Popular YouTube Artist Uses AI To Record New Album (theverge.com) 99
An anonymous reader shares a report from The Verge of a popular YouTube artist who is using artificial intelligence to produce a LP: If you heard Taryn Southern's new single "Break Free" on the radio, you'd probably just keep driving or grocery shopping, or doing whatever you do in places that still have radios playing. The song is a big, moody ballad -- the kind that might play during the climax of a Steven Spielberg movie. "Break Free" wasn't composed by a John Williams copycat, but by artificial intelligence. The song is not a fluke or a novelty for Southern either; she's using artificial intelligence platforms to create an entire album, called I AM AI. It's the first LP to be entirely composed and produced with AI. Southern used an open source AI platform called Amper Music to create the stems of "Break Free." For each track, she plugs in genre, the instruments she wants to use, and beats per minute. In return, Amper churns out disjointed verses that can be rearranged into a song, and layered beneath Southern's vocals. Southern told The Verge she's toying with four other AI music platforms, but she's not sure which of those will make the final album cut.
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Nice (Score:5, Funny)
For once it might be Beyonce and Justin Bieber worrying about their jobs getting outsourced instead of programmers and service personnel. I like this new plot twist.
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People don't listen to them for their "music", it's because they want to fuck them. If they were ugly, would their music sell? No.
Justin Bieber IS ugly though!
They'll be alright. (Score:1)
The AI composes the songs - not performs them. And many pop stars don't write their own songs.
Elvis Presley had an awesome career singing other people's songs.
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The AI composes the songs - not performs them. And many pop stars don't write their own songs.
Elvis Presley had an awesome career singing other people's songs.
Unlike damn near every entertainer today, Elvis Presley didn't need Autotune.
And the only reason they'll be "alright" is because the music standard has dropped so fucking low that we don't even call them musicians anymore; they're now entertainers. The fans will welcome these AI-writing overlords and not miss a beat.
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I think it depends if you define "musician" to be synonymous with singer.
I would not consider a singer to be a musician *unless* they also wrote songs.
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I think it depends if you define "musician" to be synonymous with singer.
Synonymous? Well, no I don't. Singers are musicians, but musicians are not necessarily singers.
I would not consider a singer to be a musician *unless* they also wrote songs.
Well then you dismiss the overwhelming number of musicians (including singers) who do not compose their own music, but instead dedicate their careers to performing the music of others.
Singers are singers, pianists are pianists, drummers are drummers, guitarists are guitarists, composers are composers. But collectively, they're musicians.
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When I said "collectively they're musicians" I thought it was clear that I meant:
- singers are musicians
- pianists are musicians
- drummers are musicians
- guitarists are musicians
- composers are musicians
- etc.
I apologize if I caused any confusion.
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Puhleez, if you honestly though 90% of musicians wrote their own songs you are sadly mistaken.
Music used to be written and created. It held emotion and power.
Today, pop music is manufactured predictable shit. It's all based on a market-validated recipe of some brainless hottie laying oversexualizing Autotuned vocals on top of revenue-generating beats. The shift to letting AI create "music" only validates how truly easy it is to manufacture shit for the masses.
As I said before, the music standard has dropped lower than a dubstep track.
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You mean like the lead singer for Rammstein who has a dildo on the end of his mic? Or did you mean the spiked dog collar he wears? The medical procedure he underwent to have a light temporarily put in his mouth?
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Next stop - Sharon Apple.
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Except the funny thing is, T-Pain can actually sing. He just had the misfortune to latch onto an easy-to-reproduce gimmick, and in the end it killed his career.
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All music will be produced on-the-fly by AI
Cool; too bad we don't have AI yet. DId you mean to say machine logic?
Entirely (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the first LP to be entirely composed and produced with AI. Southern used an open source AI platform called Amper Music to create the stems of "Break Free." For each track, she plugs in genre, the instruments she wants to use, and beats per minute. In return, Amper churns out disjointed verses that can be rearranged into a song, and layered beneath Southern's vocals
That's an interesting definition of "entirely".
I would say "partially" is a better word.
Re:Entirely (Score:4, Insightful)
You're correct. In fact, it's only a few steps removed from playing a Casio keyboard with the arpeggiator turned on and randomly pressing the white keys.
I've used Amper Music and it's an interesting platform. Algorithmic and generative music certainly is interesting, but like this song, it's kind of dull.
A more interesting application is having an AI produce a musical score which is then performed by human musicians. Gottfried Koenig does something like this in a more traditional Western Classical tradition rather than pop music. I prefer the live interaction of man and machine to the "throw a bunch of standard chord progressions into some software".
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It's just like how "literally" now means "exponentially".
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Re:Entirely (Score:4, Interesting)
That's an interesting definition of "entirely".
I would say "partially" is a better word.
I'd be inclined to agree. I'd say this is as "entirely" produced by AI to the same degree as my own work has been for years, and many others as well. It's called Band In A Box [bandinabox.com], which has been around (though not with all the features it currently has) for almost 30 years.
I also have tracks where the entire composition was done by cgMusic [cgmusic.net], and I did all the arrangement and production, like this one [bandcamp.com], or where the computer did 80% of the composition, such as this [bandcamp.com] or this [bandcamp.com].
To musicians in my position, who create their tracks from the ground up all the way to mastering, none of this is even remotely new. We've been doing it not for years, but for decades. It wasn't called AI, and "expert system" is probably more appropriate, but it doesn't change the way it is used or the results obtained.
Algorithmic Interface ? (Score:2)
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Actually both terms never really were part of the definition :)
Self learning in AI is e.g. just a small subset, albeit one that made strong improvements the last decade.
On the other hand in SF or movies AI is often set equal to self aware. However I doubt the computer in Star Trek is selfaware.
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Whenever I see "A.I." in an article I read it as "Advanced Ignoramus".
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Obig Orwell (Score:4, Interesting)
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'seven of five'
..tertiary adjunct to Unimatrix sqrt(-1)?
LP???? (Score:3)
In what world does a music download equate to an LP??
Yeah get off my lawn.
OTOH This will be the Autotune of the future. I can't say that I am inspired by that song (seemed pretty generic and soulless to me) but I am sure I will be surprised someday soon.
Copyright all possible variations of "music" (Score:1)
They should just run the Amper algorithm nonstop, generating every possible chord and note permutation likely to appear in commercial music. Then they can sit back and sue any future hit artists for copyright infringement
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There should be an easier way.
Music is encoded at 44khz * 24-bit samples. That's about 1Mbits per second of audio.
Why not just run through all the permutations of possible 1s and 0s and copyright that? You'd literally have every possible 1-second sound that could exist.
Now, as to the computational power you'd need, well, there's the rub.
I AM Radio... (Score:2)
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By cutting into the BOM [wikipedia.org].
Who? (Score:2)
And soon someone will replace her with a vocaloid.
Who gets the ASCAP fees? (Score:2)
Does all the money go to the singer? Does the AI have representation? Does the AI make flaky demands like no brown M&Ms in the green room?
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I assume that the "brown M&M's" reference is referring to the legendary Van Halen performance contract clause stipulating that there would be M&M's but no brown ones in the dressing room. The rational for the clause actually made some sense. "The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide a simple way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and comp
Gyms will save a bundle (Score:2)
Instead of paying to license newest crappy tunes they'll just buy the software once and autogenerate a bunch of different songs to play every day.
I've been playing with this for a long time now (Score:2)
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Take it away R2D2, ladies & gentlemen, he's the man!...
My experience (Score:4, Insightful)
I have experimented with computer-composed music, and conclude it's fairly easy to make "pleasant" music: the rules for western ear expectations are fairly straight forward; stay within the rules and it'll sound "normal".
Markov-like chains of "hit tune" chord progressions can be mined, for example, to find decent chords. And there are fairly obvious rules for how the melody moves around a given chord and chord transitions, if you simply study diagrams/plots of several hits. The melody "likes" certain distances and relationships with regard to the active chord, sort of reminiscent of the probabilistic modelling of electron orbits (positions) relative to the center of the the atom. One can fine-tune the extraction of such patterns/formulas using statistics and AI (although I just eye-balled most of it myself and used some trial-and-error).
Now whether anyone finds music generated from such pattern mining highly entertaining and/or moving is another matter. For one, such is subjective: a pattern or technique that one person really likes, another may not. The hard part is not really generating ideas, but culling them. AI may indeed be able to cull based on patterns of existing hits to find a bigger audience, but after a while the easy-to-find patterns will get tired and stale to listeners. The low-hanging fruit will be all picked and people will want something different. It's why fads like disco, auto-tune, emo rock, and techno come and go.
Even if AI-using composers hone their techniques of generating candidate music, the hard part will still be culling against actual listeners: after all, AI does not buy music: only actual human "testers" will suffice. The cost of testing (getting listeners) will be about the same regardless of whether a tune is composed by a human or machine. Thus, you need to make sure the bot's quality is competitive with a human, or you are wasting money. On the web you still have to pay for attention (unless you get really lucky with cute hamsters or the like).
Another thing, my "music machines" tend to sound like my hand-composed music. It's modelling my own head more or less being I tune it based on my preference and by grabbing samples of stuff I like in order to extract patterns from. Thus, the artificial composer is sort of an extension of myself. It's just "implementing" my preferences.
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> Markov-like chains of "hit tune" chord progressions can be mined, for example, to find decent chords.
Hell, even a 4 note chord" [youtube.com] works. (Axis of Awesome)
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And closely related to the "4-chords":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But do note (no pun intended) that my experiments were mostly focused on early classical music. "Bach era", if you will. (I even put one on SoundCloud, but don't feel like giving a link out just yet.)
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LOL! Hadn't seen that one. Priceless!
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The "auto-composer" generates either MIDI or MIDI-like codes*, which I then feed into a MIDI player (synthesizer) of some kind. I also experimented with the "csound" library to actually generate sound (.WAV files), which gives one more control over the wave-forms, but I decided that's too much micromanagement needed by the bot, and went back to MIDI players. (Csound is fun to play with, though. It's better for "spacey" music than traditional.)
Keep in mind these
Sounds like it sucks (Score:2)
Generative music (Score:4, Insightful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Calling it "AI" instead doesn't make it new. But hey, I guess some random YouTube douche needSUBSCRIBE NOW SUBSCRIBE NOW SUBSCRIBE NOW
Order medical marijuana online , https://dabstarsh (Score:1)