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by zoogeny
453 days ago
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Yes, and one of my points was: if metal becomes as important to musical history (over a similar time span) as classical romantic music or jazz it will get the same treatment. I'm arguing that reasoning "classical music is important because it is written" is backwards. It is written and studied because people think it is important. The degree that the formalisms are applied is directly related to how important the elites in the academies think the music is. Please don't mistake that claim with me suggesting pop music or metal are in fact as important as classical or jazz. I'm just pointing out that nascent formalisms for those genres obviously exist. But my main point is, just because classical music has been deemed important enough by the academy to write it down, study it and enforce its strict reproduction, that does not imply that it is easier for an AI to learn the genre or reproduce it effectively. I have no doubt that just like millions of humans, multi-modal AIs will be able to use the vast library of recorded music in all genres to easily reproduce those genres compositions perfectly well. There is no privilege to classical just because the historical context meant it was committed to paper rather than record. |
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This is of course silly; there are important traditions of broadly non-literate music, and modern popular music (with its huge variety of "genres", including metal, EDM etc.) clearly qualifies. I have only argued here that classical music being written makes it special/unusual, in a way that's legitimately compelling to some. (Including academic elites, and people looking for stuff to train an AI on.)
Do note that classical music being "written down" is not something that has happened "after the fact": the written form is how the pieces are published to begin with! (There's an interesting contrast here with 'folk' tunes, that spread orally in many subtle variants and are only written down afterwards.) Now, it is also true that performance practice can add a lot, historically; you don't have to reproduce strictly what's written. But the abstract "blueprint" to what you're performing is given by the written piece.
> I have no doubt that just like millions of humans, multi-modal AIs will be able to use the vast library of recorded music
Training an AI on recorded music is really really hard. They have to learn about how the acoustics of every single instrument works and this overwhelms the information that we actually care about, of how a piece of music goes. The difference there is absolutely clear, and quite massive.