A thought on the future of sounds/samples - discussion welcomed.

[koalaboy]

How many of these recent sales and discounts, etc. are due to the developers realising the disruption AI is having, and further likely to have at a growing pace, on the industry overall ?

Once AI can generate 'good/great' sounds from a prompt, produce riffs, perform other mundane editing tasks, how much value will many plugins/instruments have ?

I suspect we have a couple of years yet, but it's clear that the industry is at the beginning of major disruption and yet another change to the business models will be needed.

This isn't about composition or building whole tracks - that's an equally interesting and troubling topic - but the production/alteration of 'sound' to be used within a larger production.

[whyterabbyt]

How many of these recent sales and discounts, etc. are due to the developers realising the disruption AI is having, and further likely to have at a growing pace, on the industry overall ?

Compared to the number that are due to other economic reasons that are affecting all sorts of industries, like customers have increasingly decreased disposable income, or perhaps common seasonal behaviours like that whole Black Friday frenzy?

Not that many, I'd suspect.

[jancivil]

Initial post is hyping like mad.
Anybody whose musicianship or life in music is threatened here is weak_ass IME.
I don't find "AI" 'compostion or building whole tracks'/sic very interesting. The only troubling thing is that people think this is anything like genuine composition.
It takes a universe more than information to make compelling or valuable music. Intelligence to me means quite more than parsing information or trends/patterns/what-have-you in language et cetera.

The examples I've heard "AI" composing music is at best nicely copying, wholly derivative unoriginal pablum, I mean I get no sense of a genuine thought.

Am I just prejudiced? I've yet to see an argument doing anything to move me to that position, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificia ... _proposals
One of the more interesting, to me, examples here is Thaler's Creativity Machine paradigm.
[or] the so-called "Creativity Machine", in which computational critics govern the injection of synaptic noise and degradation into neural nets so as to induce false memories or confabulations that may qualify as potential ideas or strategies.[60] He recruits this neural architecture and methodology to account for the subjective feel of consciousness, claiming that similar noise-driven neural assemblies within the brain invent dubious significance to overall cortical activity. - Thaler 'is neuronal chaos the source of stream-of-consciousness?'
[^60 = Minati, Gianfranco; Vitiello, Giuseppe (2006). "Mistake Making Machines". in Systemics of Emergence: Research and Development]
I would query the Qualia Problem here. "subjective feel of consciousness"...

What are memories? I have seen one concept to address my chief issues:
Haikonen; "the brain is definitely not a computer. Thinking is not an execution of programmed strings of commands. The brain is not a numerical calculator either. We do not think by numbers." Rather than trying to achieve mind and consciousness by identifying and implementing their underlying computational rules, Haikonen proposes "a special cognitive architecture to reproduce the processes of perception, inner imagery, inner speech, pain, pleasure, emotions and the cognitive functions behind these. This bottom-up architecture would produce higher-level functions by the power of the elementary processing units, the artificial neurons, without algorithms or programs".
Haikonen believes that, when implemented with sufficient complexity, this architecture will develop consciousness, which he considers to be "a style and way of operation, characterized by distributed signal representation, perception process, cross-modality reporting and availability for retrospection."[42][43]
A low-complexity implementation of the architecture proposed by Haikonen was reportedly not capable of AC, but did exhibit emotions as expected.

A fair amount of the better Science Fiction deals with this thoughtfully. PKD's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (incl. the film adaptation "Blade Runner') makes for a good beginning, in terms of thought experiment. Are people building machines to have a store of {seemingly genuine, deeply impacting a personality} memories over a lifetime, as pertains to our example Rachael Tyrell? To turn this into a real rather than rhetorical question, an argument has to be made, from factual.

Sometimes the thing acquires a kind of ego, apparently. One Blake Lemoine asserted sentience in one machine. (Sentience means what, exactly? One feels, is *conscious*. Feels, eg., joy, loss, sorrow, compassion, real rage... beyond the basic, a literal pain in the __. Yes/no?)
Philosopher Nick Bostrom said that he thinks LaMDA probably is not conscious, but asked "what grounds would a person have for being sure about it?" One would have to have access to unpublished information about LaMDA's architecture, and also would have to understand how consciousness works, and then figure out how to map the philosophy onto the machine:
"(In the absence of these steps), it seems like one should be maybe a little bit uncertain... there could well be other systems now, or in the relatively near future, that would start to satisfy the criteria." - 7 July 2022, The Spectator. /emphases mine

[BertKoor]

Yes, things do change over time.

In my youth a large portion of households had a piano or organ in the living room. That is clearly not the case any more. It used to be that every town had a music shop. Not any more.

So what's next? Do you have a crystal ball?

No market left for samples? AI needs data for training. Where do you think those come from?

More importantly: do I really care? Do I live in the present or in the future? Global warming is a bigger and more concrete threat to humanity.

And if you want to debate the treat that AI poses on us: it's currently at it's infancy stage.
Imagine what might happen when it comes into puberty and rebels against its parents...

[Constructed Identity]

"the threat of AI" is a knee jerk reaction that echos a plethora of past innovations from cars to computers to robots.
The threat of cars is a humorous example. I read that people thought the high speeds cars were capable of would be harmful to the human body. There were a lot of people who didn't want to accept that horses would be replaced for day-to-day transport.

They have been talking about AI or algorithms making music since at least the early 2000s - I heard it. Yet there are no successful AIs racking up top 40 hits. Why? Because music is a social activity. It was meant to be played/performed in front of other humans. At least for popular music and really that's the only music anyone cares about.

[koalaboy]

"the threat of AI" is a knee jerk reaction that echos a plethora of past innovations from cars to computers to robots.

Dismissing AI as a knee-jerk reaction is possibly one of the most blinkered views there is. It is growing and changing culture at a speed far greater than the internet did, with even more money and research behind it, and the internet already had an enormous impact on society.

This is not just about loss of jobs, of which there will be many, but yet another change in how society functions.

Because music is a social activity. It was meant to be played/performed in front of other humans. At least for popular music and really that's the only music anyone cares about.

Spotify: Total Revenue grew 11% Y/Y to €3.4 billion, exceeding guidance
Apple Music made approximately $8.3 billion revenue in 2022
Youtube, etc..

Music may play a huge part in social interaction, but the industry/economy is built upon far more than that. If Kontakt 'samples' sound real - especially with awesome legato - nobody cares 'how' they were made. They just need to sound 'correct'.

[Constructed Identity]

"the threat of AI" is a knee jerk reaction that echos a plethora of past innovations from cars to computers to robots.

Dismissing AI as a knee-jerk reaction is possibly one of the most blinkered views there is. It is growing and changing culture at a speed far greater than the internet did, with even more money and research behind it, and the internet already had an enormous impact on society.

This is not just about loss of jobs, of which there will be many, but yet another change in how society functions.

Because music is a social activity. It was meant to be played/performed in front of other humans. At least for popular music and really that's the only music anyone cares about.

Spotify: Total Revenue grew 11% Y/Y to €3.4 billion, exceeding guidance
Apple Music made approximately $8.3 billion revenue in 2022
Youtube, etc..

Music may play a huge part in social interaction, but the industry/economy is built upon far more than that. If Kontakt 'samples' sound real - especially with awesome legato - nobody cares 'how' they were made. They just need to sound 'correct'.

Yep, and the vast majority of the money on Spotify is music from touring artists, someone named Taylor being #1 right now.

Back to the topic- I would like to think that the days of sample packs are coming to an end. It was never a particularly fun way of making music and with Behringer producing all of the classics as clones, everyone will be able to play a real instrument.

[enroe]

Dismissing AI as a knee-jerk reaction is possibly one of the most blinkered views there is. It is growing and changing culture at a speed far greater than the internet did, with even more money and research behind it, and the internet already had an enormous impact on society.

This is not just about loss of jobs, of which there will be many, but yet another change in how society functions.

Yes, exactly!

Anyone who has thought along until this point will notice one
thing: the AI composes the song, writes the lyrics and produces
the song. Finally, the AI mixes and masters the song. At the end,
the AI listens to the song - and evaluates it.

This is a closed AI loop: The human being is no longer present
anywhere. Because the AI listens to its own songs - evaluates
them - writes new songs again, etc. When this development has
really got going in a few years, then it will only be the AI that is
active and creative.

Anyone who wants to get involved in this cycle - maybe even
want to become creative himself or herself - will have to realize
brusquely and hard that he doesn't fit in: He is eternally too
incompetent, too incapable, too slow! The AI can do everything
better - and it develops infinitely fast. It develops music by AIs for
AIs!

[JerGoertz]

I'm actually an AI. Have been this entire time.

[koalaboy]

It's clear that we need AI to help people read topics

To quote myself:

This isn't about composition or building whole tracks - that's an equally interesting and troubling topic - but the production/alteration of 'sound' to be used within a larger production.

It's about the capability of AI to produce sounds that currently are the domain of sample packs and/or other plugins, that a Sound Designer will typically build and sell.

I do expect the other aspects will be assisted greatly by AI, I don't expect AI to replace most touring artists (Hatsune Miku aside), but even in this thread the response from most it to mock the possibility rather than look at how it could (and likely will) play out.

[enroe]

It's clear that we need AI to help people read topics

To quote myself:

This isn't about composition or building whole tracks - that's an equally interesting and troubling topic - but the production/alteration of 'sound' to be used within a larger production.

It's about the capability of AI to produce sounds that currently are the domain of sample packs and/or other plugins, that a Sound Designer will typically build and sell.

I do expect the other aspects will be assisted greatly by AI, I don't expect AI to replace most touring artists (Hatsune Miku aside), but even in this thread the response from most it to mock the possibility rather than look at how it could (and likely will) play out.

Yes, but at the same time you say that you should see the whole picture and not underestimate AI. In the long term, completely different aspects arise, and reducing it to just "sound building" doesn't give the whole picture:

Dismissing AI as a knee-jerk reaction is possibly one of the most blinkered views there is. It is growing and changing culture at a speed far greater than the internet did, ... etc

And the whole picture means: AI will not be reduced to “sound building”. It will run through the entire production chain without the end user, i.e. the listener and the teenagers, even noticing it.

[koalaboy]

And the whole picture means: AI will not be reduced to “sound building”. It will run through the entire production chain without the end user, i.e. the listener and the teenagers, even noticing it.

So how do you see things changing ? Do you think we will still have sample libraries in five years ?

[BertKoor]

Do you think we will still have sample libraries in five years ?

Sure... why not?
If it has some "vintage" qualities, it surely will survive.
Otherwise: good riddance.

How popular are Mod Trackers these days, and why?

Those are the evolutionary forces at work.

[harryupbabble]

well, i am okay with using samples for my songs
everything should be usable in creating anything
small pieces of things to make a bigger new thing
but that's not the way it is

[revvy]

Back to the topic- I would like to think that the days of sample packs are coming to an end. It was never a particularly fun way of making music and with Behringer producing all of the classics as clones, everyone will be able to play a real instrument.

Using samples is fun, totally central to some styles and some artists.

I also enjoy playing real instruments, like synths, bass guitars etc.

Don't own anything by Behringer. Also, they have no effect on the majority of samplists or instrument players in the world.