What's new

Aiva - Artificial Intelligence Composition: beta starting today

This is disconcerting to say the least.

But time and tide wait for no man. It's probably best to either embrace it, or focus on an expertise/niche that will not be impacted by it. For now, what AI can do as well or better than a human is limited.
 
... and "learning" the patterns
It might be more precise to say "learning about patterns". There are AI models that have been around for a few years that are designed to generate distributions (patterns) that are not seen in the training dataset. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are very popular, powerful, but are fiendishly difficult to train, for instance.
 
So can I imagine this a little bit like "Band in a Box", just much more advanced and for orchestral JW-style instead jazz and pop styles?
 
TBH I was a bit worried when I first saw this, but I do strongly believe that Art is all about how you can express your emotions that no matter how we try to put in fixed words (such as sorrow, fear, joy etc...) would still be experimented differently and uniquely by each individual- hence interpreted and produced in a unique way belonging to each artist. This could be a useful tool, based on A"Intelligence" but not consciousness. Thankfully, human audience (receptors of our music) interpret & taste our art the same way as we do produce it - based on their own conciousness and emotions to a great degree. This is a complexity that goes beyond the capability of any AI I believe. Humans with artistic sense(that don't need to be artists themselves) will always be able to differentiate an original "Monalisa" and prefer it over a printed one.
 
So can I imagine this a little bit like "Band in a Box", just much more advanced and for orchestral JW-style instead jazz and pop styles?
I'm not familiar with Band in a Box (although, I just watched a quick video).
From the looks of things, they're quite different animals. Aiva is capable of composing music in a variety of (mostly orchestral) styles with near infinite permutations of melody and progression, rather than being a list of mix'n'match presets.

TBH I was a bit worried when I first saw this, but I do strongly believe that Art is all about how you can express your emotions that no matter how we try to put in fixed words (such as sorrow, fear, joy etc...) would still be experimented differently and uniquely by each individual- hence interpreted and produced in a unique way belonging to each artist. This could be a useful tool, based on A"Intelligence" but not consciousness. Thankfully, human audience (receptors of our music) interpret & taste our art the same way as we do produce it - based on their own conciousness and emotions to a great degree. This is a complexity that goes beyond the capability of any AI I believe. Humans with artistic sense(that don't need to be artists themselves) will always be able to differentiate an original "Monalisa" and prefer it over a printed one.
I think you'd enjoy playing a game I played recently; The Talos Principle.

Actually, I'd suggest The Talos Principle to anyone in this thread pondering AI vs Human matters, and enjoys doing it alongside Portal-esque puzzles.
 
I'm not familiar with Band in a Box (although, I just watched a quick video).
From the looks of things, they're quite different animals. Aiva is capable of composing music in a variety of (mostly orchestral) styles with near infinite permutations of melody and progression, rather than being a list of mix'n'match presets.

I know Band-in-the-box from my past, when I was a musician. I practized playing solos and used it as play-along-machine: just type in a chord progression, choose a style and it creates a nice comping to improvise to. And if you wanted, you could let the machine play a jazz solo in an artist style like George Benson: it played a jazz solo then in the masters style. Altogether, one listened to a very rubbish and midi sounding jazz track, reminding of a certain style - of course, it sounded horrible, but what the product did, reminds me of what you are doing.

So maybe there are some distant roots to your composition robot in the past - or maybe not and I got it wrong:)
 
I gotta say, as a human who composes music, this doesn't sound good...:)

It will not take long for AI programmers to beat the four chord epic guys. We are there within a year maybe. A robot will throw hz out like a wet towel. After two years the AI is making horizontal development. To get to JW level, maybe three to four years from now.

”Written by a human” will maybe be something to add. But then we also get where anything you write will be suspected as done by AI. You make a masterpiece and critic say it was done by AI.

In conclusion. We need to publish our masterpieces within next three years, otherwise you will be suspected as having used AI.


Time to work harder.
 
It will not take long for AI programmers to beat the four chord epic guys. We are there within a year maybe. A robot will throw hz out like a wet towel. After two years the AI is making horizontal development. To get to JW level, maybe three to four years from now.

”Written by a human” will maybe be something to add. But then we also get where anything you write will be suspected as done by AI. You make a masterpiece and critic say it was done by AI.

In conclusion. We need to publish our masterpieces within next three years, otherwise you will be suspected as having used AI.


Time to work harder.

Maybe this overload of mainstream music will sometime cause a wish for more innovative and fresh sounding music instead of overused Hollywood styles? ;)
 
I have listened to a couple of orchestral versions what that AI created and while I think it is mediocre stuff on the one side I am impressed still that that pogram whatever wrote that and actually I think the quality of the compositions are for most time on par with a lot of music out there done even by some working composers.
 
Last edited:
I only watched this one video, so I don't know what kind of orchestrator AIVA is, but this sure shows a lot of the human hand.

"And I imported the MIDI into Sibelius... and I cleaned it up a bit just for the sake of this presentation. At this point you can do whatever you deem necessary. If you want to make adjustments to the orchestration, the production, etc, it really becomes up to you. ... I'm doing a bit of arranging... I'm doing some notational things just for my own sanity...

 
Musically, it's effective, but not very interesting. In its current state, I see this being used as a tool to generate ideas which then must be developed and shaped by a person. AIs in every field are really good at doing one thing exceptionally well, whether that's designing a specific small component to a machine, or writing music, but human oversight is needed to take those components and combine them properly to achieve an overall goal. This may change as they become more advanced.
 
I only watched this one video, so I don't know what kind of orchestrator AIVA is, but this sure shows a lot of the human hand.

"And I imported the MIDI into Sibelius... and I cleaned it up a bit just for the sake of this presentation. At this point you can do whatever you deem necessary. If you want to make adjustments to the orchestration, the production, etc, it really becomes up to you. ... I'm doing a bit of arranging... I'm doing some notational things just for my own sanity...
Weird what is generated through the AI and what still requires human labor in that video. A lot of the most mechanical tasks—copying music, re-entering notes, etc.—are being done manually but a lot of the editorial work required to make it sound like passable music as well. Basically, in this scenario the human is serving as the assistant to the AI (and saving the AI's ass!). What a world we are building!
 
Weird what is generated through the AI and what still requires human labor in that video. A lot of the most mechanical tasks—copying music, re-entering notes, etc.—are being done manually but a lot of the editorial work required to make it sound like passable music as well. Basically, in this scenario the human is serving as the assistant to the AI (and saving the AI's ass!). What a world we are building!
It's more practical at this point to think of AI as tools rather than people. We are far form an all-encompassing AI that can handle a bunch of complex individual tasks and then combine those tasks to achieve a goal. This AI generates MIDI data from other music, and does so in a way that is musically "passable" to serve as a palette of colors for a composer or orchestrator to use as they will.
 
I have listened to a couple of orchestral versions what that AI created and while I think it is mediocre stuff on the one side I am impressed still that that pogram whatever wrote that and actually I think the quality of the compositions are for most time on par with a lot of music out there done even by some working composers.

It will only get better, don't worry. This is just the beginning...and it is unsettling. It doesn't matter if it's going to be better - it will be cheaper and that's all it matters. Ironically, it will probably erase those sites such as Audiojungle first, which are largely responsible for 'race to the bottom', since amateur filmmakers and people who don't need top-end music for their projects will have access to unlimited versions of likely even cheaper music.

Here's an interesting website: https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/

It predicts 2% chance for AI to replace the composers, however, I wouldn't be so sure about that percentage.
 
Last edited:
It will only get better, don't worry. This is just the beginning...and it is unsettling. It doesn't matter if it's going to be better - it will be cheaper and that's all it matters. Ironically, it will probably erase those sites such as Audiojungle first, which are largely responsible for 'race to the bottom', since amateur filmmakers and people who don't need top-end music for their projects will have access to unlimited versions of likely even cheaper music.

Here's an interesting website: https://willrobotstakemyjob.com/

It predicts 2% chance for AI to replace the composers, however, I wouldn't be so sure about that percentage.
It will get better, but understand that this thing just listens to a song and spits out midi that sounds stylistically like it. It hardly "composes" yet, and you can still hear the original in the music if you knew it before hand.
 
Its the year 2025. Extreme battle between human composers against the Deep Blue Composer. Its the year 2026. John Williams matches all his wit and skill against Deep Blue. JW burned out from exhaustion, buried in the hail, poisoned in the bushes an' blown out on the trail, hunted like a crocodile, ravaged in the corn, alas, its futile, Deep Blue blows a hollow horn.


ap_kasparov2_day2_f.jpg
 
It's more practical at this point to think of AI as tools rather than people. We are far form an all-encompassing AI that can handle a bunch of complex individual tasks and then combine those tasks to achieve a goal. This AI generates MIDI data from other music, and does so in a way that is musically "passable" to serve as a palette of colors for a composer or orchestrator to use as they will.
Given the amount of editing required, does it actually speed time to finished piece? Is it relieving composers/orchestrators of drudge work? From the video, I don't see that it does. I mean, it's a fascinating technology to be sure, and it may or may not get better in ways that matter.

The better analogy might be to composing/arranging with a phrase library. The algorithm spits out a set of precomposed bits—a kind of highly personalized phrase library—that you can arrange/incorporate as you will within the limitations of the licensing.
 
It's the IKEA of music - the AI stuff will be good, but it won't be great, it won't be surprising. AI will also be good at generating material for further improvement by a person, as others have said, but I do that with software already as do many many others.
 
Top Bottom