It's the Beginning of the End of Real Music....

[Joe Guy]

My recent nightmare....

A/I music is going to take over the music world. Eventually, there will be grammys awarded to artificial recipients by an artificial Recording Academy. The majority of kids being born today won't care because they will grow up hearing artificially manufactured music and they will like it.

"Chill, Grandpa, it's just noise that sounds good, who cares how it's made?"

It's already at the point where anyone with absolutely no musical knowledge or talent with an A/I music program can create music and vocals. And just as bad.... or maybe worse, there are people today listening to audio streaming on the internet who are already fans of singers that don't actually exist.

Here is a short video of a musician (Rick Beato) who addresses the subject, in case you're interested.....

[ex-khobar Andy]

I liked his Twizzlers analogy. I am less concerned about AI music - although I am friends with some excellent musicians - than the AI junk I see on Facebook which purports to be real. NYT had a piece a few months ago about AI generated faces - reader was asked to choose which ones were real and which were AI - I think I got 50% right - in other words statistically random.

[Burning Petard]

Just one more marker on the long road of monetization. I watch: "Live, From New York (on tape) IT'S STEVEN CORBAY !"

One of my favorite christmas albums is a collection of traditional music, all produced and generated on an early Apple computer using a program written by the producer and performer named on the album. It took him two years to make it. Never did a second album. Imagine some IA animation, as done by the first version of Photoshop. Possible, but not bloody likely.

The antidote: live music. Go see who is performing at your local watering hole. Do it yourself. Why can't friends gather around a piano and sing sheet music together? Go to the local community symphony performance. My local library has local community musicians do free performances monthly. Has nobody heard friends together with the spoons (banging two spoons together all over their body) along with a kazoo or tissue-paper-comb?

Just like real home cooking from scratch may not match the gourmet quality of the tv show on baking from the tent on the perfect lawn of the English manor, with the white-haired Lady, criticising 'the crumb' or the symmetry, uniformity, of the decorative shapes. Home-made has an unforgettable quality of its own. But the biggest cost is the resource for which we have that same amount as Elon Musk--personal time.

My personal complaint. Military funerals with a fake bugler playing taps, with an electronic gadget in the bell of the 'bugle' generating the sound.
At least the local VFW honor guard uses real (chrome plated) Garand M1s for the salute.

snailgate.

[Sue U]

Is AI worse than Nickelback, or One Direction, or the Spice Girls, or K-Pop, or any of the music specifically manufactured as a commercial product? The vast majority of the stuff turned out by humans is crap, too, but every once in a while there's a spark of artistic innovation. AI can't do that because it can only copy and mimic what has gone before, it has no ability to make a creative leap. Which, y'know, is fine for certain applications (e.g. telephone hold music); the fact is most people are perfectly satisfied listening to the same thing over and over; very few even think about the artistry of composition and performance.

Coincidentally, yesterday I was talking to the former frontman of a power pop band I had played in. He told me he had just written a (rock) song and on a whim fed the lyrics into an AI music program. It came back as a slow country song with twangy guitar and southern-drawl vocals. I listened to about 40 seconds of it and it was awful -- just a dreary rehash of dumb and hackneyed musical tropes. It all "worked" in the sense that AI put together a chord structure and melodic sequence and matched them stylistically to a genre, but it was sooooo booooring. He wanted me to give him the lyrics of a song he really liked that I had written 35 years ago so he could see what AI might do with it. Fortunately, I have "forgotten" that song.

ETA:

The antidote: live music. Go see who is performing at your local watering hole. Do it yourself. Why can't friends gather around a piano and sing sheet music together? Go to the local community symphony performance. My local library has local community musicians do free performances monthly. Has nobody heard friends together with the spoons (banging two spoons together all over their body) along with a kazoo or tissue-paper-comb?

I thoroughly agree! And this Sunday I'm playing a concert with the Philharmonic of Southern New Jersey (3 p.m. at the Performing Arts Center of Eastern Regional High School in Voorhees). Come out and see us! (We're doing Shostakovich 5 -- it's magnificent -- Finlandia, and a Ralph Vaughan Williams oboe concerto.)

[BoSoxGal]

I love Shostakovich’s 5th! Wish it wasn’t such a long drive.

[Sue U]

I love Shostakovich’s 5th! Wish it wasn’t such a long drive.

The first time I heard it was when I played it 50 years ago in All-State High School Orchestra and I fell in love with it immediately. It was also the first time I heard a celesta, whose sound (especially as used here) fascinated me. This will be the second (and sadly, most probably the last) time I will get to play it.

Wow, it really hurt to type that.