| The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to. Pop is maybe 75% performance, sex, status, and charisma. The music isn't irrelevant, but it only really needs to be a committee-produced mashup of contemporary cliches to do its job. The rest is posing and attitude. >As it turns out, this kind of music is already pretty formulaic. But it's less formulaic than it sounds. Discovering that it uses Standard Chord Sequence Number 7 (from the small standard pop set) won't get you close to an interesting song. A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file. Basically there are huge gaps between a MIDI cliche machine - buildable now, and not particularly difficult - to a full virtual artist who produces even moderately successful tracks without human help, to a musical AI genius who produces completely new musical styles that capture the human imagination for centuries. You need a model of mind to do that last one, and we're at least 50 to 100 years away from that. |
I think this is a grand oversimplification. Personality certainly _contributes_ to pop stardom, but the music is still #1. Before anyone knew who Taylor Swift was, they connected with her through one or more song.
> A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file.
Of course, but even having an autonomous "songwriter" that could write _a_ hit would be a gamechanger for music (though obviously most immediately applicable to top 40 / pop)
> You need a model of mind to do that last one
I disagree. Machines already produce what would otherwise be considered "experimental" music, you just need some deep reinforcement learning to know what has mass appeal.