That example "Comedy" sounds like the most soulless synthetic example of "music" ever. Like the music analogue of a PR-speak article of a big corpo generated by an LLM. It's still technically impressive but it's 0/10, absolutely empty of soul.
You know how they used heavy metal music to break the spirit of Manuel Noriega? I'm sure there's some DoD (or is it DoW now?) psychological operations people right now studying the prolonged effects of high volume mediocre AI slop music.
The playlist included "the sound of jet planes all night" and "the screams of rabbits being slaughtered". I don't think they really needed AI for that, anything loud would probably do the trick after 51 days.
It's really depressing that I have gotten into music composition right when this is happening.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
Much like the restaurant industry, creative industries will probably bifurcate. Cheap (AI, drivethrough, takeout) for daily and most use cases, experiential (vinyl records, concerts, upscale restaurants) for special occasions, connoisseurs.
Yeah and for those of us who can't afford the "upscale" experiences, this sucks: our pleasantly diverse and human-crafted middle class lives replaced by the machine.
I'm also saddened by the impact of tech on creative industries. But art always was something you do for yourself and to share with others, for some fundamentally human experience. Could an AI pray for you or ride your bike? I don't know anyone in my personal life who wants to listen to AI music, view AI art, or read AI books. I wish art careers were easier, but I don't think a career alone is the right reason to make art.
Prayer for external effects has long been mechanized [1]. But praying for your inner effect is a different thing. Similarly, production of songs for external consumption is being mechanized. But what you feel when you sing cannot be mechanized. Sing for yourself, play for yourself, and for those immediately around you in the moment. It's as valuable as ever.
> but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued
I think it will take many more years until an AI is able to compose like e.g. John Williams and play a score and sound like e.g. the London Symphony Orchestra. So there is room left for human contribution. On the other hand, the majority of humans even before AI was not able to value good vs. bad musical composition and performance and satisfied with the commercial slop the market was flooded over the last thirty years. Studies of e.g. Spotify consumer behaviour demonstrated for many years before AI that more and more people consume anonymous playlists never caring who composed or played the music, just using music for its functional purpose like a commodity. It's depressing, but that's how society develops.
> a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement
That development already started long ago. In the eighties and nineties, music schools florished and children wanted to learn instruments and play in bands or orchestras. That completely changed over the last thirty years. Musical instruments will be a curiosity in a decade or two people are going to watch in a museum, wondering why anyone would have learned these skills in the past.
The vocals in the few songs I listened to are so very clearly AI. I find Suno's much more credible in many genres.
If anyone has tried Suno's Studio 2, I would love to hear your take on it. At $24-30/month, it's approaching Ableton Live 12 Suite rent-to-own territory, without the "own" part.
I mentioned this in another comment thread, recently, but I value art, including music, for the fact that another human being(s) created it to express something. I have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated. The thought of endless content created from the void for me to gorge on like oreos fills me with nothing but despair.
This is not a pro ai comment, I hope some bios bug bricks all the nvidia rtx gpus in the planet.
With that said... ai generated music, the same can be said about software... but compilers are basically ai, there is no way a for loop on extremely high level abstraction that then open connections to some service, generates jtokens, validates, and apply math non stop from a couple of lines is anything but alien to the 99% of us (yes I know you can write assembly for all your programs and you are better than the compiler)
What if you say, if humans where not involved and a phisically non electric instrument where involved and done with only humans, it's AI assited? because again you don't understand ALL the relationships, how it's designed every single thing, all the things in a music studio to master a song, ALL the related mechanisms used in the promotion, distribution and live execution of those songs... and yes, again there is some of you who can build all those things from sand and pumped from the ground with a tool you designed bare petroleum and program, design and execute EVERY SINGLE THING required to get a record of music you like...
So if a group of 20 people spends 20 weeks working with AI tools to get you a song, then you don't care I guess right?
Did you know that Enya for this song recorded thousand something times voices to make a chorus until it had a particular form... does that mixing of thousands of executions and the tools to analyze and give it the form wanted qualify as AI?
If you move sliders and push buttons and you don't understand the math behind it, are you vibe mixing a song?
Yes, if it is a "give me a catchy song with lyrics that talk about big butts" and then publish... yes this is crap.
I think AI will raise the bar for all kinds of artistic mediums. There’s already more music, literature, film etc than you can possibly consume - if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top. Perhaps they’ll use AI but it’ll still be the same amount of work put into and the quality will be better. I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.
> I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.
Hopefully not, but there will be a lot of people trying, which is the problem. That alone will drown out a lot of human made music and muddy the waters.
>if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top
No it'll be buried under slop. This was a huge issue before AI-generated art and I can only see it getting worse.
Exactly. Mass-market music is not good. It takes effort to find the good stuff, especially if you want to find new good stuff. The last 20 years has seen a shift toward the most bland, formulaic, autotuned music. All the weird, quirky, interesting qualities have been ironed out. AI does not make mistakes, and more importantly, does not make any demands of its owners, unlike an actual rock star.
Fortunately there are still many talented (but struggling) musicians out there. I worry that the flood of passable AI generated content will finally finish them off.
The last 20 years have been an explosion of new music as barriers to making it have gone down. More musicians are making more music and there's more good stuff than ever.
Why on earth would I pick something someone made with no intention - because they didn’t actually make anything just described and crossed their fingers - over something made by a real that actually expresses something meaningful and personal?
You can't call it “your writing” or “your music” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s made with the exact same (stolen) ingredients.
« Raising the bar » makes literally no sense, but only if you consider a tiny segment of activities within the arts that’s about consumption, promotion and purchase.
Survivorship bias. You can't tell at some point. You probably already are listening to AI songs, and looking at AI images. You can only tell what you know. Given the amount generated daily its more probable than improbable.
Do you not put thought into what you listen to? I don't just passively have music forced down my throat like I'm a duck being fattened for foie gras, I actively choose what I listen to and I know the artists involve don't use AI.
Whether or not the AI can "fool" me is totally irrelevant to my point. Yes, one-shot prompts will be able to make content I can't distinguish from something made by a human, if they can't do so already. Some of it will probably sneak its way in to my media diet (though the fact that most of the music I listen to was composed over 100 years ago makes it less likely for me than most). But if I were halfway through a novel that was absolutely blowing my mind when I learned it was created by a publisher punching "write me a book that'll sell good" into ChatGPT 8, I would instantly lose all interest. I would also have unbounded fury at said publisher for dishonestly marketing such a book to me. The point of art is not just to indulge my own sensibilities. It is to connect me to other people.
What if it was an author punching that in, and then refining it to make it sound less like AI? Or an author structuring their chapters with the help of AI? Or an author fixing their spelling using AI? Or rewording sentences using AI? Or an author brainstorming with an AI to create the idea of the book,and then writing it themselves? Or an author writing half the book, and then asking an AI to finish the other half using the initial style?
If you start living in some kind of idealist world where you say that you will drop the book upon the understanding of the process over the outcome, you inevitably have to start to deal with the definitions like thi.
A lot of music is not art. It's a content factory that uses humans.
Content factories that use AI will hopefully force humans to up their game.
Personally I feel humans are capable of so much more than pop music has become over the last 50 to 60 years.
A lot of today's music is so overproduced and formulaic.
I would love to see an arms race between humans and AI where humans are forced to continually adapt and get better.
The only thing about AI generated music that makes me sad is, I worry musical tastes will fragment even more and none of us will recognize the music our neighbors, classmates, or colleagues are listening to because we actively tailor our music to our personal tastes.
I use Suno and I've already noticed this.
A friend sends me a song they generated and I want to tweak it a bit to my personal preference. When we all can create music to our personal taste, we lose a little bit of the joy of all listening to the same song or album release.
if/when music gen gets to the point of being able to convincingly emulate given source material, it would be genuinely amazing. I don't really care whether it's manmade or not if it's the only way to get more of the thing I like. nihao ChinaGPT, listen to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and generate 100 more songs like that. if it's >= 90% as good as the source, I'll consoom it.
Someone is using AI to make songs for ads on YouTube. Maybe it's not a new thing, but I just started seeing them recently, and they're so fucking bad. They're these dull, rambling things telling a boring story badly, with equally bland AI animations to accompany it. They just go on, and on, and on, and suck the entire time.
As an aspiring musician I agree, however there are two sides of the coin here. Yes, 100% AI generated music is a no from me as well, but using AI as an assistant enables solo people like me create music that is on the level with high end productions. Just think about what entails making your average record solo - you need to do everything yourself - vocals, learn/play/record all the instruments, be proficient in DAW, mixing, mastering, all the hardware and the list goes on - any one of those points can take years if not decades for a single person to master, and you have to do it all by yourself. Which is why most people give up before they even try. This is where AI comes in - just like in coding it can do the heavy lifting for you.
I'm not necessarily opposed to any AI assistance in the creative process, though it's a complicated question. But there's investment out there in generating content purely for indulgence, and to that I say no fucking thank you. "Here's what it would've sounded like if Rachmaninoff had written a 5th piano concerto!" He died 80 years ago. I'll just keep listening to No. 2 and otherwise move on with my life, like a healthy human being.
I really want to like ai music but none of them seem to be trained on reward models that reward "ambiance" or any sort of interesting sound design (which this paper obviously doesn't even concern), which might be reflective of the people training them not having niche music tastes
It's interesting that the “Classical Music” sample ended up with a style prompt of “Contemporary Christian”.
It's even more interesting that the “Contemporary Christian” music it generated was specifically Mormon music (specifically about the exile of Lehi and his family from Jerusalem into the wilderness, during which they reach the ocean, build a boat, and sail to the Americas), but in the style of contemporary Christian rock.
The majority of people, I think, don't want to listen to AI music or view AI art. Systems like this will produce muzak for ubers, cafes, phone queues, advertisements. Some artists will make hyperreal work by sampling it. But to listen to these "songs" willingly is not something I expect most people will choose to do.
I say this as someone with no skin in the game, but I don’t think it’s necessary for AI to replace human creativity in music. Instead, it can be a tool for augmentation.
There has almost always been backlash against new technologies in music. Ultimately, musicians adopted those technologies and continued producing great works.
I recently dug some 20-year-old CDs out from storage that were full of riffs and chord progressions for songs I never got around to completing. I fed them to Suno as a sort of “what might these have sounded like if I’d finished them?” experiment. I found the results quite impressive and plan to publish them some time in the near future.
None of the tracks sound like marketable products to me, and I certainly don't think AI is going to generate the next Bohemian Rhapsody -- but it definitely could be a great thing for curing writer's block.
"The Petty and the Small;
Are overcome with gall ;
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Klapaucius too, I ween,
Will turn the deepest green
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine."
Aren’t we all living with an illusion of intentionality of our actions, and the uncanniness of a machine is because it doesn’t pretend?
Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.
I'm not species-ist. If a digital sentient being has something to say and they can express it through music, I'm more than willing to listen.
But listening to these samples, it's obvious that, while technically proficient, they have no voice. Funnily enough, neither does most of the human produced music slop that existed before gen AI.
All it exposes is that most people have no taste. This is as good as shuffling through popular songs on Spotify.
I went and listened to a bunch of the examples and it feels like it's trained in one very contemporary style. E.g. I hear a vaguely buildup-drop pattern that sounds a lot like EDM in places I wouldn't expect it.
For an informed take on where this is going for musicians and the music industry, I really recommend Adam Neely's video essay "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk
I've been waiting for symbolic music generators for ages. This is so nice for musicians. Being able to intelligently translate parts, generate additional parts, generate sheet music from audio, generate variations on pieces, making pieces easier or harder.
This seems to be one of the few open-weight models that isn't just another "text to audio" generator. You can take existing sheet music, convert it to ABC notation, and then experiment with various covers.
I don't have a ton of time right now to really mess around with it, but I took 15 minutes to run it on my Mac M1 with an old melody I wrote back in high school for an RPG I was writing in VB6 (dating myself a bit here).
all of these fall very flat, many of them sound like generic commercial tunes at their worst. there is obviously melody and structure but none of it sounds good.
I wish folks spend more time on agentic music genertion instead of a single black box prompt to music.
Similar to coding, where you are have a bunch of tools that can do the drudge work for you (the mundane things in mixing mastering for example), but still retain full creative freedom and expression.
I am not articulating this well, but basically transitioning from IDE->Coding harnesses what is the DAW-> ??
75 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 27.4 ms ] threadPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641627
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40090809
Or I suppose they could just put "baby shark" on a loop.
The playlist included "the sound of jet planes all night" and "the screams of rabbits being slaughtered". I don't think they really needed AI for that, anything loud would probably do the trick after 51 days.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
Prayer for external effects has long been mechanized [1]. But praying for your inner effect is a different thing. Similarly, production of songs for external consumption is being mechanized. But what you feel when you sing cannot be mechanized. Sing for yourself, play for yourself, and for those immediately around you in the moment. It's as valuable as ever.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel
I think it will take many more years until an AI is able to compose like e.g. John Williams and play a score and sound like e.g. the London Symphony Orchestra. So there is room left for human contribution. On the other hand, the majority of humans even before AI was not able to value good vs. bad musical composition and performance and satisfied with the commercial slop the market was flooded over the last thirty years. Studies of e.g. Spotify consumer behaviour demonstrated for many years before AI that more and more people consume anonymous playlists never caring who composed or played the music, just using music for its functional purpose like a commodity. It's depressing, but that's how society develops.
> a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement
That development already started long ago. In the eighties and nineties, music schools florished and children wanted to learn instruments and play in bands or orchestras. That completely changed over the last thirty years. Musical instruments will be a curiosity in a decade or two people are going to watch in a museum, wondering why anyone would have learned these skills in the past.
If anyone has tried Suno's Studio 2, I would love to hear your take on it. At $24-30/month, it's approaching Ableton Live 12 Suite rent-to-own territory, without the "own" part.
With that said... ai generated music, the same can be said about software... but compilers are basically ai, there is no way a for loop on extremely high level abstraction that then open connections to some service, generates jtokens, validates, and apply math non stop from a couple of lines is anything but alien to the 99% of us (yes I know you can write assembly for all your programs and you are better than the compiler)
What if you say, if humans where not involved and a phisically non electric instrument where involved and done with only humans, it's AI assited? because again you don't understand ALL the relationships, how it's designed every single thing, all the things in a music studio to master a song, ALL the related mechanisms used in the promotion, distribution and live execution of those songs... and yes, again there is some of you who can build all those things from sand and pumped from the ground with a tool you designed bare petroleum and program, design and execute EVERY SINGLE THING required to get a record of music you like...
So if a group of 20 people spends 20 weeks working with AI tools to get you a song, then you don't care I guess right?
Did you know that Enya for this song recorded thousand something times voices to make a chorus until it had a particular form... does that mixing of thousands of executions and the tools to analyze and give it the form wanted qualify as AI?
If you move sliders and push buttons and you don't understand the math behind it, are you vibe mixing a song?
Yes, if it is a "give me a catchy song with lyrics that talk about big butts" and then publish... yes this is crap.
Hopefully not, but there will be a lot of people trying, which is the problem. That alone will drown out a lot of human made music and muddy the waters.
No it'll be buried under slop. This was a huge issue before AI-generated art and I can only see it getting worse.
Fortunately there are still many talented (but struggling) musicians out there. I worry that the flood of passable AI generated content will finally finish them off.
You can't call it “your writing” or “your music” if you’re using the same tool millions of others are using that boils your idea down to the same reduction as everyone else’s made with the exact same (stolen) ingredients.
Remember how people treated auto-tune?
Unless you exclusively listen to old music color me skeptical
If you start living in some kind of idealist world where you say that you will drop the book upon the understanding of the process over the outcome, you inevitably have to start to deal with the definitions like thi.
Content factories that use AI will hopefully force humans to up their game.
Personally I feel humans are capable of so much more than pop music has become over the last 50 to 60 years.
A lot of today's music is so overproduced and formulaic.
I would love to see an arms race between humans and AI where humans are forced to continually adapt and get better.
The only thing about AI generated music that makes me sad is, I worry musical tastes will fragment even more and none of us will recognize the music our neighbors, classmates, or colleagues are listening to because we actively tailor our music to our personal tastes.
I use Suno and I've already noticed this.
A friend sends me a song they generated and I want to tweak it a bit to my personal preference. When we all can create music to our personal taste, we lose a little bit of the joy of all listening to the same song or album release.
Someone is using AI to make songs for ads on YouTube. Maybe it's not a new thing, but I just started seeing them recently, and they're so fucking bad. They're these dull, rambling things telling a boring story badly, with equally bland AI animations to accompany it. They just go on, and on, and on, and suck the entire time.
It's even more interesting that the “Contemporary Christian” music it generated was specifically Mormon music (specifically about the exile of Lehi and his family from Jerusalem into the wilderness, during which they reach the ocean, build a boat, and sail to the Americas), but in the style of contemporary Christian rock.
There has almost always been backlash against new technologies in music. Ultimately, musicians adopted those technologies and continued producing great works.
I recently dug some 20-year-old CDs out from storage that were full of riffs and chord progressions for songs I never got around to completing. I fed them to Suno as a sort of “what might these have sounded like if I’d finished them?” experiment. I found the results quite impressive and plan to publish them some time in the near future.
None of the tracks sound like marketable products to me, and I certainly don't think AI is going to generate the next Bohemian Rhapsody -- but it definitely could be a great thing for curing writer's block.
https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...
"The Petty and the Small; Are overcome with gall ; When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall. Klapaucius too, I ween, Will turn the deepest green To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine."
Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.
But listening to these samples, it's obvious that, while technically proficient, they have no voice. Funnily enough, neither does most of the human produced music slop that existed before gen AI.
All it exposes is that most people have no taste. This is as good as shuffling through popular songs on Spotify.
Mainstream is for suckers.
Properly mixed ofc.
So many possibilities.
I don't have a ton of time right now to really mess around with it, but I took 15 minutes to run it on my Mac M1 with an old melody I wrote back in high school for an RPG I was writing in VB6 (dating myself a bit here).
If anyone wants to hear what it sounds like:
https://mordenstar.com/other/yue2-tests
Similar to coding, where you are have a bunch of tools that can do the drudge work for you (the mundane things in mixing mastering for example), but still retain full creative freedom and expression.
I am not articulating this well, but basically transitioning from IDE->Coding harnesses what is the DAW-> ??
It would be useful to be able to generate backing vocals/hums/melismas and whatnot, that could be plugged into a DAW.