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Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

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Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#21

Post by zaptrem »

gazebo64 wrote: post #19
zaptrem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how the amount of work that went into it changes the core fact that all art is influenced by that which came before, and we don't call that stealing (unless you truly believe that "all art is theft"). My point re: LLMs wasn't meant to exclusively be a "they're doing it" one, the hope was to give an example of something many people would agree is super useful and valuable (I work much faster and learned so…

I think we intuitively allow for artists to derive and interpolate from their influences because of a baseline understanding that A) it is impossible to create art without influence and B) that there is an inherent value in a human creating art and expressing themselves. How that relates to someone using unlicensed music from actual humans to train an AI model in order to profit off of the collective work of thousand…

A) Agreed! B) So I guess the argument here is that this doesn't apply to AI music. I think that if someone really pours their soul into the lyrics of a song and regenerates/experiments with prompts until it's just right, and maybe even contributes a melody or starting point that's still a human creating art and expressing themselves. It's definitely not as difficult as creating a song from scratch, but I've been told similar arguments were made regarding whether photography was art when that became a thing.

btw, if the user of the AI doesn't do any of the above then I think the US copyright office says it can't be copyrighted in the first place (so no profiting for them anyway).

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#22

Post by zoogeny »

zaptrem wrote: post #2

One thing I've been thinking about is how to do a better hobbyist plan system. It would be cool to do a flat rate unlimited plan, but we wouldn't want that to then be abused by larger customers/companies. Are there existing API providers you think solve this particularly well?

I don't think it meets your ask of "solve this particularly well" but the unlimited plans in video that I am familiar with have a fast/slow queue system. This effectively limits the plan. It seems, as well, that these kind of queue systems are tiered. So you can have N number of fast queued items, X number of tier one slow queue, Y number of tier two slow queue, etc. On the backend this is probably just some kind of weighted priority queue where the number of requests in some time duration determines some weight scaling factor.

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#23

Post by zoogeny »

Not related to this post, but I was wondering about AI music generators and I don't have experience with their capabilities. The ones I know seem catered to making entire songs.

I was having a discussion with a friend who writes a lot of guitar music but can also play bass and sing. However, getting good drums is a problem. What he'd like is a service to upload his songs in some form (just guitar, or a mixed version with bass and vocals) and get an output that layers a drum track without altering the input. Ideally with appropriate fills, etc. I mean, just getting an in-time drum stem would probably be even better.

Is there any GenAI service to do this kind of incremental additive drums?

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#24

Post by vunderba »

zoogeny wrote: post #23

Not related to this post, but I was wondering about AI music generators and I don't have experience with their capabilities. The ones I know seem catered to making entire songs. I was having a discussion with a friend who writes a lot of guitar music but can also play bass and sing. However, getting good drums is a problem. What he'd like is a service to upload his songs in some form (just guitar, or a mixed version…

Not sure about GenAI, but Logic Pro has the ability to add a Session Drummer which can be set to track a given bass stem and produce passable drums for a song.

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#25

Post by potatoman22 »

zoogeny wrote: post #23

Not related to this post, but I was wondering about AI music generators and I don't have experience with their capabilities. The ones I know seem catered to making entire songs. I was having a discussion with a friend who writes a lot of guitar music but can also play bass and sing. However, getting good drums is a problem. What he'd like is a service to upload his songs in some form (just guitar, or a mixed version…

There's work in that area, it's sometimes called "accompaniment generation."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.12662

https://fastsag.github.io/

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#26

Post by braebo »

zaptrem wrote: post #6
naltroc wrote: post #3

how did you create this without committing grand theft musica

In my opinion training on all music is no more theft than Taylor Swift listening to the radio growing up (as long as we don't regurgitate existing songs which would be bad and useless anyway). I think an alternative legal interpretation where all of humanity's musical knowledge and history are controlled by three megacorporations (UMG/Sony/Warner) would be kinda depressing. If the above is true we might as well shutd…

It’s intellectual property laundering. A company selling a button that launders the blood sweat and tears of generations of artists is not the same as a person being inspired and dedicating themselves to mastery.

Humans create value. AI consumes and commoditizes that value, stealing it from the people and selling it back to their customers.

It’s unethical and will be detrimental in the long run. All profit should be distributed to all artists in the training set.

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#27

Post by zaptrem »

zoogeny wrote: post #22
zaptrem wrote: post #2

One thing I've been thinking about is how to do a better hobbyist plan system. It would be cool to do a flat rate unlimited plan, but we wouldn't want that to then be abused by larger customers/companies. Are there existing API providers you think solve this particularly well?

I don't think it meets your ask of "solve this particularly well" but the unlimited plans in video that I am familiar with have a fast/slow queue system. This effectively limits the plan. It seems, as well, that these kind of queue systems are tiered. So you can have N number of fast queued items, X number of tier one slow queue, Y number of tier two slow queue, etc. On the backend this is probably just some kind of…

I think this is a good start, X high speed queries per hour then unlimited low-priority ones after. Do you know of any specific companies that do this we could take a look at?

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#28

Post by zoogeny »

zaptrem wrote: post #27
zoogeny wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it meets your ask of "solve this particularly well" but the unlimited plans in video that I am familiar with have a fast/slow queue system. This effectively limits the plan. It seems, as well, that these kind of queue systems are tiered. So you can have N number of fast queued items, X number of tier one slow queue, Y number of tier two slow queue, etc. On the backend this is probably just some kind of…

I think this is a good start, X high speed queries per hour then unlimited low-priority ones after. Do you know of any specific companies that do this we could take a look at?

runway.ai (video gen) is what I was thinking when I suggested this.

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#29

Post by gazebo64 »

zaptrem wrote: post #21
gazebo64 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we intuitively allow for artists to derive and interpolate from their influences because of a baseline understanding that A) it is impossible to create art without influence and B) that there is an inherent value in a human creating art and expressing themselves. How that relates to someone using unlicensed music from actual humans to train an AI model in order to profit off of the collective work of thousand…

A) Agreed! B) So I guess the argument here is that this doesn't apply to AI music. I think that if someone really pours their soul into the lyrics of a song and regenerates/experiments with prompts until it's just right, and maybe even contributes a melody or starting point that's still a human creating art and expressing themselves. It's definitely not as difficult as creating a song from scratch, but I've been told…

> if the user of the AI doesn't do any of the above then I think the US copyright office says it can't be copyrighted in the first place (so no profiting for them anyway).

Am I understanding right that the point here is that while you are able to get away with using copyrighted material to turn a profit, your end users cannot, so no worries?

Re: Show HN: Sonauto API – Generative music for developers

#30

Post by dleeftink »

bongodongobob wrote: post #13
wryoak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m skeptical about how much value AI art is going to really contribute to humanity but as a lifelong opponent of copyright I have to roll my eyes when I see people arguing against it on behalf of real artists , all of whom are thieves in the best case and imitators in the worst.

Yeah every musician has a story of writing a new song, bringing it to the band, and they say "oh, this sounds just like [song]." It's almost impossible to make something truly novel.

> almost impossible to make something truly novel

But beyond the originality !== novelty discussion, I'm not sure how we've come to equate 'creativity' (and the rights to retaining it) to a sort of fingerprint encoding one's work. As if a band, artist or creator should stick to a certain brand once invented, and we can sufficiently capture that brand in dense legalese or increasingly, stylistic prompts.

How many of today's artists just 'riffing' off existing motifs will remain, if the end result of their creative endeavours will be absorbed into generative tools in some manner? What's the incentive for indies to distribute digitally, beyond the guarantee their works will provide the (auditory) fingerprints for the next content generation system?

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