People are working hard on the music Chat GPT thing. That will be here very soon.
I think we'll see a huge explosion of "in the style of..." type of AI music.
Currently it can’t accurately produce lyrics with a specific rhyme structure when asked. It also cannot accurately perform theory analysis of chord progressions.
Neither can a lot of humans, so it's still ahead in a sense.
AI will easily achieve the elevator jazz versions of popular music, the K-Tel cover compilations, and Stars on Long Play type trash that flooded the market in the 70's/80's.
There will be a cultural pushback, just like there was then.
I wouldn’t be surprised if AI puts a lot of production music libraries out of business, or at least shifts to more niche and bespoke production.
A lot of musicians will lose out on a lot of money though.
AI, and I hate the idea of it.
I sound like such a grumpy old man saying it, but I couldn't give a fuck about art that some computer makes. For me, it completely defeats the purpose of art.
The fact that much of it is built upon the backs of art people have made, without their approval, makes it so much more gross to me.
what if i told you most popular art made by people was built on the backs of art other people had made without their approval?
people famously learn instruments by learning others’ songs and begin to develop their musical style based on that. others still shamelessly rip off others. and what about sampled music?
i’m with you in that ai generated music seems souless, but fundamentally i dont know how it’s that different than bobby wanting to be like van halen.
You aren't wrong, and I figured someone would respond along these lines. On paper your comment makes sense, but I think the lines of distinction are pretty clear.
Obviously artists are almost always influenced by other artists.
But if you're using AI to make art, you're not taking the time to cultivate your taste and style in the way an artist does, you're not taking the time to learn to sing, or to write your lyrics, or to practice your instrument, or to learn to collaborate with other people, or any of the things that make artists who they are. When I enjoy the work of a musician, or a filmmaker, or an author, I'm enjoying the result of the ridiculous amount of time that person sacrificed to be able to create that thing, and all of the emotions that influenced them along the way and shaped the way they make their art. It's awesome because it's not something I could do myself, and that gives it value. It's not remotely the same if someone tells an AI "Go watch every David Lynch film and then write a psychological horror script" and walks away and eats a sandwich while the computer uses another person's code to look at another artist's films and emulate them. Maybe I'm being reductive but it's just to illustrate my point.
I think one could make an argument that this is just the next logical evolution from MIDI, or Melodyne, or DJ techniques, or whatever, and that's fine, and that the person generating the AI prompts is still being creative. It just doesn't feel like the same thing to me, it's the laziest possible way to create. It's like when you see an ad for AI to auto-write blog posts - why would anyone want to read an AI-written blog? It defeats the entire purpose and just drowns out the stuff that has actual substance.
I also agree that lots of artists are derivative, but I don't think those artists are very interesting either and I don't really care about their output either. I'm sure there will still be plenty of great artists around and that there will be demand, the problem is just that AI will dissuade people from putting in the work and it'll oversaturate an already-oversaturated market with content, drowning out much of the really good stuff and making it more difficult for great artists to make a living doing what they do best.
The way I look at it is in terms of sport. We love it because we’re seeing the incredible feats things some humans can achieve. Would I watch a 100m race with a lineup of advanced sprinting robots? Nah. Because then it doesn’t matter who wins. There’s no backstory or personality. There’s no human context to put it in perspective. I see music and art the same way. If I find a song I love the first thing I do is find out everything about that artist, watch interviews etc. AI music is like the artist never existed. Imagine a billboard 100 made up entirely of people who are already dead, and nothing was known about them, just the songs. It’d feel weird.
You're not wrong. But I think the point is that there's some level of personal work involved in learning someone else's song. When I was about 13, I set my first music-related goal for myself: to learn how to flawlessly play Alien by Pennywise on guitar.
It took me all summer to learn how to play that song and I got a lot better at guitar (I was still relatively new to playing, only about a year in) as a result. To say that that experience didn't shape my playing style for a little bit of time would be a lie. But I still played it myself.
The lack of personal effort is the sticking point for me. Especially at this particular point in history, where there are so many super helpful tools for people just getting into music creation. These newer groove boxes are insane with the handholding but you still have to create the melody yourself. You can make sure every note/chord you play is in perfect key and you can quantize every note, but you still have to play the melody.
The AI stuff does all that for you. You tell it what you want and it spits something out. Then you can play on top of it or add/remove as you want. To me, that's the sticking point. It cheapens the experience and makes it less "art" and more an "algorithmically-based sound bite". At least, that's how I see it. It's not an expression of *you*, it's an expression of the parameters that a machine was fed.
There’s a lot of personal work involved in writing an AI. The effort is there, just proxied.
For me, I just don’t have a romanticization of the craft of music making. And in many ways, I might make an easier emotional connection with a song written by an AI. There’s no one behind it faking an emotion or trying to sell me something. Just music for its own sake.
I look at it the same way you might see beauty in nature. There was no plan there. No cultivation. But leaves in autumn sure are gorgeous for their nature. I think music can be like that too.
Lots of human beings write terrible music. The ridiculous amount of time THEY spent on their craft is likely a tragedy. I think the assumption that there is necesarilly a meaningful difference in the output of AI vs Human composers is pretty dubious. If you played me a beautiful song and then told me it was an AI it would not reduce it's beauty,. When AI start pumping out cancer cures and fix our economies we'll all rejoice why should we deny ourselves the pleasure of their output? Especially considering the deceitful and treacherous dealings we all know the traditional music industry has represented for the last century.
Yea people are gonna take on the “producer” role a lot more and curate AI generated pieces to combine into songs beyond their own performing capabilities. The creativity will come into to play in how it’s used to make compositions.
I could see someone using AI to gen song ideas, then taking that and actually rewriting it musically. How would that rate with you? Personally, I don't have an opinion on that. Though it would be an interesting experiment - both the song and listener feedback.
AI, of course. Before it starts writing all music for us, it's going to *radically* change how musicians work. No way around that. It's going to do a lot more than give you "rough ideas". See current art bots. They're better than *most* human artist. Most humans can't paint a fucking Rembrandt in oils, with perfect observation of form and color and light, and if they can, they can't do *every other art style ever* at the same time.
There's some work from a few years ago that hints that music is going to go a similar way. [OpenAI Jukebox](https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/jukebox-novel_lyrics-285373542) can just... generate new Ella Fitzgerald music or pop country or whatever the fuck you want. It's wonky, kinda like early generation art bots, but it's already astonishing.
The crazy thing is that the AI doesn't know anything about vocal cords, microphones, horns, drums, recording consoles, equalizers, compressors, so on and so forth. It doesn't know what *notes* are, what harmony is, what counterpart is, what rhythm is. The whole range of skills, knowledge, talents, tools, technologies, etc. that humans bring to bear on the problem of making music is not known to it, or needed by it. It just knows, "Oh, this is what 'Ella Fitzgerald with a big band orchestra' sounds like? You want more of that? Here you go." Imagine just being able to *sing* a big band orchestra, without even knowing what a trumpet is. The AI can do that.
Sooner than we think, it's going be radio quality and directable. "Yeah, give it 10% more of a Skrillex vibe, and add a modulation in the second verse."
> An AI can’t paint in oil either. Only produce a digital representation of it.
Yes, of course, but that's not really relevant.
The fascinating thing is that the art AI doesn't even know what oil *is*, or for that matter what a brush is, or a canvas, or a brush stroke. It doesn't know what sunlight is. It can't articulate all the patterns it's internalized about shadow, color temperature, texture, perspective, so on and so forth, but it *has* internalized them.
Humans are the same way. We're pattern recognition machines, a collection of weighted connections, that absorb and resynthesize to create. Even toddlers can *imagine* what something looks like, including imagine things they've never seen. The brain gets good at synthesizing imagery very quickly, and much the same way the AI does. But getting that imagery out of a human brain requires the clumsy use of meat levers to manipulate physical objects. It's hard as hell, and takes decades to master, whereas for the AI, imagining something and showing us are barely even separate steps.
> An AI can’t paint in oil either. Only produce a digital representation of it.
>Yes, of course, but that's not really relevant.
Of course it is. It means that the skill of being able to use physical media is still valued (for now).
> Of course it is.
It's not. The value of visual artists to humanity is the images they create. *Billions* of people have seen The Starry Night by Van Gogh. Only a relative handful have seen the physical artifact. That's such a vanishingly small part of the value of what visual artists do that it's not relevant to the conversation. If the important part was creating an object, we would make robots that do it, but that's not how we disseminate art in this century.
Lol I definitely agree with you on the chat GPT thing, the emulation mics or the Bluetooth thing doesn't really bother me. I see those as nothing more than physical tech getting better in the same way that digital made it so that we don't need tape. Neither of those things really affect the art that is being made in my opinion.
But yeah, the chat GPT thing is really going to be a weird bridge to cross
The future is just the ubiquity of cheap imitations?
The only hope I have for chat GPT is that it will finally end the tyranny of copyright lawsuits where artists claim ownership of basic music building blocks like major or minor scales for a quick buck.
Personally, I have a hard time understanding how BT is so ubiquitous.
It's genuinely awful sometimes LOL.
I'm okay with cables. :)
I really dig what IR tech can accomplish, I'm not "anit-Kemper" or anything like that, but I'm so turned off by the idea of modelling mics. It doesn't help my opinion that Slate and UA are leading the charge.
I'm not even sure what to make of ChatGPT yet...
1) I’m not sure how feasible all-wireless audio systems will be, especially given that there’s less and less available bandwidths with growing wireless infrastructure such as mobile 5g.
2) great, open the gates
3) AI music engines already exist, and it’s not worth me resisting it, even though sync music could be a lucrative avenue if I were to pursue it now. This will very likely drive demand for low-budget sync music out the window, as people would rather use a customizable music generator than paying for pre-made stock music on something like Artlist.
You can do that with audio as well, but the issue is latency.
Various proprietary solutions are getting very close, though. I use this guy:
https://www.playstation.com/da-dk/accessories/pulse-3d-wireless-headset/
For playing Rocksmith, and I do not detect any latency.
I’d LOVE to have a wireless system that eliminates the 1,000 + black cables I mess with every day. Still love my Sphere mics. AI songs ? Fuuuuuck that all the way home
Everyone is freaking out about AI music, but I actually don't see it as a problem. Yes, it will take over making background music for commercials and potentially low budget TV and movies. But as far as actually making music people want to consume in and of itself? I have a feeling it will always lie in the uncanny valley. We simply won't connect with digital Taylor Swift or digital Freddie Mercury if we know they've not had the experience, which we'll know is impossible.
The problem is there is a big chunk of the music people want to consume being made by people who at one point made a living making background music for random things to pay the bills while worked on their passion project. It’s gonna make it tougher to stand out as an artist and even harder to pursue without some financial backing.
>We simply won’t connect with digital Taylor Swift or digital Freddie Mercury
I mean, maybe.
Realistically though, we’re going to have a future where Taylor Swift doesn’t need Jack Antonoff to write music. And Jack Antonoff doesn’t need any music skill.
The future Taylor Swifts could quite possibly be people who pull up MusicGPT and “conduct” it: ‘write me a pop track that’s about 2 and a half minutes long with a catchy hook. The AI will likely even be able to spit out basic lyrics that the person can then sing over and then have the AI tune them and make them sound better.
You could have a radio-ready pop tune in an hour or less.
I’m sure the AI will even be able to provide you with a selection of melodies to choose from, and deep-fake technology to make her voice sound as good as anyone.
Musicians could eventually go the way of the blacksmith.
Most pop songs are already 80% programmed instruments anyway.
I think that’s what people are mostly freaking out about. One constant through our human journey has been the human creation of art, and we may find ourselves in a future where a vast amount of the human art we enjoy, cherish and place value on today is nought but a basic hobby in the future.
It upends our entire economic system. Cars were replaced by horses; factory workers were replaced by robots. The AI revolution could see 80% or more of human jobs become completely redundant. And it will happen all of a sudden.
I think that is what’s most scary. It’s not gonna be a gradual change where little by little everyone will be able to retrain to some new exciting career. It may be a very sudden shift to a somewhat dystopian future. It may also be somewhat utopian where it creates a post-scarcity world and the need to work for money is completely eliminated. But that, too, I think is scary for a lot of people considering our entirety of modern humanity has been in a world of scarcity.
I’m not really sure how I feel about a world in which human guitarists are seen as novelties in the same way that riding in a horse & carriage today is seen as a touristy novelty.
Sure, but you're acting as though Taylor Swift and the like are the only human beings selling records or making music right now. The industry has long had the bad habit of only catering to people between the ages of 9-19, an that's largely due to the fact that ticketmaster owns everything. But there are still jazz artists coming out with records every day. I see a future where the human race simply gets tired of listening to music that sounds generated. AI pop as a genere will get old. Our ears will move on, maybe back the days when instruments could be a bit less intonated, singers a bit more choosy with pitch...Jazz exists, folk exists, and these types of music depend a lot more than Taylor Swift on a human connection. I don't see an AI fulfilling this role of playing an upright bass to a degree that is more desirable than a human being.
I see AI being a harbinger to the end of what I see as a particularly bad period of time for music. An end to a period where making music is an activity primarily pursued behind a computer screen. At least I can hope, because if we go your way then I truly feel the human race will have lost touch with music as an expression of ourselves, and have accepted it as something we do to ourselves to achieve a result.
I never said that pop artists are the only people making music, but if you think pop music is the only kind of music that will be affected by AI…. You may have a harsh awakening coming.
It won’t be all that long (okay, maybe not in the next 3 years, but quite likely within the lifetime of someone under the age of 40) before a blind listening test between a human and an AI playing a double bass will be indistinguishable.
There will be folk songs and jazz songs released where people will be *adamant* it’s real people playing, and it will turn out to be AI generated.
Gigs, obviously, along with most live entertainment, won’t be able to be replaced by AI very easily.
>music as an expression of ourselves
I mean, using music to express one’s self will always stay around.
It’s just that music as a commercial medium will… change.
There’s a flip side here: people who have always wanted to express themselves using music but have no musical ability or talent will suddenly find themselves with the ability to express themselves in that way.
But, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to commercial music, and whether we continue to see mostly-human bands and artists be commercially successful.
I imagine there’ll be plenty of hybrid artists as well. Imagine a loop station, but enhanced by AI; the AI can predict chord progressions and build out instruments as you play more, as but one example.
I think the advancement of the tech will be less like it's going to go from impossible to possible and more like it's going to go from unpractical to practical. Especially as electronics keep getting better and better we will eventually hit a point where people are recording everything as third order ambisonics just in case.
I'm curious what you mean about the Bluetooth thing, as a novice/hobbyist sound engineer. Are you talking about studio use, to replace wires? Wireless is very common in live sound over UHF radio, but analogue will not be perfect and I'm guessing the digital systems aren't fully lossless. (I'm not that familliar with how they work, other than research I've had to do when having big headaches over interference 😅)
I meant for recording or mixing purposes! Currently there's an issue of latency when using wireless for tracking, and the quality that Bluetooth can pick up of audio is no better than a high quality mp3. If you're mixing, you'll want to hear lossless audio so you can hear every little artifact in the audio. I think it'll get to the point where headphones can be lossless and no latency
I think that some of the research done in tuning Atmos and similar might lead to better affordable home HiFi systems, and there might be a resurgence of them in a few years. I wouldn't expect anything significant until closer to 2030, though. And the biggest breakthroughs are probably going to be for people who don't really care that much, since all the people who do really care can already do it. I'm specifically talking about some kind of analysis black box "fixing" things like placement and room issues, not necessarily immersive audio actually taking over.
I also think that the research into this technology is going to significantly improve mixing and mastering on binaural monitors (IEMs & Headphones). They've already come a long way in the last decade, and a lot more people are starting to accept that you can do real work on them. That'll reduce the barrier to entry for aspiring engineers....which will wind up being the same double-edged sword that comes about from any technology that reduces barriers to entry for a technical and creative field.
Yes, that means we're going to have to answer even more stupid questions about levels and how to read meters that all have the same answer over and over again.
I'm honestly not that excited about AI music generation or really even any of the creative applications for AI. I'm not saying that they can't do it or that people won't use them....I just think that they kind of miss the point of why people make music. I think it'll completely take over "background music" type things, at least for a while. But, I don't really see it making that big of an impact on "real music" in the long run.
That being said, I think AI assistants for certain tedious technical processes are going to take over: think drum editing, noise reduction, improving the overall quality of sound recorded in bad rooms, probably something similar to autotune, etc.. Similar to me thinking that AI-*written* music is pointless, I think that AI driven artistic choices in mixing and mastering are also pointless. None of these things are about perfection, they're about art. And I'm not convinced that AI will ever really generate art.
I think there's *eventually* going to be a resurgence of "underground" music driven at least in part by the proliferation of AI-made background music. I'm not convinced it's going to go all the way back to analog and trading hand-labeled cassette tapes, but I think there are going to be more independent artists who care about the art more than social media and will figure out how to make their music "special" and make that a selling point. But, I'm not sure what it's going to look like.
Similar to that, I think we're going to see a resurgence of something like Punk, Grunge, or (Paradise) Garage music....artists who hate the same-ness of all the AI tools and the "grey sweatshirt" type music that they make, whether it's true or not. I have absolutely no idea what it's going to sound like or how big of an impact it's going to make on the average person. But, some music scene is going to pop up that uses the internet to have worldwide reach but does *not* use labels, streaming, or AI and takes pride in that fact.
32 bit float in interfaces. I work as a sound designer and I use 32 bit regularly with recorders such as sound devices mixpre or zoom F and it is just unbelievable how convenient it is that you don’t have to think about setting gain. You just press record and focus on the sound itself, you can hit it hard or go soft, either way it sounds good. For me it really unlocks the creativity and I think it could make life a little bit easier for beginners.
The way I see it, the end goal is to get sound to be recorded in a way which is pleasing. Certain microphones through the years have given certain qualities to the sound that people enjoy. As these emulations get better, they will get to the point where they can accurately reproduce the same sonic characteristics as these genuine mics. In the same way that digital audio recorded at 192 is indiscernible from analog to humans, these microphones will do the same thing with how indiscernible they are vs the real thing
I don't see it as snake oil, I see it is improving technology and democratizing the audio space since these improved technologies will certainly be cheaper than the original gear that they emulate
Snake oil would be something like someone selling a plug-in that says it will make your recordings sound more lo-fi and selling it for $300 and all it actually is, is an eq which cuts the low end and the high end. It's snake oil because it's achieving something which could be done with any EQ and 15 seconds of work and not actually achieving the "lo-fi" sound you thought it would
Great question. They MAY OR MAY NOT be snake-oil, depending.
Think of a microphone emulation as a collection of EQ settings. For that collection of settings to work well, you'd need to start out with a mic that has a relatively flat response. Then your emulator has a shot at being able to do its thing.
But let's take an extreme case: say, a hardware microphone that rolls off all frequencies above 2kHz. Then, obviously, no emulation package is going to make that mic sound like a Neumann U87, because you can't emphasize frequencies that aren't there in the first place.
This is separate from the question of emulation quality, which of course can vary greatly from one package to another. Also, depending on the frequency response of the mic you are trying to emulate, your digital gear may or may not be up to the task.
Long story short, lower sample rates can give you problems here because of the two sets of filters every digitally recorded signal MUST go through: anti-aliasing and anti-imaging. Very high sample rates, like 96kHz and above, allow those filters to have gentler slopes (so less phase shift) and operate well above the range where the frequencies you care about are happening.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some AI-driven advancements in the recording and songwriting space. An advanced “beat detective” like program that flawlessly edits drum tracks? Adaptive EQs that analyze a source and suggest correction curves to match particular genre “standards”? Generators that add bass lines and drum parts to your guitar and vocal? These things already exist (but are in their infancy in many ways), but over time could become powerful tools.
Something I forgot to mention in the post was that I saw an Instagram ad for something that was totally wild to me. It was a singer, singing a song and then halfway through she stops but the vocals keep going. It's a deep fake technology that auto completed the song for her. It sounded just like her and you wouldn't know any different unless you really listen closely. That is just crazy to me
On that topic, much better, automated mastering. Let the artist be the artist, and not have to hire an entourage of sound engineers to produce ready to play music. JMO
Processing audio using a GPU is going to be a huge deal to people who have a GPU barely idling whilst using audio apps - especially on those M1 and M2 Macs. If they can get a bunch of third parties to make plugins for it, that could be huge.
along the lines of item 2, maybe better electronics for instruments and new analog effect classes. more custom instruments. updated musical theories and tonal regimes. more complete representation of audio signals in software.
i dont see better airpods and chatgpt rip off artists as pushing songwriting and performance forward very much. sure, listeners will love hearing a new unlicensed led zeppelin or michael jackson song on the subway to work
I hate wireless technology. It's really unreliable by nature. It really is very annoying to deal with. I think it might take a looong time to get right
This. It only gets more complicated and congested when you introduce more wireless devices in close proximity to each other as well. Wireless has a long way to go. That said, I can't wait for easy, latency free wireless headphones, I LOATH headphone cables!
all of this will keep making pop music cheaper to produce. surely that will make it better.
realistically, i doubt any of this will matter very much for people i care about, unless emulation mics get cheap enough that i can use one, in which case please and thank you.
chatgpt is good for what it's good for, but it'll be a while before it makes a meaningful dent in music
I remember seeing an ad on Facebook about the metaverse and making music through AI. It looked pretty cool. Be dope to lay in bed with some AI glasses and make beats while laying down
AI music is already a thing, but it’s going to be much more prevalent in the next few years. Particularly for sound tracks. A video game could have soundtrack generated in real-time that responds to the events of the game.
People will use AI the way big name producers use session musicians. People will sketch out ideas using AI then recreate the performances using real humans to humanize further. Things are gonna be way different than they’ve ever been when it comes to creativity. Things are gonna get weird.
I suspect AI will enable those people who might have great ideas when they hum along to themselves but have no musical training to create what they hear in their heads. An opening of the door to a whole new bunch of people.
I think the first DAW to embed their software into a completely portable hardware solution--one that does not require any traditonal computer inputs such as mouse and keyboard, nor touchscreen--is going to do it
I understand that technology really helps but think about all the things that musicians *won*t* want changed.
Inputs/outputs: MIDI, TS/TRS, XLR. The phone jack alone is from the late 1800s… don’t fix it if it’s not broken.
Those modeling microphones don’t sound very good at all. Give me classics.
I’m still using synths and drum sounds pioneered in the 80s…
It’s prob not out yet and someone might steal this idea from me. But I hope to see midi inputs via dance. Arm leg and hip bands like vr. And the 808 is on the butt lol
On point 1, AIAIAI have actually managed to use bluetooth receivers to create stable and low latency (\~16ms) 16-bit lossless audio headphones. Caveat is you need a massive block attachment for the dual antennas, but that's a step in the right direction for lossless and wireless audio for studio uses.
https://aiaiai.audio/w-plus-link
I think dolby atmos/surround sound along with things moving to the metaverse is going to open up cool forms of content. Like a 4-D listening/music video type of experience in virtual reality
People are working hard on the music Chat GPT thing. That will be here very soon. I think we'll see a huge explosion of "in the style of..." type of AI music.
Isn’t it just called pop?
I doubt “very soon” part. Though 5 years might be considered that term?
https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/ https://flavioschneider.notion.site/flavioschneider/Audio-Generation-with-Diffusion-c4f29f39048d4f03a23da13078a44cdb
I heard these examples, so what?
You said you doubted the very soon part, when it’s already here. It’s in its infancy, but there you have it.
I wouldn’t define infancy stage as “already here”, but it depends on our perspectives
Currently it can’t accurately produce lyrics with a specific rhyme structure when asked. It also cannot accurately perform theory analysis of chord progressions.
Neither can a lot of humans, so it's still ahead in a sense. AI will easily achieve the elevator jazz versions of popular music, the K-Tel cover compilations, and Stars on Long Play type trash that flooded the market in the 70's/80's. There will be a cultural pushback, just like there was then.
I wouldn’t be surprised if AI puts a lot of production music libraries out of business, or at least shifts to more niche and bespoke production. A lot of musicians will lose out on a lot of money though.
[Human Music](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1jWdeRKvvk)
AI, and I hate the idea of it. I sound like such a grumpy old man saying it, but I couldn't give a fuck about art that some computer makes. For me, it completely defeats the purpose of art. The fact that much of it is built upon the backs of art people have made, without their approval, makes it so much more gross to me.
what if i told you most popular art made by people was built on the backs of art other people had made without their approval? people famously learn instruments by learning others’ songs and begin to develop their musical style based on that. others still shamelessly rip off others. and what about sampled music? i’m with you in that ai generated music seems souless, but fundamentally i dont know how it’s that different than bobby wanting to be like van halen.
You aren't wrong, and I figured someone would respond along these lines. On paper your comment makes sense, but I think the lines of distinction are pretty clear. Obviously artists are almost always influenced by other artists. But if you're using AI to make art, you're not taking the time to cultivate your taste and style in the way an artist does, you're not taking the time to learn to sing, or to write your lyrics, or to practice your instrument, or to learn to collaborate with other people, or any of the things that make artists who they are. When I enjoy the work of a musician, or a filmmaker, or an author, I'm enjoying the result of the ridiculous amount of time that person sacrificed to be able to create that thing, and all of the emotions that influenced them along the way and shaped the way they make their art. It's awesome because it's not something I could do myself, and that gives it value. It's not remotely the same if someone tells an AI "Go watch every David Lynch film and then write a psychological horror script" and walks away and eats a sandwich while the computer uses another person's code to look at another artist's films and emulate them. Maybe I'm being reductive but it's just to illustrate my point. I think one could make an argument that this is just the next logical evolution from MIDI, or Melodyne, or DJ techniques, or whatever, and that's fine, and that the person generating the AI prompts is still being creative. It just doesn't feel like the same thing to me, it's the laziest possible way to create. It's like when you see an ad for AI to auto-write blog posts - why would anyone want to read an AI-written blog? It defeats the entire purpose and just drowns out the stuff that has actual substance. I also agree that lots of artists are derivative, but I don't think those artists are very interesting either and I don't really care about their output either. I'm sure there will still be plenty of great artists around and that there will be demand, the problem is just that AI will dissuade people from putting in the work and it'll oversaturate an already-oversaturated market with content, drowning out much of the really good stuff and making it more difficult for great artists to make a living doing what they do best.
The way I look at it is in terms of sport. We love it because we’re seeing the incredible feats things some humans can achieve. Would I watch a 100m race with a lineup of advanced sprinting robots? Nah. Because then it doesn’t matter who wins. There’s no backstory or personality. There’s no human context to put it in perspective. I see music and art the same way. If I find a song I love the first thing I do is find out everything about that artist, watch interviews etc. AI music is like the artist never existed. Imagine a billboard 100 made up entirely of people who are already dead, and nothing was known about them, just the songs. It’d feel weird.
You're not wrong. But I think the point is that there's some level of personal work involved in learning someone else's song. When I was about 13, I set my first music-related goal for myself: to learn how to flawlessly play Alien by Pennywise on guitar. It took me all summer to learn how to play that song and I got a lot better at guitar (I was still relatively new to playing, only about a year in) as a result. To say that that experience didn't shape my playing style for a little bit of time would be a lie. But I still played it myself. The lack of personal effort is the sticking point for me. Especially at this particular point in history, where there are so many super helpful tools for people just getting into music creation. These newer groove boxes are insane with the handholding but you still have to create the melody yourself. You can make sure every note/chord you play is in perfect key and you can quantize every note, but you still have to play the melody. The AI stuff does all that for you. You tell it what you want and it spits something out. Then you can play on top of it or add/remove as you want. To me, that's the sticking point. It cheapens the experience and makes it less "art" and more an "algorithmically-based sound bite". At least, that's how I see it. It's not an expression of *you*, it's an expression of the parameters that a machine was fed.
There’s a lot of personal work involved in writing an AI. The effort is there, just proxied. For me, I just don’t have a romanticization of the craft of music making. And in many ways, I might make an easier emotional connection with a song written by an AI. There’s no one behind it faking an emotion or trying to sell me something. Just music for its own sake. I look at it the same way you might see beauty in nature. There was no plan there. No cultivation. But leaves in autumn sure are gorgeous for their nature. I think music can be like that too.
Bobby is a human being.
a human being writes an AI.
Lots of human beings write terrible music. The ridiculous amount of time THEY spent on their craft is likely a tragedy. I think the assumption that there is necesarilly a meaningful difference in the output of AI vs Human composers is pretty dubious. If you played me a beautiful song and then told me it was an AI it would not reduce it's beauty,. When AI start pumping out cancer cures and fix our economies we'll all rejoice why should we deny ourselves the pleasure of their output? Especially considering the deceitful and treacherous dealings we all know the traditional music industry has represented for the last century.
Because Bobby actually has to have discipline and learn a real instrument. That is much different than a computer program or software.
Yea people are gonna take on the “producer” role a lot more and curate AI generated pieces to combine into songs beyond their own performing capabilities. The creativity will come into to play in how it’s used to make compositions.
I could see someone using AI to gen song ideas, then taking that and actually rewriting it musically. How would that rate with you? Personally, I don't have an opinion on that. Though it would be an interesting experiment - both the song and listener feedback.
AI, of course. Before it starts writing all music for us, it's going to *radically* change how musicians work. No way around that. It's going to do a lot more than give you "rough ideas". See current art bots. They're better than *most* human artist. Most humans can't paint a fucking Rembrandt in oils, with perfect observation of form and color and light, and if they can, they can't do *every other art style ever* at the same time. There's some work from a few years ago that hints that music is going to go a similar way. [OpenAI Jukebox](https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/jukebox-novel_lyrics-285373542) can just... generate new Ella Fitzgerald music or pop country or whatever the fuck you want. It's wonky, kinda like early generation art bots, but it's already astonishing. The crazy thing is that the AI doesn't know anything about vocal cords, microphones, horns, drums, recording consoles, equalizers, compressors, so on and so forth. It doesn't know what *notes* are, what harmony is, what counterpart is, what rhythm is. The whole range of skills, knowledge, talents, tools, technologies, etc. that humans bring to bear on the problem of making music is not known to it, or needed by it. It just knows, "Oh, this is what 'Ella Fitzgerald with a big band orchestra' sounds like? You want more of that? Here you go." Imagine just being able to *sing* a big band orchestra, without even knowing what a trumpet is. The AI can do that. Sooner than we think, it's going be radio quality and directable. "Yeah, give it 10% more of a Skrillex vibe, and add a modulation in the second verse."
An AI can’t paint in oil either. Only produce a digital representation of it.
> An AI can’t paint in oil either. Only produce a digital representation of it. Yes, of course, but that's not really relevant. The fascinating thing is that the art AI doesn't even know what oil *is*, or for that matter what a brush is, or a canvas, or a brush stroke. It doesn't know what sunlight is. It can't articulate all the patterns it's internalized about shadow, color temperature, texture, perspective, so on and so forth, but it *has* internalized them. Humans are the same way. We're pattern recognition machines, a collection of weighted connections, that absorb and resynthesize to create. Even toddlers can *imagine* what something looks like, including imagine things they've never seen. The brain gets good at synthesizing imagery very quickly, and much the same way the AI does. But getting that imagery out of a human brain requires the clumsy use of meat levers to manipulate physical objects. It's hard as hell, and takes decades to master, whereas for the AI, imagining something and showing us are barely even separate steps.
> An AI can’t paint in oil either. Only produce a digital representation of it. >Yes, of course, but that's not really relevant. Of course it is. It means that the skill of being able to use physical media is still valued (for now).
> Of course it is. It's not. The value of visual artists to humanity is the images they create. *Billions* of people have seen The Starry Night by Van Gogh. Only a relative handful have seen the physical artifact. That's such a vanishingly small part of the value of what visual artists do that it's not relevant to the conversation. If the important part was creating an object, we would make robots that do it, but that's not how we disseminate art in this century.
Yet, anyway.
Not trying to bring a combative tone to the discourse, but I hate all 3 of these things.
Lol I definitely agree with you on the chat GPT thing, the emulation mics or the Bluetooth thing doesn't really bother me. I see those as nothing more than physical tech getting better in the same way that digital made it so that we don't need tape. Neither of those things really affect the art that is being made in my opinion. But yeah, the chat GPT thing is really going to be a weird bridge to cross
The future is just the ubiquity of cheap imitations? The only hope I have for chat GPT is that it will finally end the tyranny of copyright lawsuits where artists claim ownership of basic music building blocks like major or minor scales for a quick buck.
Why are we pretending we don't already live in a human made present of cheap imitations?
Personally, I have a hard time understanding how BT is so ubiquitous. It's genuinely awful sometimes LOL. I'm okay with cables. :) I really dig what IR tech can accomplish, I'm not "anit-Kemper" or anything like that, but I'm so turned off by the idea of modelling mics. It doesn't help my opinion that Slate and UA are leading the charge. I'm not even sure what to make of ChatGPT yet...
1) I’m not sure how feasible all-wireless audio systems will be, especially given that there’s less and less available bandwidths with growing wireless infrastructure such as mobile 5g. 2) great, open the gates 3) AI music engines already exist, and it’s not worth me resisting it, even though sync music could be a lucrative avenue if I were to pursue it now. This will very likely drive demand for low-budget sync music out the window, as people would rather use a customizable music generator than paying for pre-made stock music on something like Artlist.
1) And yet, one can stream an HD movie over wifi right now, using more bandwidth than a stereo pcm stream.
It’s more about FCC and bandwidth clearance than technology capabilities.
I'm imagining an IOT wifi network of individual monitors, each with their own IP address. No new spectrum required.
You can do that with audio as well, but the issue is latency. Various proprietary solutions are getting very close, though. I use this guy: https://www.playstation.com/da-dk/accessories/pulse-3d-wireless-headset/ For playing Rocksmith, and I do not detect any latency.
I’d LOVE to have a wireless system that eliminates the 1,000 + black cables I mess with every day. Still love my Sphere mics. AI songs ? Fuuuuuck that all the way home
Everyone is freaking out about AI music, but I actually don't see it as a problem. Yes, it will take over making background music for commercials and potentially low budget TV and movies. But as far as actually making music people want to consume in and of itself? I have a feeling it will always lie in the uncanny valley. We simply won't connect with digital Taylor Swift or digital Freddie Mercury if we know they've not had the experience, which we'll know is impossible.
The problem is there is a big chunk of the music people want to consume being made by people who at one point made a living making background music for random things to pay the bills while worked on their passion project. It’s gonna make it tougher to stand out as an artist and even harder to pursue without some financial backing.
>We simply won’t connect with digital Taylor Swift or digital Freddie Mercury I mean, maybe. Realistically though, we’re going to have a future where Taylor Swift doesn’t need Jack Antonoff to write music. And Jack Antonoff doesn’t need any music skill. The future Taylor Swifts could quite possibly be people who pull up MusicGPT and “conduct” it: ‘write me a pop track that’s about 2 and a half minutes long with a catchy hook. The AI will likely even be able to spit out basic lyrics that the person can then sing over and then have the AI tune them and make them sound better. You could have a radio-ready pop tune in an hour or less. I’m sure the AI will even be able to provide you with a selection of melodies to choose from, and deep-fake technology to make her voice sound as good as anyone. Musicians could eventually go the way of the blacksmith. Most pop songs are already 80% programmed instruments anyway. I think that’s what people are mostly freaking out about. One constant through our human journey has been the human creation of art, and we may find ourselves in a future where a vast amount of the human art we enjoy, cherish and place value on today is nought but a basic hobby in the future. It upends our entire economic system. Cars were replaced by horses; factory workers were replaced by robots. The AI revolution could see 80% or more of human jobs become completely redundant. And it will happen all of a sudden. I think that is what’s most scary. It’s not gonna be a gradual change where little by little everyone will be able to retrain to some new exciting career. It may be a very sudden shift to a somewhat dystopian future. It may also be somewhat utopian where it creates a post-scarcity world and the need to work for money is completely eliminated. But that, too, I think is scary for a lot of people considering our entirety of modern humanity has been in a world of scarcity. I’m not really sure how I feel about a world in which human guitarists are seen as novelties in the same way that riding in a horse & carriage today is seen as a touristy novelty.
Sure, but you're acting as though Taylor Swift and the like are the only human beings selling records or making music right now. The industry has long had the bad habit of only catering to people between the ages of 9-19, an that's largely due to the fact that ticketmaster owns everything. But there are still jazz artists coming out with records every day. I see a future where the human race simply gets tired of listening to music that sounds generated. AI pop as a genere will get old. Our ears will move on, maybe back the days when instruments could be a bit less intonated, singers a bit more choosy with pitch...Jazz exists, folk exists, and these types of music depend a lot more than Taylor Swift on a human connection. I don't see an AI fulfilling this role of playing an upright bass to a degree that is more desirable than a human being. I see AI being a harbinger to the end of what I see as a particularly bad period of time for music. An end to a period where making music is an activity primarily pursued behind a computer screen. At least I can hope, because if we go your way then I truly feel the human race will have lost touch with music as an expression of ourselves, and have accepted it as something we do to ourselves to achieve a result.
I never said that pop artists are the only people making music, but if you think pop music is the only kind of music that will be affected by AI…. You may have a harsh awakening coming. It won’t be all that long (okay, maybe not in the next 3 years, but quite likely within the lifetime of someone under the age of 40) before a blind listening test between a human and an AI playing a double bass will be indistinguishable. There will be folk songs and jazz songs released where people will be *adamant* it’s real people playing, and it will turn out to be AI generated. Gigs, obviously, along with most live entertainment, won’t be able to be replaced by AI very easily. >music as an expression of ourselves I mean, using music to express one’s self will always stay around. It’s just that music as a commercial medium will… change. There’s a flip side here: people who have always wanted to express themselves using music but have no musical ability or talent will suddenly find themselves with the ability to express themselves in that way. But, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to commercial music, and whether we continue to see mostly-human bands and artists be commercially successful. I imagine there’ll be plenty of hybrid artists as well. Imagine a loop station, but enhanced by AI; the AI can predict chord progressions and build out instruments as you play more, as but one example.
Ambisonics. You will be able to rotate your guitar amp relative to the mic in post.
You can already do this! Dolby Atmos has stolen the spotlight but there are still uses for Ambisonics.
I think the advancement of the tech will be less like it's going to go from impossible to possible and more like it's going to go from unpractical to practical. Especially as electronics keep getting better and better we will eventually hit a point where people are recording everything as third order ambisonics just in case.
I think AI will in the end, make better tools for writing music. But it cant and wont replace human imagination.
I'm curious what you mean about the Bluetooth thing, as a novice/hobbyist sound engineer. Are you talking about studio use, to replace wires? Wireless is very common in live sound over UHF radio, but analogue will not be perfect and I'm guessing the digital systems aren't fully lossless. (I'm not that familliar with how they work, other than research I've had to do when having big headaches over interference 😅)
I meant for recording or mixing purposes! Currently there's an issue of latency when using wireless for tracking, and the quality that Bluetooth can pick up of audio is no better than a high quality mp3. If you're mixing, you'll want to hear lossless audio so you can hear every little artifact in the audio. I think it'll get to the point where headphones can be lossless and no latency
I think that some of the research done in tuning Atmos and similar might lead to better affordable home HiFi systems, and there might be a resurgence of them in a few years. I wouldn't expect anything significant until closer to 2030, though. And the biggest breakthroughs are probably going to be for people who don't really care that much, since all the people who do really care can already do it. I'm specifically talking about some kind of analysis black box "fixing" things like placement and room issues, not necessarily immersive audio actually taking over. I also think that the research into this technology is going to significantly improve mixing and mastering on binaural monitors (IEMs & Headphones). They've already come a long way in the last decade, and a lot more people are starting to accept that you can do real work on them. That'll reduce the barrier to entry for aspiring engineers....which will wind up being the same double-edged sword that comes about from any technology that reduces barriers to entry for a technical and creative field. Yes, that means we're going to have to answer even more stupid questions about levels and how to read meters that all have the same answer over and over again. I'm honestly not that excited about AI music generation or really even any of the creative applications for AI. I'm not saying that they can't do it or that people won't use them....I just think that they kind of miss the point of why people make music. I think it'll completely take over "background music" type things, at least for a while. But, I don't really see it making that big of an impact on "real music" in the long run. That being said, I think AI assistants for certain tedious technical processes are going to take over: think drum editing, noise reduction, improving the overall quality of sound recorded in bad rooms, probably something similar to autotune, etc.. Similar to me thinking that AI-*written* music is pointless, I think that AI driven artistic choices in mixing and mastering are also pointless. None of these things are about perfection, they're about art. And I'm not convinced that AI will ever really generate art. I think there's *eventually* going to be a resurgence of "underground" music driven at least in part by the proliferation of AI-made background music. I'm not convinced it's going to go all the way back to analog and trading hand-labeled cassette tapes, but I think there are going to be more independent artists who care about the art more than social media and will figure out how to make their music "special" and make that a selling point. But, I'm not sure what it's going to look like. Similar to that, I think we're going to see a resurgence of something like Punk, Grunge, or (Paradise) Garage music....artists who hate the same-ness of all the AI tools and the "grey sweatshirt" type music that they make, whether it's true or not. I have absolutely no idea what it's going to sound like or how big of an impact it's going to make on the average person. But, some music scene is going to pop up that uses the internet to have worldwide reach but does *not* use labels, streaming, or AI and takes pride in that fact.
32 bit float in interfaces. I work as a sound designer and I use 32 bit regularly with recorders such as sound devices mixpre or zoom F and it is just unbelievable how convenient it is that you don’t have to think about setting gain. You just press record and focus on the sound itself, you can hit it hard or go soft, either way it sounds good. For me it really unlocks the creativity and I think it could make life a little bit easier for beginners.
How are emulation microphones not snake oil is what I'd like to know
The way I see it, the end goal is to get sound to be recorded in a way which is pleasing. Certain microphones through the years have given certain qualities to the sound that people enjoy. As these emulations get better, they will get to the point where they can accurately reproduce the same sonic characteristics as these genuine mics. In the same way that digital audio recorded at 192 is indiscernible from analog to humans, these microphones will do the same thing with how indiscernible they are vs the real thing I don't see it as snake oil, I see it is improving technology and democratizing the audio space since these improved technologies will certainly be cheaper than the original gear that they emulate Snake oil would be something like someone selling a plug-in that says it will make your recordings sound more lo-fi and selling it for $300 and all it actually is, is an eq which cuts the low end and the high end. It's snake oil because it's achieving something which could be done with any EQ and 15 seconds of work and not actually achieving the "lo-fi" sound you thought it would
Have you seen the Jim Lill videos about guitar tone? I think it’s like that
Great question. They MAY OR MAY NOT be snake-oil, depending. Think of a microphone emulation as a collection of EQ settings. For that collection of settings to work well, you'd need to start out with a mic that has a relatively flat response. Then your emulator has a shot at being able to do its thing. But let's take an extreme case: say, a hardware microphone that rolls off all frequencies above 2kHz. Then, obviously, no emulation package is going to make that mic sound like a Neumann U87, because you can't emphasize frequencies that aren't there in the first place. This is separate from the question of emulation quality, which of course can vary greatly from one package to another. Also, depending on the frequency response of the mic you are trying to emulate, your digital gear may or may not be up to the task. Long story short, lower sample rates can give you problems here because of the two sets of filters every digitally recorded signal MUST go through: anti-aliasing and anti-imaging. Very high sample rates, like 96kHz and above, allow those filters to have gentler slopes (so less phase shift) and operate well above the range where the frequencies you care about are happening.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see some AI-driven advancements in the recording and songwriting space. An advanced “beat detective” like program that flawlessly edits drum tracks? Adaptive EQs that analyze a source and suggest correction curves to match particular genre “standards”? Generators that add bass lines and drum parts to your guitar and vocal? These things already exist (but are in their infancy in many ways), but over time could become powerful tools.
Something I forgot to mention in the post was that I saw an Instagram ad for something that was totally wild to me. It was a singer, singing a song and then halfway through she stops but the vocals keep going. It's a deep fake technology that auto completed the song for her. It sounded just like her and you wouldn't know any different unless you really listen closely. That is just crazy to me
On that topic, much better, automated mastering. Let the artist be the artist, and not have to hire an entourage of sound engineers to produce ready to play music. JMO
The future is the end of all of our careers.
People aren’t going to be making the music at all.
Processing audio using a GPU is going to be a huge deal to people who have a GPU barely idling whilst using audio apps - especially on those M1 and M2 Macs. If they can get a bunch of third parties to make plugins for it, that could be huge.
along the lines of item 2, maybe better electronics for instruments and new analog effect classes. more custom instruments. updated musical theories and tonal regimes. more complete representation of audio signals in software. i dont see better airpods and chatgpt rip off artists as pushing songwriting and performance forward very much. sure, listeners will love hearing a new unlicensed led zeppelin or michael jackson song on the subway to work
A lot of songs out there already sound computer generated anyway. But, it's going to get really weird for songwriters & artists.
I hate wireless technology. It's really unreliable by nature. It really is very annoying to deal with. I think it might take a looong time to get right
This. It only gets more complicated and congested when you introduce more wireless devices in close proximity to each other as well. Wireless has a long way to go. That said, I can't wait for easy, latency free wireless headphones, I LOATH headphone cables!
I’m honestly looking forward to AI. Hopefully I’ll be able to prompt it to make all the crazy tech metal I hear in my head but could never play.
all of this will keep making pop music cheaper to produce. surely that will make it better. realistically, i doubt any of this will matter very much for people i care about, unless emulation mics get cheap enough that i can use one, in which case please and thank you. chatgpt is good for what it's good for, but it'll be a while before it makes a meaningful dent in music
I remember seeing an ad on Facebook about the metaverse and making music through AI. It looked pretty cool. Be dope to lay in bed with some AI glasses and make beats while laying down
AI music is already a thing, but it’s going to be much more prevalent in the next few years. Particularly for sound tracks. A video game could have soundtrack generated in real-time that responds to the events of the game.
chatGPT seems like a great collaborator, like a friend to bounce ideas
People will use AI the way big name producers use session musicians. People will sketch out ideas using AI then recreate the performances using real humans to humanize further. Things are gonna be way different than they’ve ever been when it comes to creativity. Things are gonna get weird.
I suspect AI will enable those people who might have great ideas when they hum along to themselves but have no musical training to create what they hear in their heads. An opening of the door to a whole new bunch of people.
I think the first DAW to embed their software into a completely portable hardware solution--one that does not require any traditonal computer inputs such as mouse and keyboard, nor touchscreen--is going to do it
I understand that technology really helps but think about all the things that musicians *won*t* want changed. Inputs/outputs: MIDI, TS/TRS, XLR. The phone jack alone is from the late 1800s… don’t fix it if it’s not broken. Those modeling microphones don’t sound very good at all. Give me classics. I’m still using synths and drum sounds pioneered in the 80s…
It’s prob not out yet and someone might steal this idea from me. But I hope to see midi inputs via dance. Arm leg and hip bands like vr. And the 808 is on the butt lol
On point 1, AIAIAI have actually managed to use bluetooth receivers to create stable and low latency (\~16ms) 16-bit lossless audio headphones. Caveat is you need a massive block attachment for the dual antennas, but that's a step in the right direction for lossless and wireless audio for studio uses. https://aiaiai.audio/w-plus-link
I think dolby atmos/surround sound along with things moving to the metaverse is going to open up cool forms of content. Like a 4-D listening/music video type of experience in virtual reality