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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

#61

Post by mco »

On one hand this is impressive, and I've been wondering when something like this would appear. On the other hand, I am -- like others here have expressed -- saddened by the impact this has on real musicians. Music is human, music theory is deeply mathematical and fascinating -- "solving" it with a big hammer like generative AI is rather unsatisfying.

The other very real aspect here is "training data" has to come from somewhere, and the copyright implications of this are beyond solved.

In the past I worked on real algorithmic music composition: algorithmic sequencer, paired with hardware- or soft- synthesizers. I could give it feedback and it'd evolve the composition, all without training data. It was computationally cheap, didn't infringe anyone's copyright, and a human still had very real creative influence (which instruments, scale, tempo, etc.). Message me if anyone's still interested in "dumb" AI like that. :-)

Computer-assisted music is nothing new, but taking away the creativity completely is turning music into noise -- noise that sounds like music.

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

#62

Post by naltroc »

zaptrem wrote: post #18
gazebo64 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that a musician being influenced by other musicians still has to work to develop the skills necessary to distill those influences into a final product, and colors that output with their own subjective experiences and taste. This feels like a conveniently naive interpretation to justify stealing artists' work and using it to create derivative generative slop. The final line in your comment is pret…

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…

> Is it really consent for those artists signing to labels when only three companies have total control of all music consumption and production for the mass market?

This premise is false. I have made plenty of money busking on the street, for example. Or selling audio recordings at shows.

> {o be clear, artists absolutely have a right to benefit from reproduction of their recordings.

This is correct. Artists benefit when you pay them for the right to reproduce. When you don't (like what you are doing), you get sued. Here's a YouTube video covering 9 examples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIVSt8Y1zeQ

> I just don't think anyone should have rights to the knowledge built into those creations since in most cases it wasn't theirs to begin with

What?

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

#63

Post by zaptrem »

naltroc wrote: post #62
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…

> Is it really consent for those artists signing to labels when only three companies have total control of all music consumption and production for the mass market? This premise is false. I have made plenty of money busking on the street, for example. Or selling audio recordings at shows. > {o be clear, artists absolutely have a right to benefit from reproduction of their recordings. This is correct. Artists benefit…

> I have made plenty of money busking on the street

That's why I specified mass market. However, given a choice between literally being on the street and working with a record label I'd probably choose the label, though I don't know about others.

> pay them for the right to reproduce

My point is learning patterns/styles does not equate to reproducing their recordings. If someone wants to listen to "Hey Jude" they cannot do so with our model, they must go to Spotify. There are cases where models from our competitors were trained for too long on too small a dataset and were able to recite songs, but that's a bug they admit is wrong and are fighting against, not a feature.

> in most cases it wasn't theirs to begin with

In most cases they did not invent the chord progression they're using or instruments they're playing or style they're using or even the lyrical themes they're singing. All are based on what came before and the musicians that come after them are able to use any new knowledge they contribute freely. It's all a fork of a fork of a fork of a fork, and if everyone along the line decided they were entitled to a cut we'd have disaster.

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

#64

Post by jacobsimon »

sid-the-kid wrote: post #36

Okay. I know these guys IRL. BUT, I genuinely think they have the best music model out there. Hands down. The songs are just more unique, and have a wider range of musical variation. With Suno/Udio, the songs just sounds the same after a while (just with different lyrics). That could just be me though. I am curious what users of Udio/Suno think?

Quality has improved so much too, I tried it a few months ago at Demo Day and I’m blown away by how good it is now.

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

#65

Post by relaxing »

emporas wrote: post #57
code_for_monkey wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with AI music, and in fact AI in general, is that weve spent the last few decades aggressively attacking the idea that art should get paid for at all and yet people still do it, because they love it. So musicians work for pennies, and yet people still need to replace them with a machine. So even if you just pay someone else to make you a song, its not really any more expensive than this. Same with paintin…

The problem with real music, is that it requires a hefty amount of musicians to establish a genre. This amount could be somewhere in the range of 100 to 1000 musicians. When this critical number is not amassed then the genre effectively dies. With A.I. we can resurrect dead genres, but not only that, we can combine genres together, popular genres with one another, also popular and unpopular genres or popular and dead…

I’m a pretty big music fan and I have no idea what you’re on about. Where did you get this theory?

> The problem with real music, is that it requires a hefty amount of musicians to establish a genre.

Why is establishing genre a goal in the first place?

> This amount could be somewhere in the range of 100 to 1000 musicians.

This is demonstrably false. Genre is defined by critical consensus, and it can arise around one or a handful of bands.

> With A.I. we can resurrect dead genres

What dead genre are you after? I’d imagine there are folk styles that haven’t been kept alive, but I question whether AI recreations would satisfy anyone. I’d rather listen to authentic recordings instead. And if the genre doesn’t have a significant recorded catalog, you can’t train a generative AI to produce it anyway.

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

#66

Post by relaxing »

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…

> 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 beg of you, speak to some real life musicians. A human composing or improvising is not choosing notes based on a set of probabilities derived from all the music they’ve heard in their life.

> 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.

Your impoverished worldview of music as an artistic endeavor is depressing. Humanity’s musical knowledge extends far beyond the big 3.

> If the above is true we might as well shutdown OpenAI and delete all LLM weights while we're at it

Now we’re talking.

> losing massive value to humanity.

Nothing of value would be lost. In fact it would refund massive value to humanity that was stolen by generative AI.

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

#67

Post by relaxing »

zaptrem wrote: post #52
dingnuts wrote: post #33

[flagged]

Over the years I've seen people get a lot of hate for things they've poured their souls into who turn around and post snarky/insulting responses that ended up getting them into even more hot water. I always wondered why they didn't respond with their clearly well thought out reasoning behind what they built instead of the snark, even if the original comment wasn't in good faith either. I understand them a little bett…

You know, most people go through their lives without attracting this kind of criticism. They might laugh or call you foolish, but to consistently tell you you’re actively making the world a worse place? That’s reserved for a special class of assholes. I’d take the feedback seriously.

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

#68

Post by throwup238 »

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?

Remember that you’ve also got a nice natural limitation here: if it’s a hobbyist and not a (commercial) API consumer, there’s only so fast they can listen to the output. Even if they’re rapidly tweaking nobs in a DAW, you can use the play/pause signal to help prioritize the queue, depending on how expensive it is to serialize the GPU state and rehydrate it again. You also might not need to complete generation until the user reaches the play point so you can shuffle around the queue a lot. For example if the user skips after ten seconds you might not need to generate the rest until they try to play that track again, and when they do you usually have enough time before they reach the previous stopping point to generate some more sections.

It might also be helpful to come up with some ways to segregate customers so that “prosumer” users get faster “cold starts” (so that they can iterate faster) at the expense of sometimes having to wait for generation to start back up again.

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

#69

Post by fuhsnn »

magicmicah85 wrote: post #39
weberer wrote: post #35

So if I make a song using this API, who owns the copyright? Is it me or Sonauto?

From their terms ( https://sonauto.ai/tos ): 8. OUTPUT As between You and the Services, and to the extent permitted by applicable law, You own any right, title, or interest that may exist in the musical and/or audio content that You generate using the Services ("Outputs"). We hereby assign to You all our right, title, and interest, if any, in and to Your Outputs. This assignment does not extend to other users' Output…

>You own any right, title, or interest that may exist

>We hereby assign to You all our right, title, and interest, if any

>You are solely responsible for Outputs and Your use of Outputs

I love how it clearly laid out the scenario that the right don't exist, yet you are responsible.

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

#70

Post by JoeDaDude »

Why is it "music for developers"? I was expecting one of those Lofi music videos designed to enhance concentration or similar. These are typically instrumentals, ostensibly because they are less distracting, something like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QY2_8704o

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