[wiremine]

> Music is about connecting to human emotions, not poor facsimiles of it

"art is in the eye of the beholder."

I listen to a lot of EDM, which can be very mechanical, but I personally have strong emotional connection to. I personally would welcome AI-generated music as an alternative to human-made.

To be clear: I do agree a "human-verified" system would be great, but I don't think it would be black and white. And I would guess that eventually AI music will be better than a lot of human made music.

[keiferski]

You will probably be able to listen to machine-generated music on most major platforms. I just hope there’s one which excludes all of that.

Personally I think it’s a bit like cultural junk food: it has the appearance of real food, but leaves one hungry afterward. Which really isn’t all that surprising – music isn’t just some random collection of patterns, it’s intimately tied to real culture. Current AI software is only ever going to copy and regurgitate human culture, not make meaningful creations from scratch.

[neutronicus]

I agree with the other poster. I think it's very difficult to guide this missile so that it blows up AI-generated music and doesn't blow up EDM.

My own taste in music is pretty junk-food-y I guess. Electronic music and not the pretentious kind. Dubstep, electro. Give me something that goes wub-wub. Incidentally, I think this experience mostly isn't one about human connection? Like, there is some circuit in my brain that likes that sound and wants to be tickled.

I can play classical piano to a mediocre standard. I listen to it and enjoy it occasionally. But, honestly, what I feel like my spirit needs is something that goes wub-wub and I think that space is densely seeded enough that maybe we can scale back human involvement in producing it.

[keiferski]

Sure that’s fair, and maybe my ideal platform doesn’t really work for electronic music and works better for singer-songwriters that perform live. Which is fine - I just like the idea of a platform that guarantees that a real person made this music.

[dominotw]

junk food is a common misconception about electronic music with ppl who have only listened to trash versions of it on social media.

[keiferski]

I don’t mean electronic music writ large, I mean AI generated music.

Electronic music is probably my favorite genre, broadly. But there’s a human behind the machine, not a random collection of patterns. To use a concrete example: NIN is about 1000% more interesting because of who Trent Reznor is, and not because it’s merely good music.

This disconnect is much more of an issue with say, country or bluegrass or jazz. To divorce those from the musician and their cultural context is to miss the whole point.

[someguyiguess]

There's a human behind AI-generated music too. A human writes the prompts. Your distinction seems rather arbitrary.

[keiferski]

Typing “make me an electronic guitar song about a bad breakup” is a whole lot different than learning to play the instrument yourself and conveying your own emotions from your real experience into a song that you write and perform.

If you can’t see how these are fundamentally different things, I don’t know what to tell you.

[neutronicus]

I think a lot of songs about bad break-ups were written by talented musicians without actual experience of a bad break-up, riffing on the corpus of songs they'd heard about bad break-ups.

Like, a lot of times you're just engaging with someone's desire to have made a song, and what they felt about some songs that someone else made.

[visarga]

Even if you generate the soundtrack, if you set the lyrics it can be great music. At least for one person, who chose the lyrics. I set some poems on music and I absolutely love the results.

[esikich]

Do you really think that's the only way to do it? I spend hours refining the output, slicing things up, redoing certain parts, tossing it into the DAW and compressing, adding effects, etc. I mean, if you think one shot prompts are the only way to use AI to make music fine, but you're being intentionally obtuse.

[kstrauser]

I made (what would eventually get called) EDM in high school and a lot of what I enjoyed was dismissed as “not real music”. It’s not a musician playing it, but a computer! Unless a guitarist was plucking strings or a pianist hitting the keys, it wasn’t “real”.

Doesn’t matter how carefully crafted it was: it’s only real if you couldn’t hit “play”. Sorry, Mike Oldfield. Hate to break it to you that you’re a fake musician.

I agree with you. I do enjoy some live musicians jamming on a stage, but for a lot of the genres I frequently listen to, I’d have no way of knowing if a song was written by human or by AI. If it’s good, it’s good.

[someguyiguess]

I learned music production by first learning how to produce house. Because of this, I can confidently say that house is not music. You literally just copy/paste over and over. Just because a human makes something, doesn't make it good or "music" necessarily.

[soiltype]

> I can confidently say that house is not music.

Hey, this is really fucking stupid.

[janalsncm]

I would respect it if he followed up with “the only real music is dubstep”.

[rvnx]

Their approach of "manually tagging songs that are good 'non-AI' and not good 'AI'" is a questionable approach from an engineering and product perspective.

They would benefit much more from a have a better recommendation and ranking algorithm that carefully monitors all metrics, recommends high-performers, and excludes unpopular content from the feed.

You can use the fact it was AI-generated as a signal, but it is just a signal among other criterias, not an outright ban.

Essentially, explore songs and artists, exploit winners.

    Lot of people abort a song/artist/creator/etc.

    Lot of fake listens.

    People don't like the song of an album

    Creator is historically with a low score

    etc...

-> Downrank

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit )

Then you judge the popularity of a song, an album, a creator, a playlist, etc not its creation method. Exactly like a genre type. It's not because you don't like country music that everybody should be forbidden to listen to country music.

It's good for them too, the more streams they do, the more money they get, and the more their audience is engaged. If the person doesn’t like “AI-generated genre” then just downrank it heavily on its recommandation feed, like YouTube or TikTok does.

[doug_durham]

People engage with music in different ways. Some people focus on lyrics and the connection they make. Other people largely ignore lyrics and focus on the rhythms and patterns. Both are valid and both are very human. We do not need gatekeepers coming in and judging what is music and what is not music.

House music can bring me as much joy as listening to Bach performed by a skilled ensemble. It depends on where I am at mentally. Both are valid forms of human expression.

[recursive]

I went to see an orchestra performance. They literally just only made sound by dragging their bows across the strings on their "instruments". I can confidently say that is not music.

[ozzmotik]

and it's so low effort too. like they never try dragging their instruments across the bows. where has all the creativity gone now that we have these "official protocols" of performance and musical quality!

[pesus]

It's pretty clear you didn't get beyond the very basics of music production or house music if you think this. I'd love to hear your masterfully produced house track to prove me wrong, though.

[brookst]

And yet there are well respected composers who intentionally copy/paste. Repetition is key to minimalism, for instance.

[y-c-o-m-b]

I believe we've already crossed the quality threshold for being equal to or "better" (subjective) than human.

For EDM, check out the AI artist "Vibfy". Especially the song "I Hear You" as it has the best mastering so far. The melody and vocals of all the songs are fire, but in some of the earlier songs the mastering is sub-par with strange volume changes and muddy beats.

There is an AI folk band called "We're all f*cked" that is incredibly good and indistinguishable from actual humans.

[otabdeveloper4]

AI music != electronic music.

Most AI music is actually country-pop ballads and indie folk.

Making electronic music with AI is hard and it isn't very good at it.

[blehn]

YouTube is already recommending tons of AI-generated electronic music. It's pretty easy to spot: It will have millions of views and the "artist's" discography will only go back to 2025 or 2026. It's usually just singles. The cover art is vague atmospheric AI-generated. The "artist" will have no presence online save for a couple instagram account with a couple posts that are also AI-generated.

[otabdeveloper4]

I'm not saying it doesn't exist at all, I'm saying electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song.

AI can't do "robotic" math music, it's best at sappy generic emotive stuff. (I guess this isn't at all a surprise for those that know how the musical sausage is made.)

[blehn]

> electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song

Why do you say that? I'd argue the opposite

[otabdeveloper4]

Look at the majority of AI music and see for yourself.

AI does common-denominator stuff best, and common-denominator is heartfealt lyrics over some pentatonic chords. (Not Kraftwerk or whatever.)

This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmnfixpA9Cs is a quintessential AI song.

[platevoltage]

I'd love to see AI take a stab at a Meshuggah or Dillinger Escape Plan clone.

[ozzmotik]

not exactly what you're aiming at with your comment but, sort of adjacent, maybe relevant:

https://suno.com/s/o0CtwRfvFXxxTDE7

[HDBaseT]

I occasionally listen to Drum n Bass & House music on YouTube. Just a few years ago a number of compilations, artists and playlists were made with the tagging of "PS2 Ambiance" or "PS2 D&B to Relax to", etc.

Most of these were either:

1. Legitimate music from the PS2 era games. 2. Music which could of easily been included in the games of the era.

I constantly see "PS2 Jungle Mix" and its AI, or entirely by one guy (which I assume is AI?).

This type of music is my background music whilst playing a game, or just chilling because it has no lyrics to be distracted by. It doesn't really matter all that much if its AI or not, but I still find myself filtering by uploads from a few years ago to avoid the slop.