I’m pretty amazed by the quality AI can generate.
At some point Spotify and other music outlets will get super spammed with this.
“Make your music”
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The composition is quite good for a first generation AI. But obviously AI cannot mix and master properly yet. And the text is not that great, too. But you’re right, we’ll get spammed with AI stuff all over the place, not only in terms of music. Humans will become even more moronic and the dystopia will become even worse. I’m lucky not to be that young today and that I experienced real people and real life.
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Even I am a student who is studying AI, I also got hugely frustrated to the spammy AI contents; in fact, I have made the following reply in the FL studio forum not long ago:
TLDR: I am both an AI master student and an Music artist, but I really don’t like AI art because it loses the main quality of Arts which everything looks like dark souls without souls, and I got frustrated due to the amount of spammy AI content.
Original Reply in the FL studio Forum:
I am a master student who is studying AI, and I know there are many use cases for it, but for real…I don’t really like AI Arts…
I think people have really missed the point what makes art “an art”. A good music is not just about how good, how catchy it sounds, but the story behind it. My favorite songs or pieces always have one thing in common: I can feel and think how the artist was originally thinking, how they express their ideas through their song writing skills. Whoever I am listen to, Two Steps From Hell, Sabaton, Kitaro, or fearofdark, as long as it is done by a real person, I can often see the stories, in fictional or non-fictional ways, and I have a specific scene in my mind for their specific tracks. Even if the music lack stories, even if someone are not good at making music, I can still have the connection toward the artists because I may know how they come up with the idea, or how they have learnt from their creations overtime, which is equally meaningful.
However, when I was listening AI generated music, or watching an AI generated Artwork, I found them impressive and fun, but… I felt… empty. I can’t describe how exactly the hollowness is, but I can neither feel any sense of story telling, nor any connection to the artist, as I kinda know how those models work, which they have taken millions of songs over the internet, randomly scrambling from all those data through a neural network with multiple iterations, and output the result. The batch generated art product users only emphasize the problem since they just want to make a bunch of audios and images for a fortune, without really considering any values into their products, ending up a bunch of forgettable works.
In addition, I won’t use AI for writing music because AI is not me, nor any artists; even if they can manage to make something close enough to my ideas or my stories, they are just an interpretation, which can’t fully represents my experience and my expression. Meanwhile, I am just a hobbyist on making music, using that as a medium to express my feeling, so it has no point for me to seek inspirations through the models.
So the point is, I don’t think AI is gonna change “everything”(which is the keyword) if you are an artist who just want to express yourself through music because we have something AI can’t do, which is how we see the world through our perspective and experience, putting those feeling into our artworks, which leads to music with different meanings. For the forgettable tracks, it doesn’t really matter if that is generated by AI, will eventually fade away.
(I have spent an hour of my valuable time on writing this, instead of writing my assignments which have a near deadline, as I really want to share my frustration when I saw or heard AI arts, and the reason why I don’t think that they will replace real artists.)
I agree. I am in the younger generation (the oldest side of gen z), but for real, I am also sad to see this has been becoming real. On the internet, I often see people with similar age seems to become more self-centered to a point that we (my generation) seems to forget about the connection and empathy of other people, keep on thinking about myself rather than the bigger picture. Meanwhile, I can definitely say that my generation is slowly losing the ability to reason because oftentimes I see people blindly trusting some random twitter rumors or visually stimulating clickbaits that has questionable validity, not to mention all those alienate, meaningless short form videos. As a result, there are many irrational fear, hype and ideas all over the place, and it is difficult if not impossible to have meaningful discussions.
I am not sure, and I doubted a little before posting this, as I know this might not be a wise move to share these kind of thoughts.
Well I used to be a Programmer long time ago , so I might be completely wrong in this thought . From I witnessed about all these AI songs on internet . I guess what it actually does is choosing according to prompt from a big database of melodies , arps , drums , fxs and etc… and by combining these it comes up with a song . Why do I have thos idea? Because I literally tried to enter some very famous but eastern artist in the prompt but the result had no connection to the real artist who my search based on .
So I believe basically there is no analysing music in play. Ofcourse it’s true about vocals in which they might use some predefined melodies with some vocal generators ( like the one from Antares maybe) but the rest is pretty much predefined selection from a huge database.
What do you guys think?
With a few years refinement you won’t tell whether a song is made by software or real people but will it be an original piece with new experiences or will you be able to tell it’s a Frankenstein mashup? 
I think Melodyne is much farther ahead… it can even split a chords sample into individual notes. These AI companies have probably licensed their tech…
I believe AI can make great tools, though somehow the simplicity of letting the machine do the thinking will kill creativity in this and make results very stereotype. I mean pop music already is completely one-dimensional and stereotype, so in the future probably not much is going to change about that sound other than it is no longer made by humans directly. I hope humanity will learn the better and use these tools to enhance the own creativity rather than replacing it, else these tools can be the death of true creativity, up to the point where people can only roughly describe their visions but lack the ability to make them real or to fill them up with original action, using mimicries of way old stuff generated by AI instead.
So when you let AI make complete new songs…like feeding it all the tracks from a band and then letting it make variations…or completely making songs from the scractch, just by notion of style and theme…then this is complete synthesis by AI, so the tech will replace all the creativity or production skills. With all the flaws that can be in AI, this can yield the craziest results, rather in bad than in good ways. Because the machine has no wits, it has no true creativity…it has no beautiful mind, but a squashed, insane, unhinged mind where everything is possible regardless of the quality. You can see this in facial expressions of videos of humans generated purely by AI - it lacks soul, instead you’ll see insanity.
Also it can only make variations of the stuff you feed it with. Maybe it can hallucinate, extrapolate, interconnect, but it will always fail to make something truly new, and if it does, it usually is completely unhinged and out of wits from a human perspective and thus useless for human consumption. This is nothing like a better parrot who doesn’t know what it’s babbling about, it will just imitate the patterns and reconnect them. Thus pure AI generated music has, instead of the qualities of the original artists, the qualities of a computer parrot mindlessly banging variations of their tunes and style.
People will get fed up with this and turn to traditional arts instead. But as a tool it’s still great…thinking about that lennon tape restored, or the ability to analyse and synthesize sounds like no traditional synth could do - just it will only be truly creative, when a human uses it to express some real phantasy with soul where there can be expression of new life within.
One day these better parrot technologies will only be used in labs to find new data or as child’s toys, then new deterministic and transparent AI technology might come - able to truly “understand” the whole creativity of an artist or a group of, and the whole logical implications of the aesthetics, lyrics, cultural message, … and then using it to actually make mindful and creative mimicries of what a real artist might do. People will like it, but still I believe they would rather not use it to make serious arts, because it will only be a logical/rational representation, and within it’s perfection it will still lack soul. But then the time of all this sublimally disturbing AI generated nightmare crap trying to seem like a shiny healthy plasctic world is finally over at last…autistic people will be able to watch AI computer generated videos again without having to puke. Well, I guess I’ll just get used to it before it’s over. Like with these 3d games, quake also messed me up in the beginning and got me all nauseous, but after a while you get used to it, and then you won’t notice the illusion anymore so it could work when you desire it.
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Sharing thoughts is always better than remaining silent and to live with whatever crap may come.
Your generation is primarily social media addicted, that’s why the world is coming down soon.
It’s try and error just like prompts for graphical stuff. You never know what result to expect. And even if you’re using the exact same prompt twice, the results will differ. At the moment it seems to be always a coincident mashup based on the feeds of the AI.
If AI is used as a “helper”, then it could make sense. But if AI is used as a creator, it gets problematic. That’s how I would describe the whole case.
Would actually listen to these in the radio… I wonder if this is somehow faked, sometimes it sounds like you still haering the reverb of voices at instrumental parts.
the hypotheticals on paper about “artfully moral” use of AI is endless, but the reality is, if there are tools to exploit to take shortcuts to get clout/fame/paid, people will take them, especially in todays culture. you can expect a shit show for sure. i dont care too much about synthfluencers, or “type beats” or any of this other consumption motivated fuckery that goes around these days. i look forward to AI music establishing a well defined boundary between musicians doing art and those making products for consumption. there may come a time where AI can produce some great music with just a few prompts - but it will inevitably lead to the internal question of “why do i listen to this?”
lets say you’re someone with little musical taste or knowledge. you like the “lo fi beats” playlist on spotify. you go find some tutorials on youtube, how to make “lo fi beats”, you mimic it, now you’re making lo fi beats. you get ambitious and do some research on “hacking” the algo to get plays and pay for some spotify playlist positions. you do some viral stuff on instagram and now you’re the “lo fi beats” king/queen. the most followers, the most views, millions of listens on your playlist placement etc.
AI enters the chat.
this is going to be the end of the world for those people i described above. i myself still find tons of original music thats not based on replicated/perfected aesthetic and its what i listen to. i dont know what the “type beat” producers are making or what the hottest trends are. im open to new music but im not going to waste my time listening to random shit that hits the aesthetic. but for those algo/view hustlers, AI is going to thin the herd enough to put it into another category of music (my theory, lol). there will be people that will want to hear the ultimate drop from a combination of the best producers and best techniques etc, and AI will provide them with some mind bending material once the tech gets to that point. then there will be people who like listening to their taste in music and what they think is good for whatever reason.
i dont think anyone who has a developed taste in artist/music is going to experience any impact from an AI revolution unless you’re already joyfully listening to the regurgitated shit that gets views that exists now. one does not simply say “i love nine inch nails” but they’d rather hear the AI version. whatever threat/market there is for AI is not going to make that much of an impact for the people that are legitimately into music imho. the real painful side of the future of AI music is going to be for the ones who play the algo systems and focus more on viralness/influence. they’re gonna get cooked. the rest of the musicians are under no obligation to “adapt” to all this stuff unless their goal is to fit in with the demographic i stated above.
you can get an AI version of tupac rapping with jimi hendrix while they both patch modular and maybe its even 100% on point and sounds amazing, but its never going to be tupac rapping with jimi hendrix while they both patch modular. its kind of a simple point but complicated to explain. whatever AI music brings to the table is going to be used to push consumption. its not going to change the views of a listener who truly appreciates music beyond a well done novelty here and there.
Well, there are different technologies possible using AI technology at different levels. The engineering has gone pretty far with deep learning technology, so deep learning is what current “AI” technology is assumed to be, not like the almost mechanical song composition you’d think of from the past. The deep learning technology relies on having databases of annotated example input and examples of expected outputs of some kinds of “magic black box” neural networks, that are then trained in deep learning processes by various stochastic algorithms that build up the “intelligence” kind of by sophisticated trial and error methods until the results match the expected quality.
This process is kind of quirky and error prone and needs lots of experimentations and is a huge waste of electric energy, because the deep learning training must be done with so much calculation power due to the stochastic (trial and error) methods for optimizing the networks. Then the resulting network would be rather compacted and performant, and is a black box where you can hardly see what is inside and what it would be doing…and the quality of the results greatly depends on how well it was designed and trained, and it is a process that can probably never be 100% perfected, only approached with increasing effort. Think of the early image generation results, with the distorted and twisted faces etc., and then after some years of research people were finally able to make generators giving convincing results, though such mighty AI usually requires a huge amount of effort, testing and revalidation work to make it real and work well enough and not give weird results. You can even deliberately mess up the training or parameters/design of the network to make an AI produce such frightening results, horror movies of the future will be something you need to be psychologically tested before to make sure you’re able to tolerate what you’d see. Somehow, in the training the network gets kind of an imprint of more or less logical abstraction of the data input/output set it was trained with, and can then also create similar results. However it does not truly understand the things it was trained with, it just abstracts them somehow, and is then able to mimick similar things in more or less convincing quality depending on the design and power used to generate the network.
So an AI song generator could work in various ways, depending on what the network would produce. You can very well train it with whole songs and just let the network generate similar audio…then you have all the quality glitches etc. that can happen with a nonoptimal network. Or you can train networks to accomplish more isolated tasks, i.e. generating the lyrics and the singing track, generating the midi notes and instrument choice of all other tracks, then optimizing mixing, mastering, the AI could kind of generate the data for a DAW to produce a song that would no longer suffer from these glitches, or is a mix of AI and human interaction. Like you can train an AI to mimick whole songs, you can also train it to generate the best mixing and mastering settings for a given set of audio tracks, or whatever task you have. You just need enough good annotated example data, and knowledgeable manpower and processing power to create such a tool. Depending on how well it was made, it can then mix and master any tracks well that are similar to the input data, but for radically new styles you would probably have to adapt it and retrain it with new data.
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Exactly, this is why freedom of speech exists, but at the same time, I feel worried because my gen seems to have a tendency of discouraging it.
I know sharing thoughts in a good faith is always a better idea, but these days, some people these days can go quite extreme if you have different opinions. You don’t like a vst and share a post in Reddit? You got downvoted to hell, passive aggressively. You don’t support all of their opinions, even misinformation? They used any form of labels to dehumanise you and threat you to death, using their “Autobot vs Decepticon” kind of thinking, using their “knowledge” learnt from TikTok to “educate” you. Some kids feel lost and think them as a wolf or a doll rather than a human due to feeling detached from their peers? You can’t help to bring those lost kids back to the humanity because we “must” respect their decision, claimed by a short form video.
At the same time, Generative AI (wanna make this a bit relevant to the thread) seems to be a catalyst to worsen things because it is so easy to create fake information and fool all these people because they are not critically enough to question the validity, but the otherwise to reinforce their belief. I can foresee in the future, these people will use “because ChatGPT say so” into an argument rather than critically analyse a topic, while their thoughts are feed into the model, further firming the mis/disinformation.
Even though I am a technical person who know a bit about software engineering, I don’t really like some of the social media, especially the most popular one. I wish I can to do something for letting them quit the addiction, but I don’t think I can because it is all about self control, sadly.
Funny enough, Renoise forum, SunVox and tracker discord are the platforms which I feel comfortable to open up a bit for sharing my two cents; perhaps there aren’t many kids who love dramas and throwing tantrums since they have no interest what a music tracker is, so the average users are more mature.
Alright, let me go back to the topic.
but the rest is pretty much predefined selection from a huge database.
You are not wrong; in fact, this is how LLM works, pouring a huge amount of data into a model of neural network through multiple iterations, then output the “scrambled” result based on your description that sounds convincing.
There is no creativity or imagination during the generation, but a bunch of complex matrix calculation and threshold detection. (If I am not mistaken, as I have just studied this for a month)
These are indeed some good uses for AI (but technically, they are more about data science than AI itself), like how the last song of Beetle being restored, or how synthplant analyses the sound so that people can also learn from it. These help to rebuild something lost in the past, and drive people to learn more about their field, which I want to see in AI and they are some of the reason why I want to learn it.
However, the majority seems to prefer skipping the progress and getting the result instead, by batch generating some final products, and I could definitely tell that the majority will not fed up with those because they are basically instant rewards without any efforts, just like TikTok or junk food which are known as unhealthy, but they are still using / eating that anyways because of the short term excitement.
These are exactly why I won’t use any AI for my art even after I have learnt it. If we don’t give any meaning to the painting or music, it is really hard to call the product as art because of the lack of stories true off our chest, where is the “soul” came form. Similarly, no one really call a factory mass produced products arts, but decorations.
this is really my point, its really the difference between art and product. i heavily respect your position @Logickin. now dont get me wrong - we see how things work even today with influencers, copied aesthetics etc, i’m certain there will be a whole new era of shitstorm to follow once AI really gets tuned to this, but it just seems so opposite of a path to take for an actual creator working from the soul. for me, at the end of the day, even the most amazing AI work will be a novelty, and some of the most mediocre work from someones soul will connect with me in a way that is personal. on one hand you could make a faulty argument “people thought synthesizers were going to end studio musicians careers” but that didnt quite happen. with the AI thing, i think what really gets to a lot of people, myself included, is just how predatory and detached music has become with all of the influence and culture of “me me me”. the idea that AI would make it easier just spells out doom.
but lets be serious. if AI is capable of doing that, the big dogs with the $$ will be exploiting that so they wont have to rely on individual ideas/merit. if we wanna look at the cup half full, AI could actually cause the bigger players in the game to market solely to sheep/viral stuff and leave a whole world for us making art. if we wanna think of the cup half empty, well, you’re gonna have to do some soul searching on what it is you’re really doing. if the music/art you’re doing is something you NEED to do for yourself, or something you would do regardless, thats not going to change. if you have other ambitions beyond that, then its always going to be a matter of keeping up with the trends/aesthetics to stay relevant. the change/threat of AI really boils down to wether your art is being made for consumption or expression. the rest will sort itself out imho. the benefits of AI in the right hands will provide a lot of opportunity for true creatives and they may or may not use it as a tool. AI in the wrong hands is just going to saturate the existing turds with polished turds and appeal to the same audiences.
as far as learning it - AI is definitely part of our future. i have no hate towards the technology/ideas itself. i’ve just become a bit “anti” towards the current culture and trends, as well as the desire to replicate vs come up with original ideas. i think your way of describing it as “decorations” vs art is spot on.
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Thankfully this won’t be the death of original music anytime soon, the crowd who actually enjoys making original music will shrink again and maybe become somewhat of an underground novelty.
We’ve already seen that fancy UIs and VSTs just make people that much lazier when it comes to technology, and definitely music (especially when you have a plugin for theory, one for mixing, one for making better drum patterns, etc), so I kind of embrace the mainstream’s idea of continuing to water themselves down. If they genuinely never get sick of it by the time shit like this is just flooding the radio, there’s just no hope for a particular type of person anyway. I mean, someone like that is still listening to the radio 
Does that make AI music ‘good’ or competitive with the human pop algorithm slop which already exists? That’s just a matter of perspective. If you like it, then AI is going to kick ass. If you’ve been sick of it for a long time, this is just more bullshit trickling down the pipe. It’s not change, it’s more of the same.
It’s kind of funny that art used to (at least sometimes) be about rebellion, innovation, saying “fuck you” to people who you know are never going to listen to your music anyway because it’s not the elevator variety that they enjoy. A whole generation of kids who want to make the most easy-listening music is going to feel so batshit crazy to my brain that I’m going to have to readjust – until I remember that soundcloud rap still exists
At this point I’m dead curious to know how exactly this AI thing comes up with a song in just 40 seconds?
I mean is it making it from ground up ? Making instrument lines according to genre or what? Does it involve a sort of music theory ? Like for example it chooses a chord progression then laying a bass pattern , and go on from there… adding effects and finally some vocals which I have to admit it does a briliant job on that …
And still mixing and mastering being even automatically done…
Where does this song structure come from?
I already saw complex songs being made by it.
Thinking like a musician?
Or as I said earlier it just tries to wrap up some already made audio files.
And all this in 40 seconds! Wow!
It depends on the technoligy. But complete deep learning AI solutions are really just a black box, a big crunched up numbers matrix that just needs to be calculated through for a while (40 seconds…) to produce the result. Well…it will directly write to the output sample buffer I guess. That’s what a black box ist - you push some buttons, configure the input, let it run and crunch numbers, and it will just fill a sample buffer with a ready made song. Not all AI solutions work like this, like I’ve written you can also use it to control or mimick traditional tools, but the complete AI solutions are just an artificial brain able to generate text/image/sound/video/whatever directly. Things hallucinate and consecutively build up to the final result on randomly generated variations or feedback of the networks. So this is why some older/less sophisticated AIs have glitchy results, i.e. also glitchy audio, because the networks are not powerful enough. The big players all have very refined networks, and then the results can sound (almost) like real material.
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Well another thing worth mentioning is there are advanced DAWs like Ableton , Reason , Logic and even Renoise which they’ve been actively developed by proffesional programmers since decades ago and still not have the tools to help us build songs easier like the AI thing.
And suddenly out of nowhere since like a year ago everyone is able to do anything they imagine at once . Is’nt it odd?
Sounds like some Alien invasion has occured:)
Can AI make a song? Yes.
It can generate the text, the melody, create the visual for the jacket, and a video clip.
So basically, yes it can.
Now is it good? I don’t know.
Can AI fill a stadium with thousands of people? Not yet.
Can AI invent a far new music style? Not yet.