[neohaven]

As a person who likes music, making it, listening to it, breaking it down and hacking it...

Making a classical arrangement that evokes a particular expression in the listener is the job of the musician. If an AI system helps you explore the possibilities there, it's more like a studio musician that's able to improvise. You're still the person, the human, the emotional filter, that picks "This sounds right" or "This doesn't" for a particular situation. It's a judgement call. An emotional one.

An AI might be able to fake it, communicate with it, but it will never replace humans choosing the sounds that please them more than others. Humans communicate through music. It wouldn't surprise me that an AI would be able to as well. I don't think it would necessarily write emotionally strong music, not without human training.

Edit: I guess what I'm trying to say is, sure, computers might be able to make music. Ask any guy who messes with modular synthesizers. But they're a tool. The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself. It's like arguing "Since AIs will be able to comment on Hacker News, humans won't."

[Enginerrrd]

>It's like arguing "Since AIs will be able to comment on Hacker News, humans won't."

I'm not so sure. I often go into threads on HN and realize that every idea I could come up with on the subject has already been expressed better than I could do it, with greater expertise, and cited sources. I don't comment in those threads. If AI bots could populate a thread with every likely human thought and argue it with depth and sophistication in a well reasoned, yet carefully approachable and well-explained way, well then... again I don't think I'd feel like I would be adding much value by participating.

[neohaven]

And yet, here I am, bringing up something no one seems to bring up in the thread. One would also logically come to the conclusions that disparate AIs with disparate interests would find different things to express, to make music about, to draw about.

What distinguishes music written by AI from music made from humans? I have a story to tell. If the AI has a story to tell, one that speaks to our human emotions, it might make good music. But the point is to communicate. Even if you take, for example, someone else's words, fit them to a different model in a different field, viewpoint... You might get interesting things. You could make a cover of someone else's song, with your twist. Adding your emotion to the melting pot. AIs might be good at that, just like that, but only through communicating. Just like us. We have no idea whether they'll be better than us at doing it, or merely equivalent. We have no idea what is lossy in our sharing of mental models. Perhaps it is an unsolvable problem, which we will find out in the same way we found out about Gödel's Incompleteness.

It seems to me like we fail to understand how unique we are. We are in a unique position to shape what comes after us, and we are blind to how much we unconsciously select for things. We have an innate mental model of "humanity" we are trying to transmit to machines, and I am not sure we fully grasp it well enough to make sure we are creating something like us. We fail to do it properly to humans, sometimes, who actually do share most of our instincts and habits. Something entirely different from us? Color me skeptical.

This kind of debate only highlights this, to me.

[sujNansnam]

What your comment suggests to me is that good composition requires an agent with a world model and generalized task-solving ability, along with a personality. I think developing the world model and task-solving will be the hard part, and if we can do it, it won’t be that hard to make it have a personality too. That’s just another task.

[neohaven]

What my comment is trying to suggest is that AIs are not proven to be different from us. They might not have one "ultimate" form. They might be just like us humans. Diverse.

[patmcc]

>>>The fact an AI can express itself through music is sure as hell not gonna stop me from also expressing myself.

I think this is the key; if you're making music for your own reasons, no AI (or Mozart) would stop you. But if you're trying to make money at it, or desperately want listeners, you may eventually be on the "losing" side.

[bobthepanda]

Would it? Popular music sees major paradigm shifts every few years, and AIs only really generate things based on observation of existing patterns, at least as far as I can tell.

As far as recent examples go, Lady Gaga and Lorde were major breaks from what was prevalent at the time they started releasing music, and then spawned artists trying to emulate them.

[sl1ck731]

A pattern implies that it can "infer" something in the future.

If we oversimplify and compile a list of traits about "the world" as it was in the past that allowed a new genre or artist to flourish, AI could predict that in the future. It isn't like the paradigm shifts just happen in a vacuum.

Granted there are probably millions of little things that lead to this, stuff like the shared experiences of an entire generation coming of age, political climate, trends in other industries, etc. Not that I believe it will ever happen to an accurate enough degree, but theoretically I don't see why it could not be possible to approximate given time and resources.

[filoleg]

A lot of those things are completely random and non-predictable, to be honest, no one can predict which paradigm will win and take over for the next decade. Especially since when a game-changing paradigm comes, it is usually not received well universally at all, until the moment it takes over the public conscious completely, and then the switch is flipped.

If you feed an AI a bunch of modern car designs and ask it to design a new car, it will design you something like a modern ford or honda/toyota, but it will never design something like a Cybertruck. Which I believe will be the next paradigm shift in the design of trucks (that has been super stale and stagnant for at least the past 20 years), but this is yet to be seen.

For an example with music that has already happened and became apparent - Kanye West's "808s and Heartbreak" album from late 00's. On release, it had very polarizing reviews, most of which were skewing towards "really weak and weird". Fast forward 10 years, most of hip-hop and pop music is directly influenced by that album, most of top 50 albums use similar patterns and methods used in that album, and critics have made a complete 180. So now 808s is hailed as one of the biggest (if not the biggest) paradigm changes and influences in music of the past decade as a whole, as well as the best album by Kanye, despite at the time being called the worst. Imo an AI trained on music of 00's that came before 808s would have never been able to come up with something like that, but it totally could've come up with another top 100 song using existing paradigms.

[sl1ck731]

It doesn't have to be like Kanye's album at that point in time to be a paradigm shift, though. If 1 artist didn't get big or some genre blow up then it would have just been filled by an infinite amount of others that we never heard. Even considering a single artist hitting it big there are how many that are never heard of? An AI could produce an equal number of artists and only has to win once every month/year/etc. I think this is similar to the million monkeys at a typewriter thing.

[patmcc]

It's hard to say - maybe for a sufficiently advanced AI, Lorde's style would be an obvious extrapolation from the popular music of the time. Certainly we're not there yet, and it's an open question if we ever will be - but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if one day AIs can make better music/poetry than the best humans, by any metric we care to use.

[neohaven]

I'm always going to enjoy a person coming and showing a bit of themselves through their music.

That's not something we can really lose without losing something that connects us. People want a story. That has sold since the beginning of time, and it will keep selling. People will keep being moved to music, giving money to the artists that inspire them, and that requires connection. Maybe an AI/human team would make some really incredible stuff, and I'd be willing to pay for it if it makes me feel something. I think the human touch of "selection" will never truly leave, even if only in the listener's mind...

[kraftman]

I'm sure they'd have said the same thing about a computer being able to win Go not so many years ago...

[chki]

I think the problem with music is that there is no "objectively good" music composition. It remains entirely subjective and all criteria that are used to differentiate between "bad" and "good" albums are highly subjective. (Maybe something like "originality" might be measurable in some way but even there it gets tricky really fast)

So music generation (similar to poetry) is imo a completely different problem space altogether.

[arcticfox]

I think the only difference is that instead of one win-lose metric, there are 7.7 billion individual good-bad metrics on music.

For every individual doing the evaluation, I think it will certainly possible to train an AI to beat humans at getting "good" scores.

[jakeinspace]

Real, authentic music generation is a harder problem than go or chess, but I'm not sure that makes it any more emotionally difficult for a future writer to face a true musical AI than it was for Lee Se-Dol or Kasparov.

[vbezhenar]

It might be hard to judge. Some people will insist that generated music is bad, because it's just their subjective opinion, even if 90% of random selection will find that music good.

[zouhair]

You are splitting hair here. Which end user really care about what the composer was thinking when they created a piece. A piece can be enjoyed without having any knowledge of its author.

[Ma8ee]

Imagine the day when you can’t find a more satisfying note than the one the computer already have chosen.

[amelius]

The point is: what if the tool becomes so great that practically anybody can use it? Anybody could be that "filter" and "be" a great musician.

[p1esk]

http://aiva.ai - anybody could be that "filter"