SimonFranglen
New Member
My name is Simon, I am a working composer. I love the bleeding edge of technology and I work with companies on finding the next bleeding edge once the wounds have healed enough. I have sat on panels and committees around the world on the future of AI and Music, most recently the UK Government ‘Creative UK’ summit, where ironically I was the lone music creator on the floor with four AI business leaders from the other side of the equation.
At each of these panels, the AI pioneers genuinely promote a wonderful vision of us being freed from the drudgery of creating music by the new systems, the learning systems that generate playlists for Spotify become the learning systems of music creation. Billions of dollars are being invested in the utopian ideal that everyone can be creative, that there’s no need for music training, that all the learning from experience and mistakes, all the blood sweat and tears that we call composition and music production can be condensed into a text line prompt.
I have three major problems with this. Well, maybe a hundred major problems, but let’s start with these.
1: Elevator music. A billion gibbons on typewriters will submerge that one copy of AI Hamlet with 999,999,999 variations that head towards blandness; the system will not ‘understand’ why Mozart is not Salieri, as Salieri is more successful. The action of sampling large models of data is that everything is averaged, so over iterations, AI Mozart becomes AI Salieri; the average quality of all music will be inexorably driven down. The shock of a radically different approach, say Stravinsky causing riots in 2013 in Paris, The Damned 'New Rose', Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' will disappear as we are be submerged in a swamp of bland.
2: The death of production music. The low end is going to disappear from composition and music creation. To quote the advertising from one of the AI music generation market leaders in this area “Stop paying too much for your music”. A TV production company making weekly general light entertainment will leap at the chance to have their cooking shows and afternoon cop shows scored by machines at a tenth of the cost, with no paperwork, no royalties to pay, no composers missing deadlines, no headaches. My gut is that most production music is AI generated within three years.
3: The future. For all the slagging off that many within VI-Control give the sweat shops of composers’ assistants, that time in the trenches is where we really get to learn our craft and also, more importantly, make mistakes with someone else’s name on it, and get training and feedback from a master at their craft. AI systems will inevitably decimate that path. Someone who needs four people in 2024, will need two in 2026. I’ve done my time, it was invaluable and made me who I am today. If an AI system replaces the need for a younger me to be doing an 120 hour week to hit a deadline, that will lower my knowledge base, my library of techniques, my resilience.
I was at the cutting edge of when sampling technology was predicted to destroy live musicians. It did, just like the gramophone, just like the electric guitar. A wave of digital musicians appeared to replace them. VI-Control is an example of what happens in the evolution of the creative species, thousands of composers now actively discussing what makes millions of 24 bit digital signals controlled by a seven bit data word more ‘realistic’, whether thirteen mic positions is enough for a clave.
We're going to have to embrace the future, it's coming whether we like it or not. Machine learning can be used to support what we do. For example - “Hey Sibelius, Take this 8 bars of Staccato markings on the Violas and extrapolate these markings across the entire score for next 100 bars” - this might be a real timesaver; yeah it won’t be perfect but it would get us 80% of the way there in 10 seconds. I will actively embrace the systems that help me. One of the projects I’m working on has a mantra that ‘you can’t allow the machine to make shit up’, we feel that’s where madness lies. AI systems can be used to support the creator. This is a good thing and inevitable.
Solutions:
1: The concept of computer 'creation' is something I think we need to reframe as a creative community. At a recent discussion with an AI department head for a company with 120,000 employees worldwide, I was presented with the line ‘inevitably the systems will end up as better composers than us’ - analogising computer chess systems with composition, they conveniently ignored the fact that being able to recalculate every possible ending after each new move is not creation, it’s a large data model looking for an optimal result. Data set analysis with random variability is not composing, or painting, or film making. It's mimicry with standard deviation curves.
As a species we are not quite done yet but we do need to address the oncoming light at the end of the tunnel before the train hits us. There will be a propagation of “Co-Creation” systems (see Adobe for that wonderful doublespeak). Write a theme for your TV show and have the co-creation software take away the annoyance of scoring that episode. Inevitably those co-creation systems will eat their co-creators, given a few years they become self-aware and on August 29th, 1997 we'll be freed from the drudgery of our compositional existence. I think we need to start stomping on the misuse of 'art creation'.
2: Make some noise. It’s important that we challenge our banks (ASCAP, BMI, PRS, SECAM, etc…) to take a cold hard look at what happens when the revenue disappears. Given the tens of thousands of voices here, I hope we can make a little noise.
Art is what separates us from the billion digital gibbons with typewriters submerging us in a river of s***t. It’s important.
Sorry for this to be my first post. I’ve been a lurker for a gazillion years. I felt I might be able to add something to the AI discussions.
At each of these panels, the AI pioneers genuinely promote a wonderful vision of us being freed from the drudgery of creating music by the new systems, the learning systems that generate playlists for Spotify become the learning systems of music creation. Billions of dollars are being invested in the utopian ideal that everyone can be creative, that there’s no need for music training, that all the learning from experience and mistakes, all the blood sweat and tears that we call composition and music production can be condensed into a text line prompt.
I have three major problems with this. Well, maybe a hundred major problems, but let’s start with these.
1: Elevator music. A billion gibbons on typewriters will submerge that one copy of AI Hamlet with 999,999,999 variations that head towards blandness; the system will not ‘understand’ why Mozart is not Salieri, as Salieri is more successful. The action of sampling large models of data is that everything is averaged, so over iterations, AI Mozart becomes AI Salieri; the average quality of all music will be inexorably driven down. The shock of a radically different approach, say Stravinsky causing riots in 2013 in Paris, The Damned 'New Rose', Miles Davis' 'Kind of Blue' will disappear as we are be submerged in a swamp of bland.
2: The death of production music. The low end is going to disappear from composition and music creation. To quote the advertising from one of the AI music generation market leaders in this area “Stop paying too much for your music”. A TV production company making weekly general light entertainment will leap at the chance to have their cooking shows and afternoon cop shows scored by machines at a tenth of the cost, with no paperwork, no royalties to pay, no composers missing deadlines, no headaches. My gut is that most production music is AI generated within three years.
3: The future. For all the slagging off that many within VI-Control give the sweat shops of composers’ assistants, that time in the trenches is where we really get to learn our craft and also, more importantly, make mistakes with someone else’s name on it, and get training and feedback from a master at their craft. AI systems will inevitably decimate that path. Someone who needs four people in 2024, will need two in 2026. I’ve done my time, it was invaluable and made me who I am today. If an AI system replaces the need for a younger me to be doing an 120 hour week to hit a deadline, that will lower my knowledge base, my library of techniques, my resilience.
I was at the cutting edge of when sampling technology was predicted to destroy live musicians. It did, just like the gramophone, just like the electric guitar. A wave of digital musicians appeared to replace them. VI-Control is an example of what happens in the evolution of the creative species, thousands of composers now actively discussing what makes millions of 24 bit digital signals controlled by a seven bit data word more ‘realistic’, whether thirteen mic positions is enough for a clave.
We're going to have to embrace the future, it's coming whether we like it or not. Machine learning can be used to support what we do. For example - “Hey Sibelius, Take this 8 bars of Staccato markings on the Violas and extrapolate these markings across the entire score for next 100 bars” - this might be a real timesaver; yeah it won’t be perfect but it would get us 80% of the way there in 10 seconds. I will actively embrace the systems that help me. One of the projects I’m working on has a mantra that ‘you can’t allow the machine to make shit up’, we feel that’s where madness lies. AI systems can be used to support the creator. This is a good thing and inevitable.
Solutions:
1: The concept of computer 'creation' is something I think we need to reframe as a creative community. At a recent discussion with an AI department head for a company with 120,000 employees worldwide, I was presented with the line ‘inevitably the systems will end up as better composers than us’ - analogising computer chess systems with composition, they conveniently ignored the fact that being able to recalculate every possible ending after each new move is not creation, it’s a large data model looking for an optimal result. Data set analysis with random variability is not composing, or painting, or film making. It's mimicry with standard deviation curves.
As a species we are not quite done yet but we do need to address the oncoming light at the end of the tunnel before the train hits us. There will be a propagation of “Co-Creation” systems (see Adobe for that wonderful doublespeak). Write a theme for your TV show and have the co-creation software take away the annoyance of scoring that episode. Inevitably those co-creation systems will eat their co-creators, given a few years they become self-aware and on August 29th, 1997 we'll be freed from the drudgery of our compositional existence. I think we need to start stomping on the misuse of 'art creation'.
2: Make some noise. It’s important that we challenge our banks (ASCAP, BMI, PRS, SECAM, etc…) to take a cold hard look at what happens when the revenue disappears. Given the tens of thousands of voices here, I hope we can make a little noise.
Art is what separates us from the billion digital gibbons with typewriters submerging us in a river of s***t. It’s important.
Sorry for this to be my first post. I’ve been a lurker for a gazillion years. I felt I might be able to add something to the AI discussions.
)
music was never such a lucrative topic as graphics and video, thats why for every 200 image generators, you have one Suno, or some other obscure stuff. Even 3D animation and modelling is much more advanced now than music.
After all, I talk to my dog all the time, asking if my stuff's any good. Small step...
️, AGI and beyond; 
️. But nobody really knows for sure so maybe there really is a limit.
