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Mindblowing AI toolbox to recreate "The Shaggs"
First post for a long long time. TBH, since the appearance of ChatGPT, my inner computer nerd has been so fascinated by AI that from then on AI drew my attention and spare time away from music making. I dived deep into the topic and spent countless hours learning all I could about AI. Surprisingly, music-making with AI tools has not advanced as much as generating images or text.
Anyway, I want to recommend this YT video and channel, which is IMHO one of the best AI YT channels and one of the few about music-making with AI tools. Since all the tools used in the video are either web-based or use the free GPU tier of Google Colab, it can all be done from an iPad. Unfortunately, you need to be a Patreon to access them, although I find $3/month not much to gain access to their solutions with free tools.
Believe me, this will be great fun to play around with it in the holiday season and is my Xmas present for the iPad music community that I still love. As a bonus, this video will introduce you to the remarkable band "The Shaggs", if you don't know them already.
Comments
Thanks for this, mate.
Welcome back.
Welcome back. Love that album so I’m excited to check out the vid.
I had never heard of The Shaggs. Sounds like they were punk rock OGs. Amazing what AI can do today and what it’ll be doing in the coming years. Thanks for sharing and welcome back!
Actually, I'd call this particular experiment a failure. The Shaggs' songs seldom followed a consistent clock and they seemed to follow the rhythm of natural speech instead, which makes a lot of their stuff sound and feel quite chaotic.
This is f’ing brilliant 🤣
It’s interesting, but doesn’t really capture the amateur and clumsy elements of the band. I guess they are one of the hardest bands to get AI to replicate when you consider how difficult it would be to describe their music to another person.
Let me first say that I am out of touch, and I'm obviously wrong. People on the forum love this. Please ignore me.
However! My initial response: This just sucks on every single level.
The concept is glib and shows a total misunderstanding of the Shaggs.
The writing for the narration is cliche and vacuous. It feels like a student paper desperately churned out the night before it's due, and the overriding concern is meeting the word count.
The intercuts of visual memes are just deadening. It's as if every human emotion or insight can be reduced to a gif of Travis Bickel clapping or a cat shaking its head no or Jack Nicholson nodding yes.
But the use of AI Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain is really peculiar. I mean, I get that it's a "joke." But both Zappa and Cobain did actually have thoughts on the Shaggs. (It's clear that the author's research extended only so far as this Medium post that superficially quotes both musicians on the band.)
But the ugly, uncanny-valley versions of both artists saying nice things about AI? Ethically weird and borderline insane. I can't think of two random figures who would have been more suspicious of AI than Zappa and Cobain. But this is a fascinating aesthetic decision, and it shows the hand of the AI fanboys. I don't think there's an actual musician among us who thinks AI is awesome and will be necessary to create music. So they invented very handsome versions of iconoclastic musicians and made them say their AI project was cool! LOL
I'm not a Luddite. Technology is the pinnacle of human achievement — I'll grant that. But though coding can be artful, it isn't art. And the Shaggs "songs" produced at the end miss the point completely. They're just bad bad, not good bad. If nothing else, the drums are quantized!
I know that I'm making too much of this. It's amusing, and the stakes are really low.
But I keep thinking of the phrase from one forum influencer on a different thread who casually defined the human soul as a collection of our tastes and preferences. Holy shit, guys.
It’s an interesting and kinda sad story. I recommend reading into their history when you get a chance and checking out that debut (and only?) album. It’s outsider music and not good by normal standards buts there’s something inherently human and great about it.
I’ll definitely check it out. Thanks!
I really never heard any Suno generated vocals that I liked. IMHO that's the greatest weakness of the experiment. It sounds just awful. Yes, it's true that the AI generated Shaggs sound more robotic than the original. But for me this is not about generating a whole song by AI. It's about a new way to create sound. I really find it amazing how the fine-tuning of the musicgen model really catches the vibe of the Shaggs. This motivates me to do my own fine-tuning.
Actually I really find audio generating AI models already quite useful right now. Not for a whole track but when you split the generated audio into stems and then edit and mangle the samples, you can get some quite interesting material out this process. It's definitely more creative than browsing sample libraries. I want it as a new tool to generate sound, new ways to craft a sound.
Absolutely interesting and sad story.
A singular combination of stage-parenting taken to an authoritarian level, anxiety over societal changes, and delusion all wrapped up in New England Gothicism .
Yep. I feel bad listening to it sometimes but seeing them reunited and playing shows makes me think they’ve come to peace with everything overall.
@HotStrange
I read about them. Crazy sad story indeed. Been listening to philosophy of the world.
You know how 3 lefts make a right? I think that’s the case with the Shaggs 🙂
You can definitely hear some influence in Nirvana, especially the sound of Kurt’s guitar as well as the starting riff on smells like teen spirit.
A fun challenge? Sampling their songs. I’ll think about it
Cool mate, I’ve been quite interested in it as well, thanks for sharing.
I had the flu once, and Shaggs played on repeat on my stereo, and I was too tired to change it. I became a big fan!
Edit: watched that video. Very fun!
I heard of The Shaggs before but never listened until now.
Wow....jeez. It really is 'so bad it's almost brilliant'.
You can definitely see it as an early progenitor or indie music. The songs are quite catchy, but they're obviously lacking the most basic musical skills like keeping a consistent rhythm, playing even remotely in time with each other, etc. But it's an interesting listen for sure. Definitely a bit tragic too, reading the backstory. Original records now selling for $10000 a pop, wow. I wonder if they managed to find all 1000 of the original pressing, would be a lovely windfall and would be at least some compensation for what their dad put them through.
A couple of them have played one off gigs here and there, with musicians who have deliberately retuned their guitars, but what I have heard on YouTube just doesn’t cut it compared with the vibe of the original album.
AI songs are already showing up in Spotify playlists. The corporate suits don’t wanna have to pay people.
Ted Gioia has been writing about this for quite a while. A lot of the money behind music AI is so that streaming services can stream music they don't have to pay royalties on -- their profit margins are so low that their business model is essentially to figure out the least expensive way to keep you from turning the app off. They do a lot of research to figure out how many songs you actually like they have to stream to you in order to keep you listening -- and they will fill up the rest of the time with the least expensive music they can.
They also have been buying up inexpensive/unsuccesful labels to be able to stream music from them.
Gee, that's not like you.
But I'm with you on this one. The whole thing was horrible.
Why AI is a disaster for the climate:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/23/ai-chat-gpt-environmental-impact-energy-carbon-intensive-technology
this channel is awesome...
Ai is a perfect fit for a century that seems, so far, to be obsessed with delusional unreality.
Every dog has it's day.