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by tomphoolery 2853 days ago
Agreed! I'm in a band called The Wonder Bars[1], and we play house music live with real instruments, but we also include drum machines. We're very far from computers being able to improvise (well), and 4-5 humans playing live instruments is just a crowd-captivating visual. Along with Agent Zero[2], Worldtown Soundsystem[3], and several other bands in the Philadelphia area, we make up a vibrant "live electronic" scene united by the way we make music, not by the genres of music that we particularly choose to write and play.

We're also DJs/producers, and as a DJ, I somewhat disagree with AI ever taking our music-creating jobs. Perhaps playing music will be somewhat more automated in the future, but history shows that creating music will just become more complex and more interesting as we continue forward. Think about it: There are still _professional_ drummers out there, people just paid to drum, when drum machines exist. There are entire orchestras that are paid almost the same salary as developers, yet the Vienna Symphonic Library lets a single person on a keyboard play an entire orchestra's score. The truth is, compositions have classically exploited the modern technology of the day to their own advantage, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. I can even imagine a world where the independent singer/songwriter suddenly becomes more capable than ever, with AI allowing them to orchestrate entire film scores by just playing a piano or a guitar into their computer. But I don't see the creative aspect of music dying just because we built a machine to organize some stuff better for us.

[1]: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2nrkwnQWEqM20n92QC7Cdy [2]: https://www.facebook.com/agentzeromusic [3]: http://world.town

1 comments

Oh I definitely agree we have nothing to worry about :) I may have to check you out though! I enjoy live house of many flavors.

But at the same time, photo style transfer is...impressive[1]. It's interesting to me that so many engineers are focused on creating machinery that learns the photographic signal subspace, but there's not too many working on the audio signal subspace.

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rdoiv.jpg