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MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

ai.honu.io

281–290 of 340 posts

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#281
I’m a musician and have spent over 20 years making music. It’s my biggest passion. I still love this. Music isn’t a competition to me so it doesn’t bother me that someone with little experience can create great sounding music. I can still make music that’s an expression of myself, or I can generate some AI music to see if something catches my ear as a starting point. It’s just another tool, and I’m excited to see how it evolves.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#282

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.

people can express themselves...

Is it really an act of personal expression if you've narrowed the "vocabulary of creation" to the stable Diffusion equivalent of "hyper realistic, unreal engine, 8K, masterpiece, intricate details"?

At that point would not the act of creation feel rather hollow?

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterexample: https://on.soundcloud.com/d6rX9goHHrSH3sQY9 I agree with you. When gwern investigated AI folk music in 2019, I realized it could generate a wonderful variety of music, full of soul. Be sure to listen to several tracks before making up your mind. My favorite is “crossing the channel”, since I think GPT made a mistake at the beginning, and then generated the most reasonable sounding not-mistake, which t…

This is the best generated music I've ever heard. Are you blogging about your project? Where can I read more about your methods?

Sadly no, and nowhere. And with my primary focus being gamedev for the foreseeable future, the only way I see it being resurrected is if I need some generated music. That’s fairly low on the priority list for now, but it might preempt other things. https://github.com/shawwn/noh

To be immodest for a moment, my work serves as an example that it’s possible to do it, and better than anyone else, long before they figure out how. Many examples of this pop up throughout history, and I am gratified to be a small but real one.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#285
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s already an endless supply of free and royalty free music in every style. While an AI can now also generate that for you as well, it was not necessary to create the AI to meet your goal and requirement.

So whats the issue? I can create exactly what I want instead of what is available.

By definition of having an AI generate something for you instead of making it yourself, you can’t create exactly what you want. You can probably get it in the ballpark, though. But that’s exactly the same scenario we have today with musicians.

The same way we traded away the profession of painters for photography, it seems like we might be trading away muscicians for generative music AI. Except photography is super useful for lots of things and truly benefitted humankind, and generative music AI… only replaces musicians? I have no idea why we would make this trade, as a society.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#287
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an absolutely massive gulf between "free (or fixed list price) and immediate, just use these apps" and "locate a musician, bargain with them, pay, collaborate with them, wait for revisions, eventually get something usable (but not be 100% sure if I own the rights or not)." I wouldn't even know where to start; I'm too far out of my league. Tackling the latter would likely exceed the entire effort I spent writ…

It's not that hard, you find an email and you basically do a cold call. I was doing it in high school off Newgrounds (which is full of royalty free stuff too!) If your project is small and free, you're not going to land The Eurythmics. But all those people posting their music online hoping to get noticed? Emailing them, even a cold call, immediately tells them you've listened to their stuff and you like it. Honesty i…

Dude I've literally offered to design entire websites for up and coming music artists for FREE because I love their work and am rebuilding a portfolio to have more music sector work.

I've offered this to like 15 people. Some respond in utter confusion and blow me off. Most don't even respond.

This isn't 2005. The vast majority of people, especially "music artists" are not corresponding over email and are not exactly professionals either.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#289
post #205

(This is not meant to be an anti-ai-generated-art rant. It's coming whether we like it or not. But some of the motives in this thread confuse me.) Music producer here with an honest question to those saying "this will provide me with a simple soundtrack/background music for $PROJECT" Have any of you checked out / made offers on music production subreddits? Or other music subreddits? various music production discords?…

Hmm, I was there right yesterday. I needed a track to go with a very particular side-project, and I was looking for somebody to arrange/design/sing the vocals. I’m 100% sure that a musician will always do a more musical job than me. The problem is that coaxing the exact work that I need from that musician is going to be a pain (that is to say, expensive and time-consuming), because the piece does not (can not) fall into any set genre (which tend to be cheaper to produce).

I’m not going the AI-route. It’s frankly easier, more fun and it sounds better to compose the music myself, and if the project takes off and makes a dime, hire a pro to improve things later.

Re: MusicGen: Simple and controllable music generation

#290
post #205

(This is not meant to be an anti-ai-generated-art rant. It's coming whether we like it or not. But some of the motives in this thread confuse me.) Music producer here with an honest question to those saying "this will provide me with a simple soundtrack/background music for $PROJECT" Have any of you checked out / made offers on music production subreddits? Or other music subreddits? various music production discords?…

It's not that there isn't enough electronic music being made, it's that every new track that lands on soundcloud is a drop in the ocean of mediocrity. There is _too_ much, and 99.9% is just boring to listen to, because it sounds like everything else. I listen to a LOT of electronic music (and have, since the mid 90's) and just don't have the patience anymore to sit through hours of average material to find one or two…

Nothing has replaced physical music scenes and communities for content discovery. They filter brutally.
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