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by swatcoder 1222 days ago
Sure. But in this case it’s worth remembering that you’re not just listening to ChatGPT’s work here. It wrote lyrics and some weird chord progressions.

The OP, who is himself the frontman for the Decembrists applied his best effort to instill that with a melody, performance style, and sonic character of his band. He could take material from a 5-year-old or a Markov chain and dress it up to sound like a fair Decembrists song.

If you took the same ChatGPT output to another musician, expert or otherwise, you might not have the same experience you’re having now.

4 comments

I think your last point may hold for this genre of music but not necessarily for pop. Pop musicians are extremely versatile. They sort of have to be to stay relevant. Take Ariana Grande for example. She could sing basically anything in any style you want[0], but you may not even have to ask her because we have efficient zero-shot voice cloning now[1]. Before you wonder if this will work for music, check out this video of AI generated Eminem track[3].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss9ygQqqL2Q

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.02111.pdf

[2] https://aka.ms/valle (demos from one)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtFNOSTTPYg

[4] https://github.com/NVIDIA/tacotron2 (used to create audio for 3)

The Eminem parody is too good!
> The OP, who is himself the frontman for the Decembrists

Wow, buried lede there. That should be in the title!

I read the article, pressed play on the song and thought "wow, the author did a great job at sounding like the decemberists", then scrolled back up and saw the author... doh!
And at the other end of the scale, regular old digital tooling (sequencers, samplers, VSTs, chord transposers, autotune, DAWs and beginner DAW alternatives) has been doing the more important stuff to allow people that are not skilled musicians to produce something resembling a song for a long time before LLMs. Some in a more user friendly manner than others.

Stringing together some cliches and googling "what are some common chord progressions?" was never the barrier to humans becoming singer-songwriters and computers lowered more important barriers some time ago, though credit where it's due, the LLM is reasonably good at picking lines that rhyme.

Spot on.