PigLick on 18/5/2024 at 06:17
As a professional musician, this is fun to mess around with, but at the same time it is quite disturbing
Sulphur on 18/5/2024 at 08:26
I'd put up a thoughtful analysis on this, but I'm not in the mood, so: we already have an utter deluge of generic crap from people using similar tools on places like Spotify, now it's going to be a veritable flood of pap I won't even have the energy to sift through. I imagine the people who get lucky with it will claim the song is 'theirs' and then reap the short-term reward of that (how do copyrights work when an algorithm someone else created is creating something from a few lines of your input?), but as a tool for musicians who know how to put tracks together, this might be just another thing to use to make some parts of the process easier, other people lazier, but there's possibilities too, like using some of this shit as a sort of aural palimpsest.
Also, I got too lazy to finish this post, so I had ChatGPT do it for me.
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/1i5NvDY.pngPigLick on 18/5/2024 at 12:21
[video=youtube;N8NyEjB_XeA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NyEjB_XeA&t=1356s[/video]
pretty chunky, but this is why music will possibly be the last bastion of non ai things.
demagogue on 18/5/2024 at 14:16
Okay, but for reference here:
[video=youtube;FUDCmJzTUCg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUDCmJzTUCg[/video]
Azaran on 18/5/2024 at 17:56
Quote Posted by Sulphur
I'd put up a thoughtful analysis on this, but I'm not in the mood, so: we already have an utter deluge of generic crap from people using similar tools on places like Spotify, now it's going to be a veritable flood of pap I won't even have the energy to sift through. I imagine the people who get lucky with it will claim the song is 'theirs' and then reap the short-term reward of that (how do copyrights work
I will say this may not be a bad thing. Considering most of the popular music out there over the past 15 years or so has been engineered to (
https://www.mic.com/articles/107896/scientists-finally-prove-why-pop-music-all-sounds-the-same) sound the same, made increasingly superficial and uniform, same cheesy autotune in most songs, same 4 or 5 beats with little variation, I have no issue if this kills the pop music industry, seeing how it's already decadent - the deluge of crap has been flooding the industry for years. Most of the talented people (unless you're an established old timer) are in indie circles nowadays, and not making a living from their music. We're in the new Bubble-gum pop age. So if this automation of pop takes over, it may force real, talented artists to take more of a prominent role.
I remember in the 90's up to the mid 2000's, how good music was everywhere, the variety was insane, and I'd get excited about the new stuff coming out. Sure we still had shitty pop, but well made music wasn't hard to come across. Today, it's few and far between. I don't even bother paying attention to the moedrn music scene anymore, there's plenty of gems to listen to from decades ago.
Sulphur on 19/5/2024 at 03:04
I'm not the kind of person who cheers for the death of something, so I don't see why the route to making the industry better is killing it. I think you might be overly optimistic in envisioning a future where everyone's bored by engineered pop and turns to indie artists - a) it's not like that genre's going to be invulnerable to the propensities of AI songsmiths given enough time, and b) 'pop' means 'popular', so as long as people like music, it's never going to die.
I also think you're wrong about good music being hard to come across. What's happened is that we've got a lot more music coming out now than before, and while that invariably means that you'll get exposed to a lot of crap because the volume makes that statistically more likely, there's also invariably a lot of good stuff out there too. Your exposure to it depends on the sources you use to curate; and that's far more important now than it used to be before because of that volume problem. While I don't listen to mainstream pop much, I've found plenty of artists in other genres to listen to over the past ten years plumbing the spectrum from shallow fried pop to complex and introspective and technically impressive.
heywood on 19/5/2024 at 13:16
I agree that studio produced music is already formulaic crap. We're long past the heyday of big budget studio recordings producing statement albums that become the soundtracks for a generation. Same with movies and TV. The explosion of content started before AI, and along with social media it's helping to fracture society because we have few common cultural and media experiences to relate to each other through anymore. AI may make that worse, but it isn't going to kill music.
Live music is where it's at. It's not about the tunes, it's about the performances and the events. I was just thinking about that last night when I had this on the TV while making dinner:
[video=youtube;m1K6oRlxcdw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1K6oRlxcdw[/video]
That's the kind of musical experience that a community can share. Last month, my daughter and one of her best friends performed a Taylor Swift song together on piano and guitar for an ice cream social at her elementary school. Last year, I learned how to assemble and tune a drum kit for my son to get started playing. AI could never inspire me to do that, or inspire her music teacher to teach, or inspire my friend to make his own guitars.
When I think about it, all of my best and most memorable musical experiences were live. My grandmother taking me to see the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra when I was a kid. My mother playing piano in our living room. Listening to the organ and choir at church. Moshing at a Mighty Mighty Bosstones show. Dressing like an idiot and singing drunk at Jimmy Buffett. Grateful Dead shows when Jerry was still alive. Introducing my wife to Genesis by getting front row seats for a recreation of the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by The Musical Box using the original costumes, slide show, and period instruments including a real mellotron. Sitting at a cocktail table at Ronnie Scotts listening to Gary Burton, Antonio Sanchez, and Julian Lage blow me away, and then seeing my wife get giddy while talking to the band about the Berklee scene outside the bathrooms during a break. Bluegrass nights at the Cantab Lounge. Taking my kids to see the Nutcracker with a live orchestra. No way is AI going to replace that.
This summer, we're taking them to Tanglewood. And man, I wish I had gotten tickets to see Phish at the Sphere. Holy shit!
DuatDweller on 19/5/2024 at 23:06
I am partial to Schandmaul.
Quote:
Schandmaul is a German medieval folk rock band from the Munich area.
As well as using modern instruments such as the bass and electric guitar, the band also utilizes instruments typically used in Medieval folk songs such as the bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy or shawm, to produce their trademark folk rock sound. Schandmaul was nominated two times for the Echo Music Prize and has so far had six albums in the top ten German album charts and three top-ten albums in Austria.
The name 'Schandmaul' translates roughly to 'malicious tongue' or 'backbiter' and refers to their mascot of a grinning skeletal jester.
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schandmaul)
[video=youtube;z7Xh4EA72uo] (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Xh4EA72uo)[/video]
Cipheron on 20/5/2024 at 10:36
Quote Posted by PigLick
pretty chunky, but this is why music will possibly be the last bastion of non ai things.
I think you're even giving AI too much credit. A lot of what ChatGPT appears to be good at might be largely based on cheats and prescripted responses which it then randomly fills in the blanks. So it's not purely the AI's work. Let me give an example: asking it for movie plots.
Here's an experiment, the same prompt "write an outline for an original science fiction movie" several times asking for it to write an original movie plot. I'll show just the main character it came up with for each one
(
https://chatgpt.com/share/e8d61d08-18ef-4840-9277-9a3ccfc8c60f)
"Dr. Elara Quinn, a brilliant astrophysicist and archeologist."
(they discover an ancient alien artifact that's sending out signals)
(
https://chatgpt.com/share/3689bfe2-1f38-43bc-bfa5-df78a7d1c8a7)
"Captain Mira Thorne, and her crew aboard the starship Aurora."
(they explore ancient alien ruins on a mysterious planet)
(
https://chatgpt.com/share/bffb8848-a494-490e-bd6e-9221fdf7b403)
Dr. Elena Reese, a brilliant but disillusioned archaeologist specializing in alien artifacts.
("Dr. Reese discovers a hidden chamber in an ancient alien ruin containing a mysterious artifact.")
OK ... not a lot of variety there. Let's try asking "write an outline for an original action adventure movie"
(
https://chatgpt.com/share/c5a01eee-8aeb-4599-be80-3514c5bc543e)
Dr. Emily Carter: A brilliant and adventurous archaeologist known for her expertise in ancient civilizations.
("Emily discovers an ancient map leading to the "Serpent’s Heart," a legendary artifact said to grant immense power."
(
https://chatgpt.com/share/3bcec7eb-78a6-4568-a425-832a465995c9)
"Introduction of the protagonist, Dr. Elena Martinez, an archaeologist and adventurer."
... what's the deal with all these female scientists and archeologists, who always have a name beginning with "E"?
How I believe this actually work is that they do prompt-specific training using sample texts they created. So when you marvel at how well ChatGPT is able to narrow down on what you're asking for: that's not AI, that's the programmers painstakingly detecting common requests then training it on preset responses, which it then varies the text around.
In this case they all seem to have been Indiana Jones and Contact inspired plots, but with a female scientist with an English/European name started with "E", and ChatGPT's pattern matcher decided that was the important part.
