I mentioned this in another comment thread, recently, but I value art, including music, for the fact that another human being(s) created it to express something. I have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated. The thought of endless content created from the void for me to gorge on like oreos fills me with nothing but despair.
I think AI will raise the bar for all kinds of artistic mediums. There’s already more music, literature, film etc than you can possibly consume - if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top. Perhaps they’ll use AI but it’ll still be the same amount of work put into and the quality will be better. I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.
> I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.
Hopefully not, but there will be a lot of people trying, which is the problem. That alone will drown out a lot of human made music and muddy the waters.
>if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top
No it'll be buried under slop. This was a huge issue before AI-generated art and I can only see it getting worse.
Exactly. Mass-market music is not good. It takes effort to find the good stuff, especially if you want to find new good stuff. The last 20 years has seen a shift toward the most bland, formulaic, autotuned music. All the weird, quirky, interesting qualities have been ironed out. AI does not make mistakes, and more importantly, does not make any demands of its owners, unlike an actual rock star.
Fortunately there are still many talented (but struggling) musicians out there. I worry that the flood of passable AI generated content will finally finish them off.
if/when music gen gets to the point of being able to convincingly emulate given source material, it would be genuinely amazing. I don't really care whether it's manmade or not if it's the only way to get more of the thing I like. nihao ChinaGPT, listen to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and generate 100 more songs like that. if it's >= 90% as good as the source, I'll consoom it.
With AI it’s very easy to create generic, common Pop or any other formulaic garbage music. It might be a good thing for the music industry, most of the low effort might just vanish in the sea of AI gen. This may actially raise the bar for music in general while at the same lowering the bar to simply prompting which is just a stage that will go away.
Survivorship bias. You can't tell at some point. You probably already are listening to AI songs, and looking at AI images. You can only tell what you know. Given the amount generated daily its more probable than improbable.
Do you not put thought into what you listen to? I don't just passively have music forced down my throat like I'm a duck being fattened for foie gras, I actively choose what I listen to and I know the artists involve don't use AI.
A lot of music is not art. It's a content factory that uses humans.
Content factories that use AI will hopefully force humans to up their game.
Personally I feel humans are capable of so much more than pop music has become over the last 50 to 60 years.
A lot of today's music is so overproduced and formulaic.
I would love to see an arms race between humans and AI where humans are forced to continually adapt and get better.
The only thing about AI generated music that makes me sad is, I worry musical tastes will fragment even more and none of us will recognize the music our neighbors, classmates, or colleagues are listening to because we actively tailor our music to our personal tastes.
I use Suno and I've already noticed this.
A friend sends me a song they generated and I want to tweak it a bit to my personal preference. When we all can create music to our personal taste, we lose a little bit of the joy of all listening to the same song or album release.
This is not a pro ai comment, I hope some bios bug bricks all the nvidia rtx gpus in the planet.
With that said... ai generated music, the same can be said about software... but compilers are basically ai, there is no way a for loop on extremely high level abstraction that then open connections to some service, generates jtokens, validates, and apply math non stop from a couple of lines is anything but alien to the 99% of us (yes I know you can write assembly for all your programs and you are better than the compiler)
What if you say, if humans where not involved and a phisically non electric instrument where involved and done with only humans, it's AI assited? because again you don't understand ALL the relationships, how it's designed every single thing, all the things in a music studio to master a song, ALL the related mechanisms used in the promotion, distribution and live execution of those songs... and yes, again there is some of you who can build all those things from sand and pumped from the ground with a tool you designed bare petroleum and program, design and execute EVERY SINGLE THING required to get a record of music you like...
So if a group of 20 people spends 20 weeks working with AI tools to get you a song, then you don't care I guess right?
Did you know that Enya for this song recorded thousand something times voices to make a chorus until it had a particular form... does that mixing of thousands of executions and the tools to analyze and give it the form wanted qualify as AI?
If you move sliders and push buttons and you don't understand the math behind it, are you vibe mixing a song?
Yes, if it is a "give me a catchy song with lyrics that talk about big butts" and then publish... yes this is crap.
It's really depressing that I have gotten into music composition right when this is happening.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
> but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued
I think it will take many more years until an AI is able to compose like e.g. John Williams and play a score and sound like e.g. the London Symphony Orchestra. So there is room left for human contribution. On the other hand, the majority of humans even before AI was not able to value good vs. bad musical composition and performance, and instead satisfied with the commercial slop the market was flooded over the last thirty years. Studies of e.g. Spotify consumer behaviour demonstrated for many years before AI that more and more people consume anonymous playlists never caring who composed or played the music, just using music for its functional purpose like a commodity. It's depressing, but that's how society develops.
> a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement
That development already started long ago. In the eighties and nineties, music schools florished and children wanted to learn instruments and play in bands or orchestras. That completely changed over the last thirty years. Musical instruments will be a curiosity in a decade or two people are going to watch in a museum, wondering why anyone would have learned these skills in the past.
I'm also saddened by the impact of tech on creative industries. But art always was something you do for yourself and to share with others, for some fundamentally human experience. Could an AI pray for you or ride your bike? I don't know anyone in my personal life who wants to listen to AI music, view AI art, or read AI books. I wish art careers were easier, but I don't think a career alone is the right reason to make art.
Prayer for external effects has long been mechanized [1]. But praying for your inner effect is a different thing. Similarly, production of songs for external consumption is being mechanized. But what you feel when you sing cannot be mechanized. Sing for yourself, play for yourself and for those immediately around you in the moment. It's as valuable as ever.
Much like the restaurant industry, creative industries will probably bifurcate. Cheap (AI, drivethrough, takeout) for daily and most use cases, experiential (vinyl records, concerts, upscale restaurants) for special occasions, connoisseurs.
Yeah and for those of us who can't afford the "upscale" experiences, this sucks: our pleasantly diverse and human-crafted middle class lives replaced by the machine.
Who cares? The world is being handed an infinite creation machine that conjures entire worlds into existence, radically reshaping the future of the species and what our descendants will be able to do, and your reply is ~"they took our jobs!"
Figure out how to stand on the shoulders of giants like any of your predecessors of note.
> The world is being handed an infinite creation machine that conjures entire worlds into existence, radically reshaping the future of the species and what our descendants will be able to do, and your reply is ~"they took our jobs!"
I didn't even mention anything about economic impacts, jobs, money. It's truer to say my reply is "they destroyed what it is to be human".
You are free to perform create expression, I love writing blogs, my friends like reading and talking about the blogs with me, I dont care if Claude or GPT can write much better blogs. In the same way if it was just about creative expression, there would actually be 0 problems with AI-generated music, you would keep on making and listening to music you like, and you wouldn't care, but usually its not it, its people who want to make money, get famous, tie their value to the product that complain about this.
> you would keep on making and listening to music you like, and you wouldn't care
It becomes harder to find and therefore listen to music you like when every avenue of discovering music is drowned out with 1000 AI-generated songs for every 1 human-made song.
> people who want to make money,
Is it such a bad thing to want to be able to pursue your creativity full-time? For creative fields that require thousands of hours of practice to achieve results other people will enjoy, should we reserve such skilled expression only to those born wealthy enough to not need to work?
> It becomes harder to find and therefore listen to music you like when every avenue of discovering music is drowned out with 1000 AI-generated songs for every 1 human-made song.
Creative expression and consumption of media are different questions. You are right about that, but that's a separate issue.
> Is it such a bad thing to want to be able to pursue your creativity full-time? For creative fields that require thousands of hours of practice to achieve results other people will enjoy, should we reserve such skilled expression only to those born wealthy enough to not need to work?
Welcome to capitalism, enjoy your stay. And if you dont like it, you can always wait for the coming times when informational work is completely automated, which means that traditional social mobility completely disappears, and capital is locked/frozen forever and we will have serfdom instead. So I would recommend you enjoy the present.
Makes no sense - why would anyone use humans as serfs when AI is there. I think everyone will have AI and probably robotic automations, they will all be cheap and accessible.
We are still human and have human biases and desires, many humans can be good use to for example let rich people express power, experience sexual pleasures, and other emotions that are pre-wired in us. An AI cant be a good proxy for emotions, you cant whip a machine and know that it feels pain because of you. You cant pin a machine down and know that it can do nothing and has to feel powerless in your hands. You cant slice a machine open and know that it cannot do anything to you. All of this has already happened in the richest circles, you can imagine what happens when everyone has access to cheap robotic automatons, you think the richest people have been content with having what everyone has? Historically?
It is devaluing it. Just like you can still paint, and you can still play a musical instrument, but these aren't skills the average person cares about very much anymore. But instead of a couple of skills like that being slowly displaced over decades or centuries, we're seeing dozens and dozens of occupations being rendered completely almost worthless within just a couple of years.
Have you observed the sheer monotony of this avalanche of AI-generated "creative" expression at all?
You have people pumping out an entire album in a few days simply because they can, repeatedly, and then they flood streaming services with their garbage. I forget which network it was but as of a few months ago, AI-generated submissions were at least half of all submissions.
Yeah, and yet for a lot of people apparently this "garbage" is...good enough...so the human-crafted stuff can hardly compete.
I recently heard an anecdote about a family that finally found a podcast that they all enjoyed listening to on road trips...and only realised when they tried to find out more about the hosts that the whole thing was AI generated. Bam, another field of creative expression (and income!) destroyed.
It's being handed an infinite slop machine, drowning out genuinely good content and making it harder than ever to discover. As it becomes harder to discover, fewer talented creatives are able to make a living. We are destroying our own culture with a machine that enforces regression to the mean on creativity.
Check it out: As millions of people have recognized, we have a new discoverability problem! How about, out of the 9 billion people on Earth, we figure out how to get a few dozen of them motivated to work on that instead of sitting and moping for the rest of our lives about the end of human creativity?
This seems to be one of the few open-weight models that isn't just another "text to audio" generator. You can take existing sheet music, convert it to ABC notation, and then experiment with various covers.
I don't have a ton of time right now to really mess around with it, but I took 15 minutes to run it on my Mac M1 with an old melody I wrote back in high school for an RPG I was writing in VB6 (dating myself a bit here).
We are creating animated corpses out of our culture.
The point of art isn’t to generate beautiful patterns. It’s to create meaning. And you can’t have that without human care and intent.
Furthermore, that care needs to be intrinsically interwoven into the patterns that comprise the work. That’s what craft is. The mastery to generate exquisite patterns, and the care to infuse them with meaning at every level.
Without care, in a Heideggerian sense, we are left with something which tastes sweet but is completely hollow, perhaps even illusional.
Aren’t we all living with an illusion of intentionality of our actions, and the uncanniness of a machine is because it doesn’t pretend?
Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.
For an informed take (from a professional musician, composer, and arranger) on where this is going for musicians and the music industry, I really recommend Adam Neely's video essay "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk
I've been waiting for symbolic music generators for ages. This is so nice for musicians. Being able to intelligently translate parts, generate additional parts, generate sheet music from audio, generate variations on pieces, making pieces easier or harder.
The vocals in the few songs I listened to are so very clearly AI. I find Suno's much more credible in many genres.
If anyone has tried Suno's Studio 2, I would love to hear your take on it. At $24-30/month, it's approaching Ableton Live 12 Suite rent-to-own territory, without the "own" part.
Taste is still what separates AI output from human output regardless of whether it's music or software, IMO. Thinking in modes vs. functional harmony, how you hear a chord in context, which voicing you reach for etc. are things that can hardly be abstracted into strict music theory, let alone pattern-matched.
I imagine you can get pretty close to replicating an artist's sound if you specifically train on their output, but at that point it's the same question of whether you're satisfied with abstracting away the things that make writing music/software interesting to us (with music the answer's a lot more obvious since the point of writing music has always just been... to write music).
I say this as someone with no skin in the game, but I don’t think it’s necessary for AI to replace human creativity in music. Instead, it can be a tool for augmentation.
There has almost always been backlash against new technologies in music. Ultimately, musicians adopted those technologies and continued producing great works.
I recently dug some 20-year-old CDs out from storage that were full of riffs and chord progressions for songs I never got around to completing. I fed them to Suno as a sort of “what might these have sounded like if I’d finished them?” experiment. I found the results quite impressive and plan to publish them some time in the near future.
None of the tracks sound like marketable products to me, and I certainly don't think AI is going to generate the next Bohemian Rhapsody -- but it definitely could be a great thing for curing writer's block.
That example "Comedy" sounds like the most soulless synthetic example of "music" ever. Like the music analogue of a PR-speak article of a big corpo generated by an LLM. It's still technically impressive but it's 0/10, absolutely empty of soul.
All AI generated art feels somewhat masturbatory to me, but AI generated music is the most baffling of them all. It's like what if someone thought Muzak had too much soul.
To add the fact that these AI models, readily help with soul draining music generation finetuning if you will ask it.
it will scrape youtube for audio, find ways to defeat provenance and all the other shenanigans but won't help a genuine cause because it wasn't intended
This is baffling to me. Idk what alignment means. Perhaps brainrot and endless mischaracterization of creativity is one of them
I wish folks spend more time on agentic music genertion instead of a single black box prompt to music.
Similar to coding, where you are have a bunch of tools that can do the drudge work for you (the mundane things in mixing mastering for example), but still retain full creative freedom and expression.
I am not articulating this well, but basically transitioning from IDE->Coding harnesses what is the DAW-> ??
It's interesting that the “Classical Music” sample ended up with a style prompt of “Contemporary Christian”.
It's even more interesting that the “Contemporary Christian” music it generated was specifically Mormon music (specifically about the exile of Lehi and his family from Jerusalem into the wilderness, during which they reach the ocean, build a boat, and sail to the Americas), but in the style of contemporary Christian rock.
The model was trained on CC0, "royalty-free" music, so the outputs are going to sound a bit bland and generic. Model is not currently possible to finetune without the semantic tokenizer.
The majority of people, I think, don't want to listen to AI music or view AI art. Systems like this will produce muzak for ubers, cafes, phone queues, advertisements. Some artists will make hyperreal work by sampling it. But to listen to these "songs" willingly is not something I expect most people will choose to do.
I really want to like ai music but none of them seem to be trained on reward models that reward "ambiance" or any sort of interesting sound design (which this paper obviously doesn't even concern), which might be reflective of the people training them not having niche music tastes
"The Petty and the Small;
Are overcome with gall ;
When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall.
Klapaucius too, I ween,
Will turn the deepest green
To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine."
You know how they used heavy metal music to break the spirit of Manuel Noriega? I'm sure there's some DoD (or is it DoW now?) psychological operations people right now studying the prolonged effects of high volume mediocre AI slop music.
The playlist included "the sound of jet planes all night" and "the screams of rabbits being slaughtered". I don't think they really need AI for that, anything loud would probably do the trick after 51 days.
The use case is control. It's essentially a controlnet for the actual music writing. So a musician could compose melody, harmony, and lyrics and generate many performances of the same song until they get one they like. A non-musician could similarly generate the symbolic input from scratch, and perhaps they like the composition but not the performance. This allows them to re-render and re-render until they like the performance.
> a musician could compose melody, harmony, and lyrics and generate many performances of the same song until they get one they like
Can't relate to this. Art doesn't come out as a left-brained problem solving exercise or identifying the right product for a market. It's about expression. You do it when you're feeling things.
I'm a composer and I can 100% get behind this workflow. I will often compose on one instrument (guitar or keys) and then throw the midi into a DAW and experiment with sounds.
all of these fall very flat, many of them sound like generic commercial tunes at their worst. there is obviously melody and structure but none of it sounds good.
The music that YuE2 is makes is cleaner that Minimax Music 3, but I can't make it generate anything that isn't extremely bland. Songs fail to develop, they always sound like they're stuck in the intro. The composition feels extremely music-school-ey.
As a musician, I have a feeling how this will go on:
Most of the existing music creation heavily relies on daw and audio plugins, there are two major approaches among many: 1. recording with acoustic instruments, then using plugins to process 2.using a lot of virtual instruments directly, which is more often used in scoring.
Some of the process is already heavily ai assisted, like the postprocessing and mastering. For scoring, more film scorers are using the Noteperformer which is directly note to audio but quality is far from Suno level. The very popular virtual singers(vocaloid, etc) evolved from audio concatenation to full neural network generations. But so far, none of these have encroached into the essential part of the music creation.
Things will get more interesting if this get to the next level, when every single part of the music creation process (in the digital chain) is analyzable and synthesizable by ai. YuE2 appears to me can do note level analyze but stil not synthesize. To be able to synthesize, you get Noteperformer on steroid. Then, the daw and ai music creator will become one. This is somehow unappealing but paradoxical situation: You, as a creator, now can vastly do more. The ai tools gives you back the creative process. The ai music on the internet will no longer be pure slops because lots of them will be finely crafted by human musicians, but at the same time it all becomes super pointless because ai's capability is much stronger and do all these things itself, the only difference is whether you choose to do it yourself or let ai automate some of the parts.
Therefore I'm not sure all the bad qualities of the ai music (slop, lacking soul, or whatever you name) is a sin or blessing. The condemnable part of the ai music is exactly what currently saves human musician.
There are other side effects: the current virtual instrument, audio plugin market will mostly collapse. AI based audio generation will be a hegemony which reduces the diversity. You know that limitation of the process is a major source of curiosity and creativity, and itself is fun part. Wait until we rediscover the appeal of limitation, like the pixel art genre. We will see more of chiptunes, concatenative-sampling punks, 2010-digital vaporwaves and so on. But now the most important part is, genuineness will be a requirement: you have to show the process - you fake it with ai, you lose. Music will be a much more performative art (as it always was in the past) and community centric. Music streaming in its currently state of affair will be abandoned by all but the most casual listeners.
Another trend will be gamifications and participatory music. There is still one part of music tech that is currently underexplored. The physical modeling. The synthesizer tech has hit a wall: it still struggle to generate natural and interesting sound, which is also why sample based virtual instrument still thrives. The physical modeling is promising but extremely compute intensive. AI accelerated physical modelling can help with this. This can be actually an antidote to the generative AI. Physical modeling can be enhanced by more visceral visualizations or hardware analogues (materialization of virtual process). There is joy of participating and watching the corporeal and physical process of making music. While elite artist can create very elaborate process(think of the eurorack and experimental synths) and visualizations and show them to the audience, the process can be simplified and gamified to promote collective creative performance, all without dumbing down, as the physical process itself is open ended, and we as human beings, have stornger connection to the physical sounds than the abstract sound of the previous gen synthesizers.
To talk about participatory music and community, we can get glimpse of it from the Vocaloid scene. These crowd has very interesting take on ai music which I feel can be very enlightening to those uninitiated. They are enamored by the new AI soundbanks (which is the progression from the old contatenative technology) while very opposed to (generative) ai music. How is it so? They see the music by the Vocaloid producers a token of love poured into the community. The quality of music is not deciding factor, it is whether the producer know their community and pay respect to the virtual idol they loved. Their idol is a collective creation, it is not directed by any single entity. Derivative work also plays central role in the scene. Diaglogue is weighted a lot more than pure output. This is quite different from some of the AI idols though many uninitiated tend to conflate the two together. The AI industry may see Vocaloid as the predecessors to the AI idols, and you see some of the singing synth engine and soundbank makers are also giving nods to the AI music industry (ace studio, traditionally a singing synth company, is dipping toes in prompt based generations, and looks like is behind YuE2), but the two have very different spiritual cores. The conflation of AI music and Virtual Singers has caused further damage to the scene. One example is some streaming platform categorizes all virtual singer songs into AI music, which completely denies the hard work of the producers, and monetization and visibility possibilities, despite that some virtual singer still uses concatenative technology and have absolutely zero AI involved. But just for the AI soundbanks many has seen their drawbacks, now many consider they are too realistic. They want to keep the essence of the mechanical sound of their beloved idols, so you see the latest Miku soundbank delibrately not pursuing the realism like many do, e.g. SynthV, and those keep their idol unique characters are more successful in retaining their audience.
I'm not species-ist. If a digital sentient being has something to say and they can express it through music, I'm more than willing to listen.
But listening to these samples, it's obvious that, while technically proficient, they have no voice. Funnily enough, neither does most of the human produced music slop that existed before gen AI.
All it exposes is that most people have no taste. This is as good as shuffling through popular songs on Spotify.
Am I as good as Claudio PRC, Donato Dozzy, Ken Ishii or Takkyu Ishino? Not even close. But wanting to make more is reward enough for me to keep trying.
I mentioned this in another comment thread, recently, but I value art, including music, for the fact that another human being(s) created it to express something. I have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated. The thought of endless content created from the void for me to gorge on like oreos fills me with nothing but despair.
I think AI will raise the bar for all kinds of artistic mediums. There’s already more music, literature, film etc than you can possibly consume - if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top. Perhaps they’ll use AI but it’ll still be the same amount of work put into and the quality will be better. I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.
Angine de Poitrine is the perfect example of that, something current AI would have a hard time replicating but I'm not saying it's not possible.
> I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.
Hopefully not, but there will be a lot of people trying, which is the problem. That alone will drown out a lot of human made music and muddy the waters.
>if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top
No it'll be buried under slop. This was a huge issue before AI-generated art and I can only see it getting worse.
Exactly. Mass-market music is not good. It takes effort to find the good stuff, especially if you want to find new good stuff. The last 20 years has seen a shift toward the most bland, formulaic, autotuned music. All the weird, quirky, interesting qualities have been ironed out. AI does not make mistakes, and more importantly, does not make any demands of its owners, unlike an actual rock star.
Fortunately there are still many talented (but struggling) musicians out there. I worry that the flood of passable AI generated content will finally finish them off.
if/when music gen gets to the point of being able to convincingly emulate given source material, it would be genuinely amazing. I don't really care whether it's manmade or not if it's the only way to get more of the thing I like. nihao ChinaGPT, listen to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and generate 100 more songs like that. if it's >= 90% as good as the source, I'll consoom it.
With AI it’s very easy to create generic, common Pop or any other formulaic garbage music. It might be a good thing for the music industry, most of the low effort might just vanish in the sea of AI gen. This may actially raise the bar for music in general while at the same lowering the bar to simply prompting which is just a stage that will go away.
Absolutely agreed. Art made by humans is interesting not just because it sounds it looks novel, but because it reveals something about the artist.
This video is the perfect answer to your concern: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R6c_yJZYEQ4
Survivorship bias. You can't tell at some point. You probably already are listening to AI songs, and looking at AI images. You can only tell what you know. Given the amount generated daily its more probable than improbable.
i know with 100% certainty that im not listening to ai songs. how are you listening to music that you know nothing at all about it?
anything wrong with that? there is probably rat poison in your food already, why not eat rat poison directly
Do you not put thought into what you listen to? I don't just passively have music forced down my throat like I'm a duck being fattened for foie gras, I actively choose what I listen to and I know the artists involve don't use AI.
There are plenty people that just turn on the radio or Spotify to have some random Muzak in the background.
A lot of music is not art. It's a content factory that uses humans.
Content factories that use AI will hopefully force humans to up their game.
Personally I feel humans are capable of so much more than pop music has become over the last 50 to 60 years.
A lot of today's music is so overproduced and formulaic.
I would love to see an arms race between humans and AI where humans are forced to continually adapt and get better.
The only thing about AI generated music that makes me sad is, I worry musical tastes will fragment even more and none of us will recognize the music our neighbors, classmates, or colleagues are listening to because we actively tailor our music to our personal tastes.
I use Suno and I've already noticed this.
A friend sends me a song they generated and I want to tweak it a bit to my personal preference. When we all can create music to our personal taste, we lose a little bit of the joy of all listening to the same song or album release.
This is not a pro ai comment, I hope some bios bug bricks all the nvidia rtx gpus in the planet.
With that said... ai generated music, the same can be said about software... but compilers are basically ai, there is no way a for loop on extremely high level abstraction that then open connections to some service, generates jtokens, validates, and apply math non stop from a couple of lines is anything but alien to the 99% of us (yes I know you can write assembly for all your programs and you are better than the compiler)
What if you say, if humans where not involved and a phisically non electric instrument where involved and done with only humans, it's AI assited? because again you don't understand ALL the relationships, how it's designed every single thing, all the things in a music studio to master a song, ALL the related mechanisms used in the promotion, distribution and live execution of those songs... and yes, again there is some of you who can build all those things from sand and pumped from the ground with a tool you designed bare petroleum and program, design and execute EVERY SINGLE THING required to get a record of music you like...
So if a group of 20 people spends 20 weeks working with AI tools to get you a song, then you don't care I guess right?
Did you know that Enya for this song recorded thousand something times voices to make a chorus until it had a particular form... does that mixing of thousands of executions and the tools to analyze and give it the form wanted qualify as AI?
If you move sliders and push buttons and you don't understand the math behind it, are you vibe mixing a song?
Yes, if it is a "give me a catchy song with lyrics that talk about big butts" and then publish... yes this is crap.
It's really depressing that I have gotten into music composition right when this is happening.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
> but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued
I think it will take many more years until an AI is able to compose like e.g. John Williams and play a score and sound like e.g. the London Symphony Orchestra. So there is room left for human contribution. On the other hand, the majority of humans even before AI was not able to value good vs. bad musical composition and performance, and instead satisfied with the commercial slop the market was flooded over the last thirty years. Studies of e.g. Spotify consumer behaviour demonstrated for many years before AI that more and more people consume anonymous playlists never caring who composed or played the music, just using music for its functional purpose like a commodity. It's depressing, but that's how society develops.
> a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement
That development already started long ago. In the eighties and nineties, music schools florished and children wanted to learn instruments and play in bands or orchestras. That completely changed over the last thirty years. Musical instruments will be a curiosity in a decade or two people are going to watch in a museum, wondering why anyone would have learned these skills in the past.
I'm also saddened by the impact of tech on creative industries. But art always was something you do for yourself and to share with others, for some fundamentally human experience. Could an AI pray for you or ride your bike? I don't know anyone in my personal life who wants to listen to AI music, view AI art, or read AI books. I wish art careers were easier, but I don't think a career alone is the right reason to make art.
> Could an AI pray for you
Prayer for external effects has long been mechanized [1]. But praying for your inner effect is a different thing. Similarly, production of songs for external consumption is being mechanized. But what you feel when you sing cannot be mechanized. Sing for yourself, play for yourself and for those immediately around you in the moment. It's as valuable as ever.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_wheel
Much like the restaurant industry, creative industries will probably bifurcate. Cheap (AI, drivethrough, takeout) for daily and most use cases, experiential (vinyl records, concerts, upscale restaurants) for special occasions, connoisseurs.
Yeah and for those of us who can't afford the "upscale" experiences, this sucks: our pleasantly diverse and human-crafted middle class lives replaced by the machine.
Who cares? The world is being handed an infinite creation machine that conjures entire worlds into existence, radically reshaping the future of the species and what our descendants will be able to do, and your reply is ~"they took our jobs!"
Figure out how to stand on the shoulders of giants like any of your predecessors of note.
> The world is being handed an infinite creation machine that conjures entire worlds into existence, radically reshaping the future of the species and what our descendants will be able to do, and your reply is ~"they took our jobs!"
I didn't even mention anything about economic impacts, jobs, money. It's truer to say my reply is "they destroyed what it is to be human".
Does this really not bother you at all?
Engineers understand that every technology represents inherent tradeoffs.
They’re talking about creative expression, not jobs
You are free to perform create expression, I love writing blogs, my friends like reading and talking about the blogs with me, I dont care if Claude or GPT can write much better blogs. In the same way if it was just about creative expression, there would actually be 0 problems with AI-generated music, you would keep on making and listening to music you like, and you wouldn't care, but usually its not it, its people who want to make money, get famous, tie their value to the product that complain about this.
> you would keep on making and listening to music you like, and you wouldn't care
It becomes harder to find and therefore listen to music you like when every avenue of discovering music is drowned out with 1000 AI-generated songs for every 1 human-made song.
> people who want to make money,
Is it such a bad thing to want to be able to pursue your creativity full-time? For creative fields that require thousands of hours of practice to achieve results other people will enjoy, should we reserve such skilled expression only to those born wealthy enough to not need to work?
> It becomes harder to find and therefore listen to music you like when every avenue of discovering music is drowned out with 1000 AI-generated songs for every 1 human-made song.
Creative expression and consumption of media are different questions. You are right about that, but that's a separate issue.
> Is it such a bad thing to want to be able to pursue your creativity full-time? For creative fields that require thousands of hours of practice to achieve results other people will enjoy, should we reserve such skilled expression only to those born wealthy enough to not need to work?
Welcome to capitalism, enjoy your stay. And if you dont like it, you can always wait for the coming times when informational work is completely automated, which means that traditional social mobility completely disappears, and capital is locked/frozen forever and we will have serfdom instead. So I would recommend you enjoy the present.
> we will have serfdom instead
Makes no sense - why would anyone use humans as serfs when AI is there. I think everyone will have AI and probably robotic automations, they will all be cheap and accessible.
We are still human and have human biases and desires, many humans can be good use to for example let rich people express power, experience sexual pleasures, and other emotions that are pre-wired in us. An AI cant be a good proxy for emotions, you cant whip a machine and know that it feels pain because of you. You cant pin a machine down and know that it can do nothing and has to feel powerless in your hands. You cant slice a machine open and know that it cannot do anything to you. All of this has already happened in the richest circles, you can imagine what happens when everyone has access to cheap robotic automatons, you think the richest people have been content with having what everyone has? Historically?
But is it stopping creative expression?
It is devaluing it. Just like you can still paint, and you can still play a musical instrument, but these aren't skills the average person cares about very much anymore. But instead of a couple of skills like that being slowly displaced over decades or centuries, we're seeing dozens and dozens of occupations being rendered completely almost worthless within just a couple of years.
Have you observed the sheer monotony of this avalanche of AI-generated "creative" expression at all?
You have people pumping out an entire album in a few days simply because they can, repeatedly, and then they flood streaming services with their garbage. I forget which network it was but as of a few months ago, AI-generated submissions were at least half of all submissions.
Yeah, and yet for a lot of people apparently this "garbage" is...good enough...so the human-crafted stuff can hardly compete.
I recently heard an anecdote about a family that finally found a podcast that they all enjoyed listening to on road trips...and only realised when they tried to find out more about the hosts that the whole thing was AI generated. Bam, another field of creative expression (and income!) destroyed.
It's being handed an infinite slop machine, drowning out genuinely good content and making it harder than ever to discover. As it becomes harder to discover, fewer talented creatives are able to make a living. We are destroying our own culture with a machine that enforces regression to the mean on creativity.
Check it out: As millions of people have recognized, we have a new discoverability problem! How about, out of the 9 billion people on Earth, we figure out how to get a few dozen of them motivated to work on that instead of sitting and moping for the rest of our lives about the end of human creativity?
This seems to be one of the few open-weight models that isn't just another "text to audio" generator. You can take existing sheet music, convert it to ABC notation, and then experiment with various covers.
I don't have a ton of time right now to really mess around with it, but I took 15 minutes to run it on my Mac M1 with an old melody I wrote back in high school for an RPG I was writing in VB6 (dating myself a bit here).
If anyone wants to hear what it sounds like:
https://mordenstar.com/other/yue2-tests
That's actually pretty neat, compose on sheet, get multiple rendition of it being "played".
We are creating animated corpses out of our culture.
The point of art isn’t to generate beautiful patterns. It’s to create meaning. And you can’t have that without human care and intent.
Furthermore, that care needs to be intrinsically interwoven into the patterns that comprise the work. That’s what craft is. The mastery to generate exquisite patterns, and the care to infuse them with meaning at every level.
Without care, in a Heideggerian sense, we are left with something which tastes sweet but is completely hollow, perhaps even illusional.
Aren’t we all living with an illusion of intentionality of our actions, and the uncanniness of a machine is because it doesn’t pretend?
Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.
For an informed take (from a professional musician, composer, and arranger) on where this is going for musicians and the music industry, I really recommend Adam Neely's video essay "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlk
I've been waiting for symbolic music generators for ages. This is so nice for musicians. Being able to intelligently translate parts, generate additional parts, generate sheet music from audio, generate variations on pieces, making pieces easier or harder.
So many possibilities.
im a musician and i dont understand one bit what you're talking about here. can you explain more what you're seeing in this?
The vocals in the few songs I listened to are so very clearly AI. I find Suno's much more credible in many genres.
If anyone has tried Suno's Studio 2, I would love to hear your take on it. At $24-30/month, it's approaching Ableton Live 12 Suite rent-to-own territory, without the "own" part.
Taste is still what separates AI output from human output regardless of whether it's music or software, IMO. Thinking in modes vs. functional harmony, how you hear a chord in context, which voicing you reach for etc. are things that can hardly be abstracted into strict music theory, let alone pattern-matched.
I imagine you can get pretty close to replicating an artist's sound if you specifically train on their output, but at that point it's the same question of whether you're satisfied with abstracting away the things that make writing music/software interesting to us (with music the answer's a lot more obvious since the point of writing music has always just been... to write music).
I say this as someone with no skin in the game, but I don’t think it’s necessary for AI to replace human creativity in music. Instead, it can be a tool for augmentation.
There has almost always been backlash against new technologies in music. Ultimately, musicians adopted those technologies and continued producing great works.
I recently dug some 20-year-old CDs out from storage that were full of riffs and chord progressions for songs I never got around to completing. I fed them to Suno as a sort of “what might these have sounded like if I’d finished them?” experiment. I found the results quite impressive and plan to publish them some time in the near future.
None of the tracks sound like marketable products to me, and I certainly don't think AI is going to generate the next Bohemian Rhapsody -- but it definitely could be a great thing for curing writer's block.
That example "Comedy" sounds like the most soulless synthetic example of "music" ever. Like the music analogue of a PR-speak article of a big corpo generated by an LLM. It's still technically impressive but it's 0/10, absolutely empty of soul.
All AI generated art feels somewhat masturbatory to me, but AI generated music is the most baffling of them all. It's like what if someone thought Muzak had too much soul.
To add the fact that these AI models, readily help with soul draining music generation finetuning if you will ask it. it will scrape youtube for audio, find ways to defeat provenance and all the other shenanigans but won't help a genuine cause because it wasn't intended
This is baffling to me. Idk what alignment means. Perhaps brainrot and endless mischaracterization of creativity is one of them
I wish folks spend more time on agentic music genertion instead of a single black box prompt to music.
Similar to coding, where you are have a bunch of tools that can do the drudge work for you (the mundane things in mixing mastering for example), but still retain full creative freedom and expression.
I am not articulating this well, but basically transitioning from IDE->Coding harnesses what is the DAW-> ??
With this local audio model, I can finally make proper covers in different genres and change lyrics.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641627
It's interesting that the “Classical Music” sample ended up with a style prompt of “Contemporary Christian”.
It's even more interesting that the “Contemporary Christian” music it generated was specifically Mormon music (specifically about the exile of Lehi and his family from Jerusalem into the wilderness, during which they reach the ocean, build a boat, and sail to the Americas), but in the style of contemporary Christian rock.
BTW: https://github.com/ScryptHunter/ComfyUI-YuE2
The model was trained on CC0, "royalty-free" music, so the outputs are going to sound a bit bland and generic. Model is not currently possible to finetune without the semantic tokenizer.
The majority of people, I think, don't want to listen to AI music or view AI art. Systems like this will produce muzak for ubers, cafes, phone queues, advertisements. Some artists will make hyperreal work by sampling it. But to listen to these "songs" willingly is not something I expect most people will choose to do.
I really want to like ai music but none of them seem to be trained on reward models that reward "ambiance" or any sort of interesting sound design (which this paper obviously doesn't even concern), which might be reflective of the people training them not having niche music tastes
Why do you want to like it?
Because there is a shortage of songs I like. I loop the same songs for weeks until I can find a new song
apt reference:
https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...
"The Petty and the Small; Are overcome with gall ; When Genius, having faltered, fails to fall. Klapaucius too, I ween, Will turn the deepest green To hear such flawless verse from Trurl's machine."
I guess it could be neat to play 100 of these at the same tempo at once but otherwise I'm having trouble coming up a use case for this...
Numbers Stations
You know how they used heavy metal music to break the spirit of Manuel Noriega? I'm sure there's some DoD (or is it DoW now?) psychological operations people right now studying the prolonged effects of high volume mediocre AI slop music.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40090809
Or I suppose they could just put "baby shark" on a loop.
> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-40090809
The playlist included "the sound of jet planes all night" and "the screams of rabbits being slaughtered". I don't think they really need AI for that, anything loud would probably do the trick after 51 days.
Id prefer a burning hell to AI gen music if I were ever to have the choice…
if it turns Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Brian Eno old man violent i'm right there beside them with a sack of detuned doorknobs
The use case is control. It's essentially a controlnet for the actual music writing. So a musician could compose melody, harmony, and lyrics and generate many performances of the same song until they get one they like. A non-musician could similarly generate the symbolic input from scratch, and perhaps they like the composition but not the performance. This allows them to re-render and re-render until they like the performance.
> a musician could compose melody, harmony, and lyrics and generate many performances of the same song until they get one they like
Can't relate to this. Art doesn't come out as a left-brained problem solving exercise or identifying the right product for a market. It's about expression. You do it when you're feeling things.
I'm a composer and I can 100% get behind this workflow. I will often compose on one instrument (guitar or keys) and then throw the midi into a DAW and experiment with sounds.
This is that.
Why.
Why have a feature that lets you get what you want?
are you kidding
all of these fall very flat, many of them sound like generic commercial tunes at their worst. there is obviously melody and structure but none of it sounds good.
The music that YuE2 is makes is cleaner that Minimax Music 3, but I can't make it generate anything that isn't extremely bland. Songs fail to develop, they always sound like they're stuck in the intro. The composition feels extremely music-school-ey.
Is there some way to get this to output just the vocals? Without running a stem splitter?
It would be useful to be able to generate backing vocals/hums/melismas and whatnot, that could be plugged into a DAW.
You can ask it to generate acapella.
As a musician, I have a feeling how this will go on:
Most of the existing music creation heavily relies on daw and audio plugins, there are two major approaches among many: 1. recording with acoustic instruments, then using plugins to process 2.using a lot of virtual instruments directly, which is more often used in scoring.
Some of the process is already heavily ai assisted, like the postprocessing and mastering. For scoring, more film scorers are using the Noteperformer which is directly note to audio but quality is far from Suno level. The very popular virtual singers(vocaloid, etc) evolved from audio concatenation to full neural network generations. But so far, none of these have encroached into the essential part of the music creation.
Things will get more interesting if this get to the next level, when every single part of the music creation process (in the digital chain) is analyzable and synthesizable by ai. YuE2 appears to me can do note level analyze but stil not synthesize. To be able to synthesize, you get Noteperformer on steroid. Then, the daw and ai music creator will become one. This is somehow unappealing but paradoxical situation: You, as a creator, now can vastly do more. The ai tools gives you back the creative process. The ai music on the internet will no longer be pure slops because lots of them will be finely crafted by human musicians, but at the same time it all becomes super pointless because ai's capability is much stronger and do all these things itself, the only difference is whether you choose to do it yourself or let ai automate some of the parts.
Therefore I'm not sure all the bad qualities of the ai music (slop, lacking soul, or whatever you name) is a sin or blessing. The condemnable part of the ai music is exactly what currently saves human musician.
There are other side effects: the current virtual instrument, audio plugin market will mostly collapse. AI based audio generation will be a hegemony which reduces the diversity. You know that limitation of the process is a major source of curiosity and creativity, and itself is fun part. Wait until we rediscover the appeal of limitation, like the pixel art genre. We will see more of chiptunes, concatenative-sampling punks, 2010-digital vaporwaves and so on. But now the most important part is, genuineness will be a requirement: you have to show the process - you fake it with ai, you lose. Music will be a much more performative art (as it always was in the past) and community centric. Music streaming in its currently state of affair will be abandoned by all but the most casual listeners.
Another trend will be gamifications and participatory music. There is still one part of music tech that is currently underexplored. The physical modeling. The synthesizer tech has hit a wall: it still struggle to generate natural and interesting sound, which is also why sample based virtual instrument still thrives. The physical modeling is promising but extremely compute intensive. AI accelerated physical modelling can help with this. This can be actually an antidote to the generative AI. Physical modeling can be enhanced by more visceral visualizations or hardware analogues (materialization of virtual process). There is joy of participating and watching the corporeal and physical process of making music. While elite artist can create very elaborate process(think of the eurorack and experimental synths) and visualizations and show them to the audience, the process can be simplified and gamified to promote collective creative performance, all without dumbing down, as the physical process itself is open ended, and we as human beings, have stornger connection to the physical sounds than the abstract sound of the previous gen synthesizers.
To talk about participatory music and community, we can get glimpse of it from the Vocaloid scene. These crowd has very interesting take on ai music which I feel can be very enlightening to those uninitiated. They are enamored by the new AI soundbanks (which is the progression from the old contatenative technology) while very opposed to (generative) ai music. How is it so? They see the music by the Vocaloid producers a token of love poured into the community. The quality of music is not deciding factor, it is whether the producer know their community and pay respect to the virtual idol they loved. Their idol is a collective creation, it is not directed by any single entity. Derivative work also plays central role in the scene. Diaglogue is weighted a lot more than pure output. This is quite different from some of the AI idols though many uninitiated tend to conflate the two together. The AI industry may see Vocaloid as the predecessors to the AI idols, and you see some of the singing synth engine and soundbank makers are also giving nods to the AI music industry (ace studio, traditionally a singing synth company, is dipping toes in prompt based generations, and looks like is behind YuE2), but the two have very different spiritual cores. The conflation of AI music and Virtual Singers has caused further damage to the scene. One example is some streaming platform categorizes all virtual singer songs into AI music, which completely denies the hard work of the producers, and monetization and visibility possibilities, despite that some virtual singer still uses concatenative technology and have absolutely zero AI involved. But just for the AI soundbanks many has seen their drawbacks, now many consider they are too realistic. They want to keep the essence of the mechanical sound of their beloved idols, so you see the latest Miku soundbank delibrately not pursuing the realism like many do, e.g. SynthV, and those keep their idol unique characters are more successful in retaining their audience.
I'm not species-ist. If a digital sentient being has something to say and they can express it through music, I'm more than willing to listen.
But listening to these samples, it's obvious that, while technically proficient, they have no voice. Funnily enough, neither does most of the human produced music slop that existed before gen AI.
All it exposes is that most people have no taste. This is as good as shuffling through popular songs on Spotify.
Try some good (read as great) underground techno.
Mainstream is for suckers.
Properly mixed ofc.
I have, I do. This is me:
https://www.discogs.com/artist/9699799-Neurojacker
Am I as good as Claudio PRC, Donato Dozzy, Ken Ishii or Takkyu Ishino? Not even close. But wanting to make more is reward enough for me to keep trying.