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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

#71

Post by stepvhen »

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…

I encourage you to listen to more music, particularly if "humanity" is intrinsic to the art of it. There is plenty of music made by humans that is rather un-humanlike. Noise, Drone, Chiptune, Glitch, Musique Concrete, Field Recordings, etc all explore the outer limits of music as an artform, and many have no more of a human element than somebody was there to create it (incidentally, most music in those genres doesn't often have lyrics).

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#72

Post by ffwd »

soundwave106 wrote: post #60
philhartmanonic wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about that. The whole idea of "having a soul" is so nebulous that it's hard to build a view on top of it. Do we have souls? If yes, is it possible to mechanically replicate a soul? If not, why not? What's a soul? If instead you define art as the communication of things that can't be fully expressed by direct sterile language, that's something I can get behind. Going that route, I think that getting AI to…

That statement "music has soul" to me merely characterizes the emotional attachment that people put on music. I'm not sure how that could be 100% programmed or machine-learned at this time. That being said, musicians have been creating machine-assisted composition (sequencer driven, stochastic, etc.) for a long time. I can imagine great art coming from AI, if the composer is there to help "guide the AI tool" in the d…

Without sounding too nerdy - music doesn't have soul, brains apply the "soulful" property inside itself to aesthetic signals where it makes sense to do so. Music like all other sensory stimuli is purely aesthetic and lacks depth, it's the brain that connects the dots and fabricates the story, and in that sense an AI's output can have many different possible stories. Personally I really like artificial and alien music and art, and it can for example make us more aware of peoples place in the universe and our environment and the future, and connect the brain to novel atmospheres and ideas. This notion of a guy playing a guitar being the only thing that's music is very outdated to me and not interesting at all.

And yes - musicians use accidents both digitally but even in the acoustic world all the time, that suddenly makes for interesting listening. Music has never been 100% human.

And the last point is if you want computers to be able to fabricate the stories themselves, and maybe create output that tells or "exploits" such a story, then yes maybe it isn't a human story, or maybe they can emulate our story, but in the end we come down to what is consciousness, what is intelligence, and all of this. But if intelligence can be artificial similar to humans, then AI's can in theory create vast and amazingly intricate stories that would be even more fascinating than what a human could come up with.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#73

Post by astazangasta »

bch wrote: post #17
astazangasta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy. A "soul" is a collection of thoughts and narratives that define the core of your being, many of which are held in common with other human beings. I think this is a useful requirement for a soul, since this means that ensouled creatures must participate in a community of discourse/culture along with humans. If AI can't do this, it's worthless.

AI will "fake it till it makes it." I'm listening to Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin right now. What about those can't be analyzed and recreated ? There's not complex bowing technique or lyrics to speak of, but it's still relatable, and some I'm sure would say soulful. BoC for certain (by their tone) evoke "nostalgia". Does that qualify as soulful ? Does it seem out of reach of algorithms ? I think "soul" will have t…

This is the wrong idea. Of course a machine can recreate Aphex Twin with perfect fidelity, just like, unfortunately, a monkey can recreate a Jackson Pollock.

But a machine does not yet have the capacity to lay its finger on the cultural pulse and create something new and slightly different that strikes a resonating cord, pulls people in a new direction, makes them grow, because in addition to having a certain algorithmic description, the music they are making also betrays a certain darkness, a blend of fear, grotesque and dissonance that is there, somewhere down inside us, and that we love despite its ugliness. Until a machine can discover this part of humanity and translate this roiling mass into music, it hasn't managed the same feat as Aphex Twin.

This is what makes music great, that it is born from a place that requires loving observation of humanity. Real creativity requires having insights about humans, representing them in art, and exposing your insight through a particular medium. The image itself, the sound, means nothing. It's the reception, the speaker, the meaning, that matters.

A machine has no place in society. It isn't "straight out of Compton". It CANNOT make music.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#74

Post by Shebanator »

shams93 wrote: post #66
aaronwidd wrote: post #65

What this will change probably isn't pop music, it's soundtracks for TV commercials, video games, shows, movies etc. Currently to put music in something you need to license it somehow, in most cases the generic music you hear in most media is sourced from a company that has a library of royalty free songs that they sell for a pretty hefty license fee. Imagine being able to instead go into some software and punch in s…

That's a really good point, there's a market opportunity for a soundtrack generator that does a decent job of producing usable generic music for video productions.

And porn.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#75

Post by gglitch »

stepvhen wrote: post #71
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…

I encourage you to listen to more music, particularly if "humanity" is intrinsic to the art of it. There is plenty of music made by humans that is rather un-humanlike. Noise, Drone, Chiptune, Glitch, Musique Concrete, Field Recordings, etc all explore the outer limits of music as an artform, and many have no more of a human element than somebody was there to create it (incidentally, most music in those genres doesn't…

Good point. An experimental algorithmic band called Autechre just released their 12th album this week, comprising over 4 hrs of music produced entirely by Max/MSP algorithms they've spent their entire careers learning to build and tweak. I think it's outstanding, many others will find it utterly unlistenable; but what's interesting is that they've dedicated their lives to making music that carries the flavor of malfunctioning machinery, while in the mean time, computers have been learning to make Muzak indistinguishable from pop nominally made by humans.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#76

Post by ElHacker »

SanderMak wrote: post #23
ElHacker wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but knowing that there isn't a person behind those words, feeling what I'm feeling, definitely detracts from the experience of the whole. It would be very interesting to create a secret fake person profile and publish AI generated music under that fake name and see if humans feel identified with the lyrics and music. See how far it goes, who knows, maybe create the next super star. Then to later reveal the secret.

You should see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_(2002_film) , sounds like you'll enjoy its premise.

Thanks for the suggestion. Will definitely see it.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#77

Post by ashleyblackmore »

onion2k wrote: post #29
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…

Even if the musical output was impressive, I can't think of people developing a deep relationship with it outside of novelty. There are plenty of times and places where people want high quality "music" but don't want to actually engage with it on any level - the music that tells you you're still connected when you're waiting for a conference call, the low volume background music in some retail environments, the music…

That's true.

Eno worked on a number of projects to generate music years ago, with Bloom and similar: http://www.generativemusic.com/. A quick fiddle with that can definitely generate some banal hold/elevator music.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#78

Post by jerf »

zamalek wrote: post #35
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

"at around 3:50 it even attempts some singing."

Mmmmm... that sounds like overfitting. That's not "attempting some singing", that's "playing back one of the things it trained on". Which really raises questions about the rest of what you hear, too; it seems like what is being produced is probably in some sense the "average" of the training data, rather than something able to generate new samples from it. But it's a very interesting "average" full of interesting information.

Since I wouldn't expect this to produce much else, I'm not being critical about the effort, just pointing it out so others understand what they are hearing. It was an interesting and worthy experiment that I wondered about myself.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#79

Post by sangnoir »

nkozyra wrote: post #48
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

> The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to. I think this is a grand oversimplification. Personality certainly _contributes_ to pop stardom, but the music is still #1. Before anyone knew who Taylor Swift was, they connected with her through one or more song. > A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance.…

> Before anyone knew who Taylor Swift was, they connected with her through one or more song.

Only if by 'connected with her' you mean heard her debut hit over and over and over again on radio until it became an earworm.

Re: Welcome to Magenta – Google music AI project

#80

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

astazangasta wrote: post #73
bch wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI will "fake it till it makes it." I'm listening to Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin right now. What about those can't be analyzed and recreated ? There's not complex bowing technique or lyrics to speak of, but it's still relatable, and some I'm sure would say soulful. BoC for certain (by their tone) evoke "nostalgia". Does that qualify as soulful ? Does it seem out of reach of algorithms ? I think "soul" will have t…

This is the wrong idea. Of course a machine can recreate Aphex Twin with perfect fidelity, just like, unfortunately, a monkey can recreate a Jackson Pollock. But a machine does not yet have the capacity to lay its finger on the cultural pulse and create something new and slightly different that strikes a resonating cord, pulls people in a new direction, makes them grow, because in addition to having a certain algorit…

Not so sure about that.

James/Aphex said back in 1997 that he was using algocomp for some of his music. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphex_Twin#Musical_style

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