French Songwriter Kiesza Composes First Mainstream Music Album Co-Written With AI (bbc.com) 51
dryriver shares a report from the BBC, highlighting "a new album that features everything from cowboy sci-fi to Europop." What's special about the album -- Hello World by Canadian singer Kiesza -- is that it's the first full-length mainstream music album co-written with the help of artificial intelligence. You can judge the quality for yourself: First, view the single "Hellow Shadow" with Canadian singer Kiesza. Next, the BBC story, which seems to think that the album is actually rather good: "Benoit Carre has written songs for some of France's biggest stars: from Johnny Halliday -- the French Elvis, who died last year -- to chanteuse Francoise Hardy. But this month, the 47-year-old is releasing an album with a collaborator he could never have dreamt of working with. It's not a singer, or rapper. It's not even really a musician. It's called Flow Machines, and it is, arguably, the world's most advanced artificially-intelligent music program. For musicians, there's been one good thing about these projects so far: the music they've produced has been easy to dismiss, generic and uninspiring -- hardly likely to challenge Bob Dylan in the songwriting department. But Carre's album, Hello World, is different for the simple reason that it's good. Released under the name SKYGGE (Danish for shadow), it features everything from sci-fi cowboy ballads to Europop, and unlike most AI music, if you heard it on the radio, you wouldn't think something had gone horribly wrong. Flow Machines, developed at Sony's Computer Science Laboratories in Paris, does indeed write original melodies, Carre adds. It also suggests the chords and sounds to play them with. But Carre says a human is always needed to stitch the songs together, give them structure and emotion. Without people, its songs would be a bit rubbish. "There were many people involved in this," he says, listing the likes of Belgian house producer Stromae and Canadian pop star Kiesza. "They gave their soul, their enthusiasm. I think that's the most important point of the album, in a way -- that it's a very human one.'"
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I met Weird Al in person, and he is a VERY intelligent artist to work with. A coherent parody is difficult to write.
AI? Really? (Score:2)
There's that term again, "AI"... Is it really?
Computer algorithms that automate and change and actually add to human generated tracks are nothing new.
Re: AI? Really? (Score:4, Informative)
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Indeed. Which is funny because JS Bach's music is some of the most mathematical and algorithmic. He once presented a series of Canons to his patron in puzzle form to be cracked. One would harmonise as in a typical Canon, by playing the initial melody over the top of the original, a few bars later. In another, by turning the score upside down.
Bach also lived in a time when the mathematics of music was evolving. The notes in a musical scale follow simple mathematical ratios. For example an octave is 2/1, that
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There's no reason a computer couldn't be trained on the many scores that Goldsmith wrote before he passed away, and then use AI to produce something that has unique elements but uses the same style as he did.
Unfortunately no, the computer doesn't understand what does and doesn't work together. Some people like salty popcorn and some sweet, but very few like half-salty, half-sweet popcorn or pepper popcorn. At best you'd get some kind of clustering where you get classic, middle-of-the-road recipes like lamb with rosemary and thyme. At the core of most the recent advances is self-learning, but it depends on some kind of evaluation of the final result. Like are you winning at Go, beating people at poker, reaching
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I'd like to see track by track comparison of what came out from AI and what has been added by humans to that track
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Incorrect headline (Score:1)
The French songwriter is Benoît Carré.
Kiesza is the Canadian singer on the song in the video linked by the article.
Canadian (Score:2)
Title says French, story correctly says Canadian (she's from Calgary). What about the AI though?
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Where the title goes wrong is that Kiesza is the singer, not the composer. Benoit Carre is the composer, and is French.
The humans will be replaced (Score:2)
For many kinds of music, the human is already irrelevant. You can just use a RNG to create grindcore or dubstep, and the singer in most popular music has not only been buried in a wall of noise, but their actual voice has been auto-tuned to oblivion. When we're all gone it's just going to be Skynet singing to itself.
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Now if only they could invent an AI that continuously posts "Get of my lawn", we'd have the entire old farts vs. modern culture lifecycle covered.
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Now if only they could invent an AI that continuously posts "Get of my lawn", we'd have the entire old farts vs. modern culture lifecycle covered.
For the first time in history, old music is selling better than new music. If that doesn't conclusively prove that new music is at least no better than old music (old music is cheaper) then I'm not sure what could.
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Sorry, it doesn't.
You can't measure quality by sales.
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You can't measure quality by sales.
The only quality which matters for music is whether people want to listen to it. Artistic merit is subjective. A song isn't inherently superior because it is clever any more than a human is.
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Sorry, it doesn't. You can't measure quality by sales.
But you can be certain that the music producers are noticing that their shit isn't flushing.
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Now if only they could invent an AI that continuously posts "Get of my lawn", we'd have the entire old farts vs. modern culture lifecycle covered.
For the first time in history, old music is selling better than new music. If that doesn't conclusively prove that new music is at least no better than old music (old music is cheaper) then I'm not sure what could.
The whole story here is interesting. I was listening to Studio 360 last winter, and they were outlining how modern Pop music is made. And it certainly sounds like this article is way beyond late. A group in Sweden performs much/most of the music composition. The algorithms are set to churn out tunes with an emphasis on "hooks". And churning out is the right word. Lots of them.
These tunes then go to people who decide if the tune sounds good or not. All the production grooups get the same songs, and there h
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When we're all gone it's just going to be Skynet singing to itself.
We need to set that line to music!
The Original Submission Title Was Different (Score:3)
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No one has ever accused a Slashdot editor of competence. Especially not this latest crop.
nothing beats a human computer (Score:2)
To preempt the inevitable juvenile anon coward assholes that will post comments about this, all I have to say is that the noise being created on Sl
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To be fair, there are things that computer generated music is definitely better at. E.g., the computer rendition of "The Endlessly Rising Canon" is superior to any human performance of the same thing, but this is because the composition depends on the alteration of the volume in the same note played in different octaves so that there is no audible distinction when the cycle revolved, with the notes starting off played so softly in a lower octave that they are difficult to hear, moving up to being played at
In a few years... (Score:3)
...the AI will sue him for a part of the money.
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...the AI will sue him for a part of the money.
Only if the code is registered with the RIAA and there is no prior art... come to think of it the generated tunes were almost completely based upon some melodic and rhythmic riffs done by real musicians so the code can be said to have come entirely from prior art in the first place... obviously there was nothing GNU in it!
RLOF, BARF, CHUNDER PLUNK!
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Since no one involved is from the US what does it matter what the US Constitution says?
I thought it said Al (Score:2)
I didn't like the song, BUT..... (Score:2)
I didn't care for the song, but I probably wouldn't have cared much for the source material from which the AI learned.
What if anyone could "teach" this AI musician from their own set of music and see what it came up with? This could be really fun actually. What if I fed it a dozen songs from various artists and told it to learn from that? Is a dozen not enough to come up with anything more than a weird mix? Feed it every song in my whole music collectiion.....
Hmmm......I might not like that. Remov