Having listened to the song linked in the OP I was blown away, but then:
> I ought to note that a human being is involved in all this: the French composer Benoit Carré, who took the raw data generated by the CSL and matched it to audio from existing recordings [..] Benoit then arranged, produced, and mixed the tracks that resulted from this collaboration. Carré has also written the words.
I feel like there's a big difference between "AI creating music" and "AI as an assisstive tool for creating music".
But in the early 90's I sat in on a seminar by a music prof at my university, he was working on AI generated music. His vision was that it would be an assistive device; basically labor saving for composers.
At the time his students were doing automated compositions and I was blown away by the quality at the time. Definitely his students were already at the stage of partially composed music - basically just a songwriter who needed a good arranger / producer.
Given some of the work I've read on RNN's, I think this is really close to being fully automated. 5 years, maybe, and stuff like this will be fully automated.
sounds like the ol' stone soup trick, where its all the extra ingredients which make the magic work, not the AI. I'd reckon a talented producer could make a good song out of pseudo-random notes. Unless the original untouched AI track is released, I have to be skeptical
Some years ago I was backstage at a major rock event the day before the performance. One of the management types was explaining to me that they had two sets of everything, and three crews. One crew was at the current venue, one was at the previous venue, tearing things down, and one was at the next venue, setting up. I asked "so why not have two sets of performers and double your revenue? 'Cats' has two road companies. Barnum and Bailey circuses have two road companies. There are bands that replaced all their members over time and kept the name. It's all about the branding." A more senior manager, overhearing this, looked very thoughtful.
It's been done in Japan. AKB48 has three teams. They're organized like a sports league, with farm teams and regular turnover.
I'm not all that familiar with them, but isn't Gorillaz an entirely fake band? I mean, they don't have real human members, it's all virtual musicians.
In a sense, all the boy bands are basically the same thing. One runs its course, another springs up with the exact same formula. It'd be much more efficient without having to deal with human performers.
I think this franchise music thing is going to happen.
Given the relatively short, finite length of the average pop song; given the well known, restricted inputs; given that there is a general formula for successful pop songs; not only can AI write pop songs, it can (and will) write every possible pop song. At this point it's merely a question of a short amount of time, sub ten years perhaps, twenty tops.
The creation part will ultimately end up being the trivial aspect. Figuring out which of the billion songs AI create are any good will be the more difficult, time consuming filtering / discovery aspect (that will process partially at human-speed).
AI will create vast amounts of content/goods in the relatively near future (of all types, from VR worlds to pop songs to physical things automatically made by printing). A large industry will spring up around filtering that, deciding what's good, to then serve it up to people for popular mass consumption.
When I look for new music in a particular style (let's say trap), I can discard 90% of new songs with just 2 sec snippets. Very few songs get 30 sec of listening, and even fewer a full listen. I would say I'm pretty good at it (the ones I like tend to become hits).
If I can filter 90% in 2 sec, you can probably machine learn it. Of course, if after you filter out the easy stuff, you still have heaps of songs, there will be a problem.
But I think the solution will still be some form of machine learning. So we'll have a long automated pipeline filtering out stuff, and only surface for human rating a minuscule amount. Gems will be thrown away, but it won't matter.
Me, I wait for the day when algorithms will invent a new genre (house/trance/drum&bass/dubstep/trap/???).
And one thing that keeps coming to my mind. Can "good music" be absolutely rated? Will eventually advanced computers consider our music good? Will they "like" completely different music, which sounds like garbage to us? Or to put another way, how much of music depends on general intelligence, and how much on the specific realization of said intelligence (brain/culture)
I hope you are being sarcastic :) Even though pop songs aren't that imaginative, exponential growth means causes problems. We can't count all ways of ordering 52 cards using all the computers in the world in the history of the universe, and I bet one could come up with an algorithm for creating pop songs, one per ordering of a deck of cards.
Really? Yes there are some intervals that we have discovered/learned in our audio spectrum, but the fact that you can so confidently discredit something highlights your ignorance. Unfortunately, life ain't no engineering problemo
I recently worked on a project that attempted to find harmonizing chord progressions for pop songs, given a melody. Since pop music has such predictable structure, I think AI generation is well within possibility.
Just take a few pop songs written by professionals then do some descent with modification - and dump them all onto youtube. Cull the losers - rinse and repeat.
Has anyone fed the Real Book into a Markov Model (or I guess RNN these days) and seen what gets spit out?
All the music examples I've seen have been people feeding tracks because...people tend to have lots of MP3s lying around. I'm curious as to what you get when you work directly with the notation which conveys a lot more structure than a waveform.
Pop evolutes. With machine learning we can create, say, every single combination of reggaeton, but every decade new styles appear. AI leveraging real creation requires AGI.
A lot of pop songs go through the hands of several different producers, each of whom might work on a specific element for a desired effect. In many cases these producers are selected for specific sounds deemed to be chartworthy. I would be very surprised if some of them are NOT using AI trained on extensive databases with the latest most popular and most lucrative music.
[+] [-] cthor|8 years ago|reply
> I ought to note that a human being is involved in all this: the French composer Benoit Carré, who took the raw data generated by the CSL and matched it to audio from existing recordings [..] Benoit then arranged, produced, and mixed the tracks that resulted from this collaboration. Carré has also written the words.
I feel like there's a big difference between "AI creating music" and "AI as an assisstive tool for creating music".
[+] [-] yesiamyourdad|8 years ago|reply
At the time his students were doing automated compositions and I was blown away by the quality at the time. Definitely his students were already at the stage of partially composed music - basically just a songwriter who needed a good arranger / producer.
Given some of the work I've read on RNN's, I think this is really close to being fully automated. 5 years, maybe, and stuff like this will be fully automated.
[+] [-] gabrielgoh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
Some years ago I was backstage at a major rock event the day before the performance. One of the management types was explaining to me that they had two sets of everything, and three crews. One crew was at the current venue, one was at the previous venue, tearing things down, and one was at the next venue, setting up. I asked "so why not have two sets of performers and double your revenue? 'Cats' has two road companies. Barnum and Bailey circuses have two road companies. There are bands that replaced all their members over time and kept the name. It's all about the branding." A more senior manager, overhearing this, looked very thoughtful.
It's been done in Japan. AKB48 has three teams. They're organized like a sports league, with farm teams and regular turnover.
[+] [-] yesiamyourdad|8 years ago|reply
In a sense, all the boy bands are basically the same thing. One runs its course, another springs up with the exact same formula. It'd be much more efficient without having to deal with human performers.
I think this franchise music thing is going to happen.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
Had; Barnum and Bailey folded in May.
[+] [-] adventured|8 years ago|reply
The creation part will ultimately end up being the trivial aspect. Figuring out which of the billion songs AI create are any good will be the more difficult, time consuming filtering / discovery aspect (that will process partially at human-speed).
AI will create vast amounts of content/goods in the relatively near future (of all types, from VR worlds to pop songs to physical things automatically made by printing). A large industry will spring up around filtering that, deciding what's good, to then serve it up to people for popular mass consumption.
[+] [-] lucidguppy|8 years ago|reply
Imagine a world where the Police never broke up?
[+] [-] 21|8 years ago|reply
If I can filter 90% in 2 sec, you can probably machine learn it. Of course, if after you filter out the easy stuff, you still have heaps of songs, there will be a problem.
But I think the solution will still be some form of machine learning. So we'll have a long automated pipeline filtering out stuff, and only surface for human rating a minuscule amount. Gems will be thrown away, but it won't matter.
Me, I wait for the day when algorithms will invent a new genre (house/trance/drum&bass/dubstep/trap/???).
And one thing that keeps coming to my mind. Can "good music" be absolutely rated? Will eventually advanced computers consider our music good? Will they "like" completely different music, which sounds like garbage to us? Or to put another way, how much of music depends on general intelligence, and how much on the specific realization of said intelligence (brain/culture)
[+] [-] CJefferson|8 years ago|reply
I hope you are being sarcastic :) Even though pop songs aren't that imaginative, exponential growth means causes problems. We can't count all ways of ordering 52 cards using all the computers in the world in the history of the universe, and I bet one could come up with an algorithm for creating pop songs, one per ordering of a deck of cards.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
That apparatus already exists and is quite functional. Are you fully in charge of choosing what music you discover and end up liking? Are you sure?
[+] [-] jeeez|8 years ago|reply
Really? Yes there are some intervals that we have discovered/learned in our audio spectrum, but the fact that you can so confidently discredit something highlights your ignorance. Unfortunately, life ain't no engineering problemo
[+] [-] cthor|8 years ago|reply
What would you say that is?
Your answer has to be detailed enough that a computer can understand it.
There's a lot of patterns to pop songs but there's patterns in all music. I haven't seen any function that inputs x and outputs a pop hit.
[+] [-] luckyt|8 years ago|reply
https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/ai-project-harm...
[+] [-] lucidguppy|8 years ago|reply
Just take a few pop songs written by professionals then do some descent with modification - and dump them all onto youtube. Cull the losers - rinse and repeat.
[+] [-] dqv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] richdougherty|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] amelius|8 years ago|reply
[1] http://songsmith.ms/
[+] [-] tnecniv|8 years ago|reply
All the music examples I've seen have been people feeding tracks because...people tend to have lots of MP3s lying around. I'm curious as to what you get when you work directly with the notation which conveys a lot more structure than a waveform.
[+] [-] uyoakaoma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jchw|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skdotdan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeeez|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangayle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user5994461|8 years ago|reply
Doesn't matter. There is no value in the songs, they are easy to write and many are written in a day with the premise of becoming the next pop song.
Pop is about distribution and marketing. Control it and your songs will be the next thing played everywhere.
[+] [-] dwringer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuiA|8 years ago|reply
Seems like this is the broader insight to the whole "can AI make art/music/whatever" debate that many are missing.
[+] [-] lwansbrough|8 years ago|reply
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