Here's the time I'm devoting to your deserved response to both posts you made. Sorry about the delay.

I see where you’re coming from and will concede JMSL’s ability to algorithmically create music.

I still maintain an artist using that or similar software (Guitar Pro, etc.) to translate their own ideas into a more manipulateable form for composing/practicing is fundamentally different from prompting a genAI that has been trained on ideas stolen from actual artists.

Yep yep, true fax.

Quick edit; Generated slop training on generated slop is already a problem and will get exponentially as more platforms are flooded with it. That will only alienate and divorce it even further from reality. It will only get worse.

Yep yep. Feedback loops in neural nets are bad business.

Wouldn’t you prefer the ‘actual’ musicians making ‘actual’ music be recognized instead of being buried even further under exponentially growing pools of emotionless notes arranged into emotionless music? The musicians you and I both appreciate for their creativity and skill are having that skill and creativity stolen from them and you’re cool with it because pop doesn’t innovate?

Right. "buried even further". It has pained me for about 20 years that the greatest musicians of our time are just fucking left to rot away on random ass jobs and release one or two fucking albums here and there, hold down meaningless day jobs and the corporate shitshovels rake in the big bucks and dictate what music is. The damage has already been done before any computers, AI, or anything of the sort entered the picture.

The article is about how there's generic AI music on spotify. Before that, there has been a fuckload of generic human music on spotify; but when you said the generic shitty human music was generic, shitty and soulless, you got painted as some heretical elitist. I dunno, maybe I'm too millenial , since while Estradasphere was ignored, Igorrr is at least playing big festivals to big crowds and recognized in places.

The damage has been done already, and I am getting mad at people blaming new tools based on existing compositional ideas for the human failures that have existed, and will continue to exist as long as there are human beings.

Record execs have leeched off actual creativity for a solid century now and you want to end them with an even more soulless product that still doesn’t pay artists?

I don't particularly want to hear shitty generic AI music any more than I want to hear shitty generic human music. It's all the same bottom of the barrel crap. Artists have been complaing about getting no money for working with record labels already. No one's getting fucking paid to begin with.

The take home message for me isn't "The machines are killing us" it's "Man is a wolf to man" and blaming tools is distracting us from the actual eternal message and truth. It's not the fault of an uranium ore that it was used to bomb Nagasaki instead of power a nuclear plant; or improperly disposed of and caused cancer. It's people that are bombing each other and giving each other diseases. The war in Israel/Palestine/North of Ireland/Northern Ireland isn't religion; it's desire for resources and the minds of people.

The only reason the song you linked is ‘imaginative’ is because a real human already imagined it only to have it tossed into the slop pile for a computer to root through. Wouldn’t you prefer the ‘actual’ musicians making ‘actual’ music be recognized instead of being buried even further under exponentially growing pools of emotionless notes arranged into emotionless music? The musicians you and I both appreciate for their creativity and skill are having that skill and creativity stolen from them and you’re cool with it because pop doesn’t innovate?

Right, but there's many instances of art being made like that and then shoved into museums. Sometimes it's compositionally interesting to set up a system and try to coerce emergent behaviours, or to create a loose system with randomised parameters and a rough idea of what you want so that it's different every time.

Sometimes it's nice to listen to a hand crafted masterpiece where every meticulous detail has been laboured over for years and years.

I don't want AI to displace human made music, far from it. I love music, I make music, and I want my favourite musicians to be able to make ends meet.

But I don't want to cloud my objective judgement and say "this is a robot, it has no feelings therefore no one is expressing anything". The roots and processes that led to the AI have a foundation in both human artistic (music, visual arts) and mechanical (mathematics, programming) creativity and vision. And not just "programmer wrote neural net, fed it human music".

Like I mentioned various times throughout these rambling, asenine posts, mechanical composition and using chance in music generation have been in place for fucking ages. Eno, Cage, Russolo and I'm sure someone, some point in history has set up a musical performance near birds on purpose to have them accompany.

People have made art through collages and songs through sampling and distoring samples. Programmers have been writing procedural music generation for a long time; I have no idea since when, but I'm sure it has existed; dynamic music in games has existed since the 00s at least, probably longer.

I think, and I need to emphasise this : in a non mass market, corporate media way, these AIs are a way of experimenting with music, and having fun, seeing what comes out when you change parameters. These things are meant to have the entirety of human creative works (or close enough to it) lying in them, surely you can get some interesting things to come out of it if you fiddle it enough and then think about it.

That said, music written via formula to cater to the lowest common denominator and generate the greatest possible monetary return is certainly closer to how genAI is/will be used, but the human element involved in writing, recording, and performing that music still distinguishes it from the sort of slop showing up on Spotify.

Yeah, and it sucked when it was some random pop musician getting paid through the ass for no fucking reason than being a product. You know what, it's worse with a person, because it sets the bar of musicality through the floor and says "this is what people can aspire to do : the bare minimum and it will yield the best life for them. No need to try harder for music! Just replay the same fucking chord progression and you too can make millons.". At least if it's a shitty AI song, everything is transparently stupid. "Of course it made #1, it was mathematically engineered to offend no one and make no statements in a computer". Removing the human element at least lays bare the transparent money trap the generated sound is.

AI generated works are an exemplar of derivative beyond that of even the blandest pop. The only human involved is the prompt writer at best; lyrics, melody, the recording itself are statistical approximations and entirely devoid of human creativity and that is an utter tragedy.

But that's the thing man, it all boils down to what the prompt writer is doing. If they put in "make new pop song" than yeah, of course it's going to sound like nothing. If they actually take the time to write out a clearer vision of metaphors and feelings and ideas, perhaps it will come out with something better and unexpected; For example, Shining does some pretty cool saxophone tricks, but I have never heard his voice actually turn into the saxophone and back again the way I heard it in a passage in Pho Que. These kinds of accidents and emergent behaviours can come about because of glitches or the vision of the person controlling the music generation. It can be done by hand in regular music creation, sure, but the AI generated music can do fun cool things as well that can inspire.

Again, I don't want AI music to replace human music. But I think it's a really simplistic way of looking at things whenever I see "AI bad" all over lemmy. I mean, I also don't like seeing the fake bands pop up on YT and spotify, especially when they pretend they are "real musicans", especially when what they are doing has already been done by people and now they are overshadowing the actual people.

But that's not the fucking neural net doing it; it's some asshole trying to make a quick buck, or someone who had an idea that they got carried away with. We're back to the central theme : "Man is a wolf to man" .

Anyway, that's it for now, I have some other ideas I wanted to bring up but couldn't find a good place to crowbar them in (The evolution of Shining's sound for example). I hope you read this and thank you if you did. I value your opinion and I'm glad to run into someone else into BTA and heavy music with saxophones.

I have felt for a long time now that it was a shame that Rock 'n' Roll stopped having saxophones in it. Some bands are bringing it back, but some of them use it too smoothly in serene passages wheras I want the saxophones to screech and make hell noises over heavy guitars.

First read this post I already wrote (TL;DR : the software he used was software for generating music, not writing a composition) : https://lemmy.world/post/32532002/18110617

Second, apologies for mixing metaphors and rambling about many things at the same time that are similar. The callout about synthesisers is about them reducing band sizes, not about composition.

If I program a instrument/synth in Supercollidor or Pure Data or some hardware synth, and then sample the instrument/synth or create and sequence a melody for it on my MIDI (piano) keyboard or Schism Tracker, etc., I have complete and absolute control over everything, down to the very waveform. In that case I am truly and purely the creator of the piece.

I agree with this complely.

Brian Eno literally created ambient music with algorithms like that, but it is still his creative work.>

If I type in a prompt, I am just playing a probability lottery. I have done jack shit more than describing a piece of music.

This is the center of the kind of point I'm trying to get to with John Cage and Brian Eno. They made partially completed pieces that were to be re-assembled algorhymically by machines later on, giving up complete creation of authorship to an inhuman entity. Tie that to :

Why isn’t it seen as a collaboration between the person writing the prompt (using a scripting language) and the programmer/designer of the generation software and curator of the Data set?

There are very structured and algorithm based ways of writing music , that can be automated in a computer, and varied with parameters. Composers/programmers were already doing this in experimental music. They do , and continue to do it in video games with dynamic soundtracks that react to combat intensity. What's the difference between these and writing a prompt that says "generate a 3 minute song based off a popular jazz standard chord progression, instead of saxophones use Neys, instead of a double bass use a church organ, make the drums sound like they are from the 1900s, use the song stucture of intro-chorus-interlude-chorus-solo-outro , set the tempo to 150 bpm but make it get faster between structure changes, and use 4/4 time for the intro, swing in the rest."

Do I have to go record several pieces of music or have a synthesiser play through variations of the chord progressions, cut them up and roll a dice by hand for it to be my composition?

The core idea is that record executives have been doing that since pop music existed. No one involved in the process wanted anything other than to make money. It's the same fucking picture. No one gave a damn before, but now they do. It seems stupid to not care back then.

The idea is drawing paralels to already established bullshit that's been "putting musicians out of business". A person doing a DJ set for a "live gig" like Skrillex should be seen as putting musicians out of business if this stupid elevator music tier AI BS is being put up on spotify. Compare and contrast Skrillex with modern Igorrr, he has like 4 people on stage with him doing a DJ set, Skrillex (or insert solo DJ "performer here) is just alone on stage.

They had the same fear with synthesisers, "who needs a trumpet or flute player when the Moog synthesizer can do it all?! Look at it play an orchestra's worth of sounds on "Switched on Bach"!"

I guess I need to put a signature or whatever on these AI posts : "my point isn't that AI is awesome, it's that human beings have been doing this shit long before neural net AIs came along to make this shit up". The point of the post is "Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore" My point is "They haven't for fucking ages, why the tears now?". It's not "AI generated music great" , its "Humans have been making soulless slop forever"

Also : "Artists already made art worthless during the post modern era with Warhol and Pollock; what are you getting mad at software developers for?"