Rick Rubin on AI (& now Graeme Revell, too)

[eassae]

Be ready. Here comes the tank man.

[jancivil]

Playing always feels like a waste of time, a means of filling the hours and days before you die. It's insubstantial, inconsequential and selfish. Any satisfaction you get from it is fleeting at best. I derive no real satisfaction from it at all.

Watch out! Bones may become a "dull boy."

become?

He couldn't have shown the truth of what I said about not actuallly caring about music any more clearly. I wouldn't weigh in on what end it's a means to, it's uninteresting.

I thought for a while last night about the notion of music as a means towards expressing emotion. I'm just way out of step with what I've ever seen most people say about it.

Music is not limited in the ways words or verbal language is; so when one says express emotions this is the kind of expression of a story or play, or film. I've personally never set out to create a musical anything as though purporting to do that. It's not that there's a particular absence of feeling necessarily - there might be, for someone, but it's not my job to ponder that - it's just not the intent, or even mixed into intention. I've written a couple of screenplays in order to more or less do that. It's not the same activity, it's not the same task as music.

Here's one way of looking at this: a dog tends to feel your emotional intent by the tone of your voice. It's not quite up to dealing with the shapes of words amounting to meaning. It can associate sounds with experience to whatever extent, but it's the tone that is conveying what the dog can use.

So one might want to think about musical tension and repose or release in the more literal ways of a play; and some people are apparently upset a bit by a preponderance of "unresolved dissonances". This is all objective to me. It's not about say painting a pleasant picture or portraying the happier outcome. So there isn't really any direct correlation like 'these sounds signify discord' as though more literal. They're there to be those objects, in free play.
Now it might kind of resemble Calder's mobiles, weights in space that behave in their various ways owing to gravity...

Stravinsky famously opined that "music is powerless to express anything". Whenever this cropped up in like music school I didn't try to conclude anything, it wasn't the kind of thought to lend itself to facile intuition, let alone something to be contentious with. But I came to a kind of agreement, that this 'emotion in music' is something a person projects onto a music. I don't know from a music that everybody has the same 'feeling' about or reaction to, it would have to be at an almost infantile stage to be.

So it is with music with words attached oftimes. I thought of a good example, Reelin' in the Years by Steely Dan. The lyric portrays bitterness and a familiar contempt in every line; to me the music can't be more joyful. Fagen callled it "a dumb little song but fun".

[eassae]

Playing always feels like a waste of time, a means of filling the hours and days before you die. It's insubstantial, inconsequential and selfish. Any satisfaction you get from it is fleeting at best. I derive no real satisfaction from it at all.

Watch out! Bones may become a "dull boy."

become?

He couldn't have shown the truth of what I said about not actuallly caring about music any more clearly. I wouldn't weigh in on what end it's a means to, it's uninteresting.

I was being cheeky…but I think you are exactly right about him not caring about music in any way.

I'm not completely sure he's having this conversation in earnest. His constant contradictions of himself and logical fallacies are either from a fully left brained mind, or he's just taking the piss. I mean the thread title and initial conception is based on an appeal to authority fallacy. So it's there right from the get-go. For all I know he's just using chat gpt for all his responses?

Now it might kind of resemble Calder's mobiles, weights in space that behave in their various ways owing to gravity...

If I understand what you're saying, music for you as the modernist painters would say is non-objective, and any emotion it invokes in a listener being incidental? If this is the case the dark side to this is novelty for novelty sake. I'm not saying that's what you're doing, but I think that can be/is a danger. Some of the stuff coming out of academia right now is completely ridiculous. If I don't understand what you're saying then…

Anyway, I find Reelin' In the Years quite joyful as well. Lyric meaning rarely registers with me though, and I tend to hear it as timbre for a long, long time. If it's a favorite track then they may start to sink in at some point.

[bermudagold]

this is how superficial a level of creation it is...is this what we want flooding radio and streaming platforms?...regurgitated motif retreads with our brainfarts on top?...cause its already totally serviceable for current popular music landscape

[ghettosynth]

this is how superficial a level of creation it is...is this what we want flooding radio and streaming platforms?...regurgitated motif retreads with our brainfarts on top?...cause its already totally serviceable for current popular music landscape

By definition, if it floods radio and streaming platforms, with the assumption that the flooding of the former is because is has attention, and the latter that it's being streamed, then the answer is yes, that's what "we" want. The issue here is that you're confusing what you want for the larger "we."

I find these threads hilarious. Do you know what "we" don't want, as evidenced by almost none of it being on the radio, the vast catalogue that is the KVR Music Cafe.

[BONES]

He couldn't have shown the truth of what I said about not actuallly caring about music any more clearly.

You're talking about musicianship and a dozen other things I don't care about and you're unable to separate any of that irrelevant shite from music itself. That you don't get it kind of tells me music doesn't affect you in the way it does me, so you have to find all this technical bullshit to give it some value or meaning. I think that's really sad.

But I came to a kind of agreement, that this 'emotion in music' is something a person projects onto a music.

OK, this now confirms my theory. If you really can't feel the emotion in music, I honestly feel a bit sorry for you. There are songs, like the one below, that I can't sing without ending up in tears. It has nothing to do with the lyrics, it's the emotional power of the music that does it. Maybe you are too busy analysing it, looking for merit in it's structure and form or whatever, to simply sit back and take in it's full majesty?




Or maybe you don't sing, so it never gets into you?

His constant contradictions of himself and logical fallacies are either from a fully left brained mind, or he's just taking the piss.

There are no logical fallacies or contradictions or anything else in anything I've said. That's just how you choose to keep your little alternative reality bubble afloat, it has no bearing in the real world.

I mean the thread title and initial conception is based on an appeal to authority fallacy.

OK, so you've lost the argument and now you're resorting to high school debating tactics. Classic! But here's the problem, you were obviously a shithouse debater because you f**ked it up. Appeal to Authority is only a "fallacy" when it is not supported by evidence. Therefore it's not possible to draw that conclusion based only upon the subject or title of a paper or discussion or whatever, it must be appraised as a whole. So your tactic falls flat on its face, straight out of the barrier.

[eassae]

There are no logical fallacies or contradictions or anything else in anything I've said.

Yes there are. See I can just say stuff too…but there actually are…a lot.

[Bombadil]

Neo-Nihilism. It's the NOW thing.

[eassae]

Neo-Nihilism. It's the NOW thing.

It's amazing how many people think they are anarchists when they are actually nihilists.

[Bombadil]

I know.

[Bunny_boy]

[bermudagold]

will.i.am is on a full media blitz defending AI...of course because he is heavily invested in multiple AI startups...but he is another one making this comparison to sampling...the two are not materially analogous and they know it...its so intellectually disingenuous to beat this drum...but every AI parasite is doing it

https://www.vice.com/en/article/will-i- ... -critical/

[eassae]

...but he is another one making this comparison to sampling...the two are not materially analogous and they know it...

Yeah, it's definitely a false equivalence. Even if somebody did want to force the point though, sampling was highly controversial back in the day, and that controversy is a big reason people have to pay for or use royalty free samples, because it was determined to be copyright infringement.

[vurt]

this is how superficial a level of creation it is...is this what we want flooding radio and streaming platforms?...regurgitated motif retreads with our brainfarts on top?...cause its already totally serviceable for current popular music landscape

i don't care what floods radio and streaming platforms.
radio was always pretty shit here in the uk, aside from 2 or 3 djs out of hundreds.
the day john peel died, i stopped listening to radio altogether, till recently i discovered radio 6, at 2am once a week, has some nice underground electronic (not dance) music for an hour, and radio 3 does a late night electronic and orchestral (new music) show which has a few nice bits.

don't let other people tell you what to listen to. that's how we end up with things like agadoo.

[Bunny_boy]

Repurposing existing music in different contexts via sampling is an incredible art form; doing via AI is just being Jive Bunny