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I fed my own track to a music-improvising AI. This is what it did to it
So I took my own recent SoundCloud track Supermassive:
And I fed it to music creation AI Aiva as an ‘influence’. (You can choose key, mood, style, and upload wav files of your own ‘influences’.)
After a couple of minutes, it gave me three versions of its’ response as mp3s. (I could just as easily asked for 5 ‘variations’. ) I could have had midis for free too, or paid to get better quality wavs, and commercial license rights, or even full copyright. I chose the middle one of the three tracks it came up with, just because why not?
I’ve used it exactly as is - the composition, instrumentation and the arrangement are entirely the AI, responding to my ‘influence’, all I did was cut n paste the result into a video.
The accompanying graphics? Courtesy of another AI, of course. text to visuals AI Nightcafe Studio, and a quick hashing through Glitch Studio. (Text prompt: ‘ a supermassive supercomputer enslaves humanity’ - so not sure why it gave me a Japanese shopping mall set on Mount Doom..unless that is it’s plan…)
(You can easily tell which one is the AI in a blind test btw - it’s the one that sounds musically competent.)
This is happening fast, folks… I’m not inviting comments about ‘my’ work here, since, well, it isn’t. No humans involved… Just fascinated/awed/concerned by it, is all…
Luckily, since I wasn’t a musician in the first place, I don’t have to worry about being put out of business. If I did library music, jingles and the like though, I think I might be getting a tad concerned…
So: do you proper musicians out there feel threatened yet? After all, it only took Alpha Go a couple of years to go from learning to play the game, to decisively smashing the worlds best human player at it…
(I think now I need to feed it an unceasing diet of Dark Ambient ‘influences’ , just to mess with Aiva’s learning algorithms. Visions of an ad agency going bust when their Lovecraftian existential -horror themed breakfast cereal jingle fails to break the new brand on the supermarket shelves…)
Comments
I for one welcome our robot overlords.
Just kidding.
As someone who barely qualifies as a proper musician (I do actually occasionally play guitar and drums poorly) I am grateful for the assistance. Listening to the A.I. created track I can hear the limitations. The volume swells sound more like my early efforts learning to use a compressor rather than an artistic choice. And while I have been guilty of creating overly crowded pieces of “music” this sounds like it lacked that human trait of knowing when too much is too much.
Still, it is early on. As you said, it only took Alpha Go a couple of years to trounce the best human player so who knows where we’ll be two year from now.
I think there will always be a place for people with talent. Even with all of the A.I. art that is being created now on Midjourney and Stable Diffusion there is still room for talented people with imagination.
But I’ll be nicer to my computer. Just in case.
For those interested in Alpha GO…
I’d be more threatened by AI if I were a champion GO player. But as a musician, there are millions of blood driven musical competitors. What’s a million more robots in the game. Musicians in Broadway orchestra pits and the union screamed murder during the 90s when synth orchestras replaced them. No one is screaming about that now. So it will be with AI composers.
@MadeofWax : yes, it made some weird choices about dynamics, didn’t it? I admire your optimism re the future, mind
Hi. @LinearLineman. I’m sure you are right in one sense, that the best stuff made by we meat puppets, or maybe just the weirdest, will escape the algorithms at least for a while yet.
But - philosophically, if you like - what happens when an AI makes the first piece of original music that really tears your heart out, just like the best, most moving of human endeavours? Then tweaks it, and does it again? And again? And again?…
In the meantime: do you not wonder what will happen to the market for simply ‘functional’ music, underscore for corporate videos, backing for YouTubers, soundtracks for knock off reality tv shows, and the like? Or even to ‘disposable’ pop music?
In the 80s I worked as a music journalist alongside a Royal Academy of Music trained pianist and composer, a nerdy looking white guy who had a brief flurry of commercial success as one of the first British EDM ‘producers’ , making hit records for a made up band fronted by a charismatic black soul-voiced woman. But the thing that let him stop working at our shitty little music tech gear mag and move into a big house in the country were the income streams he got from his library music business.
Can’t imagine that as a strategy going forward.
Tell you what though: I’d be very interested to hear what happens if you fed one of your improvs to it- and then talked us through what you think, technically, of what it comes up with… would it have the chops to surprise you, or would the result be predictable and bland? Probably that, I’m guessing, but still… top tier human improviser versus the machine… it’s Alpha Go all over again…
@Svetlovska, I’d be happy and curious to collaborate with you on trying a couple of my tracks. Ikd like to hear a fugue like track and a fast jazz track. We’d need midi, I assume. What do you think?
Hi, @LinearLineman : it’s probably better you check out the site yourself, if it interests you? It has , er, ‘presets’ for jazz and classical in there… (!) I only used the ‘influences’ tab, uploaded my wav, and let it do it’s thing. But you can get deep tweaking sliders on the Profile tab. You’d get more from that by messing around with it than I would, I think. Take a look if you’re interested: https://creators.aiva.ai/
I think it can become a great tool to create new sounds to use in your own compositions. For exemple creating variations of a drone or synth pad that you could then resample to incorporate in your own music. Use the AI to feed your own inspiration.
But to me, SOLELY relying on an AI to create an original piece and then sign it with your name, selling it and getting profit from it, just because you took 1 minute to input a prompt message is very questionable, at least for me. Credit should go to whoever or whatever created it. So AI should get the credit they deserve as much as human do.
But this is already going on.I have already seen people on Instagram selling this kind of AI artwork, Artwork which I was able to replicate easily with the proper prompt. The most funny part was reading the comments on Instagram, "you're such a talented artist", I mean, come on... I am not interested in a world where writing a prompt is synonymous of talent...
But if one day, an AI comes with a piece that tears my heart, I think I would welcome it. After all, it is a new kind of intelligence, why not imaging it touching our souls. But one thing for sure AI will always lack is this sexual drive and desire that is imprinted within our flesh and that helped produced most of the master pieces throughout History.
@JanKun : I agree. Claiming the unmediated output of an AI on the basis of a short string of text seems lame in the extreme. I think next time I try it (and there will be a next time… ), I’ll take the midis, then mess around with them. If I mess with them enough, I’ll maybe feel justified in claiming the thing, at the level of the ‘producer’ over the AI ‘session musician’. In some senses it is only an extension of what I do most of the time already, using scale locked autogenerators to drive my noises…
I’m also interested in feeding it wavs of my most out there stuff, like the hardware modular autogenerative tracks, so it would be the AI equivalent of running s&h white noise or an lfo through a quantiser, just to see what comes out.
As a side note, I notice that a lot of people in different fields are starting to post vids to YouTube of their experiences with different flavours of AI, the most successful of which artistically are those where there is active collaboration and back and forth between the AI and the artist. It feels like this is the beginning of something, a new movement in creation of visual and aural arts.
I’m still waiting for someone to tip me to a video-making AI I can front load with my curated collection of stills, short clips, and video filter options, and have it Ken Burns the shit out of it to generate a custom blended movie from the tidbits in seconds flat. Quite surprised no one seems to have made a front end for something like that, actually…
Unless of course there is? Anybody here know ? Sure would save me a lot of time getting some moving images to accompany my noises on YouTube…
@JanKun: I wouldn’t be so sure…
https://www.dezeen.com/2021/12/06/living-replicating-robots-xenobots-3/amp/
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hairong-Lin/publication/359682430_Memristor-based_affective_associative_memory_neural_network_circuit_with_emotional_gradual_processes/links/6247a8477931cc7ccf0d5176/Memristor-based-affective-associative-memory-neural-network-circuit-with-emotional-gradual-processes.pdf
(I just skimmed the abstract and conclusion on that last one… I got no way of understanding the detail of the paper, but interesting concept nonetheless)
Fwiw, @Svetlovska, I vastly prefer the original.
Modelling the aesthetic detail a single human can produce, and then working toward the detail a collaborating group of humans can produce (like the composer/conductor/orchestra group, for example) seems a little distant right now. I don’t think anyone needs to feel threatened quite yet… but given a few hundred billion dollars and a couple of decades, who knows where we’ll end up? Personally, I hope we do create a class of ‘Great Master’ robots- if nothing else, that’s a more positive vision for the future than the clichéd ‘Ultimate Weapon’ robot-fantasy paradigm…
That is both promising and scary, thank you for the links, very instructive eventhough a bit over my very limited cortex.
I agree that on this @Svetlovska track, the original sounds much better !
I would definitely be interested in the video-making AI stuff which is probably already here. Hope someone on the forum will drop a few hints.
Well, it is coming, whether we like it or not. I think homophonic and patterned, loop-based music would be the easiest ones to emulate. Then, there's the "new complexity" school of contemporary "art" music and formalist music—basically, if you write one of those "intellectual" music where you can explain everything systematically yet it still sounds like Cage's Music of Changes, these kinds of music wouldn't be hard for machine learning system at all.
Of course, this is not about good or bad. I'm just thinking about which styles and genres would be easiest to do. I'd say if you can explain the type of your music-making process succinctly well, then someone can make an AI simulate it. Now, if we have a piece where you say, "Damn, I understand everything in this piece, and there's no secret here. But, heck, I didn't know it could be this beautiful! What makes it beautiful?" Well, here we might have a candidate that the AI can't simulate...
Like with most things robots are having a go at replacing humans with varied success. This to a degree is already happening in today’s mainstream music. I was going to put music in inverted comas but I instantly realised that music isn’t necessarily an exclusive domain of the humans. Just like with chat bots AI will get very good at writing songs, lyrics as well as music. Whether listening to robot vs human created music will be different, perhaps is the question we should be asking? If it pulls the right emotional strings and serves its purpose I guess it should definitely be considered.
This, somehow, I think, relates to our continuous quest to isolate. Once upon a time humans gathered around the flames, then around the radio, then, increasingly each household got their own radio, washing machine and home cinema. We don’t need to meet in person because we have Skype, zoom and WhatsApp.
Now we’ll have our fave songs written by robots. Loneliness never sounded more appealing!
Yes, it’s true that we are still engaged in direct personal interactions yet direct, in person contact have suffered in the last few decades. I remember leaving the house after lunch and coming back for dinner as a 8 year old. Now I organise play dates for my own kids. It feels like, the more we know and the more control we have over our lives, the more we end up growing apart.
I hope the current global crisis will serve as a wake up call to rein in some of the uncontrolled tangents we’ve gone on. Unchecked capitalism and consumption and similar.
God, how did I even end up talking about capitalism!!! Oh dear, mark my post as off topic.
This AI stuff is fascinating and also so weird. I saw a guy on YouTube make an entire slideshow of AI generated images that illustrated the “mystical” history of humanity (atlantis, the deluge, etc). Literally some of the most beautiful and haunting images I’ve ever seen. It was some text to speech thing and I guess the more specific you are, the more text, the more “original” it will be. Well he must have included lots of concrete visual terms because every image was just so rich and layered. What was funny though (and creepy as hell) was it seemed the AI has trouble generating multiple human faces at once. There were images of single human faces that looked good, but if it was drawing a scene with multiple people or a crowd loitering around, they all turned into these creepy “human like objects” but with no visible face or the faces looked like a five year old went through magazines, cutting out some eyes here, a mouth there, etc. crazy CRAZY times.
I also would love to know if there is a good purely generative video app for iOS - have had a few looks the past few days and didn't see anything interesting / sophisticated.
😂 Link please? 😂
@Gavinski
Actually, not off topic at all. We seem to be falling into forms of connected isolation as if it was inevitable. But it’s not. I went to see live music last night and was reminded of the immediacy and depth of focus of the people in attendance (both players and observers). As a musician dug in and really “sold” his performance the crowd responded with hoots and clapping. Same as it has been for thousands of years around the fire pit. I hope we can make it a choice as to whether we isolate with robots or find a balance with each other in real time and space.
A valid point about the politics, but in isolation who will hear you scream.
Totally. That also goes for music making with other people. Just before the summer holidays kicked in I joined a community world music group and was amazed how much fun and fulfilment that brought to me. My social life generally revolves around music making and my regular 6 piece ands gigs and practices usually account for most of it. While it fulfils my group creative writing and boys hanging out aspect, it is just a male environment and can have ‘that’ male vibe. This community group made me realise that it’s just fun to make music, without the need to be ‘amazing’ or to be at the centre of attention or to be the leader/director or whatever. It’s just so much fun, practices and gigs but in a larger multi gender and multi ethnic setting.
I’m mentioning this because both projects are not in any way connected with iOS or electronic music that I’ve put a bit on pause because I was missing the human element in music while jamming on my own. I know there’s many online collabs and that’s cool, but I’ve somehow noticed that the screen time, other than the occasional Drambo jam has become more of a downer for me lately. I suspect that’s partly due to continued small tech issues as well as the sheer amount of prep required to get stuff going.
So, jamming with robots will definitely return to my life but for now I’m just buzzing from jamming with human beings. 6 gigs booked in September alone…can’t wait!
Edit: so yes, the human social fire is definitely still burning. There’s also a lot of avenues to get lost in though. At times having less choice is somewhat less confusing and more straight forward.
I'm in on this. Visually stunning at times. Hieronymus Bosch can hang up his paintbrush. Oddly, the music, I don’t think is AI. If it’s beautiful or impactful, why not. I wonder what images would be created if you read Ulysses by Joyce, the Bible or 1984 into it.
@Jankun, the “you’re so talented” part is sociologically very interesting. Do you think people these days want to believe developing a talent is unnecessary when you have a button you can push? Everyone, it seems, wants to think they are talented and are shown they don’t have to work for the result or recognition. That’s what most of Facebook is about, no?
There’s always been an abundance of people with little talent or training making art. That hasn’t changed. Now the machine helps you make better crummy art…. Similar to paint by numbers, I guess. Anyway, idiots congratulating idiots is nothing new. What’s new is the huge megaphone available to those idiots.
Impressive, thanks! I downloaded a free app based on the strength of this, 'Dream by WAMBO' - pretty amazing what it can come up with
What I find most promising about machine learning systems in music is the possibility for a musician to have live accompaniment which would be responsive to the human musician. And this could conceivably be a feature in any DAW soon.
Or rather…Arab spring was presumably able to happen thanks to social media, which makes the global communication system called internet a great tool for social change. The problem is that it is also a great tool to curtail those type of movements…with fake news thrown in the mix, were in a right mess.
Great pun btw. There’s a song in there somewhere.
This sounds fantastic: an AI accompaniment that can modulate from anywhere to anywhere real time, because it senses and uses the new key in the fraction of a second after the keyboard/string was touched by the human player but before the audible sound comes out.
Imagine having a 4 hour "live" improv session along with your DAW. The DAW could be available for a jam session at any time. And every musician could benefit from this extra practice time.
Does anyone remember being young and going to a concert and seeing a band that musically did not make sense or have any audiotory attraction until that "one night" For some strange reason that one show were everything makes one fall in love - the bands clothes/ hair/ the way they walked across the stage/ the way the interacted & talked to the patreons of the night/ the patreons themselves/ friends in the crowd/the smells/ the chosen lighting/ the chosen setup music/ the chosen walk on music/ the chosen club....&.&.&...............
Now as far as being a part in a larger macro of a total immersive multimedia experience then yes this is an amazing thing and the track is really good! But for myself honestly @Svetlovska I didnt really connect with the music until it was paired with the Neon Mountain City.
And for me that pairing created a kind of "cinical smirk on the lips im proving my point very elegantly type of experience" Which is punk rock in my mind.
Anyways thank you for my daily brain grinder.
Cheers
Wake me up when I can give a prompt such as
“The entire music video of Joy Division / Transmission, except that Pingu is the lead singer of Joy Division. Thanks”
Now that’s a video I want to see…
Right on, a vote for the humans right here!
So… there’s this dude…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=236&v=fiOrhg1nKZs&feature=emb_logo
For more explanation on wtaf is going on here, watch this:
There’s even an ipad connection there, what more could anyone possibly want?