KVR Audio

annode · Post by **annode** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 5:19 pm

In the New Age music category Brian Eno's Reflection was nominated along with;
- Steve Roach - Spiral Revelation
- Kitaro - Sacred Journey Of Ku-Kai, Volume 5
- Peter Kater - Dancing On Water
- India.Arie - SongVersation: Medicine
(EDIT: I feel strongly that Eno and Roach absolutely do not belong in the New Age category! There is a Dance/Electronic Music category, this seems more appropriate don't you think? )

Personally I'll be voting for Steve Roach. But how do you feel about knowing that generative music software may get a Grammy award?
Is this the beginning of A.I. moving in to replace us? How long has AI been used in country music? Come on...any country music song would only need a short algorithm.
Have you heard any of the popular music out there? AI?

dark water · Post by **dark water** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 6:57 pm

I agree with you annode: whilst Eno's generative music is very enjoyable for me to listen to, I would hesitate to put it up for a (human-celebrated and recognized) award.
I say that as someone who enjoys the results of my computer's own generative music compositions, such as:

https://soundcloud.com/user-434633776/something-fishy
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... r#p6933814

Then again, the artist can still exist as the editor and mixer of the resulting audio, for example, so it is a moot point as to how much a piece of music is the result of AI or human.

I would be interested to know how other people's views might change depending upon what threshold is reached and how much of the generative music process was devised by a human as opposed to AI.
In terms of mixing software, perhaps there will come a point soon when computers will be able to make (subjectively) ''aesthetically pleasing'' mixes too and put mixing / mastering engineers (further) out of business?

slipstick · Post by **slipstick** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 9:49 pm

How about if the generative system is designed / written by the person using it? Or the algorithms extensively modified by them?

The generative systems I've used have seemed to need considerable input from the user to produce anything very interesting. To the extent that I've found it as easy to write a lot of my own "generative" code to feed and help them.

To me it feels a bit like the old aleatoric composition days when in theory pure chance could decide the composition...but the composer still got to decide which bits he was actually going to use.

Steve

Stanoli · Post by **Stanoli** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 10:26 pm

He`s old and makes the musical equivalent of looking relaxed into a fire.
Nothing against it and if he gets a grammy for it, even better.
A nice counterpoint to the common aggressive and hyper EDMgenre.

annode · Post by **annode** » Sun Jan 21, 2018 11:41 pm

There is an app. available representing what Eno used to make this 53min mastered recording. http://usoproject.blogspot.com/2009/09/ ... er_19.html
I can't speak on this app. , but as I understand it, it is the same program used for the nominated recording .
The program could just be simple logic,(but I doubt it) like ' if so, then what '. If all the possible decisions the program could make are those made by Eno himself I might feel differently about this nomination.

This nomination may be just a curiosity, or maybe something more of a landmark. Either way I hope it stirs up more controversy.
Don't get me wrong, I am a big Eno fan and have been for many yrs now. I would have been happier if they nominated Brian Eno "The Ship" from 2016. That was a great release.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Mon Jan 22, 2018 2:50 am

dark water wrote:I agree with you annode: whilst Eno's generative music is very enjoyable for me to listen to, I would hesitate to put it up for a (human-celebrated and recognized) award.

Frank Zappa's Jazz From Hell WON the Grammy for instrumental album. All but one track were composed using the Synclavier system. He was convinced no one who voted for it had heard any of it. He probably included the one live track to add back some 'human element' or eyebrows.

annode · Post by **annode** » Mon Jan 22, 2018 3:58 pm

jancivil wrote;

He was convinced no one who voted for it had heard any of it.

In the rock field, the separate categories for hard rock and metal albums were combined and the Best Rock Instrumental Performance category was eliminated due to a waning number of entries.

Wikipedia
Looking at the nominees through those yrs you can see it was slim pickings.
BTW, the category was for one song, not the LP.

Like that removed category, the same should be done for New Age. New Age used to be the catch all section in record stores for electronica but lets let it die finally.

EDIT: Later it occurred to me, the category which Zappa's synclavier track won was for performance, such as playing an instrument well. What strikes me now and jancivil inadvertently make the point that Zappa didn't play, it was programmed. So, like a generative music program it is also programmed. Zappa chose every note and nuance himself unlike Eno, but the similarities are worth noting.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:10 pm

Right, it awarded a recording of an instrumental performance by their lingo. It's not the same as generative but the workflow of a Synclavier at that time was sequencing. So there is a fair amount of copy/paste there. You could play into it but it's a lot like I work, you play in phrases and the 'performance' is a lot of edits. But FZ presented live work like that from here on it in, idealized *composite* performances.

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammy_Aw ... erformance
It looks like the award was for the album. The singles titles are displayed with quotes around, the albums titles in italics.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Mon Jan 22, 2018 6:13 pm

But the real point is: it doesn't matter. They're giving Eno what is kindred to the Emmy recognizing historical importance. I wouldn't advise anyone to look to the Grammy for the best in music of that year or whatever. If the award does match quality it's a coincidence afaic.

dark water · Post by **dark water** » Mon Jan 22, 2018 7:04 pm

jancivil wrote:But the real point is: it doesn't matter. They're giving Eno what is kindred to the Emmy recognizing historical importance. I wouldn't advise anyone to look to the Grammy for the best in music of that year or whatever. If the award does match quality it's a coincidence afaic.

True, there's no argument here with that.

I haven't properly listened to Zappa's 'Jazz From Hell' (I'm more a fan of his 'One Size Fits All' era), so I'll give it a listen, cheers.

CircuitEYE · Post by **CircuitEYE** » Wed Jan 24, 2018 1:26 pm

Right, they are closer to Electronic then New Age.

do_androids_dream · Post by **do_androids_dream** » Wed Jan 24, 2018 1:41 pm

Well awards don't mean shit at the end of the day. Most are just a different way to go about marketing or self congratulatory pats on the back from the industry. Roach has always been associated with New Age so I have no problem with that categorisation.

annode · Post by **annode** » Wed Jan 24, 2018 4:49 pm

do_androids_dream wrote:Well awards don't mean shit at the end of the day. Most are just a different way to go about marketing or self congratulatory pats on the back from the industry. Roach has always been associated with New Age so I have no problem with that categorisation.

So your saying since the Grammy awards don't mean shit at the end of the day, nominating computer generated music is moot.

Putting Roach in the box with New Age is just sightless.
He makes and is well known for Tribal Ambient, Space Ambient and general Atmospheric Ambient. I'll agree that Michael Sterns is associated with a New Age style... this post is mainly about Eno's generative music release being nominated.

vurt · Post by **vurt** » Wed Jan 24, 2018 4:56 pm

not that i give a shit about awards but, there was a short news item on about the release of this last year.
they where in the studio with eno while he was designing/programming the generative music app. from the bottom up he designed everything, from the samples within to all the different variables possible within the effects so it stays "musical" eg its not just purely random, he made decisions and just fed lots of options for the different sounds.

its random within defined parameters.

annode · Post by **annode** » Wed Jan 24, 2018 5:13 pm

vurt wrote:not that i give a shit about awards but, there was a short news item on about the release of this last year.
they where in the studio with eno while he was designing/programming the generative music app. from the bottom up he designed everything, from the samples within to all the different variables possible within the effects so it stays "musical" eg its not just purely random, he made decisions and just fed lots of options for the different sounds.

its random within defined parameters.

I saw an interview with him at his home(and lab) and I came away with a similar perspective on it. Like other constructions he's made in the past, it incorporates mid-length delays taps. It makes logical decisions which he fine tuned. There seems to be no doubt it is a program(audio release) modeled from his own compositional likeness.

So one can ask if it is worthy to be nominated as a true expressive output from this artist. Can a program that models Beethoven create new Beethoven music worthy of award nomination ?
EDIT: Ok, I thought a few mins about that and yes it's rediculus to compare Beethoven with Eno. To model Beethoven would take extreme technical thought and programming...unlike Eno's program. But still, can I ask the same question using artists on a similar simplicity as Eno? How about country music?

Brian Eno's generative recording 'Reflection' nominated for Grammy?!