AI and the music business

[Ninshub]

Listened to this fun (or alarming according to your perspective) video by Rick Beato.

Prediction: it's going to be a huge mess!  

[Ninshub]

This one's already pretty good - scary to think what will be achieved in a few years.


This is the original 1980 John Lennon demo, released posthumously:




This is an AI cover with a reworked John voice, added Beatles voices (notably Paul solo at one point), and added orchestration:

[Ninshub]

That person doing the Dae Lims channel is talented.


Here's Paul McCartney's original 2018 "I Don't Know", a beautiful ballad with Paul's very noticeably aged and somewhat crippled voice (age 75 thereabouts at the time of recording).




Here's the ballad with a McCartney sounding in his late 30s instead. Pretty amazing, especially once they'll be able to get rid of some of the synthesized artifacts and some of the monotony in the repeated samples or whatever they are.




Vocals come in at 0:46.

I think it will be an easier going for AI in the pop-music industry because you have large teams working on lyrics, sound, etc.

That said, there is art that just won't be as easy to duplicate that is meaningful because it is personal. For example the Korean rapper Cheetah has a song called Coma that is about her actually being unconscious after an accident, and the lyrics use clever near sounding words (in Korean) like (if memory serves) grave and 4 (which suggests she was dead but also her spirit was in another dimension beyond our 3-D world).

Or another example Metallica came up with Creeping Death partly because Lars really loved the movie Ten Commandments.

I think people connect with music partly because of the story and personal connection. AI may even push people to turn toward their local bands that play live to maintain that connection.

[Ninshub]

Yes, apart from the chaos that will ensue with labels, etc., I would imagine at some point all this over-infatuation with technology will eventually lead to a backlash and a desire to have a more connected or authentic experience. Maybe people will actually learn to play instruments again!

Yes, apart from the chaos that will ensue with labels, etc., I would imagine at some point all this over-infatuation with technology will eventually lead to a backlash and a desire to have a more connected or authentic experience. Maybe people will actually learn to play instruments again!

It's like AI art - ultimately the creations are quite uninspired, exactly what I would expect from people relying on the hard work of others, which is all machine "learning" generated art/music is.

[Ninshub]

They have no soul is what you're saying.

They have no soul is what you're saying.

I miss that old time rock and rolll human made music! 

But yeah was just reading a good article on this ->

AI Art Is Boring

That promise to “create your own original music in seconds” was the portkey back to Kierkegaard. “In the case of children, the ruinous character of boredom is universally acknowledged,” he writes, and, indeed, I maintain that boredom is the inevitable outcome of AI toys promising to make music, visual art, poetry, etc. We have all experienced as children and witnessed as adults that transition between playing with a new toy and rapid disenchantment because the toy fails to engage the imagination. I am not the only Gen-X parent, for instance, to notice that when LEGO began selling kits to build branded objects like Star Wars spaceships, my own children would usually complete the assembly once and then be done with the toy forever. By contrast, my contemporaries and I spent hours with sets composed of bricks and no predetermined design.

Kierkegaard proposes that the plebian bores others and amuses himself while the aristocrat amuses others and bores himself—a dialectic perhaps well suited to describe the inevitable use of AI machines to “make one’s own music or art.” At the current state of the technology, the input of the human user is barely creative—little more than dropping a coin in a jukebox—and thus, all users similarly situated are plebian bores for the time being. The works resulting from their prompts may amuse them (for a while), but they will mostly bore others who will only be interested in “making their own music” with the same toys. Before long, a million individual users of the music generating AI will achieve a collective homeostatic boredom—a two-dimensional Babel leading nowhere.

I don't see the current AI which has been made available, as a threat to human music generally, but it might become a threat to simplistic music... extrapolating tinkley piano music (Max Richter etc), copying interesting rap voices (Jay-z etc), clashy bangy or minimalist contemporary classical (Steve Reich etc). But the music industry has a so many other really massive problems, that AI is just one other problem.

I'm particularly interested in the classical music industry at present, as I've been helping a friend towards the release of his classical compositions since 2019 (hoping to release his first classical composition within the next few weeks actually).

This is the sort of classical stuff which is coming out of top educational institutions... I don't think AI could do any worse... I personally find it very unsatisfying to listen to... and I can't listen to it for long anyway. But one wonders if AI will cause it problems, because I'm pretty sure it can do it..

https://youtu.be/3xmpywK0ACA?t=1023

Here's a Steve Reich piece. It was recently suggested in the NYT (I think?) that Reich is perhaps the USA's greatest living classical composer. It's perhaps interesting for the first 30 seconds, then it just begins to drag...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXJWO2FQ16c

These are pieces I think AI could probably produce relatively easily.

[Laird]

This is the sort of classical stuff which is coming out of top educational institutions... I don't think AI could do any worse... I personally find it very unsatisfying to listen to... and I can't listen to it for long anyway. But one wonders if AI will cause it problems, because I'm pretty sure it can do it..

https://youtu.be/3xmpywK0ACA?t=1023

I don't think that that piece even meets my personal criteria for "music", although it is a metered sequence of sounds played on musical instruments.

Here's a Steve Reich piece. It was recently suggested in the NYT (I think?) that Reich is perhaps the USA's greatest living classical composer. It's perhaps interesting for the first 30 seconds, then it just begins to drag...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXJWO2FQ16c

I'm not sure that I even consider that to be classical music. Maybe "unclassically classical"? It's too hypnotically percussive to be "classically classical". Given the music's percussive tendencies, it's unsurprising that its video is hosted on the channel of a manufacturer of drum sticks. Given my own percussive tendencies, it's probably not surprising that I really, really like this piece. Great find, Max, albeit that you weren't exactly promoting or even recommending it!