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Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

magenta.tensorflow.org

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Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#31

Post by ENGNR »

ashleyblackmore wrote: post #25

People want and need other people around, doing human things. Even if the musical output was impressive, I can't think of people developing a deep relationship with it outside of novelty. Algorithms are cold, and music is usually very much the opposite - I can see an "uncanny valley" effect cropping up with the imitative forms: people hearing something that is supposed to come across as laden with emotion, instead le…

Imagine the performance side of things though.

Being able to add to the song with commands like 'add a psytrance bass line', even within predefined parameters, to dynamically generate an entirely new bass line from other songs in the genre.

Maybe you could instantly add an improvised violin melody by telling it a style given that the chords/key from the human band are consistent.

Sentiment analysers could tweak the music based on crowd reaction towards musician defined goals and learn those pre-sets over time.

If music is a synchronisation layer between humans, maybe machine learning could help us to synchronize even more closely.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#32

Post by vintermann »

tunesmith wrote: post #10

There's music and then there's music. I'm glad they are at least thinking about long narrative structures. Ultimately I don't think this is a very worthwhile because I personally believe the entire definition of art and music is a production that is filtered through the human experience. The same piece of music would mean more to me coming from a human than from an AI or program. If someone told me it was from a huma…

Well, look at it this way: The AI is really not so different from us in intelligence (although presently dumber), but it's different in motivation. It's has only one single "desire", namely to understand you and write music that connects with you. It's not trying to fool you, it's trying to understand the human experience itself, and tell back to you what it is seeing.

Isn't it OK to let ourselves be moved by its love letters to humanity?

Every Monday, there are hundreds of tweets from Spotify users who declare that the Discover Weekly algorithm understands them better than anyone, that they want to marry it etc. (This is a remarkable testament to neural network AIs. Not many people want to marry Netflix or Amazon's recommender system, to put it like that!)

Of course that only finds music for you, it doesn't create it from scratch. But given the immense size of the library it searches through, that's impressive enough that many really get the feeling that it knows you, understands you. I hope generative algorithms will be that good one day, and I won't waste time worrying that it's fake once they are.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#33

Post by hellofunk »

anilgulecha wrote: post #19
julianpye wrote: post #16

Keyboards have been popping out automatic C-maj, A-min, F-maj, G-maj progressions for fourty years now. And with the typical toolset for electronic music, it will be easily capable to create something similar. But the masterpieces of music demand something altogether different. Beethoven's break with consistency by switching keys in the adagio of the 5th piano concerto. Wagner introducing the Tristan chord, Berg usin…

Not to take away from your point, but none of the above stop an AI from replicating that behavior. It's just a matter of the state-of-the-art catching up.

Catching up to past innovations is a different matter from actually innovating fresh ideas.

Personally I think AI is so far away from doing anything on a human-like scale that none of us will ever be alive (or our grandchildren) to be fooled by such advances.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#34

Post by hellofunk »

julianpye wrote: post #16

Keyboards have been popping out automatic C-maj, A-min, F-maj, G-maj progressions for fourty years now. And with the typical toolset for electronic music, it will be easily capable to create something similar. But the masterpieces of music demand something altogether different. Beethoven's break with consistency by switching keys in the adagio of the 5th piano concerto. Wagner introducing the Tristan chord, Berg usin…

>Mahler losing so many of his children

I think he lost 1 child, not many. And it was a few years after finishing Kindertotenlieder.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#35

Post by zamalek »

shams93 wrote: post #13

The problem is the reliance on midi but it shouldnt be hard to build a credible house music generator even with midi byt relying in midi music data for training wont get you something that sounds like a jimi hendrix. But doing automated dance music makes sense.

> But doing automated dance music makes sense.

This has been done with LSTM[1][2]. Impressively, the NN is generating waveforms and not MIDI notes - at around 3:50 it even attempts some singing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VTI1BBLydE [2]: https://github.com/MattVitelli/GRUV

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#36

Post by TeMPOraL »

julianpye wrote: post #16

Keyboards have been popping out automatic C-maj, A-min, F-maj, G-maj progressions for fourty years now. And with the typical toolset for electronic music, it will be easily capable to create something similar. But the masterpieces of music demand something altogether different. Beethoven's break with consistency by switching keys in the adagio of the 5th piano concerto. Wagner introducing the Tristan chord, Berg usin…

I think algorithms are perfectly capable of generating music we'll consider creative an beautiful - the trick is, you can't tell people it was done by a computer!

Look at the examples you've provided. They gain additional meaning because of the context information you've given. When dealing with art, people like to wonder, what the author thought? How did they feel? People try to connect. With machines, they know there is no human to connect to on the other side, so the work will be considered inferior.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#37

Post by thomasahle »

my_username_is_ wrote: post #3

Having recently spent some time browsing the submissions of /r/deepdream and seeing how far computer generated imaging has come, I have no doubts that one day we will be listening to wonderful sounds that are generated by artificial intelligence. However an intrinsic part of the music (to me, anyways) as an art form, is the humanity of it. A computer can generate lyrics that are relatable on the surface, but knowing…

> but knowing that there isn't a person behind those words, feeling what I'm feeling, definitely detracts from the experience of the whole.

I recently had a discussion about this with a musician. I said that I didn't like when music was produced (and certainly lyrics written by) somebody else than the performer. I said it took away from the experience of 'getting to know' the person I was listening to.

She basically replied, that I was being extremely old fashioned, and that this 'idea' of music was very harmful for the business. She said it prevented people from working together and each contributing what they did best.

If she's right, I guess we just have to interpret the music on its own, and not see it as a mental state of some individual creator. Maybe this is related to, when authors are annoyed that people identify them with their main characters. In any case, non-individual art doesn't seem to be going away.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#38

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

alive2007 wrote: post #28
ashleyblackmore wrote: post #25

People want and need other people around, doing human things. Even if the musical output was impressive, I can't think of people developing a deep relationship with it outside of novelty. Algorithms are cold, and music is usually very much the opposite - I can see an "uncanny valley" effect cropping up with the imitative forms: people hearing something that is supposed to come across as laden with emotion, instead le…

I see this sort of application having a lot of use in the kinds of derivative pop music developed by ensembles of songwriters and manufactured purely to generate radio hits. Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer is genius. The average person listening to Taylor Swift just does not care about Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer. In a way, Magenta's job is not besting Bach. By the definition of Bach (a human being who changes th…

The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to.

Pop is maybe 75% performance, sex, status, and charisma. The music isn't irrelevant, but it only really needs to be a committee-produced mashup of contemporary cliches to do its job.

The rest is posing and attitude.

>As it turns out, this kind of music is already pretty formulaic.

But it's less formulaic than it sounds. Discovering that it uses Standard Chord Sequence Number 7 (from the small standard pop set) won't get you close to an interesting song.

A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file.

Basically there are huge gaps between a MIDI cliche machine - buildable now, and not particularly difficult - to a full virtual artist who produces even moderately successful tracks without human help, to a musical AI genius who produces completely new musical styles that capture the human imagination for centuries.

You need a model of mind to do that last one, and we're at least 50 to 100 years away from that.

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