* is the biggest gatekeeper of them all, and there have been countless landmark blues, jazz, and rock musicians who have had great careers without the slightest inkling of a formal music education.
> 
> To assume that anyone could _orchestrate_ (a segment of the population far tinier than those other musicians I mentioned) if they were just given the proper education is not just off-base, it's _exceedingly_ presumptuous, yet you speak of it as if it were some kind of God-given right.
> 
> You're standing up for a cause that doesn't actually have any real people in it, methinks.


I would love to agree with this, but talent is only the biggest gatekeeper for those who listen to music, not those who only hear it.


----------



## Virtual Virgin

I find the irony of the amount of luddites on a forum named "Virtual Instrument Control" quite amusing.


----------



## timprebble

I find the irony of calling people luddites on a forum named "Virtual Instrument Control" quite amusing.


----------



## TonalDynamics

Akoustecx said:


> I would love to agree with this, but talent is only the biggest gatekeeper for those who listen to music, not those who only hear it.


----------



## Daren Audio

Interesting. Looks like someone was willing to pay for MJ (Mid-Journey) AI-generated art.


----------



## NekujaK

There is a topic on MJ's Discord channel called #in-the-wrold where folks post real world uses of their MJ-generated art. Some of it is for personal projects, but there also quite a few commercial uses.

Some folks sell physical prints of their MJ art, and here are a few other examples:

*Tarot cards*: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/dark-futures-tarot

*Book of poetry*: 

*Graphic novel (one of many): *

*T-Shirt designs*: https://www.spreadshirt.at/shop/user/gallardo-designs

*Kickstarter game project*: 

*Album cover for a single*: 

These are no doubt discouraging examples for graphic artists who make a living from their craft. AI art is definitely starting to have a commercial impact.

I'm bracing myself for the day when my TV/film music placements start to dwindle because clients start using AI-generated music instead.


----------



## Akoustecx

TonalDynamics said:


>


I'm afraid I have no idea what that is supposed to mean!


----------



## Akoustecx

Will Soundful Be A Friend or Foe For Producers?


Can Soundful, a human aided AI music platform, fulfil the demand for music within the creator community? Music production, as defined by bedroom




www.attackmagazine.com


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

davidnaroth said:


> One thing about Soundful I am curious about is how they make the loops and samples. Most sound libraries EULA have a no redistribution policy and one that states the sounds must be accompanied by another, if theyre delivering the user stems then does that not violate those policies?


"we do not use loops in our platform, rather we use one-shot samples.

.... The majority of “AI music” today is a compilation of different loops strung together and repeated. Maybe there are some other elements layered in, but that’s a lot of what many providers are doing. Frankly, this has given AI Music Creation a bad name. Soundful is different in that we use one shot samples of individual notes to power our creation process. We were able to pioneer a way to sample one shots that will make our platform sound professional and deliver the highest quality in music creation possible."









Will Soundful Be A Friend or Foe For Producers?


Can Soundful, a human aided AI music platform, fulfil the demand for music within the creator community? Music production, as defined by bedroom




www.attackmagazine.com





Pretty sure the EULA for whatever one-shots they're using is not an issue. (Not sure if there's a disclaimer anywhere indicating that single notes from the stems can't be extracted. Soundful EULA probably forbids reselling one-shots as individual samples.)

The use of one-shots sometimes makes the guitar sound a bit unrealistic if you listen closely. The track below sounded a lot better before they applied automated mixing/mastering, but I might consider using parts of some of the stems. Soundful support confirmed that the stems don't have the mixing/mastering applied.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> "we do not use loops in our platform, rather we use one-shot samples.
> 
> .... The majority of “AI music” today is a compilation of different loops strung together and repeated. Maybe there are some other elements layered in, but that’s a lot of what many providers are doing. Frankly, this has given AI Music Creation a bad name. Soundful is different in that we use one shot samples of individual notes to power our creation process. We were able to pioneer a way to sample one shots that will make our platform sound professional and deliver the highest quality in music creation possible."
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Will Soundful Be A Friend or Foe For Producers?
> 
> 
> Can Soundful, a human aided AI music platform, fulfil the demand for music within the creator community? Music production, as defined by bedroom
> 
> 
> 
> 
> www.attackmagazine.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Pretty sure the EULA for whatever one-shots they're using is not an issue. (Not sure if there's a disclaimer anywhere indicating that single notes from the stems can't be extracted. Soundful EULA probably forbids reselling one-shots as individual samples.)


"We actually sample everything ourselves. It’s a very big project that we do in-house. Some sound designers’ catalogues that we acquire, sure they might be using well-known instruments but for us, we’re building our own sounds. ... with those specific sounds, we have certain steps to go through before they are ingested in our proprietary software.

However, as the majority of our sounds are simple sampled multiple notes, it’s something we can control."


----------



## TonalDynamics

Akoustecx said:


> I'm afraid I have no idea WAT that is supposed to mean!


Exactly!









Wat


“Wat” is a variant of the English word “what” that is often used to express confusion or disgust, much like its better known acronym “WTF,” short for “what the fuck.” Although the term “wat” is most frequently used as an interjection without a question mark, it is sometimes used to caption...




knowyourmeme.com





^The summary on that stub is a bit harsh because there is certainly no disgust involved, just confusion... care to elaborate your OP a bit more?


----------



## TonalDynamics

NekujaK said:


> There is a topic on MJ's Discord channel called #in-the-wrold where folks post real world uses of their MJ-generated art. Some of it is for personal projects, but there also quite a few commercial uses.
> 
> Some folks sell physical prints of their MJ art, and here are a few other examples:
> 
> *Tarot cards*: https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/dark-futures-tarot
> 
> *Book of poetry*:
> 
> *Graphic novel (one of many): *
> 
> *T-Shirt designs*: https://www.spreadshirt.at/shop/user/gallardo-designs
> 
> *Kickstarter game project*:
> 
> *Album cover for a single*:
> 
> These are no doubt discouraging examples for graphic artists who make a living from their craft. AI art is definitely starting to have a commercial impact.
> 
> I'm bracing myself for the day when my TV/film music placements start to dwindle because clients start using AI-generated music instead.



Honestly, I wouldn't brace myself for that. Too much other stuff in the world to brace oneself against that poses more immediate danger to the modern artiste on a daily basis, like complacency and distractions for instance.

But those examples you posted, first of all good on them if they found a free way to promote their passion projects, and it _kinda_ works at glance... but once you spend about 2 seconds looking at the skull or the robots, you realize instantly that it is very typical example of AI art.

The eyes in the skull are a dead giveaway with all kinds of shading, symmetry and color issues, as is the incoherent anatomy of the robots.

Unironically the A.I. have collectively adopted the concept of 'incoherence' itself as a signature style, particularly when dealing with the anatomy of creatures and organic lifeforms.

All I am seeing is a technology that is 'not quite' there yet, perhaps analogous to let's say, string samples in the early '90s? It will come along for sure, but it's not even all that close to 'good' atm. I can get maybe 1/100 'usable' images if I spend a lot of time generating stuff, and even then you just hope no one looks too closely at it.

Because art is more than copypasting various bits into a single whole, eh... it has a message, it has nuance, and if a human makes it it is certainly coherent in terms of anatomy, color gradients and values, shading, etc.

Take a Dali for instance, the parts of it that are surreal are very deliberate and intentional, whereas the machine's surreal/incoherent bits are _unintentional;_ the A.I. is saying, 'I'm doing my best and this is all I can come up with, I hope it's close enough to what you want', and I have yet to see an AI generator yet that doesn't have this signature flaw.

These are all aesthetical judgements of course and a matter of perspective, but there's mine for the $.02.


----------



## Akoustecx

TonalDynamics said:


> Exactly!
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Wat
> 
> 
> “Wat” is a variant of the English word “what” that is often used to express confusion or disgust, much like its better known acronym “WTF,” short for “what the fuck.” Although the term “wat” is most frequently used as an interjection without a question mark, it is sometimes used to caption...
> 
> 
> 
> 
> knowyourmeme.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ^The summary on that stub is a bit harsh because there is certainly no disgust involved, just confusion... care to elaborate your OP a bit more?


I was responding to your statement that talent is the biggest gatekeeper. Broadly speaking, I believe that talent is only recognised by those who listen, ie are actively engaged with the music, as opposed to those who merely hear the music. If talent really were the biggest gatekeeper, then this thread wouldn't exist, as no one would be interested in the, currently, uninteresting music that AI is capable of.
I place no judgement on those who only hear music, there are many albums in my collection that i would only put on as a background to another activity, at which point I am not mindfully engaging with the music, and as such am hearing it but not listening to it. It is similar to the way I engage with an awful lot of visual art, I look at it, but I do not see it, and so I cannot possibly have an informed opinion on the talent of the artist.
Also if talent really were a gatekeeper, then there would be no place for acts such as Milli Vanilli, or any performer who is chosen to mime over music with which they had no involvement in the making or performing of, but merely look good in the foreground while it plays in the background.


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

TonalDynamics said:


> Honestly, I wouldn't brace myself for that. Too much other stuff in the world to brace oneself against that poses more immediate danger to the modern artiste on a daily basis, like complacency and distractions for instance.
> 
> But those examples you posted, first of all good on them if they found a free way to promote their passion projects, and it _kinda_ works at glance... but once you spend about 2 seconds looking at the skull or the robots, you realize instantly that it is very typical example of AI art.
> 
> The eyes in the skull are a dead giveaway with all kinds of shading, symmetry and color issues, as is the incoherent anatomy of the robots.
> 
> Unironically the A.I. have collectively adopted the concept of 'incoherence' itself as a signature style, particularly when dealing with the anatomy of creatures and organic lifeforms.
> 
> All I am seeing is a technology that is 'not quite' there yet, perhaps analogous to let's say, string samples in the early '90s? It will come along for sure, but it's not even all that close to 'good' atm. I can get maybe 1/100 'usable' images if I spend a lot of time generating stuff, and even then you just hope no one looks too closely at it.
> 
> Because art is more than copypasting various bits into a single whole, eh... it has a message, it has nuance, and if a human makes it it is certainly coherent in terms of anatomy, color gradients and values, shading, etc.
> 
> Take a Dali for instance, the parts of it that are surreal are very deliberate and intentional, whereas the machine's surreal/incoherent bits are _unintentional;_ the A.I. is saying, 'I'm doing my best and this is all I can come up with, I hope it's close enough to what you want', and I have yet to see an AI generator yet that doesn't have this signature flaw.
> 
> These are all aesthetical judgements of course and a matter of perspective, but there's mine for the $.02.


Have you looked at the results of the current MJ beta yet? They seem to have largely resolved the coherence issue, at least for the examples I've seen.



I do miss the old "impressionistic"/quasi-surrealist (probability dreams?...) style though...


----------



## Daren Audio

NekujaK said:


> I'm bracing myself for the day when my TV/film music placements start to dwindle because clients start using AI-generated music instead.


Yes, every industry and sector will be impacted or dwindled by AI one way or the other. 

Even in healthcare Phillips has AI software learning how to detect cancer cells accurately. It's learning at a rapid pace 24/7. The future is humans & AI working together, albeit with hiring less pathologists saving the hospital CEO millions. And this applies to all sectors. 

https://philips.medium.com/philips-devs-are-coding-algorithms-that-help-detect-cancer-accurately-746a87613766

Of course, people at the top of their industry will still be able to command top dollar. That won't change.


----------



## Daren Audio

Akoustecx said:


> Also if talent really were a gatekeeper, then there would be no place for acts such as Milli Vanilli, or any performer who is chosen to mime over music with which they had no involvement in the making or performing of, but merely look good in the foreground while it plays in the background.


Funny you mentioned Milli Vanilli. 
They were vilified for lip-syncing but now Tik Tokkers are making millions by doing the same thing.
The game has changed.


----------



## Akoustecx

Daren Audio said:


> Funny you mentioned Milli Vanilli.
> They were vilified for lip-syncing but now Tik Tokkers are making millions by doing the same thing.
> The game has changed.


I'll have to take your word for it, I am definitely not in the TikTok demographic!


----------



## NekujaK

TonalDynamics said:


> Honestly, I wouldn't brace myself for that. Too much other stuff in the world to brace oneself against that poses more immediate danger to the modern artiste on a daily basis, like complacency and distractions for instance.
> 
> But those examples you posted, first of all good on them if they found a free way to promote their passion projects, and it _kinda_ works at glance... but once you spend about 2 seconds looking at the skull or the robots, you realize instantly that it is very typical example of AI art.
> 
> The eyes in the skull are a dead giveaway with all kinds of shading, symmetry and color issues, as is the incoherent anatomy of the robots.
> 
> Unironically the A.I. have collectively adopted the concept of 'incoherence' itself as a signature style, particularly when dealing with the anatomy of creatures and organic lifeforms.
> 
> All I am seeing is a technology that is 'not quite' there yet, perhaps analogous to let's say, string samples in the early '90s? It will come along for sure, but it's not even all that close to 'good' atm. I can get maybe 1/100 'usable' images if I spend a lot of time generating stuff, and even then you just hope no one looks too closely at it.
> 
> Because art is more than copypasting various bits into a single whole, eh... it has a message, it has nuance, and if a human makes it it is certainly coherent in terms of anatomy, color gradients and values, shading, etc.
> 
> Take a Dali for instance, the parts of it that are surreal are very deliberate and intentional, whereas the machine's surreal/incoherent bits are _unintentional;_ the A.I. is saying, 'I'm doing my best and this is all I can come up with, I hope it's close enough to what you want', and I have yet to see an AI generator yet that doesn't have this signature flaw.
> 
> These are all aesthetical judgements of course and a matter of perspective, but there's mine for the $.02.


Technical critiques of art by artists, or music by musicians, doesn't have any relevance in the real world where uninformed consumers are the target audience.

VI-Control is full of threads in which composers pick apart and bash current pop music. But the fact of the matter is, regardless of our "insider" perceptions of musical integrity and quality, it doesn't stop the general public from embracing and enjoying it.

Even though AI art (currently) has problems with coherence, it isn't preventing people from incorporating it into commercial projects. Also, in many cases, folks take the output generated by MJ and bring it into Photoshop for further manipulation or "fixing". I've done it myself for images used in promotional videos.

Also, as pointed out above, MJ's new beta algorithm is a massive leap forward in terms of coherence, overall quality, and interpretive integrity. The technology will only improve over time. Meanwhile, people are happily using it to generate art for personal and commercial puposes, regardless of its technical or artistic shortcomings.

Consumers of AI-generated music will also be blithely unaware of its musical limitations, especially when it comes to simple underscore and other background uses. It doesn't need to be Mozart or Williams to be successful.

Oh, and nobody liked Jackson Pollock or Picasso's art initially, either 

----- edit: small addendum -----

All it takes is some TV executive to say, "Hey, how much are we paying that guy for our music? I just read about this new AI music, and it costs a lot less. Let's put some into the next edit, and see how it does."

Most cues are buried so deep in the mix, they can barely be heard anyway, and the audience doesn't care or notice anyway, and the decision makers with the purse strings can't tell the difference either. So the little AI music experiment will be deemed a success, and suddenly that's one less composer gig.

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


----------



## Daren Audio

Akoustecx said:


> I'll have to take your word for it, I am definitely not in the TikTok demographic!


I'm not on Tik Tok either but follow its impact on the business world.
Some make more than the average US CEOs.






Source:
https://www.wsj.com/story/these-tiktok-stars-made-more-than-ceos-d5bb8fd2


----------



## TonalDynamics

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Have you looked at the results of the current MJ beta yet? They seem to have largely resolved the coherence issue, at least for the examples I've seen.
> 
> 
> 
> I do miss the old "impressionistic"/quasi-surrealist (probability dreams?...) style though...



That's an impressive beta, but still possesses the typical technical flaws when viewed at full resolution.

It's the eyes... why can _no_ company or startup manage to code an A.I. which establishes consistent symmetry of shape, color and texture within the eyes?

So this most recent example serves as a good point to clearly establish my take on it:

For those who merely 'look' at art or 'hear' music (as another poster put it), this may provide 'passable' results, especially for thumbnails and small-size images.
For those who see art and listen to music though, these results aren't anything close to acceptable and offer nothing innovative over the vast library of what has been produced by humans over thousands of years.

It will likely be the same with AI-gen music -- but I predict that this will have the net effect of making the genuine article go _up_ in value at the high end, instead of deflating it. It will certainly expose all the stuff at the bottom of the barrel, though. Notice I said 'bottom', and not 'middle', because I haven't seen any evidence yet that this sort of tech can even achieve mediocrity as your average music 'listener' would define it.


----------



## TonalDynamics

Daren Audio said:


> Some make more than the average US CEOs.


That seems to be slightly misrepresented in that article, no?

"Seven of TikTok's top earners *collectively* made $55.5 million dollars last year"

Collectively, meaning if you divide by 7, the income of the 7 top TikTokers made $7.92 mil last year, so just over half as much, in which case the comparison fails to achieve the intended result


----------



## Daren Audio

TonalDynamics said:


> That seems to be slightly misrepresented in that article, no?
> 
> "Seven of TikTok's top earners *collectively* made $55.5 million dollars last year"
> 
> Collectively, meaning if you divide by 7, the income of the 7 top TikTokers made $7.92 mil last year, so just over half as much, in which case the comparison fails to achieve the intended result


If it pays the bills, it pays the bills. 
One doesn't have to hit the $Million dollar mark. There are plenty of others making good money on that platform that fly under the radar.


----------



## TonalDynamics

NekujaK said:


> Even though AI art (currently) has problems with coherence, it isn't preventing people from incorporating it into commercial projects. Also, in many cases, folks take the output generated by MJ and bring it into Photoshop for further manipulation or "fixing". I've done it myself for images used in promotional videos.


And it's in this realm of 'editing' AI art that it finds its true value, imo... but this is a different beast, no? You're assisting the AI in the final result so it's as much you acting as curator as it is the machine creating something at that point.

This is the technology's best use case, imo.



NekujaK said:


> Oh, and nobody liked Jackson Pollock or Picasso's art initially, either


Again, that's intentional and deliberate surrealism vs. a systemic, observably repetitive incoherence as a direct result of technical shortcomings, seems apples and oranges to me


NekujaK said:


> Technical critiques of art by artists, or music by musicians, doesn't have any relevance in the real world where uninformed consumers are the target audience.
> 
> VI-Control is full of threads in which composers pick apart and bash current pop music. But the fact of the matter is, regardless of our "insider" perceptions of musical integrity and quality, it doesn't stop the general public from embracing and enjoying it.
> 
> Consumers of AI-generated music will also be blithely unaware of its musical limitations, especially when it comes to simple underscore and other background uses. It doesn't need to be Mozart or Williams to be successful.


The data is in, and this is not entirely true.









Is Old Music Killing New Music?


All the growth in the music business now comes from old songs—with consumption of new music actually shrinking. How did we get here, and is there a way back?




tedgioia.substack.com





According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market.

There is a real and present hunger for innovation -- in music, as in the humanities in general -- that is not being met by popular production.

The implications of this could be the topic of several theses, however for the sake of our conversation suffice it to say that the resurgence of the 'classics' are evidence of some kind of timeless quality winning out over monotony and predictability.


And while I appreciate your concerns, as a composer, uninformed consumers have never been my target audience. If one was deliberately aspiring to mediocrity, perhaps... but do you think J.W. ever said to himself, "Ya know the people seeing this film are mostly musical idiots, so I'll just phone this next cue in, they'll never know the difference"?

I'll stick with my original prediction, the stuff at the 'bottom' will be ruthlessly exposed, but all the mid-tier and high-end work will probably just go up in value.

Cheers


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

TonalDynamics said:


> And it's in this realm of 'editing' AI art that it finds its true value, imo... but this is a different beast, no? You're assisting the AI in the final result so it's as much you acting as curator as it is the machine creating something at that point.
> 
> This is the technology's best use case, imo.
> 
> 
> Again, that's intentional and deliberate surrealism vs. a systemic, observably repetitive incoherence as a direct result of technical shortcomings, seems apples and oranges to me


Not just acting as curator, but using collage and digital painting tools (etc.) to combine and alter the images (and yes, "fix" the eyes if necessary).

As for "observably repetitive incoherence"---there's a lot of that in the art world. And the incoherence generated by AI is chaotic enough to be interesting---random yet imbued with a dream-like logic.

The noise and distortion generated by analog processors was for a long time considered a technical shortcoming by the audio engineers designing them, who strove for as clean a signal as possible. But that "technical shortcoming" ended up forming the basis for new and interesting aesthetics and forms of musical artistry....

OTOH the "noise" artifacts sometimes produced by Synthesizer V generally aren't (so far) as pleasant as the artifacts produced by some other music software. Noise and artifacts can be engineered to (tend to) be more aesthetically pleasing....


----------



## NekujaK

TonalDynamics said:


> Again, that's intentional and deliberate surrealism vs. a systemic, observably repetitive incoherence as a direct result of technical shortcomings, seems apples and oranges to me


Only the intent behind the art is different between surrealists and AI incoherence. To the uneducated viewer, their only concern is whether or not they find the final result pleasing and/or useable.

Either someone likes it or doesn't. The backstory and critical analysis doesn't matter.



TonalDynamics said:


> And while I appreciate your concerns, as a composer, uninformed consumers have never been my target audience. If one was deliberately aspiring to mediocrity, perhap


A gig is a gig. There are people working hard to earn a buck at all levels of music and art. It's all honorable work - I'm not going to be a snob and judge someone for how they earn a living.

It doesn't matter where and how AI encroaches, the bottom line is, it will take income away from working people. This is not something new - such has been the way of technological innovation throughout history. But what makes the current AI innovations noteworthy is the targeting of commercial creative ventures.

It's already hard enough to make a buck using one's creative talents, and the AI factor is only making it more challenging. Unless maybe we find ways to embrace AI technologies and put them to our own use. But unfortunately, that's not what technologies like Soundful are interested in. They're aiming much higher with a vision that doesn't include composers.


----------



## TonalDynamics

NekujaK said:


> Only the intent behind the art is different between surrealists and AI incoherence.


Oh no, it certainly isn't; That's what I meant by 'repetitively observable', as in the things that make it a dead-giveaway that something is AI art:

I'm not talking about matters of taste being what they are, I'm talking about technical shortcomings of the algorithms that lead to systemic visual aberrations, which causes synthetic-looking gradients, line-weights, inconsistent diffusions (you'll often for instance find a diffuse texture up against a high-resolution one in AI-gen, as a direct result of combining two different source images with different resolutions), unintentional asymmetry of objects (one shoulder and its clothing looking nothing like the other for instance, another common flaw), and random lines being presented as the 'seams' of one object in place of a naturally occurring color gradient(the space from the jawline to the neck is another common example), just to name a few items.

These are strictly technical flaws that need to be fixed, because they show up over and over in virtually every algorithm, and they all scream "AI art", hence why the editing in PS is the best way forward.. but at that point, the image is nothing more than 'inspiration', which conceptually is not much different from using a photo or existing artwork as your source (this is what the AI itself is doing at a higher level of procedural complexity)

Again, not saying things like the MJ beta aren't impressive, but the algos have a long way to go towards photo-realism, let alone producing anything that can stand up to artistic scrutiny at full resolution.



NekujaK said:


> A gig is a gig. There are people working hard to earn a buck at all levels of music and art. It's all honorable work - I'm not going to be a snob and judge someone for how they earn a living.



And neither am I, don't mischaracterize what I said; I am saying no one deliberately stares at a blank page, or empty DAW template and says "I would like this piece to be as average as possible" - we are all trying to produce something vaguely exceptional, if only in some minor way.



NekujaK said:


> It doesn't matter where and how AI encroaches, the bottom line is, it will take income away from working people. This is not something new - such has been the way of technological innovation throughout history. But what makes the current AI innovations noteworthy is the targeting of commercial creative ventures.



I notice that you conveniently ignored the article I linked, and all the data within it. 
There is a repressed hunger for quality that people are finding in the 'classics', which data for the most-streamed songs supports.
I reject the notion that modern pop music is as desirable as you are suggesting it is, and instead believe that it is generating vast swathes of unsatisfied listeners in its wake.


----------



## NekujaK

TonalDynamics said:


> Again, not saying things like the MJ beta aren't impressive, but the algos have a long way to go towards photo-realism, let alone producing anything that can stand up to artistic scrutiny at non-thumbnail resolutions.


I don't think anyone would disagree. But even with its current shortcomings, it's already generating art that is being bought and sold. Imagine what the future holds...


----------



## tsk

So are the AIs in Mid Journey and Dall-E drawing the pictures "from scratch". My understanding was that they just have a large database of tagged pre made images and mix them together.

Which would not be impressive. But what actually is going on?

If you type dog as a text prompt, does the AI draw a different dog from scratch each time?


----------



## Daren Audio

The technology is definitely, commercially viable:


----------



## NekujaK

tsk said:


> So are the AIs in Mid Journey and Dall-E drawing the pictures "from scratch". My understanding was that they just have a large database of tagged pre made images and mix them together.
> 
> Which would not be impressive. But what actually is going on?
> 
> If you type dog as a text prompt, does the AI draw a different dog from scratch each time?


With MJ, each prompt gives you four initial images, which you can further iterate on. There is quite a wide array of variety, but I often see similar elements being used throughout the various images.

Bottom line, I don't know the real answer.


----------



## TonalDynamics

Daren Audio said:


> The technology is definitely, commercially viable:


Oh it has a certain niche appeal, to be sure.



But it takes about two seconds to realize that image is AI-gen, and there are people like me who would refuse to buy that library just on principle that you were too cheap to pay your artists or photographers, so the viability part is yet to be seen methinks 

Then again, IME 8dio have never been the sort of company that valued quality over quantity...


----------



## NekujaK

It should be noted that many of the really impressive renderings that come out of MJ are based on user-supplied source images.

Browsing the MJ galleries on Discord, I'm often astonished by some of the results people are getting, only to discover they seeded their prompts with existing source images (MJ allows you to include URLs to external images in a prompt).

So it's not always easy to evaluate what MJ is capable of on its own versus how much it relies on the referenced image(s).


----------



## NekujaK

TonalDynamics said:


> I notice that you conveniently ignored the article I linked, and all the data within it.
> There is a repressed hunger for quality that people are finding in the 'classics', which data for the most-streamed songs supports.
> I reject the notion that modern pop music is as desirable as you are suggesting it is, and instead believe that it is generating vast swathes of unsatisfied listeners in its wake.


You are entitled to your opinion, of course.

I'm just not willing to categorically label something "bad music" because either I don't like, or don't understand it, or it doesn't contain any extension chords, etc.

That people continue to embrace Springsteen and Dylan is great, but there's always room for all music. Besides, popular music is meant to come and go and evolve over time. Big band hits from the 1940s aren't as ubiquitously popular as they once were, and hardly anyone writes in that style anymore. It was right for its time and then ran its course. That's what popular music is supposed to do - it's a momentary reflection of its time.

Right now, there may be a surge in demand for older music, and it will eventually pass. It doesn't mean current music is objectively "bad". Maybe the older songs are just better at tapping into the current zeitgeist. Maybe they're providing some sense of stability and comfort in these unprecedented chaotic times we live in.

Everything's in flux. Nobody saw hip-hop coming or could've predicted its massive influence on popular music. Things are changing all the time.


----------



## TonalDynamics

NekujaK said:


> Nobody saw hip-hop coming or could've predicted its massive influence on popular music. Things are changing all the time.


I mean that's a 30 year old phenomenon, though. I don't think we can blame the 'state of the industry' on hip-hop, or even EDM.

What you say is true of course, that all things are cyclical, however all one has to do is take a quick retrospective of human history through the decades, and it becomes clear that there are ages of relative innovation, and ages of relative stagnation; I am of the opinion that we are living through one of the latter.

It's kind of funny actually cause I participated in a GS thread which was very similar to this one, about modern vs. 'old-school' production aesthetics (which turned into a dumpster fire of name-calling, really reactionary and tragic), and the point that I and several other of the more critical members eventually landed on was that social media peer norms and expectations combined with broader access has had a profound effect on the homogeneity of the sound of modern productions...

With the caveat that the social media era is not merely a 'generational' factor, but rather a radical, paradigmatic shift in the way that 'consensus' and expectations are established by fiat -- especially once 'the machine' was infiltrated by corporate interests.

But again, that's a thesis, for someone (not me) 

As it stands I think the demand speaks for itself; In the end, people value quality over quantity, and we can certainly agree to disagree.

Cheers


----------



## NekujaK

TonalDynamics said:


> I mean that's a 30 year old phenomenon, though. I don't think we can blame the 'state of the industry' on hip-hop, or even EDM.


No no, I wasn't referencing hip-hop in that way. I was merely using it as an example to illustrate how it's impossible to predict the directions pop music will end up taking. In the 1980s when the first strains of hip-hop hit the airwaves, no one could foresee just how pervasive an influence it would become, influsing itself into nearly every aspect of modern popular music, even 30 years on.



TonalDynamics said:


> all one has to do is take a quick retrospective of human history through the decades, and it becomes clear that there are ages of relative innovation, and ages of relative stagnation; I am of the opinion that we are living through one of the latter.


That could be true, but I do hear amazing new music all the time. It doesn't always resonate with me, but I see the creative energy behind it, and can appreciate and admire it for at least that.

But what I think doesn't really matter. People like the music they like, and whether something's popular or not, is not a measure of how good or bad it is. Popularity is just one metric that can result from a variety of influences that often having nothing to do with the music itself.

Circling back to the topic of AI-generated music, there is no doubt in my mind that AI is capable of creating music that appeals to a large segment of people. It may not be there today, but it's coming, and when it arrives, it has the potential to shake up the world of commercialized music, in all its forms.



TonalDynamics said:


> I participated in a GS thread which was very similar to this one, about modern vs. 'old-school' production aesthetics (which turned into a dumpster fire of name-calling, really reactionary and tragic)


It wouldn't be GS if there weren't some name-calling, mud-slinging, and flaming involved 



TonalDynamics said:


> the point that I and several other of the more critical members eventually landed on was that social media peer norms and expectations combined with broader access has had a profound effect on the homogeneity of the sound of modern productions...
> 
> With the caveat that the social media era is not merely a 'generational' factor, but rather a radical, paradigmatic shift in the way that 'consensus' and expectations are established by fiat -- especially once 'the machine' was infiltrated by corporate interests.


I definitely believe this to be true. Innocuous myths that we once referred to as urban legends before the onset of social media, are now able to acquire the false weight of truth simply through rapid proliferation and faux validation that's prevelant on social media.

In terms of music production, this became very obvious to me when I had some private mixing consultations with a Grammy-nominated engineer a few of years ago. He spent a good portion of our sessions debunking common mixing "wisdom" that's become accepted as fact due to proliferation on the web.

However, in terms of music, I believe there's a beneficial flipside. Social media enables people to find and hear music they would otherwise have not been aware of, giving even the most isolated musician an opportunity to get heard. It's a double-edged sword due to the sheer glut of content out there, but still, when you think about it, it's pretty remarkable that any person can post a video on YouTube at no cost, and potentially reach millions of viewers globally. It's unprecedented in the history of man.



TonalDynamics said:


> As it stands I think the demand speaks for itself; In the end, people value quality over quantity, and we can certainly agree to disagree.


I don't think I ever endorsed quantity over quality. I agree, people definitely appreciate quality. The rub is, quality means different things to different people.

What my 14-year-old nephew thinks of as quality is vastly different than my opinion of quality. Heck, even my wife and I disagree about the quality of music. I like Led Zeppelin - she thinks it's unlistenable noise  I like Puccini operas - my best friend leaves the room when he hears opera. Nobody's wrong in these situations.

"Quality" is such a loaded term when it comes to art. I can accept that a Mercedes Benz is a quality car because it's mechanically sound and drives well. The quality of a piece of fine furniture is evident in the materials and craftsmanship. But how can I assess if Bob Dylan produces quality music? To this day, my musically-educated opera-singing parents think Dylan is a no-talent bum.

Quality in art simply boils down to what we like and don't like. Actually, it doesn't even have to be a matter of like. I don't like Celine Dion's music, but I can appreciate the quality of her singing and performing talent. I just don't want to listen to it.

If all my blabbering doesn't align with your definition of quality music, then yes indeed, we'll just have to agree to disagree


----------



## MartinH.

tsk said:


> So are the AIs in Mid Journey and Dall-E drawing the pictures "from scratch". My understanding was that they just have a large database of tagged pre made images and mix them together.
> 
> Which would not be impressive. But what actually is going on?
> 
> If you type dog as a text prompt, does the AI draw a different dog from scratch each time?



I recommend this video to get an idea of how neural networks work on the lowest level:


----------



## NekujaK

MartinH. said:


> I recommend this video to get an idea of how neural networks work on the lowest level:



Great videos, especially the neural network series. Reminded me of a kid's science book I had when I was growing up, way back in the 1960s. One of the activities in the book explained how to make a physical "computer" that could be taught to proficiently play a simple chess-like game called Hexapawn.

Fascinated by the idea of teaching an inanimate object to perform an activity, I went ahead and built the so-called computer, which simply consisted of a collection of labeled matchboxes containing colored beads that represented different move responses.

The computer's moves would be made by randomly selecting a bead based on a given board situation. When the computer lost a game, it is "punished" by removing the last bead drawn. After several games, all the beads representing sub-optimal moves will have been filtered out and the computer becomes virtually unbeatable. This was AI long before the term came into popular use.

The process of playing Hexapawn and teaching the computer is described in this brief article. It's an ultra-simplified version of an extremely limited neural network - actually, I'm not even sure it qualifies as a neural network because it's really only one layer deep, but the iterative brute force learning process is reminiscent of the way neural networks are taught.









Matchbox Mini Chess Learning Machine


Matchbox Mini Chess Learning Machine: This matchbox computer is one of the simplest machine learning projects that you could make. All it takes is the following: - a piece of cardboard divided into 9 squares- 3 white pawns- 3 black pawns- 24 matchboxes- a paper printout (provided)- bead…




www.instructables.com


----------



## AnhrithmonGelasma

Midjourney beta retracted, improved photorealism not coming back: "devs said they planned to move away from the fantastic photorealism the new model offered. I understand they are basing this decision on the number of “edge use cases” they observed where people used the beta to create soft core porn, gore, and photorealistic images they regarded as “stock photos”. I truly hope they do not disregard the incredible capacity the new beta model offered with regards to original photorealistic works otherwise not possible with any existing model including the current releases of stable diffusion"


----------



## Tim_Wells

MartinH. said:


>



That's pretty exciting stuff. Makes me think this could alleviate the shortage of STEM professionals by assisting workers whose scientific skills are not as good as they might be.


----------



## Daren Audio

MartinH. said:


> I recommend this video to get an idea of how neural networks work on the lowest level:



Photoshop uses this technology for their 'neural filters'. Some are great and some still need work.


----------



## TonalDynamics

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Midjourney beta retracted, improved photorealism not coming back: "devs said they planned to move away from the fantastic photorealism the new model offered. I understand they are basing this decision on the number of “edge use cases” they observed where people used the beta to create soft core porn, gore, and photorealistic images they regarded as “stock photos”. I truly hope they do not disregard the incredible capacity the new beta model offered with regards to original photorealistic works otherwise not possible with any existing model including the current releases of stable diffusion"



Interesting, the beta still seems fully functional at least on the Discord server


----------



## NekujaK

TonalDynamics said:


> Interesting, the beta still seems fully functional at least on the Discord server


There were actually two different betas going at the same time. What you may be seeing is the "other" beta.

The beta renderer, which was invoked by including --beta in a prompt, was only a available for a day earlier this week and has been withdrawn, apparently forever.

The other is the beta upscaler, which was introduced a couple of weeks ago. This can be selected as a default in your settings, or invoked by including --upbeta in a prompt. This is still available, and is a new upscaling engine that renders cleaner images.

Those are the only betas I'm aware of. But maybe there are others?


----------



## TonalDynamics

NekujaK said:


> There were actually two different betas going at the same time. What you may be seeing is the "other" beta.
> 
> The beta renderer, which was invoked by including --beta in a prompt, was only a available for a day earlier this week and has been withdrawn, apparently forever.
> 
> The other is the beta upscaler, which was introduced a couple of weeks ago. This can be selected as a default in your settings, or invoked by including --upbeta in a prompt. This is still available, and is a new upscaling engine that renders cleaner images.
> 
> Those are the only betas I'm aware of. But maybe there are others?


It's a regular BETAfest 😱

The upscaling is really bothering me though, for some reason it seems to insist on making alterations to faces; changing the eyebrows, doing weird things with colors, even altering perspective on some items.

For generating thumbnails/lower-res stuff though, this is a great alternative to stock photos
(or if you're 8Dio, a good reason to fire the artist)

I'm having a lot of fun with it.

On the whole it's a remarkable technology, but I'm still not convinced they can provide a solution for all the bugs and shortcomings that plague AI-art; but I'm also not _un_convinced.

In any case I see it as more of a supplement than a replacement, as in nothing that's close to replacing me working with an actual artist; it's more akin to having a large library of stock photos that are more specific, but the tradeoff is a lower resolution (can't look too closely or it becomes very disturbing).


----------



## NekujaK

TonalDynamics said:


> It's a regular BETAfest 😱
> 
> The upscaling is really bothering me though, for some reason it seems to insist on making alterations to faces; changing the eyebrows, doing weird things with colors, even altering perspective on some items.
> 
> For generating thumbnails/lower-res stuff though, this is a great alternative to stock photos
> (or if you're 8Dio, a good reason to fire the artist)
> 
> I'm having a lot of fun with it.
> 
> On the whole it's a remarkable technology, but I'm still not convinced they can provide a solution for all the bugs and shortcomings that plague AI-art; but I'm also not _un_convinced.
> 
> In any case I see it as more of a supplement than a replacement, as in nothing that's close to replacing me working with an actual artist; it's more akin to having a large library of stock photos that are more specific, but the tradeoff is a lower resolution (can't look too closely or it becomes very disturbing).


Yup, it's fun to see what it can do, and yes, it still has a ways to go, especially with faces and hands, which the revoked beta was much better at rendering.

Try embedding external image references in a prompt to get a more lifelike result. You can use the --iw command to adjust how much weight MJ gives the external images.

There are also two new commands that were introduced recently: --stylize and --quality that influence how MJ renders images. I've dabbled with them, but not enough to know what settings are optimal given a particular prompt.


----------



## MartinH.

Daren Audio said:


> Photoshop uses this technology for their 'neural filters'. Some are great and some still need work.


I always wondered, do those work locally on your GPU or in the cloud with image data being sent back and forth?




NekujaK said:


> Yup, it's fun to see what it can do


That fun aspect should not be underestimated. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point people will find it so fun to generate music based on text prompts and reference tracks for themselves or their friends, that it basically overshadows "oldschool" music listening. Imagine just friends sending each other back and forth the tracks they create. Since music takes orders of magnitude longer to consume than images, the simple time this generated music eats up may make it hard for artist based music to find a place anymore. And even if it sucks as music, if your friend "made" it for you, aren't you at least curious enough to listen to it at least once? What if half your friends send you several each day because it's the hip new trend (not gonna be a thing among composers, but think about normies)?
Aren't "[song] in the style of [other artist]" videos some of the most popular music content on youtube already? What if one day everyone can generate those at will with their spotify subscription?


By the way this copyright lawsuit is one to keep an eye on how it turns out in the end: 









Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Can’t Be Copyrighted, US Agency Rules


The U.S. Copyright Office has shot down a copyright claim for an image created by an AI algorithm—though artists who use AI as a tool shouldn’t be affected.




dot.la





This may be THE thing that saves creative professions if copyright can't be granted for ai-generated art.


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## NekujaK

MartinH. said:


> I always wondered, do those work locally on your GPU or in the cloud with image data being sent back and forth?
> 
> 
> 
> That fun aspect should not be underestimated. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point people will find it so fun to generate music based on text prompts and reference tracks for themselves or their friends, that it basically overshadows "oldschool" music listening. Imagine just friends sending each other back and forth the tracks they create. Since music takes orders of magnitude longer to consume than images, the simple time this generated music eats up may make it hard for artist based music to find a place anymore. And even if it sucks as music, if your friend "made" it for you, aren't you at least curious enough to listen to it at least once? What if half your friends send you several each day because it's the hip new trend (not gonna be a thing among composers, but think about normies)?
> Aren't "[song] in the style of [other artist]" videos some of the most popular music content on youtube already? What if one day everyone can generate those at will with their spotify subscription?
> 
> 
> By the way this copyright lawsuit is one to keep an eye on how it turns out in the end:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Can’t Be Copyrighted, US Agency Rules
> 
> 
> The U.S. Copyright Office has shot down a copyright claim for an image created by an AI algorithm—though artists who use AI as a tool shouldn’t be affected.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> dot.la
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This may be THE thing that saves creative professions if copyright can't be granted for ai-generated art.


Interesting case and article regarding copyrights. I believe Soundful claims that if you generate a piece of music using their technology, you own the copyright to it. But if the ruling in this case stands, then that probably won't be possible.

Your concerns about people generating AI music for themselves is actually quite valid. I posted an article a while back about Spotify wanting to incorporate AI music creation into its platform, so users can create their own music to play and share.

Here's a link to the thread:





More annoying AI music stuff - this time it's Spotify


Here's a somewhat disturbing development in which Spotify is rolling out AI music tools to listeners, so they can create their own music to listen to. Even if the AI-generated music is crap, it's still going to pull listeners away from listening to music by artists, which will impact streaming...




vi-control.net


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## José Herring

MartinH. said:


> By the way this copyright lawsuit is one to keep an eye on how it turns out in the end:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Can’t Be Copyrighted, US Agency Rules
> 
> 
> The U.S. Copyright Office has shot down a copyright claim for an image created by an AI algorithm—though artists who use AI as a tool shouldn’t be affected.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> dot.la
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This may be THE thing that saves creative professions if copyright can't be granted for ai-generated art.


Just keeps getting weirder every day.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma

MartinH. said:


> I always wondered, do those work locally on your GPU or in the cloud with image data being sent back and forth?
> 
> 
> 
> That fun aspect should not be underestimated. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point people will find it so fun to generate music based on text prompts and reference tracks for themselves or their friends, that it basically overshadows "oldschool" music listening. Imagine just friends sending each other back and forth the tracks they create. Since music takes orders of magnitude longer to consume than images, the simple time this generated music eats up may make it hard for artist based music to find a place anymore. And even if it sucks as music, if your friend "made" it for you, aren't you at least curious enough to listen to it at least once? What if half your friends send you several each day because it's the hip new trend (not gonna be a thing among composers, but think about normies)?
> Aren't "[song] in the style of [other artist]" videos some of the most popular music content on youtube already? What if one day everyone can generate those at will with their spotify subscription?
> 
> 
> By the way this copyright lawsuit is one to keep an eye on how it turns out in the end:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Can’t Be Copyrighted, US Agency Rules
> 
> 
> The U.S. Copyright Office has shot down a copyright claim for an image created by an AI algorithm—though artists who use AI as a tool shouldn’t be affected.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> dot.la
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This may be THE thing that saves creative professions if copyright can't be granted for ai-generated art.


"Copyright Review Board’s three-person panel cited several cases in which courts refused to extend copyright protection to non-human creations. [One of them being:] a federal appeals court ruled that a book allegedly “authored by non-human spiritual beings” could only gain copyright if a human curated the revelations."

If they were citing that as precedent in their decision, why wouldn't the curation argument apply to AI created works? 

Interesting argument:

"“Artists are using AI as a tool [in] the same way [that] artists are using the camera,” he said. “You cannot claim the camera is the artist. Artists are using cameras to create photographs, and that’s how photographs get copyrighted.”" 

... doubt the US Copyright Review Board will rule that photographs can't be copyrighted.


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## Daren Audio

MartinH. said:


> I always wondered, do those work locally on your GPU or in the cloud with image data being sent back and forth?


Yes, Photoshop neural filters requires cloud servers so it takes like a minute or two for it process and send the final render back to you.


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## NekujaK

MartinH. said:


> By the way this copyright lawsuit is one to keep an eye on how it turns out in the end:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Art Created By Artificial Intelligence Can’t Be Copyrighted, US Agency Rules
> 
> 
> The U.S. Copyright Office has shot down a copyright claim for an image created by an AI algorithm—though artists who use AI as a tool shouldn’t be affected.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> dot.la
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> This may be THE thing that saves creative professions if copyright can't be granted for ai-generated art.


As I thought about this some more, I realized that in the case of Soundful, where the intended users are consumers (not creators) of AI-generated music, lack of copyright ownership will actually be a benefit to them.

In the current world, let's say NBC licenses some library music for a bumper. They don't own the copyright to that music, and must pay a sync fee plus royalties. In the AI-music scenario, they would only pay to generate the music, after which, there would be no sync fees or royalties to pay, because no one owns any copyright. So AI music would definitely be a very attractive option.

With graphic arts it's different because of the "permanance" of physical art. An ad agency isn't likely to use MJ to generate an image for an ad campaign if the agency can't own the image outright, since anyone would be free to use the image for any purpose and potentially compromise branding, messaging, etc.

And of course, graphic artists using MJ would want to own the copyrights to their own work, so AI art would also be a less attractive prospect.

No doubt there are going to be some interesting legal battles in the next few years as everyone tries to figure out how these new AI tools fit into the world of commercial art in all its forms.


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## NekujaK

FYI, a new beta (they're calling it a "test") is available on MJ for the next day or so. Don't have time to try it until maybe tonight.

Exerpted from their announcement:


> *This test is an effort to unify aesthetics and coherence into a single system* *There are two modes:*
> 1) A general purpose artistic mode you can use by typing --test
> 2) A photo-realism mode you can use by typing --testp



So it seems they may not have completely discarded the recent beta algorithms.

----edit----

And while we're at it, Night Cafe just launched their new Stable Diffusion algorithm (not sure if it's theirs, or a 3rd party engine). Anyway, they claim it's a new state-of-the-art AI image algorithm. I don't know any more details.

If you have a Night Cafe account, they're offering 40 free credits this week to try the new algorithm.


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## AnhrithmonGelasma

NekujaK said:


> FYI, a new beta (they're calling it a "test") is available on MJ for the next day or so. Don't have time to try it until maybe tonight.
> 
> Exerpted from their announcement:
> 
> 
> So it seems they may not have completely discarded the recent beta algorithms.


Listening to the backlash I guess....

The earlier reference to wanting to avoid results that seem like "stock photos" raises the question of whether they want to avoid being sued---or having their sources of stock photos explicitly forbid this type of usage (perhaps as a pop-up legal agreement on the website, assuming that would be legally binding?...).


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## NekujaK

AnhrithmonGelasma said:


> Listening to the backlash I guess....
> 
> The earlier reference to wanting to avoid results that seem like "stock photos" raises the question of whether they want to avoid being sued---or having their sources of stock photos explicitly forbid this type of usage (perhaps as a pop-up legal agreement on the website, assuming that would be legally binding?...).


I recall reading a while ago that MJ was deliberately trying to keep their images "artistic" to avoid any legal complications. They've also consistently been adamant about suppressing nudity and gore, as was mentioned again in the announcement you quoted last week.

If I were them, I'd be nervous too. I'm sure they don't want the government intruding and threatening them like what happened with Tumblr over porn images and YouTube collecting data from kids.

But in theory, users could still embed a link to a stock photo in a prompt, so I'm not sure what MJ can do to filter out stock images.


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## NekujaK

FYI, I started a dedicate AI image creation thread, since there are discussion about the topic spread out in a few different threads.






AI Image Creation


There seems to be a fair amount of discussion and interest in AI art creation these days, not only in the real world, but also here on VI-Control. Currently, there are a few different threads where AI art has come up, so I thought it might be more convenient to have a single dedicated thread...




vi-control.net


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## waveheavy

It's not really a threat at all to those who actually understand music theory and have the tools to compose beyond... Pop, rap, and Hip-Hop. Already with tools like loops and Stylus one can just plugin ready-made beats and background pads.

But for the latest hit TV show that wants an orchestral piece that follows the theme of the show, that's still going to be done mostly by those who are trained in music composition and orchestration. No shortcuts on that, and there never will be.


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## NekujaK

Adam Neely's thoughts on AI and music:


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## Tim_Wells

Interesting video, above. His impressions on how many thought the of the invention of photography would eliminate artistic painting were likely an appropriate comparison. 

The guy below explores the topic of AI and music and puts quite a bit of thought into it. Some of it is a little scary.


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## mikeh-375

waveheavy said:


> It's not really a threat at all to those who actually understand music theory and have the tools to compose beyond... Pop, rap, and Hip-Hop. Already with tools like loops and Stylus one can just plugin ready-made beats and background pads.
> 
> But for the latest hit TV show that wants an orchestral piece that follows the theme of the show, that's still going to be done mostly by those who are trained in music composition and orchestration. No shortcuts on that, and there never will be.


Perhaps. Sadly discernment from those who commission is not guaranteed, especially when money can be saved.


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