As a musician this makes me feel very weird... It might be time to hang it up. I've often wondered what pop/rock music is, why I'm drawn to it, and why I've spent so much time trying to master it (originally it was to attract women and get laid)? It's beginning to seem like a demonically inspired adolescent obsession and a complete waste of time when AI can write a better song in 4 seconds than I can in an entire lifetime... or is this the intention of (((The Programmers)))? To breed a sense of defeat and demoralization?
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Thread
- Thread starter Johnnyvee
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@PurpleUrkel , as a fellow musician I think I can see where you're coming from, but I don't. It was creepy hearing AI replicate the Emo version of Kanye's most recent controversial banger. Mostly because it did, in fact, replicate my band's old guitarist's tone very well for the meme song. Hearing AI generate music is surreal in a demoralizing way, because its ability to replicate music drives home how well it can replicate any media. It will only get harder and harder to tell what's real and what's not on your screen, or through your speakers. But that's why this stuff is never to be taken too seriously, anyway. Nothing on the internet is ever really to be taken too seriously; we would be in a better world if more people approached the internet with this in mind. I dare say that goes for software like AI, too.
Pop/rock music is the current iteration of the musical conversation happening over generations. As anyone has an aptitude for certain things, people find themselves drawn to things they have an aptitude for. Or at least they spend time flailing their arms and making mistakes until they find the thing they have an aptitude for. Once you do, you're drawn to it for whatever reason that you can justify compels you.
I was with my old band mates a while back, talking about how music feels like it's all the same now since everything's been done before. But I argued that that's OK, because making music doesn't have to be about being original and taking music somewhere new, but simply about being authentic. The time spent making music with friends is time spent discovering the magic of manipulating what you hear. And maybe even making bonds with your fellow musicians that can last a lifetime. You do it long enough and you become music, so to speak. Maybe you wanted to attract the opposite sex, too, there is a reason why the "love song" is an age-old and timeless trope, after all. I was certainly glad to find that aspect of it once I was actually in a band and onstage, to be honest.
But music is a human thing, AI can't make it, it just replicates it the way it's replicating art right now, too. AI isn't conscious, so it doesn't feel something genuine worth expressing by way of carefully crafting a manipulation of pigment, graphite, or sound. AI is just a program thing on a computer, not a genuine conduit for the beauty of art with an authentic soul. So the computer will be used to make even more music and bills are even harder to pay for the average musician with their craft, what else is new? That was already mostly impossible for most of us, anyway. The time spent honing the craft of musicianship was time spent living an authentic human life, and that has meaning in and of itself because you actually experience it for yourself. Life isn't lived through a screen, it's lived through time spent doing something worthwhile, like making music with friends. A computer can't feel like us, so it can't really make music like us. It may replicate it, and replicate it well, but it will be men like us that carry on the torch when all this comes crashing down and people actually need to hire musicians again. And trust me, that last part will happen again, even if after our lifetimes. How did the first instrument ever get invented, anyway?
Pop/rock music is the current iteration of the musical conversation happening over generations. As anyone has an aptitude for certain things, people find themselves drawn to things they have an aptitude for. Or at least they spend time flailing their arms and making mistakes until they find the thing they have an aptitude for. Once you do, you're drawn to it for whatever reason that you can justify compels you.
I was with my old band mates a while back, talking about how music feels like it's all the same now since everything's been done before. But I argued that that's OK, because making music doesn't have to be about being original and taking music somewhere new, but simply about being authentic. The time spent making music with friends is time spent discovering the magic of manipulating what you hear. And maybe even making bonds with your fellow musicians that can last a lifetime. You do it long enough and you become music, so to speak. Maybe you wanted to attract the opposite sex, too, there is a reason why the "love song" is an age-old and timeless trope, after all. I was certainly glad to find that aspect of it once I was actually in a band and onstage, to be honest.
But music is a human thing, AI can't make it, it just replicates it the way it's replicating art right now, too. AI isn't conscious, so it doesn't feel something genuine worth expressing by way of carefully crafting a manipulation of pigment, graphite, or sound. AI is just a program thing on a computer, not a genuine conduit for the beauty of art with an authentic soul. So the computer will be used to make even more music and bills are even harder to pay for the average musician with their craft, what else is new? That was already mostly impossible for most of us, anyway. The time spent honing the craft of musicianship was time spent living an authentic human life, and that has meaning in and of itself because you actually experience it for yourself. Life isn't lived through a screen, it's lived through time spent doing something worthwhile, like making music with friends. A computer can't feel like us, so it can't really make music like us. It may replicate it, and replicate it well, but it will be men like us that carry on the torch when all this comes crashing down and people actually need to hire musicians again. And trust me, that last part will happen again, even if after our lifetimes. How did the first instrument ever get invented, anyway?
This is something I was thinking about. In my opinion there is already too much art in the world which means there are too many artists (and not enough doctors). Humans will be (and are) using AI to cheat the process and I myself am now tempted to do so. How many Hollywood writers are using AI to finish episodic TV shows at crunch time the night before the weekly table read? Similarly, Bob Marley was a master at being able to invent super hooky vocal melodies over a ONE chord guitar vamp, and now all I've got to do is ask AI to "create me a Bob Marley style vocal melody," copy it and call it my own.
I don't know, I haven't done that yet, but it's very tempting and feels like the serpent is offering me an apple. Probably best to walk away before I start taking credit for something I didn't actually create.
I have only listened to a few AI generated songs so far, and find most the have lyrics that are kinda meaningless and offer not eccentricity or uniqueness of the human spirit and creatively. Fine if you want background noise that’s pleasant to the ear but nothing else.
I was driving yesterday and listening the Wille Nelson’s “You are always on my mind” and got to thinking, there is no way AI could create something like outstanding like this. The human spirit and creativity in music will alway preserve unless artists stop trying and listeners stop grisly embracing music and just want background noise, mindless dance music or mindless get-pumped workout music.
I was driving yesterday and listening the Wille Nelson’s “You are always on my mind” and got to thinking, there is no way AI could create something like outstanding like this. The human spirit and creativity in music will alway preserve unless artists stop trying and listeners stop grisly embracing music and just want background noise, mindless dance music or mindless get-pumped workout music.
Maybe not yet but it is for sure coming. I think this is the whole intention behind AI. Ultimately it was most likely designed and envisioned to be the mind and "mouth" of advanced human forms of robotics.
But this is only part of what I'm talking about. You can use AI to co-write your songs (movies, books, poetry, etc.) and then edit the structure to create the "You are always on my mind" lyric (not exactly the most original, poetic, complicated lyric but it is Willy's human delivery of the lyric that gives it it's punch) to plagiarize AI's melodic and verbal structure(s) and then claim them as your "original" work.
Effective vocal melody is one of the hardest things to create and as stated in the above Rogan video where Jewel joins the chat and says "great (AI) melody" we can see how quickly AI can solve such a long standing existential problem for a musician such as myself. My personal issue as a musician has never been "the feel" or not having stage presence, it has always been my limited vocal ability (think Bob Dylan and Neil Young) and my limited ability to write strong vocal melodies and Beatle-esque song structures with perfect mathematical sequences (verse/chorus/bridge/verse) to compensate for my lack of vocal quality. As we see with guys like Bob Dylan and Neil Young (and even Wille Nelson) strong vocal melodies and song structures combined with strong stage presence can compensate for a "mediocre" voice thus creating something deemed artistically significant by millions of people.
This presents an existential dilemma for someone like myself who has a lot of God given feel for music yet has struggled for the better part of three decades to write great mathematically correct pop-rock songs in the vein of Everybody Wants To Rule The World (best bridge ever written), Bye Bye Miss American Pie, Wonder Wall, Blackbird (Beatles), Chasing Cars (Snow Patrol), etc. AI melody creation could be the thing that unlocks something that could dramatically change the direction of my life. The missing link so to speak. The only question is should I go down that rabbit hole? It is very tempting but it would require me to live a lie as I couldn't possibly go around performing and telling the audience, "This next song was written by myself and AI and is about the jews destroying the world and blowing up children in Gazza."