[mjburgess]

Because the cause of a person singing is their mental states (desire, emotion, intention, etc.) and the cause of this generation of audio is that the words are associated with some backcatalogue of previous music.

Listening to songs, as speaking with people, is in large part about enjoying the causes of the song rather than the mere variations in pitch.

Beethoven's 5th even, purely instrumental, is enjoyable because of how the composer is clearly playing with you.

To generate pitch variations identical to beethovens fifth makes this an illusion, one hard to sustain if you know its an illusion. It isnt an illusion in the case of the 5th itself: beethoven really had those desires.

[int_19h]

The cause of many popular performers singing is primarily their desire to make money. It's not even some kind of closely held secret. And they still sell albums by the millions.

What you describe certainly exists, but it's not the entirety of art, and I would argue that at this point it's not even most of art.

[tsukikage]

Meanwhile, Hatsune Miku remains popular. There are even concerts.

[Devasta]

Hatsune Miku has more in common with Gorillaz than AI slop.

[tsukikage]

I did consider mentioning Gorillaz, but they are voiced by actual people, whereas Miku is software synthesis. The suggestion was that "the cause of a person singing is their mental states", but there is no person singing here and therefore no mental states in the singer - it's just Vocaloid.

Meanwhile, "To what extent can a piece of art be a thing that is of interest in itself, divorced from its creator, context, or any representation of anything in particular?" is absolutely a valid area for people to explore and one that artists are exploring all the time. There is now one more tool to play with in the toolbox.

I heard the exact same objections to the modtracker scene three decades ago - "it's just computer generated slop, I'm not interested unless it's a real person performing on real instruments". I maintain that not only was it a perfectly valid mode of expression then, but tools like Ableton grew in part from those experiences and are an integral part of much - most? - music now.