Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore | “Rubber burns, the map fades away / Chasing the ghosts of yesterday.” Sure, fine.
Nobody Cares If Music Is Real Anymore
I stumbled upon the AI dj that Spotify has. It's plays music you like and music you may like based on history. I used it once and I knew we were all doomed when it played a track of brown noise sounds, sleep sounds not music, then once it was over the dj came back and goes "wow you sure do have great taste in music, how about this next one you may enjoy and plays more brown noise. So yeah, AI is Hella stupid and I'd be embarrassed to listen to ai music
no one has cared since record executives have been generating AI generated tier music by hand.
What's the fucking difference between a rich asshole comissioning music based around market resarch, to be made by some trendy female popstar, written by five different men, the singing gets autotuned, punch clock studio musicians play generic chord progressions and melodies, and it's all straight ahead 4/4
At least with imaginative gen AI, you can get cool stuff like Pho-que
If you dislike Pho-que, you'll probably dislike the human counterparts like Shining (Nor) or Naked City
no one has cared since record executives have been generating AI generated tier music by hand.
Reminds me of this NYT video about how a pop song is made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaAv5AiBRgY
At the beginning, a musician at a keyboard composes the basic tune. Then a whole series of MFers overproduce it to hell. At the end, the original musician happens to meet the singer who did the human part of the final rendering and is the "star" who everybody watches perform. In a better day, the original musician would be the star, but in this process they are insignificant.
Jørgen is my spirit animal and Arctopus fucking rules but this take is hot as fuck my dude. Real people making real music with real instruments is art. Generative AI takes our art and makes emotionless, sloppy approximations out of it. If you despise cookiecutter pop now you're going to be blown away by the absolute drivel that is already being pumped out thanks to genAI. 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? Because musicians with decades of knowledge of their instruments and a variety of styles want a paycheck? 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? It might start with pop but if you think avante-garde, cerebral music will be ignored you're mistaken.
by the way, do you like Zu as well? To see what I mean, check out the album carboniferous.
You deserve a better reply and I will write you one later, but...
Arctopus fucking rules but this take is hot as fuck my dude.
Bro, the song skullgrid was generated by a Java program that Colin and a programmer friend of his, possibly Mike , was working on. In 200X. You've been rocking out to AI generated music before you even realised. Brian Eno also had some music that was meant to be generated by an automated system, and afaik, so did John cage.
Edit : https://colinmarston.bandcamp.com/album/computer-music-2003-2004
the sounds were created in Wire, a program using Jsyn written by Phil Burk, which is a java-based synthesis engine. i created the scores in JMSLscore (a java-based scoring program by Nick Didkovsky). this allowed me to access sounds i created from scratch, but organize them with a traditional musical staff.
"Fore" became the warr guitar part for the song "Skullgrid" from BTA. the first 41 seconds: beholdthearctopus.bandcamp.com/album/skullgrid
What's the fucking difference between[…]
Multiple people are getting paid so they can make a living, more money flows through the economy and even if you don’t personally find it to your taste, it’s still the result of cumulative human efforts.
Gen AI has its uses in personal entertainment but I will spit on the corpo who tries to make me pay for art a person didn’t actually compose/play.
Spotify is no paragon of morality but at least I can find real, human artists via the platform and see/support them in other ways.
When it comes to human expression, I only want my money to go to human expression (even if it’s deemed “soulless”).
even if you don’t personally find it to your taste,
This is the bit that pisses me off though. Corporate music has always been soulless slop, and when you point it out "oh that's just like your opinion man".
To get philosophical, because that's what the topic is; mathematics, life, human conciousness are based off similar patterns. Conway's game of life demonstrates purely mathematical cellular automata; when you go down to the chemical level, life is cellular automata with chemicals, which give way to cells, and complex structures and human beings.
Corporate pop does the same fucking shit the godless AI does. People don't sing, they don't give a shit, and it's just there as another piece of slop for idiots to fucking consume. It works in a similar way to the AI; it catches onto patterns, rigid bullshit defined by someone moron that says "hey, the millenial whoop is popular this decade, cram it into the songs we're releasing for fiscal quarter 3". "this year's hot rhythmn is the reggeton clave, shove that in". Then the zillionaire that teenage girls somehow get 1k dollars in order to see goes on stage , dances a bit and DOESN'T EVEN FUCKING SING.
The AI does the same shit "Oh, the guy put in sad, make it pianos and minor chords". But now it's not about fucking opinion, it's a fucking abomination that must be extinguished. "It all sounds like slop" My brother in christ, have you heard 80s pop music?
It's the same fucking pattern.
"oh noz, the AI is putting the real musicians out of bidness" Yeah, corporate pop doesn't do anything like that. That's why the greatest composers of our modern era have to manage touring schedules with working real fucking jobs and making losses on their tours, becuase fuck me, my opinion is worth fucking nothing. It's the same thing. Fucking DJ sets are walking around using synths instead of analog instruments, but that wasn't the crime putting honest musicians out of business, no, it's the fucking guy in india typing in a generic description into sumo ai to turn a quick buck.
How do fake bands dominate spotify when regular ones don't? It's easy; corporate business practices mean that the business side of music (or any endevour, let's fucking face it) is a zillion times more important than the actual musician aspect of music.
If this sounds like I'm on the side of AI; it's not. The point is that it's been too late for fucking decades, acting outraged about what's happening now because it uses new tech is blaming the statistic department for rises in heatwaves.
You still pay people, not AI. It's people who do it, people who maintain it. People who maintain the AI itself etc. It just shifted from one tech-field to another tech-field. If you'd compare the soulless calculated success pop-shit with the ai-shit that is.
But I get your point.
I can still feel some kind of emotion through it. The emotion may just be greed, but it's at least something. AI generated music doesn't even have the soul of slime. It gives nothing. It feels like nothing. It's completely empty and hollow instead of just mostly.
I can still feel some kind of emotion through it.
Ok, I'm pretty sure seeing a sunset behind a forest will also give you a kind of emotion as well. Who is the artist there?
Art is like a greasy mirror, there may be some intent there by the artist, but mostly you see yourself and your own feelings in the work.
Also, the AI generated music doesn't come from nothing, someone is communicating an idea to the computer which then, based on as much human music as it has consumed, tries to give back something that sounds like what the original person intended. it's not just a magic "music button".
So with the AI music, there's an expression and emotion you can feel coming from the original person (alongside the thousands of other people whose work has been fed into the machine)
If you don't like it sure.
The main difference is that AI can't be innovative at all
Corporate pop has never been innovative; at its most Avant Garde it takes experimental aesthetics and crams them into tin pan alley song structures.
I listened to whatever that is for a full minute and it was literally a long screeching note the whole time... Wtf is it supposed to be? Music?
Great, it fucked up. I have heard other people complain about this when I used it as an example, but I JUST NOW heard it too. Fucking whatever. If you actually care try again a few times. If you don't whatever.
Agreed. Ultra commercial music has always existed. With AI, the threshold to creating it is simply much lower. There's nothing magic about music just because it's created by a human, they are very capable of producing bland and uninteresting music too.
i stopped listening to new music in 1995, still haven't finish exploring past records
That's a load of crap, but ok
AI created music will be the reason I cancel Spotify. I haven't been plagued yet but it will happen. And I will cancel
I'm pretty sure the article is at least mildly ironic. I don't think he literally believes that "nobody cares if music is real any more." Towards the end he talks about how AI music is not really art, and it lulls you into oblivion. The writer's a legit scholar with an academic interest in video games, btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Bogost