I don't know about that. Music is as much mathematics as playing basketball is physics. Musicians I have met, just do it completely intuitively, they can just feel it. Yes you can describe all notes, their relationships and their resonances with mathematics, but you can do that with anything and everything. That is the very point of mathematics - to describe things.
I think it is odd to say that something is mathematical, when all things can looked at through the lenses of mathematics.
Also for tasks that have clear indications of varying degrees of success. Like throwing a ball in a basket. Yes absolutely computers and AI will in time do them better than humans ever will.
But for music once you make a song that is perceived as "good" or "not bad", there is no such thing as better or worse, it becomes entirely subjective. So I do not know if it is possible for anything to be better than something else. For composers and music makers we often assign celebrity status and perceive some greater than others, but really the music some create is not better than the rest.
Maybe AI will be able to demonstrate technical prowess beyond human ability like be able to instantly write down all 15 sounding notes in a given beat in a song. But it does not make sense for it to better at creating music than humans in general.
music is one of the most subjective things in life, and what one person considers good or meaningful music is based entirely on non-mathematical forces like culture, early child exposure to music, and personal taste. Music only is mathematical in the same way everything can be represented by mathematical concepts. While I have no doubt ai will be able to make presentable music in the near future, music is about expressing the human experience, which is something ai can't do. Treating music like its a product that can be perfected shows a deep misunderstanding as to why people find value in music
I really like hacker news but the users here have very strange perspectives on art.
Question: could you enjoy a song if you knew absolutely nothing about the artist? Let's make it instrumental so you can't judge the voice.
From what you say I infer you couldn't, you need to know about their life, their struggles, their views on things, etc.
Some people can actually enjoy just the pure sound. Electronic club music tends to be like that, where if you listen it in a club or on the radio in a long mix you might have no idea what song is being played, the vocals and lyrics are ultra-minimal so no "human expression" there.
of course I think you can enjoy music as just "pure sound". I have no doubt that generative music models will make perfectly adequate music, and will almost certainly have the capacity to make songs that are great and moving. But just like visual mediums, music is more than just a file. Music is cultural. Electronic music is absolutely human expression, even if it isn't making some grand statement on society or the human condition it exists in context of other electronic music tracks. By simply having someone feel the drive to create a song and making creative decisions about how that song should sound and feels it makes a comment on the genre of electronic music, and contributes to the cultural project of music.
thanks for the thoughtful comment and I hope you have a nice day.
There's a video game called Sonic Chronicles--just before it was completed, the developers were prevented from using the soundtrack they had made and were forced to recompose new songs for the entire game for reasons that remain murky. The result are some almost incomprehensible pieces of minimally instrumentated MIDI music like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o47N-aYd08).
Yet despite sounding like complete ass, those songs were actually lifted from previous Sonic games, where they sound [completely different](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4-DQ4hGRJo) despite being structurally identical.
Well, not all MIDI sounds bad. Have a listen to the Addictive Drummer demos for example. It can sound pretty damn good / real. Still, your point is well taken. MIDI guitar emulations for example are still pretty dang bad. One wonders if this is because a guitar is a more continuous vs discrete instrument compared to drums. Even with all of MIDI’s rich parameters, it’s pretty tough to describe pick angle, materials, etc.
Also, I wonder if there will be a natural “backlash” against generic AI music and towards stuff that has more human imperfection. But then again even the AI will learn to imitate the imperfections so what exactly will make a piece more human in the long run?
The instruments are also mathematical, frequency ratios, spectrums, envelopes ...
MIDI sounds bad because while the notes being played respect a mathematical structure, the MIDI instruments spectrums do not integrate properly into said structure.
I'd really like to understand what you mean by this?
Yes of course, mathematics is used in the design of the instrument but it's not really a "mathematical" / precise device in the same way a calculator is, nor does a good musician conform to mathematics only when expressing themselves using the instrument.
In traditional musics, people use stones which when hit will make a sound that might conform to some frequency, but I wouldn't think the stone is "mathematical"?
I completely understand math is involved in Western and Eastern musical theory, but a saxophone being "mathematical" ? My trumpets and saxophones will only play the correct tones if I work with it to do so.
Disclaimer: been playing sax, trumpet since I was 6.
There is a mathematical structure in the harmonics of a piano note. There is a different one in the harmonics of a sax note. Yes, it's not 100% structure, there is noise too.
This is why the "timbre" of a piano is different from the timbre of a sax, and why the same C note might fit in a song if it's played by a piano, but not in the same song if it's played by a sax.
If you take a higher level view, the mathematical structure of the notes (the chords, ...) needs to fit the mathematical structure of the harmonics of the instruments (the timbres) to get a pleasing sound. Put another way, the timbres of some pairings of instruments might clash on a particular sequence of notes, so you need to search for a different instrument pairing which is harmonious on that sequence.
And then you have synthesizers, which are very mathematical in the way the timbre is generated (oscillators, filters, ...), but this allows you to exactly fine tune the timbre so it "fits"
There was a paper which studied the neurological basis of music.
One of the function of the brain is to predict the future. Neurons and brain systems are rewarded for correct predictions and punished for incorrect ones.
The main theory of the paper was that music is pleasant because it's repetitive nature and simple patterns makes it easy for the brain to predict, thus there is a lot of reward to extract from it. They focused on modern trance music and ethnic african drumming, both which feature very long very repetitive sequences, which reward the brain so much that they can induce a trance like state.
Not any random combination of physical objects is a musical instrument (yes, avantgarde music exists, ...) The sax is built the way it is because it generates a sound spectrum with harmonic relations between the frequencies (integer ratios, ...). Those who originally built the sax didn't use math to design it, but it so happens that the result respects certain mathematical ratios, because those ratios are highly predictable and pleasant to the brain.
Well. What I mean is that people have used mathematics in order to create music for a long time. But you're correct that everything is mathematical in a sense.
People tend to like the same pieces of music, so there is obviously specific patterns that people generally like. AI is good at finding patterns so in the end AI will become good at creating music.
It is useful to keep in mind the difference of 'music' and 'musical industry'. Musical industry relies on 'celebrity' and social interactions. It relies very little on its efficiency or performance at 'making music'. People want to hear what person 'X' is singing, and what 'story' they are telling.
To the very few that care only about the sound waves, AI will triumph because it will craft music that is perfect for that specific persons taste, and even include other parameters like tone, mood, state of mind, place of residence, weather...
The music, I guess. But there are people who like the artist - their interviews, shows, you name it. Not sure how's that going to map on AI-generated music. And no, avatars don't cut it - they are known to be fake so whoever appreciates Dolly Parton for what she's doing will not feel for some avatar issuing the correct words.
That sounds quite bleak, we're all really going to be living in our own worlds soon aren't we? "Hey did you hear the new album perfectly tailored for me yesterday?...of course you didn't".
We have computers and computer science because we can represent things mathematically. This is not insightful nor does it mean some software can automagially engooden things.
There is a thing in dance music where some DJ or producer will find an interesting new sound or style, and then other DJs and producers will produce sound-alike knock offs, and that will be interesting for _a while_, but eventually people will get bored of it and nobody will buy that kind of music again.
An AI might sort of make producing knock-offs of popular styles easier, but it'll also probably hasten the decline in popularity of those styles as well. One popular song is great, 3 or 4 copies of that style might still be good, but 10,000 indistinguishable copies of it -- meh.
I think what you might actually see is something like this:
A dj comes up with a new sound, and people might like ask an ai to produce a whole mix of songs similar to that record, just for them, that nobody else will ever listen to. Or even better -- a DJ might come up with a new sound and _sell an AI themselves_ that can produce songs like that on demand.
I think it is odd to say that something is mathematical, when all things can looked at through the lenses of mathematics.
Also for tasks that have clear indications of varying degrees of success. Like throwing a ball in a basket. Yes absolutely computers and AI will in time do them better than humans ever will.
But for music once you make a song that is perceived as "good" or "not bad", there is no such thing as better or worse, it becomes entirely subjective. So I do not know if it is possible for anything to be better than something else. For composers and music makers we often assign celebrity status and perceive some greater than others, but really the music some create is not better than the rest.
Maybe AI will be able to demonstrate technical prowess beyond human ability like be able to instantly write down all 15 sounding notes in a given beat in a song. But it does not make sense for it to better at creating music than humans in general.