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Rave.dj – an artificially intelligent mash-up machine

rave.dj

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Re: Rave.dj – an artificially intelligent mash-up machine

#51
At great risk of sounding haughty, as someone who's perhaps a bit more into the DJing scene than what's probably the average HN user, all of these sound horrible. Beat matching is the easiest part of DJing, and that's about all that this tool does, so I don't think it's solving any DJing problems specifically.

One thing that it does do is take away the turntable GUI (or hardware) and replace it with a two-field upload form, radically reducing the amount of know-how required to perform beat-matching. That's just really scratching the surface of what a lot of "live" DJs do (as they're called these days), as many are bringing instruments like drums and saxophones (see Big Gigantic[1]), keyboards and vocoders (see Lorenz Rhode[2]), their voice (see Gallago[3]), and traditional African drums (see Black Motion[4]), let alone simple song selection and set progression - "reading the crowd".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkxMjfYOE-g

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwf2uvWlL_c

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmCFPjwlxIU

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHEc9uA2Zmw

When the tool comes along that can style-transfer two songs in the same way that it can for images, then I will admit that AI is on the verge of taking our music-creating/music-playing jobs. But for now, I'm satisfied that there's a bit more to the depth of DJing than that what an AI can learn.

Re: Rave.dj – an artificially intelligent mash-up machine

#52

Any blog posts on how this is working? Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson & The Wurzels... Scream Harvester: https://rave.dj/talVuJvYAn6zbA

Seems to just be a beat matcher / BPM adjuster, which is interesting in itself, but quite basic features in any DAW/DJing software.

Re: Rave.dj – an artificially intelligent mash-up machine

#54

At great risk of sounding haughty, as someone who's perhaps a bit more into the DJing scene than what's probably the average HN user, all of these sound horrible. Beat matching is the easiest part of DJing, and that's about all that this tool does, so I don't think it's solving any DJing problems specifically. One thing that it does do is take away the turntable GUI (or hardware) and replace it with a two-field uploa…

Agreed! I'm in a band called The Wonder Bars[1], and we play house music live with real instruments, but we also include drum machines. We're very far from computers being able to improvise (well), and 4-5 humans playing live instruments is just a crowd-captivating visual. Along with Agent Zero[2], Worldtown Soundsystem[3], and several other bands in the Philadelphia area, we make up a vibrant "live electronic" scene united by the way we make music, not by the genres of music that we particularly choose to write and play.

We're also DJs/producers, and as a DJ, I somewhat disagree with AI ever taking our music-creating jobs. Perhaps playing music will be somewhat more automated in the future, but history shows that creating music will just become more complex and more interesting as we continue forward. Think about it: There are still _professional_ drummers out there, people just paid to drum, when drum machines exist. There are entire orchestras that are paid almost the same salary as developers, yet the Vienna Symphonic Library lets a single person on a keyboard play an entire orchestra's score. The truth is, compositions have classically exploited the modern technology of the day to their own advantage, and I don't see that stopping anytime soon. I can even imagine a world where the independent singer/songwriter suddenly becomes more capable than ever, with AI allowing them to orchestrate entire film scores by just playing a piano or a guitar into their computer. But I don't see the creative aspect of music dying just because we built a machine to organize some stuff better for us.

[1]: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2nrkwnQWEqM20n92QC7Cdy [2]: https://www.facebook.com/agentzeromusic [3]: http://world.town

Re: Rave.dj – an artificially intelligent mash-up machine

#55
This one managed to match up the lyrics of two similarly-themed songs surprisingly well, assumedly by accident: https://rave.dj/y0GOaTZwBsEvYw. "But mighty fine only got you somewhere half the time, the other half either got you... eighteen years, and on the eighteenth birthday he found out it wasn't his!"

Re: Rave.dj – an artificially intelligent mash-up machine

#56

At great risk of sounding haughty, as someone who's perhaps a bit more into the DJing scene than what's probably the average HN user, all of these sound horrible. Beat matching is the easiest part of DJing, and that's about all that this tool does, so I don't think it's solving any DJing problems specifically. One thing that it does do is take away the turntable GUI (or hardware) and replace it with a two-field uploa…

Agreed! I'm in a band called The Wonder Bars[1], and we play house music live with real instruments, but we also include drum machines. We're very far from computers being able to improvise (well), and 4-5 humans playing live instruments is just a crowd-captivating visual. Along with Agent Zero[2], Worldtown Soundsystem[3], and several other bands in the Philadelphia area, we make up a vibrant "live electronic" scene…

Oh I definitely agree we have nothing to worry about :) I may have to check you out though! I enjoy live house of many flavors.

But at the same time, photo style transfer is...impressive[1]. It's interesting to me that so many engineers are focused on creating machinery that learns the photographic signal subspace, but there's not too many working on the audio signal subspace.

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/Rdoiv.jpg

Re: Rave.dj – an artificially intelligent mash-up machine

#58
post #38

Ok. I think I nailed the perfect one: https://rave.dj/ySGzN-0svLlPpA

Wow, I have to say I'm kind of amazed this mashup was generated and not hand-crafted..

Really.. it sounds like someone just hit play on two songs at the same time to me. Beatmatching is trivial.
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