i am sorry but we (i make music in my spare time) need to worry.
to echo what the comment above is saying. not because this AI generated music is good. but because it is good enough for the vast majority! and this concerns other fields as well. the consumption economy has set the bar for music and entertainment in general very low. most people don't know (or think) that the bar is low. because they have not experienced anything better and probably never will.
The thing is, and this applies to any other human made vs computer made thing: there will always be people who cannot or don't care to discern between quality and "whatever" (aka "good enough", but where "good" is a very low bar).
The people who would be satisfied with AI generated music are people who would not have paid for human made music in the first place.
You as a good musician will never lose a sale to an AI music source, because that buyer wouldn't have bought your music in the first place.
Now if you make your living providing easy listening background music, then you will eventually be replaced.
Not even that I think. Even background music has more purpose than AI generated one. But you are right ... some people may have a low threshold with being satisfied and hear this kind of music.
Look at Max Martin - his songs are massive hits because they are highly engineered and use a proved Swedish recipe / formula / composition techniques (ex: balanced lines) that on paper are actually quite simple. On paper.
If it were as simple as it looks, everybody would be a Max Martin or somebody would train an AI on his canon and maybe actually have something decent. Music is based in emotion, and the bits and bytes aren’t close to simulating anything close other than probably raw schizophrenia.
The current state of AI music? There’s no amount of money you could pay me to listen to it for an hour a day for a week. No way. It’s that bad.
Counterpoint: a moderately musically inclined person with Propellerhead’s Figure can come up with more pleasing and coherent music on their third or fourth try that would put any of these to shame. It’s just reality at present.
My wife is an illustrator, and she got really depressed when I showed her the image AI tools available today. Again, none of this stuff would replace her unique work, but it devalues the entire profession.
This. All the previous comments made really good statements, but, in the end, it's the value we give to art that might suffer from AI generated content, and the people who produce "real" art.
I'm sure textile weavers a century ago said the same thing, and the world replied that if a machine can do what you do even adequately, your profession was always overvalued.
In the end, it's an iron law of post-industrial capitalism that the market value of human effort eventually approaches zero.
"This is a business I know well. Jukedeck is an example of how founders and investors do not conduct appropriate market research. There is a limited market demand for low-cost royalty-free music for videos. One could argue there is an oversupply* of royalty-free music relative to buyers. The quality is not good enough to disrupt the billion dollar Production music industry that is top heavy, a relative small amount of creators at the top get the majority of the money, the rest compete for the little that is left. Jukedeck has raised enough money ($3million #) to be around for a few years if they control their burn rate. But Jukedeck in its current form, is just another music startup destined for the Deadpool."
Well jukedeck has been bought by TikTok, so their product was indeed valuable for someone. I guess the point with such AI systems is not to replace existing creators, but rather fill in new market needs
Not sure that article is making the point you have in mind:
“people let playlists run on in the background when they serve inoffensive, bland music they can’t be bothered to turn off. If you look at the music Spotify has broken, it’s all chill-out stuff. That isn’t art, it’s wallpaper.”
As I said, we will see in 2 years. I am confident that your prediction (which was not "widespread music generation" but quite specific - in a platform in which the majority of streaming is generated by a handful of artists) will be spectacularly wrong.
I'm sure the names of the "handful of artists" will still be attached to the music, it's just the music will be AI generated. Most of those artists don't compose their hits anyway.
Yes, I expected goal-post moving in line of "even if a single beat is AI-generated, the entire song counts for AI-generated".
Or, the more likely one, in this case, "the first draft of the beat was AI-generated, then human-edited and the vocals were by the singer but they were processed, so it's AI-generated". Typical singularitarian bullshit.
No goal-post moving here, I predict that the entire song, every sound in it, including vocals, will be AI generated. Optionally with the name of your favorite human artist attached to it. Whether people will know (or care) that it's fully AI generated I don't know, it depends on how Spotify decides to promote such songs.
I initially thought your prediction was "AI-generated, with mostly human vocals and some editing" - which has no way of occurring in 2 years even for new songs, let alone if you include the legacy catalog.
This insane interpretation will not only not occur in 2 years, it will not occur this decade. Singularitarian delusion runs higher than even I imagined.
First, your prediction is analogous to something like "in 2 years, 50% of images used in {ad platform}/getty, will be AI-generated". Your prediction is actually "AI-generated without human editing". This is not true today and will not be true in 2 years from now even for images.
I am not a musician, have no musical (or any other art, actually) talent and have kept up (shallowly) with state-of-the-art music generation for a decade (because of idiocy kurzweil has spewed out).
I am "reacting strongly" because I detest singularitarians and everything they stand for. This board in particular has been a hotbed of delusion and idiocy for the last 6 months in every single AI thread I have read comments in.
I don't know about half, but if Spotify don't have a large AI team they're missing the boat. They have a perfect opportunity to segue their audience into cheap content they create themselves.
I feel the same way about the IEEE article about immersive 3d audio - where’s the market?! It’s not the future of music - people crave live or festival / social atmosphere, not getting into an alien pod to jam out Lizzo.
Image generation models didn't improve. Someone figured out how to use them to do something new.
Anyway models have been improving for a long time but when was the last time you saw a news item about the progress in machine translation? That was probably around 2016-17 when the hype cycle for neural machine translation was at its apex. You don't hear anything more about it in the news because the hype cycle has now dipped to its bottom-most pit of indifference and the hype about being able to speak to a machine and communicate with any human on the planet in their native language has been replaced with, for example, the hype about being able to generate human-like art.
My point being, just because performance increased in the past in one particular task, it doesn't mean that it will improve in all other tasks, or, indeed, that it will keep improving in the same task. For all we know what we've seen so far of image generation is all we'll get for the next ten years or so.
I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have history books, so I don't make predictions. We can't even speak about the past with confidence, let alone the future.
No really ... it sounds shitty. It's the same with images ... if a human would compose it a "story" or "intention" is behind the product. AI can't provide that because it's just a A without real I .
Midjourney improved so much over the summer, it was staggering. Arms no longer grow and point wherever the wind blows them. Tables are covered in identifiable objects instead of nonsense shapes.
The gap between 'okay' and 'really good' is smaller than we think
Fawed but interesting. Experimental page should have nudge/spin again option on each section; sometimes the results are musically very good and an interesting segue from the previous section, sometimes they're just kinda ass.
Also I think it's a mistake to just look at music (even electronic dance music) as a series of transformations that journey from A to B. A lot out-there music relies on fairly safe tonalities and very straightforward musical structures, to provide an anchor for wild timbral experimentation. Listeners can enjoy the departure from conventional sonic reality in somewhat the same way as a theme park roller coaster balances existential terror and reliable predictability.
Many of the timbres the AI selected were not very rich in replicating natural instruments.
Also, almost every single track in every song is continuously overloaded with randomness, or perhaps I should call it juvenile improvisation attempts.
Together, these make for a frenetic chiptunes vibe, as I hear it.
These things make me sad. Not that the results are anywhere close to good enough to replace a human artist yet, but eventually it'll probably be at a level that's good enough for most people, and that'll be the day when music will be truly disposable. I imagine an endless stream of music equivalent to the average Netflix-produced movie. Perfect for people who want music to play all the time without actively listening to any of it.
Now we just need something similar to https://github.com/nogasm with a different kind of "implant" that monitors my dopamine levels and optimizes based on that.
By the Transitive Property of the Monkey's Paw, I think you'd be in an endless loop of punching yourself in the face as the quickest and easiest way to release it.
Music is disposable ... just today. Just take a listen at the most songs in charts ... senseless crap.
At the end always better like this AI crap at least to my ear.
Don't worry because AI would not replace a big part of music if ever.
Maybe AI would be used for generating catchy hook lines but that's all. The end selection of what's catchy and what's boring will always do a human.
The music in the top of the charts is definitely not appealing to me but it's not all senseless crap. The lyrics and emotions can be closer to a Marvel movie but there's a pretty high level of production in the bigger artists. It does nothing at all for me personally but when I hear something like a Dua Lipa song you realize there's real effort and skill going into it.
I guess I have no taste. I had a lot of fun playing with the "live" music generator. Some of the settings produced interesting, catchy riffs.
As a musician and a listener, I vastly prefer real instruments played by real musicians, preferably acoustic. So I wouldn't actually listen to this stuff, but then I don't generally listen to any kind of electronic music. But this AI thing generates the same kind of shallow, bland, sometimes catchy stuff I hear all the time that's supposedly made by "creators."
If folks remember Ballblazer by Lucasfilm Games, Russ Lieblich wrote a music player that would string together riffs like weird chiptune jazz solos. The walking bass was the best part. It was constrained by the template but could come up with some surprising harmonies.
This is a wonderfully concise response and I plan to use it verbatim in the future to evidence my sincere and perhaps bottomless disdain for something. Bravo phrasing.
Surprisingly good. Not Good good but I expected a lot worse.
I think there's great potential for that kind of music in video games, if they can procedurally generate it on the fly based on the current game state (think e.g. roguelikes).
You have to start somewhere, and this probably has a place.
Still, having become accustomed to live acoustic music, I find this generated stuff not engaging. Maybe after a few more generations it will get there.
Interesting and listenable in a “don’t mind this, but forgettable” way. It’s currently okay as disposable background music.
But it seems very far from generating music that I’d actually connect with. Years, at least, away from creating a solid song, much less something that talented songwriters should worry about.
It's years, at least, away from creating anything that I'd connect with. But it's only a couple years away from filling all the lobbies and elevators of the world.
Bruce makes the point that early "AI" image generation was pretty shit, but a couple of specific developments (especially diffusion modelling) changed all that remarkably quickly; the corollary is that we might expect that for music too.
I wonder how people will react when this does become "good enough".
I'm thinking of those that consider themselves prompt artists or prompt engineers, and consider DALL-E/SD to be merely tools that creatives use to create their art, just like photoshop, and how dare you insinuate that the work isn't my original creation...
If I type in "Symphony, Beethoven, dramatic strings, romantic theme turning dark then triumphant, tenor flute solo in third movement" and such a thing is produced... am I a musician? A classical composer perhaps?
I'm not trying to say that there is no act of creation on the part of the user of such systems, but I do think it's an interesting area of discussion, because to me there is some sort of qualitative difference here.
To my ear, they all sound about okay for 4 seconds, until my brain recognizes that there's no tension being built or story being told. It's like every track is 4 seconds of music followed by 4 seconds of music followed by 4 seconds of music rather than a track with a real sense of progression.
Many have said in this thread already that maybe we ought to expect that a ml approach in the next few months/years could be much better. I'm not so confident that it will happen so soon. Audio might end up being a much harder problem than visuals, for a variety of different reasons. Having the time domain built into the medium requires some concept of memory, and even modern neural nets seem to struggle remembering what they said before the most recent prompt.
Once again though, its not impossible. Just requires the right techniques and enough people focused on it.
Most real tracks don't have tension buildup or progression. That you judge music based on it mostly just speaks of your preferences. As far as I heard the tracks were coherent and not just 4s snippets glued together. Having said that, I don't think they were exceptional or anything.
Besides ambient music, what music doesn't have any sort of buildup of tension and subsequent release? Do you have any particular example tracks that doesn't have any tension/release at all?
I feel like most of the music people commonly listen to have that, it's an essential part of what makes music feel "human".
I think maybe you two aren't on the same page. I know you are referring specifically to tension and release as a music theory concept, which is for sure very common. Even a single "tense" chord in a chorus resolving to the tonic is tension and release. I think the other person is speaking of "tension" in the context of progression, like a song's building up to a crescendo would be considered tension, or a dubstep drop, or a metal breakdown, etc. (those are also tension and release in music theory, but I think the person is speaking broadly in laymens terms)
The thing is even if you can make a machine reproduce it, it's missing the human component, and the fact that you (I) know it's not human made already degrades the experience.
What AI gives you is a mash up, a mix of people's intent, a mix of people's feelings. What I want is the result of a singular person expressing his singularity though his work, I don't want the "average of the best" music or the "average of the best picture". This is good for content creation, when you need to pump out the maximum amount of "content" for people to "consume" (see marvel, netflix&co), but not for art
Art that leave a mark is always weird/quirky/personal/deep/&c. the fact that a machine can replicate the result removes the most interesting part of the equation, the human part. It's like making your own bread vs buying supermarket bread, the later is cheaper and faster, it might even taste better if you fucked it up, but it's a complete different experience
Not sure why this is downvoted, I think it’s exactly right. A huge part of what makes music feel meaningful is the parasocial relationship with the artist, and the cultural context the music captures and expresses.
That's... such a different way of relating to music!
Some of the most meaningful experiences I've had with music involved DJs whose names I didn't know, playing tracks produced by musicians whose names I didn't know and had no way to discover.
Didn’t say it’s the only way! But I think you would agree that most popular music is made by artists who have a very prominent public persona, expressed in different ways depending on the genre and subculture the music appeals to. As a fan you’re not just listening to the music as it is, but interpreted in terms of your thoughts and feelings about the artist. That context can make the music feel more meaningful.
Several years ago I implemented some very basic rules outlining some distance metrics between two chords and ran some multiobjective evolutionary algorithms to generate, say, a 16 bar progression while trying to minimize these distances between any two subsequent jumps. I added a couple or three other objective functions for judging the progressions by my idea of structure (i.e., starting and ending on the same chord), and found the results to be very promising.
With enough of a sophisticated rule system (which could be built from existing music) an AI should be able to optimize for tension building or storytelling quite easily. Of course it will only optimize for the definition of tension building or storytelling that it understands, via statistical methods or being told by the programmer explicitly. In the latter case the programmer is just doing one of the things composers always do, while in the former, the generated content is interesting - or not - in much the same way (IMHO) as transformer-based language generators like GPT-3.
Unfortunately I don't have the full working codebase anymore. Although I think I have enough I could recreate it, it was pretty rudimentary and I've always intended to revisit the idea one day and flesh it out as at least a blog post or something (at which point I will submit it here). I only have a couple of the progressions but they don't mean much on thier own since I hand-picked them out of the result set based on personal taste rather than any formal algorithm.
The good thing about this hitting the music industry is that lawsuits will follow very soon and the stealing of intellectual labor and property all those models are based on can probably end a bit sooner.
99 comments
[ 63.4 ms ] story [ 2575 ms ] threadAs amazing as AI image generation is, AI music generation (to me) is not.
to echo what the comment above is saying. not because this AI generated music is good. but because it is good enough for the vast majority! and this concerns other fields as well. the consumption economy has set the bar for music and entertainment in general very low. most people don't know (or think) that the bar is low. because they have not experienced anything better and probably never will.
what's gonna happen next will be sad.
The people who would be satisfied with AI generated music are people who would not have paid for human made music in the first place.
You as a good musician will never lose a sale to an AI music source, because that buyer wouldn't have bought your music in the first place.
Now if you make your living providing easy listening background music, then you will eventually be replaced.
If it were as simple as it looks, everybody would be a Max Martin or somebody would train an AI on his canon and maybe actually have something decent. Music is based in emotion, and the bits and bytes aren’t close to simulating anything close other than probably raw schizophrenia.
The current state of AI music? There’s no amount of money you could pay me to listen to it for an hour a day for a week. No way. It’s that bad.
Counterpoint: a moderately musically inclined person with Propellerhead’s Figure can come up with more pleasing and coherent music on their third or fourth try that would put any of these to shame. It’s just reality at present.
This. All the previous comments made really good statements, but, in the end, it's the value we give to art that might suffer from AI generated content, and the people who produce "real" art.
In the end, it's an iron law of post-industrial capitalism that the market value of human effort eventually approaches zero.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10707049
"This is a business I know well. Jukedeck is an example of how founders and investors do not conduct appropriate market research. There is a limited market demand for low-cost royalty-free music for videos. One could argue there is an oversupply* of royalty-free music relative to buyers. The quality is not good enough to disrupt the billion dollar Production music industry that is top heavy, a relative small amount of creators at the top get the majority of the money, the rest compete for the little that is left. Jukedeck has raised enough money ($3million #) to be around for a few years if they control their burn rate. But Jukedeck in its current form, is just another music startup destined for the Deadpool."
You know how I know? The Rolling Stones are still touring. Most people don’t go to Spotify or YouTube for discovery, they go for convenient on demand.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/apr/28/streaming-musi...
“people let playlists run on in the background when they serve inoffensive, bland music they can’t be bothered to turn off. If you look at the music Spotify has broken, it’s all chill-out stuff. That isn’t art, it’s wallpaper.”
Or, the more likely one, in this case, "the first draft of the beat was AI-generated, then human-edited and the vocals were by the singer but they were processed, so it's AI-generated". Typical singularitarian bullshit.
This insane interpretation will not only not occur in 2 years, it will not occur this decade. Singularitarian delusion runs higher than even I imagined.
It's interesting you react so strongly to my prediction. Are you a musician? How much do you know about music generation research?
I am not a musician, have no musical (or any other art, actually) talent and have kept up (shallowly) with state-of-the-art music generation for a decade (because of idiocy kurzweil has spewed out).
I am "reacting strongly" because I detest singularitarians and everything they stand for. This board in particular has been a hotbed of delusion and idiocy for the last 6 months in every single AI thread I have read comments in.
Predictions rely on everyone forgetting how wrong you were
As we have seen with text-to-image, sometimes AI models can improve at an astonishing rate.
Anyway models have been improving for a long time but when was the last time you saw a news item about the progress in machine translation? That was probably around 2016-17 when the hype cycle for neural machine translation was at its apex. You don't hear anything more about it in the news because the hype cycle has now dipped to its bottom-most pit of indifference and the hype about being able to speak to a machine and communicate with any human on the planet in their native language has been replaced with, for example, the hype about being able to generate human-like art.
My point being, just because performance increased in the past in one particular task, it doesn't mean that it will improve in all other tasks, or, indeed, that it will keep improving in the same task. For all we know what we've seen so far of image generation is all we'll get for the next ten years or so.
I don't have a crystal ball, but I do have history books, so I don't make predictions. We can't even speak about the past with confidence, let alone the future.
A blind test would be better. A musical Turing test - whether you like music and can't tell if that's AI or real composer.
The gap between 'okay' and 'really good' is smaller than we think
Also I think it's a mistake to just look at music (even electronic dance music) as a series of transformations that journey from A to B. A lot out-there music relies on fairly safe tonalities and very straightforward musical structures, to provide an anchor for wild timbral experimentation. Listeners can enjoy the departure from conventional sonic reality in somewhat the same way as a theme park roller coaster balances existential terror and reliable predictability.
I would say we reached that day quite some time ago, due to a variety of factors, none of which included AI/ML/correlation analysis.
As a musician and a listener, I vastly prefer real instruments played by real musicians, preferably acoustic. So I wouldn't actually listen to this stuff, but then I don't generally listen to any kind of electronic music. But this AI thing generates the same kind of shallow, bland, sometimes catchy stuff I hear all the time that's supposedly made by "creators."
I think there's great potential for that kind of music in video games, if they can procedurally generate it on the fly based on the current game state (think e.g. roguelikes).
Still, having become accustomed to live acoustic music, I find this generated stuff not engaging. Maybe after a few more generations it will get there.
But it seems very far from generating music that I’d actually connect with. Years, at least, away from creating a solid song, much less something that talented songwriters should worry about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN0DDD7B3oU
Bruce makes the point that early "AI" image generation was pretty shit, but a couple of specific developments (especially diffusion modelling) changed all that remarkably quickly; the corollary is that we might expect that for music too.
I'm thinking of those that consider themselves prompt artists or prompt engineers, and consider DALL-E/SD to be merely tools that creatives use to create their art, just like photoshop, and how dare you insinuate that the work isn't my original creation...
If I type in "Symphony, Beethoven, dramatic strings, romantic theme turning dark then triumphant, tenor flute solo in third movement" and such a thing is produced... am I a musician? A classical composer perhaps?
I'm not trying to say that there is no act of creation on the part of the user of such systems, but I do think it's an interesting area of discussion, because to me there is some sort of qualitative difference here.
Many have said in this thread already that maybe we ought to expect that a ml approach in the next few months/years could be much better. I'm not so confident that it will happen so soon. Audio might end up being a much harder problem than visuals, for a variety of different reasons. Having the time domain built into the medium requires some concept of memory, and even modern neural nets seem to struggle remembering what they said before the most recent prompt.
Once again though, its not impossible. Just requires the right techniques and enough people focused on it.
I feel like most of the music people commonly listen to have that, it's an essential part of what makes music feel "human".
What AI gives you is a mash up, a mix of people's intent, a mix of people's feelings. What I want is the result of a singular person expressing his singularity though his work, I don't want the "average of the best" music or the "average of the best picture". This is good for content creation, when you need to pump out the maximum amount of "content" for people to "consume" (see marvel, netflix&co), but not for art
Art that leave a mark is always weird/quirky/personal/deep/&c. the fact that a machine can replicate the result removes the most interesting part of the equation, the human part. It's like making your own bread vs buying supermarket bread, the later is cheaper and faster, it might even taste better if you fucked it up, but it's a complete different experience
Some of the most meaningful experiences I've had with music involved DJs whose names I didn't know, playing tracks produced by musicians whose names I didn't know and had no way to discover.
With enough of a sophisticated rule system (which could be built from existing music) an AI should be able to optimize for tension building or storytelling quite easily. Of course it will only optimize for the definition of tension building or storytelling that it understands, via statistical methods or being told by the programmer explicitly. In the latter case the programmer is just doing one of the things composers always do, while in the former, the generated content is interesting - or not - in much the same way (IMHO) as transformer-based language generators like GPT-3.