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For Video Soundtracks, Computers Are the New Composers (npr.org) 171

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Reader jader3rd writes: NPR has a story about computer composed soundtracks being used for small video projects.

Ed Newton-Rex, the company's founder, is a composer who studied computer programming, and says he started to ask himself: "Given what we know about how music's put together, why can't computers write music yet?" "You basically make a bunch of choices that really anyone can relate to," Rex says. "That's one of our aims. We wanted to make it as simple as possible, [to] really democratize the process of creation." Despite the successes there's been limited investment, because audiences and producers are uncomfortable with it. "On the credits they don't want to see 'Composed by Computer Program Experiments in Musical Intelligence by David Cope,' " he says. "It's the last thing they want to show their audience."

But how much longer will that last, until audiences are comfortable with seeing that a movies soundtrack was computer composed?


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For Video Soundtracks, Computers Are the New Composers More

For Video Soundtracks, Computers Are the New Composers

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  • How much longer... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @03:23PM (#54512905) Journal

    until the entire movie is computer composed? It's not much of a stretch.

  • The audience really cares who makes the music? Aside of a few memorable scores, I couldn't even say who did it for most movies.

    And producers? I am pretty sure you can convince them with "It's as good as human work but cheaper".

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hackel ( 10452 )

      Just because you have no music appreciation doesn't mean the rest of us do not as well. I care very much, particularly is where film is where the the majority of good, new music is coming out of these days. And you don't have to look far to see producers and directors that feel passionately about their scores. They will heap all kinds of praise onto a composer they really appreciate for bringing their vision alive.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by g01d4 ( 888748 )
        While you certainly don't want music to intrude in a negative fashion, its transparency to a viewer might not be a bad thing. In other words, the music might contribute to a viewer's experience of a film without their explicit awareness (or acknowledgement).

        film is where the the majority of good, new music is coming out of these days

        I recall speaking to a local community college professor composer several years ago whose aim was film scores. I was initially surprised till I realized a good score stands alo

      • My point is that people will probably not really care WHO did the music as long as it's good. Yes, there are a few memorable scores but I bet you anything you want that you will find more people who can instantly identify the Imperial March hearing less than two bars than people who can name the composer.

        That's basically also the point of the article. Computers today (allegedly, seeing, respectively hearing, is believing) can create interesting and emotional musical cues for movies, and the article claims t

      • To reinforce what you said, I'd say: Sorry to burst your bubble, A.I., but music and singing is not really based on logic. It's based on feelings and mood.. Stuff that comes out of my mind and other musicians is spontaneous, totally random, somewhat chaotic, and eventually comes together like many rivers into an understandable semi-logical/or logical merge. And a Lot of music that we have heard on the radio is just that. So when you all come up with AI that thinks like a human. Call me.. I'll put them into

    • The audience really cares who makes the music? Aside of a few memorable scores, I couldn't even say who did it for most movies.

      That's the fault of lazy/untalented composers and disinterested film-makers. It's especially bad with Marvel films. As an exercise, try humming the theme song from any Marvel film*.

      Effective soundtracks can make a mediocre film truly memorable, and lacklustre soundtracks can make a great film forgettable. The viewers attention can be grabbed momentarily with action or impressive visual effects, but to really grip them you need a sold soundtrack. Done well you'd hardly notice it was there, but if it were abs

      • I agree, and personally I would prefer a compelling story and interesting character development to loud explosions and wiggling tits, but I guess that's not the mass appeal anymore.

  • A movie will certainly have a computer composed soundtrack soon... but in 8-bit. Think Avatar 2 with "The Legend of Zelda" soundtrack running in the background.

  • Why would we need this?

    • Why would we need this?

      For soulless movies. Like Transformers. Or (judging by the trailers) Baby Driver and Atomic Blonde.

  • People Don't Demand Better (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BlueStrat ( 756137 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @03:31PM (#54512961)

    That's why. They've found people simply don't care. It's the same with bands that used to play in bars and clubs. The venue owners found out they didn't have to pay live bands or performers, that people were fine with a DJ/karaoke, or just a jukebox with a decent speaker system. They still patronized and spent money at roughly the same rate, and the owners pocket a tidy sum in their cost savings.

    And then people wonder why they can't find live bands in bars and clubs anymore, and why now movie scores will be generated by software going forward.

    Because people have proven they'll tolerate it. That's why. If venue owners or movie producers/studios lost money without real performers, this would not be happening.

    Strat

    • Re:People Don't Demand Better (Score:5, Interesting)

      by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @03:50PM (#54513107)

      They've found people simply don't care. It's the same with bands that used to play in bars and clubs. The venue owners found out they didn't have to pay live bands or performers,

      I used to play guitar in bands 25+ years ago. I'll never forget a discussion I had with our rhythm guitarist one night. Being that he was probably almost twice my age, I figured he was old and didn't know what he was talking about. He told me that no one really cared about anything we did as long as the drum beat kept time. He explained to me that he thought there might be one or two people out of 500+ in the crowd that would even notice if one of us made a mistake.

      To prove his point, during a song in the middle of the set he let go of the fret-board and strummed the open strings a couple of times. Not a single person stopped dancing, or even noticed as far as I could see. No one said a thing to us about it. While were were packing up, the owner of the bar even told us we were really on that night. So, you're probably right.

      • I was in a group setting where everyone picked a song they could relate to and it was played for the group to discuss afterword. I chose Joe Satriani - Satch Boogie. Shortly into the song people realized the lyrics weren't coming as a started having multiple concurrent discussions about various drivel. My point? Most people don't know what music is today and have zero appreciation of it. If they don't hear about crack and hoes and how the front man is da bestest cause he gets his money ridin' dirty it has n

      • To prove his point, during a song in the middle of the set he let go of the fret-board and strummed the open strings a couple of times. Not a single person stopped dancing, or even noticed as far as I could see. No one said a thing to us about it. While were were packing up, the owner of the bar even told us we were really on that night. So, you're probably right.

        I still play the occasional gig. It's even worse these days. Even on the tunes that have typically had the dance floor filling up, you look out beyond the glare of the par-cans, and all you see are people with their faces stuck in their phones.

        C'mon, people! That behavior from an "audience" is downright soul-killing! We've literally spent decades and invested our souls into learning to perform for you, at least show a bare minimum of respect!

        Strat

        • and all you see are people with their faces stuck in their phones.

          I'm not sure why so many people refuse to live in the moment at all these days. When I go to a public place anymore, I feel like I'm surrounded by zombies half of the time. I'm starting to think that if the Matrix came out today, most people would feel it was a better fantasy world to live in than Star Trek.

          • I used to be a nerd. Now I'm constantly surrounded by people who are more nerdy than me. They have their faces stuck in a cell phone.

        • C'mon, people! That behavior from an "audience" is downright soul-killing! We've literally spent decades and invested our souls into learning to perform for you, at least show a bare minimum of respect!

          Well, realize that I'm only there because I'm friends with one of the other bands that are playing, just want to see the headliner, or because I want to eat and have some drinks. Perhaps I even want to speak to my friends which I can't do with a live band playing too loudly in the place we happened to choose to go to, so we text each other instead. Still, I'm old and have fairly esoteric musical tastes so my impression of what the current live music scene is like probably doesn't fit what I expect.

      • "Bar audience misses short flub from local band, anecdote tortured to death in order to prove unrelated point."
      • I was shocked to realize the same thing a few years ago. We were looking for live music performers for a festival. A cellist friend brought in a CD of his friend playing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. While we listened to it, he raved about how good his friend was. I pointed out he was missing a lot of notes, and everyone looked at me like I had just said spaghetti grows on trees. So I started pointing out every time he missed a note, and all I got were dumb stares. It gradually dawned on me that the v

      • 21 Pilots.

        They are a strange beast that I'm addicted to (four months with pretty much nothing else, I compare them to the Beatles at Sargent Peppers level). And while their live sets have a lot of electronic parts, most drums and singing are live, and freaking awesome.

        They play for the crowd, to an incredible effect. Shoot, the crowd sings half the vocals.

        But search for acoustic versions, that's the sweet spot. They are great musicians.

    • I feel a bit wistful asking this, but is it really worse? Deadmau5 isn't necessarily better or worse than the NY Philharmonic, just different. And while computer-generated scores might be mediocre now, soon enough they will probably exceed what a human can do.

      • Deadmau5 isn't necessarily better or worse than the NY Philharmonic, just different.

        Hey now, I didn't mean DJs who have taken it and techno/trance to the next level. That's talent and that's far, far and away from some lame $50/night bar DJ spinning oldy-moldy CDs from his milk crate until the drunks go home.

        Same with hip-hop/rap, dubstep, etc etc. I have very eclectic tastes. I value talent, technical ability, dedication, and ability to connect on an emotional level with the audience foremost. I consider Tupac one of the major artists and talents of the age. Steve Vai is also amazing and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by J-1000 ( 869558 )

      And then people wonder why they can't find live bands in bars and clubs anymore, and why now movie scores will be generated by software going forward.

      I find this to be overly cynical. People are complicated, and their tastes along with the scenarios they find themselves in are extremely varied.

      Back in "the good old days" music delivery was far more homogeneous. You had records, you had radio, and you had live. Records had to be found and paid for, and radio was unpredictable. Those two mechanisms didn't alw

  • They should just go into pop music. That stuff is already mass produced, with songwriters literally sitting in rooms together churning out songs (this is why songs from different artists can sound the same, because they essentially have the same parts in them). Seems like it should be pretty easy to automate that, especially given the formulaic nature of current pop music.
  • The music for the video game "ballblazer" from 1984 was algorithmically generated, according to http://www.langston.com/Papers... [langston.com].

    • "Been done since 1984"

      At least, and it hasn't got much better since then. The examples of human and computer generated 'Vivaldi' pieces in the story make that clear.

  • This is pretty much how pop music is written already. There it seems completely appropriate, since there is no skill or innovation required. But for actual film music? While algorithms can compose absolutely pleasing pieces (because we've been conditioned to like them), they cannot properly account for the various emotional complexities involved in an actual film. I fully expect this to replace film composers on crappy, network TV shows, perhaps even low-budget films. Everything is about budget and tur

  • We don't need background music when we read a book, so why do films need it?

    • because most movies are actually pretty boring

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dunbal ( 464142 ) *
      Because music and sound in general adds another layer to film - an emotional layer. This can be achieved in books with good writing and far greater depth of character and plot. In movies - which are really just a brief synopsis of a story - you need to hammer your point home a lot faster.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      Adds non-verbal cues to the scenes. Reading a book != watching a movie.

    • That's like asking "Humans don't need wheels for walking, so why do cars need them for driving?" It's a different medium that uses different forms of expression.

  • How To Actually Try This Service - Instructions (Score:5, Informative)

    by dryriver ( 1010635 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @03:39PM (#54513033)
    Set your browser to https://www.jukedeck.com/ [jukedeck.com] and click "Make" in the top right corner of the screen. Once you've created an account (email required), you can start playing with AI compositions. The options are a bit limited right now - you choose genre, speed, how many seconds in the compositions peaks and so forth. Then their cloud tech composes the track and records the resulting composition through machine learning driven synthesis.This takes about a minute. They describe the tech in more detail on their research blog. This tech is clearly in its infancy. But the audio tracks created are actually quite pleasant to listen to. Not much worse than typical stock music you'd buy for video tracks.

    • The sound samples I listened to on the NPR article were fingernails-on-the-chalkboard hard to listen to, the audio equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. But, as music is really nothing more than patterns, it should be entirely possible to have a machine assemble enough human-generated patterns with enough elaboration and finesse to be listenable. A sampled instrument library is basically exactly that, anyways.

  • The hangup is on audience reaction? Pick a pseudonym. "Composed by Sound Tek featuring David Cope" would be sufficient. The audience would need to look it up in order to learn it's an algorithm written by Cope rather than a band.

  • Credits (Score:3)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @03:41PM (#54513049)

    On the credits they don't want to see "Composed by Computer Program Experiments in Musical Intelligence by David Cope".

    Of course not. We want to see "Soundtrack composed by CPE-MI v2.5, vocals by Hatsune Miku v3".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vanyel ( 28049 )

      Who actually *reads* "composed by" credits anyhow? I don't think any but audio nerds actually care who did it as long as they like the sound. Computers couldn't have done a worse job than the soundtrack for Ladyhawke.

  • Computers have been doing this since the 1950s (Score:4, Informative)

    by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday May 30, 2017 @03:48PM (#54513089)
    https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html#computer [stanford.edu]

    The earliest instance of computer generated composition is that of Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson at the University of Illinois in 1955-56. Using the Illiac high-speed digital computer, they succeeded in programming basic material and stylistic parameters which resulted in the Illiac Suite (1957). The score of the piece was composed by the computer and then transposed into traditional musical notation for performance by a string quartet.

    http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html [nytimes.com]

    IN a low-key, musical version of the match between Garry Kasparov and the chess-playing machine called Deep Blue, a musician at the University of Oregon competed last month with a computer to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Steve Larson, who teaches music theory at the university, listened anxiously while his wife, the pianist Winifred Kerner, performed three entries in the contest -- one by Bach, one by Dr. Larson and one by a computer program called EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

    Dr. Larson was hurt when the audience concluded that his piece -- a simple, engaging form called a two-part invention -- was written by the computer. But he felt somewhat mollified when the listeners went on to decide that the invention composed by EMI (pronounced ''Emmy'') was genuine Bach.

  • I recommend anyone go to the TFA website and click on the two music samples, one written by a computer and one written by vivaldi. One sounds beautiful and one is repetitive and annoying. I correctly picked out the vivaldi one right away and I suspect most other people can as well. Machine composers are not ready if this is a demo of where they are today.

    • I correctly picked out the vivaldi one right away and I suspect most other people can as well.

      I only listened to the first 15 seconds of each one, but I didn't detect any significant difference. However, I find the vast majority of classical music to be monotonous and mundane. So it's possible that the issue isn't that the computer composed music is just as good as the human composed music, but rather that most human composed music is just as bad as computer composed music.

      That being said, I was impressed with how authentic the computer composed music sounded. I suspect that the vast majority of

      • Must be all that classical training. The two samples were as different as night and day to my ear. They should do a blind test and see how many people can pick the real vs AI composition.

      • However, I find the vast majority of classical music to be monotonous and mundane.

        No the issue there is definitely you lol. That's not a problem, there's no need for everyone in the world to understand music.

      • as long as it elicited the proper emotions.

        That's precisely the problem. A computer can reasonably copy Vivaldi's sensibilities in chord changes, melodies, and arpeggios, but putting it together in a coherent way that's appropriate to the scene is the tough part.

        This would probably be good enough for short commercials, but wouldn't be up to snuff for anything dramatic.

    • The only use it seems to have found so far is as a kind of advance white-noise filler for youtube videos. It is perfectly adequate for that.
  • Beep-Boop-Beep

  • "That's one of our aims. We wanted to make it as simple as possible, [to] really democratize the process of creation."

    Where, I suppose, "democratize" is supposed to mean, "characterized by the principle of social equality for all." Or in other words, everyone should be able to compose a movie soundtrack without regard to musical talent, training, or hard work. Sounds ideal.

    • More like the practical definition of democracy, which is along the lines of "the least unpleasant compromise nobody really wants other than its better than what the other demographic truly wanted".

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • how does this even vaguely make it so?
    Or is it like German Democratic Republic....

  • That's the only reason why 'computer composed music' will ever be a Thing. Meanwhile people with actual taste will wonder "Who wrote this garbage? Oh, it's computer generated, no wonder it sounds totally uninspired and generic".

    GREY. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO END UP BEING GREY. That's what your so-called 'AI'/Robot world has in store for you all: Nobody will have any incentive to learn anything or learn how to DO anything themselves. Everything will be done half-assed by some shitty algorithm or by some hal
    • A) That mechanized fantasy is self-repairing. As time goes by, I suspect it will be quite resilient. B) War will be mechanized also... I wouldn't count on there being an "other side of the fence". Try not to build your human outpost on any oil resources.
      • That's all bullshit too.
        • We will see. The future is hard to predict, I'll grant, but I think there's a lot of data in favor of my scenario. Check back on this thread in 20 years. Whoever is right will ask his robot to fetch the other a beer... if it isn't too much trouble for the robot. :-)
  • ...who studied music theory, and programming. A few years ago he wrote an A.I. program that composes music. He mainly taught it to compose Jazz, but I am sure that it could be taught to compose any kind of music. It's a pretty cool concept.

  • Despite the successes there's been limited investment, because audiences and producers are uncomfortable with it.

    No it's not. Not all that many people care who composes the music. But for anything big enough to have credits in the first place, the current state of the art AI is not going to be good enough. It's fine for a YouTube video of your cat, but AI can't yet score a dramatic moment or a sad death or a chase scene. Jukedeck is just an automated muzak generator.

  • I've been using cgMusic as a source of compositions for a couple years now. I don't turn to it often, but it's good when I need something that doesn't fall into my own tropes. (It has its own limited set of tropes though.) I then handle the arrangement and the engineering, and do a bit of editing to the composition itself, all of which is simple because the program outputs MIDI files.

    Here are [bandcamp.com] three [bandcamp.com] examples [bandcamp.com].

    I've also used other procedural generators to take existing music and re-mix it, such as this [bandcamp.com]. I had

  • If an AI composes a song, since it is transforming existing data through a neural network (not conscious "artistic creation") , it by definition did not create anything new. It's just a random number generator.

  • Inception is known for a single note of a song they play throughout the film.

    But for the most part, this allows amateurs and low budget studios to focus on what they're good at and have access to things they're not good at.

    When starting out, plenty of people just rip off music or graphics or whatever they're missing from professional sources and risk copyright issues if they release their finished product.

    Not everyone who wants to make computer games or movies is an artist or a composer or has access to one

  • To my ears, the computer-generated composition is cringe-inducingly bad.

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