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MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

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Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#171

Post by wholinator2 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #50
the_only_law wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won’t speak to music, as I listen to a lot of stuff, enough to know there is good stuff out there being made. But for movies and TV? Where do I find the good stuff? It seems Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and just milking people off boring franchises and cheap nostalgia through crappy remakes and sequels. My eyes rolled to the back of my head when I saw an ad for a show called “how I met your father” on Hulu.

Those “boring franchises” are what bankroll the passion projects, artsy festival bound movies, and experimental content. As far as content goes, there has been a ton of excellent stuff just this year across movies, TV, and anime. One “organic” way to start is to look for recent recommendation threads on Reddit for a movie or show you really like.

See, I've seen this stated many places but never explained. How exactly does the money made by derivative bullshit go into valuable, passionate, art projects and not either directly into pockets or into the next billion dollar derivative bullshit thing?

Generally, the bullshit costs way more to produce and market and advertise. And at least on paper, a significant amount of the money made is only recuperating costs for the 3 hours of incredibly CGI it took to make a 3rd 'ant man' or a 4th 'jurassic park'. The majority of actual indie art films cost ridiculously less than that because they're filming a movie, not a commercial.

Anyways, my opinions aside, are there any articles with cited money trails that prove that billion dollar blockbusters actually fund valuable art and not just executives yahts?

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#172

Post by moonchrome »

solumunus wrote: post #150
yantrams wrote: post #53

I'm just weirded about the fact that conversation about something AS EPIC AS THIS is so boring and rudderless here on hacker news of all places. I mean like YESTERDAY I did not have this superpower to summon something as majestic as say https://fb.watch/l4ssOD40M4/ with a simple 'A quirky and skronky Aphex twin sample that just hits you' Edits: I woke up to this news delivered from Yann Lecun himself in the morning o…

That is straight garbage.

I get the same feeling every time I buy into the AI hype and try it for myself.

On stuff like art it's hard to judge objectively, but in things like code it's much simpler. Don't get me wrong there are cases where I find generative AI useful - but the hype machine and the unedited whole solutions are just straight garbage.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#173

Post by visarga »

rubicon33 wrote: post #7

Maybe I'm just getting older but I feel like the quality of both music and film has seriously declined over the last 5-10 years. Maybe the good stuff is still out there but lost in a sea of average garbage that has surfaced to the top. Something tells me AI isn't going to rescue us either. I just sampled a bunch of these generated tracks and they immediately remind me of the average, mediocre, soul-lacking content th…

> remind me of the average, mediocre, soul-lacking content

This model is just the equivalent of GPT-2 for music. It's not the GPT-4 yet. Music is trailing a few years from language. Used to be that language was about 5 years behind vision. Now language is the top.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#175

Post by waboremo »

bluefishinit wrote: post #137
jimbokun wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we like music for the fun of making it, and the shared emotional connection felt with the artist (whether it's real or not, knowing a human wrote and performed a piece allows you to imagine this connection). I don't know what the point of machine generated music is. Just destroying one of the few remaining ways for people to make a living doing something creative, I guess. The promise of automation was to hav…

> I don't know what the point of machine generated music is. One point is that music fans can now make their own music. I think it's great that people can express themselves and it's not limited to those who put in 10k+ hours to master a single instrument. More people creating is a good thing.

The idea that creating music has had a huge technical barrier is laughable. It has not existed for ~20 years. Artists like Tinashe have learned to produce music themselves with programs like ableton, not a lick of mastering instruments or graduating from this and that art school. Just a general sense of what sounds good to you. Unlike visual art, there's no mechanical barrier either, no mastering of techniques. You can genuinely fiddle around with knobs and buttons and create something that sounds great to you - soundcloud is filled with these.

So there isn't going to be an increased level of profound self expressions because of this. Quite the opposite, more pure noise for the purpose of farming ad revenue.

What's worse, and an aspect many proponents of AI generations ignore, is that by ushering people into this specific channel of caring more about prompts than all else, we are doing a real disservice to potential people who could have become serious masters of their realm. After all, "why learn how that music program works when I can just generate it?"

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#176

Post by tarr11 »

jimbokun wrote: post #106
yantrams wrote: post #53

I'm just weirded about the fact that conversation about something AS EPIC AS THIS is so boring and rudderless here on hacker news of all places. I mean like YESTERDAY I did not have this superpower to summon something as majestic as say https://fb.watch/l4ssOD40M4/ with a simple 'A quirky and skronky Aphex twin sample that just hits you' Edits: I woke up to this news delivered from Yann Lecun himself in the morning o…

Because we like music for the fun of making it, and the shared emotional connection felt with the artist (whether it's real or not, knowing a human wrote and performed a piece allows you to imagine this connection). I don't know what the point of machine generated music is. Just destroying one of the few remaining ways for people to make a living doing something creative, I guess. The promise of automation was to hav…

This feels like a straw man to me. We are continuing to automate feeding, housing and clothing ourselves as well. These two things are not mutually exclusive.

I would like to make music, video games and movies, too, and AI lets me do that. I don’t need millions of dollars or years of training to make something creative anymore.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#177

Post by Tao3300 »

visarga wrote: post #160
Tao3300 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because we like music for the fun of making it, and the shared emotional connection felt with the artist... I don't know what the point of machine generated music is. Bingo. This is a fun toy, but in terms what it means , you may as well ask an AI to pray. It's completely hollow in terms of the actual experience. This could make suitable filler for idle games, ads, aquariums, and elevators. Not much else. Perhaps a…

> but in terms what it means , you may as well ask an AI to pray The generative process is based on a combination of learning and randomness. The random part doesn't mean anything, but it's clear that it is far from just random notes. Do you think human music always starts from a meaning? It's just lucky accidents that sound good. We even retrofit explanations post facto to our actions, we can certainly compose music…

You've misunderstood. I'm not talking about the meaning of the inputs and outputs of a creative process. I'm talking about the very experience of doing the thing. Hence the prayer comparison.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#178

Post by meltedcapacitor »

tumult wrote: post #45

I don’t understand what’s motivating certain types of people to continue working on these types of AI practical implementation projects. There’s nothing good for the world this (type of AI in particular) will offer. Maybe someone will say this will let people who aren’t musicians express themselves by creating music. That’s not true. It’s as true as hiring a musician to make a song for you, given a description. And n…

Sounds like the "is DJing an art form" debate. :o)

Unlike classic "hiring a musician", here it's practical to "hire" the (robot) musician 10000 times with a feedback loop between the model and the prompt writer, iterating and picking the best output(s)... which looks like a similar process to other exercises considered art forms.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#179

Post by bottlepalm »

jsheard wrote: post #132
bottlepalm wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, cynical/jaded internet commenter - I don't need Mick Gordon's dynamic compositions, I just need some background music for my game that's good enough. And no you can't do this already: const musicSpeed = inFightSequence ? 'intense' : 'chill'; const musicPrompt = `drum and bass beat with ${musicSpeed} percussions`; playMusic(musicPrompt);

I wish you luck with your game which constantly oscillates between https://youtu.be/dLkFh9Kn8AU?t=60 and https://youtu.be/gQktj-WkgEo?t=75 because you didn't put any thought into the music beyond telling the computer to make "chill DnB" and "intense DnB".

Are you deflecting by attacking my simple example instead of defending your ‘this has already been done before’ point? If you’re wrong just say you’re wrong.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#180

Post by wholinator2 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #144
pests wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where in your gwern link is the input format being crucial discussed? I couldn't find it.

I don’t know if gwern realized how powerful his model was. His examples are underwhelming, because you have to prompt it in a certain way to get it to generate chords. He was showing me samples and they were neat, but boring. One day he posted something that sounded pretty amazing, and I was blown away. “More like that, please.” It had chords in it. He didn’t pursue it past that. I did. So it’s possible that no one i…

Do you have a write up anywhere with samples? I'd love to hear some of the better examples you have. I agree that most of what's out there is underwhelming
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