Discussed previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38743719
(336 points/86 days ago/165 comments)
Suno, an AI music generator
141–150 of 177 posts
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was music director for 97.7 KAFA from 2006-2007 and I literally listened to 100 CDs everyday Picked up my box of 500 CDs from the mail distributors sent us each week and had to find new music every week It was a challenge and honestly not much fun cause as you said its frankly a lot of junk However that’s all art - for every “let it be” there are 100,000 songs produced and released by artists for themselves What wa…
> I literally listened to 100 CDs everyday Not possible without a lot of skipping songs.
Not who you responded to, but I worked in college radio for a while. Depending on what CDs they were listening to, generally the label will highlight which tracks are standouts and that you should listen to. Usually it would be 3 or 4 tracks max (generally track 1, 3 and 4 though there are exceptions).
Most tracks are 3 minutes long.. so given an average of lets say 3 songs a cd at 3 minutes each... 100 x 3 x 3 / 60 == 15 hours of listening (hand wavey no time to change cd and stuff...). So yeah probably pushing the limits of reasonable but not quite as crazy as you might think.
Also, although it was unfair to the artist, I would usually make up my mind on pop songs by the end of the first chorus. If I'm not hooked within 1 minute it's probably not going to play on my show. It was brain numbing work, and frankly made me view music as a chore for a few years afterwards... but you can listen to quite a few tracks this way and try and find the few gems amongst the chaff so to speak.
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's also a prototype, you are numb and spoiled by the speed of technological advancements. > Like with good art, you need to learn how to appreciate it, see it not for whether it can be useful to you for 10$, but for what it can be in the future with a cost structure so cheap they can afford to run it on 10$ subscriptions. Nonsense. This isn't a university research team or a FOSS project-- it's a commercial art pr…
It's like you've never played an early access game
> It's like you've never played an early access game
It's like you've never thought about why we in the game industry release early access games. Getting critical feedback from people invested enough to buy into a beta test is the whole point. Even if we don't agree with any given critique, knowing that a non-zero number of players hate some mechanic, thinks something is unbalanced, or encounter irritating usability problems is invaluable for guding both creative and a technical strategies.
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#144> Who owns the songs I generate using Suno?
> If you are a paying subscriber to Suno, then you own the songs you generate while subscribed to Pro or Premier.
So, as soon as I stop subscribing, I no longer “own” the songs? What if they go under? That’s nonsense.
EDIT: I was wrong, that isn’t how it works
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jazz guitarist here, utterly disgusted by this technology: you are right on the money. The chorus is fine (though bland), but the verses are simply terrible - not just bad timing, there is a total lack of melodic "flow." Like almost all AI music I've heard, the melodies fit into one of two categories: 1) generic and lazy, but works musically due to Music Theory 101 (playing chord tones to the beat, cliched progressio…
Any good for creating samples?
Convenient for making samples? Sure, I guess. So are drum machines. I'll bet SD would be great at making images for collages to, but it kind of defeats the purpose, no? Good samples are almost always good because they're amazing but weird little bits of quirk or real musical genius that can say something completely different about music in a different context. The process of finding and choosing samples is exploratory, and the sophistication you get from listening to all of that great music is a big part of it. Commanding some machine to just make them for you and tweaking them to get them just so yields all the inconvenience of sampling with the lack of substance you'd get from a drum machine. While people making amazing art using drum machines, it's because they're making art around them, not because any specific thing the drum machine did.
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of art techniques-- e.g. a basic set of shapes to help draw heads with correct proportions-- are formulaic. That doesn't make them any less artistic than someone just throwing down marks based on their gut instinct. Music itself has been boiled down to a mathematical and artistic scaffolding that people have worked within for centuries. There are also a whole hell of a lot of creative decisions in between the sh…
Yeah, I think what it comes down to is AI can be another tool in the artist's toolbox to create novelty, but by itself it is incapable of doing so.
It would be a net positive if it didn't facilitate a whole bunch of Dunning-Kruger 'artists' summiting Mt. Stupid flooding the lower end of the commercial art markets with vaguely convincing looking bullshit. It weakens our artistic culture, waters down professional standards at the lower end of the markets putting a whole bunch of workaday or entry-level people out of jobs, and in turn, pushes less qualified people upmarket which makes it harder to hire and find work, and weakens salaries. Also, since the MBAs in charge will inevitably shove these tools down people's throats, it takes the most enjoyable parts of the artistic process away from you, replaces it with a bunch of crap amalgamated from a billion other people's work, and leaves the fussy, irritating, soulless, and completely not-rewarding task of cleaning up and enhancing some algorithm's bullshit. It would be like if developers had to start every single coding task with an ever-changing template of completely clusterfuck spaghetti code made by the worst intern at your company.
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#147Being a musical artist isn't about knowing how to use tools to make a sound, it's about having the taste to know which sounds out of many are the right ones to express what you're trying to say. It's about having an idea you want to create to put out into the world. People without ideas and taste will play with this stuff for a while because it feels like it gives them a shortcut to talent, but after a while the nove…
What percentage of the artists that are currently earning a living by making music have taste?
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was music director for 97.7 KAFA from 2006-2007 and I literally listened to 100 CDs everyday Picked up my box of 500 CDs from the mail distributors sent us each week and had to find new music every week It was a challenge and honestly not much fun cause as you said its frankly a lot of junk However that’s all art - for every “let it be” there are 100,000 songs produced and released by artists for themselves What wa…
> I literally listened to 100 CDs everyday Not possible without a lot of skipping songs.
Here’s me with a sample of CDs:
https://twitter.com/AndrewKemendo/status/1770053620144234763
Actually you skip within the song…to do this well you listen to about 20-30 seconds of each song focused on intro, bridge, outro. Most songs aren’t air worthy so you’ll know in 5 seconds it’s a skip
It was a few hours a day
After months of this you get it down to a science
As other posters said, the CDs have stickers indicating the tracks they want you to play so sometimes I’d just play those if I was feeling lazy
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#149Being a musical artist isn't about knowing how to use tools to make a sound, it's about having the taste to know which sounds out of many are the right ones to express what you're trying to say. It's about having an idea you want to create to put out into the world. People without ideas and taste will play with this stuff for a while because it feels like it gives them a shortcut to talent, but after a while the nove…
Any thoughts on the part you missed out, actually talented people using these tools to either accelerate their production or even perform as a different type of/genre of performer outside the constraints of their physicality.
Think those lines of discussion are far more interesting than the well trodden "low talents will use it, then fail" path.
Re: Suno, an AI music generator
#150The two best things it ever made for me:
A Warrior's Dream: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/sxe3ig5zynrd3pcs3oy8a/a-warri...
Ollie, the Orange Tabby: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/amfudnsccpvl15arjurz3/Ollie-t...
the first one I made by describing an experience I had in an online text-based game that is now offline, long live Clok. Cogg is a good successor though. Anyway, GPT-4-turbo did pretty good making them into lyrics, besides the "profoundly floored" part; that was rather cheesy. I still like it though.
The second was for my cat that I used to have. I then tried out an AI Remaster tool. I kinda liked it better unmastered now, but ah well. It still reminds me of him and makes me happy when I hear it.
These tools, I think, should really be used for simple things like this, to give voice to personal experiences like this, for people who clearly have no musical talent like me, or to help those who do to jumpstart the creative process if that's what they need. People selling these songs... Well, I can't even fault them since it's hard to make any kind of money these days.