AI disqualifies anyone as a musician! It's like playback.

[BONES]

Sorry, pressed the wrong button.

[BONES]

You're confusing the "tool" with "creativity"!

The two things are not mutually exclusive. You've never heard of a "creative tool"? Any musical instrument can be considered a creative tool. There are literally thousands of examples of software applications that are creative tools, from Photoshop and Illustrator to DAWs and virtual instruments. AI can also be used as a creative tool. Mybe you are not creative enough to see the possibilities but that's down to your limitations, not any limitations of the process.

As a "tool," AI can improve an equalizer, optimize compression, analyze the
frequency response, etc. There will likely be entirely new, amazing tools that,
with the help of specific AIs, will provide new possibilities.

And if you use those tools, there will be plenty of people who look down their noses at you, assuming you rely on those crutches because you're not very good at production. You see, you have chosen to draw the line where it suits you, where you can still believe that you're some kind of creative f**king wunderkind. OTOH, I don't have a my sad, little ego that I need to prop up with bullshit like that, I am perfectly comfortable with the level and quality of creativity that I bring to what we do. I'll give you an example -

I added a part to the last song I need to sort out on the new album the other day which has added a little bit of extra depth and interest that has improved the song considerably. It's a rhythmic preset from the factory bank that came with Heavyocity's Oblivion (Kontakt instrument). I auditioned a couple of dozen presets to find something that would do the job. It's a two bar loop of three different layers that uses a couple of different step sequencers to modulate the layers and create something with a bit of complexity. I just dropped it in and it worked without me having to adjust anything. It didn't need EQ, it didn't need any tweaks, it sits in perfectly as is. So I made the creative decision not to f**k with it just so I could feel like I'd done something to make it "ours". It's something we bought that someone else probably spent a lot of time creating. How f**king arrogant would I have to be to think that I could improve upon it? My creative input was to find the right thing that made the song better and stick it in there. That's plenty enough creative for me. If, like me, you're a creative professional, those are exactly the kinds of decisions you make dozens of times a day that determine how good or bad the finished artwork will be.

This is about AI as a "creative machine"— like SUNO, Udio, and others. And they bring a completely new quality, thus crossing a red line.

So doing something new is "crossing a (presumably creative) red line"? I'd have thought the whole idea of being creative was to do something new but you're saying that because AI does something new that it's not creative. How does that work?

They are incomparable to anything in the past because they are truly "creative": They generate—via text prompt—complete songs in a completely new way!

Exactly! And isn't that something any truly creative thinker would be keen to embrace?

And that's a huge difference, practically the "atomic bomb" for human culture.

You mean the culture that made the likes of Justin Bieber and Simon Cowell multi-millionaires? Maybe that's a culture that needs an atomic bomb going off in the middle of it?

In your golf game analogy, it would be as if a robot were playing golf instead of a human. And it would play much better than any human because its light sensors allow it to calculate precisely how to hit the ball. This completely changes the sport of golf - and makes humans essentially superfluous.

Computers have been beating grand masters at chess for ages now but that hasn't stopped people from playing chess, has it? Digital tools made musicians redundant decades ago - I can't play guitar at all but I can put guitar through any and all of our songs if I want to. I can't play piano but I can load a MIDI file and a sample-based piano instrument and have amazing piano parts in any of our songs and zerocrossing says he can't sing so he uses computer-generated vocals in his music. But that hasn't meant that nobody plays guitar or piano any more, or that nobody sings any more, does it? AI can replace us all but only if we choose to give up on the things we enjoy doing.

I've listened to your music, you and I are never going to be successful in the industry and AI isn't going to change that so what, exactly is the problem here? We'll all keep doing what we're doing, nothing needs to change. You're like Chicken Little, running around screaming that the sky is falling but it's not. Sure, things will change but we can all choose to embrace the change or ignore it. No-one will be left behind.

Exactly - I agree with you! You describe the process and procedure of songwriting very well.

Except he doesn't, he's outsourcing what is, for me and many, many others, the most important element - the vocals. It's in the vocal performance that we are truly able to express our emotions. Without it's just words on a page with music behind it.

And I can only emphasize this: In writing my own song, there is so much feeling, experience, expression, communication - very personal - yes, sometimes even sensitive and vulnerable, that it is unmistakably connected to me as a person, that the song
practically represents "me as a person".

Really? If that's true then what I deduce from the music I've listened to is that you are dull and boring. There is no passion in your vocal delivery at all. Have you ever been into a studio with a producer? Every one I've worked with has pushed me to give my vox more emotion and you could do with a bit of that. You mostly sound like you're reading off a page. Maybe that's the struggle of not singing in your native language but that's how it comes across in most of the songs I've listened to. And if the little precises of the songs are any indication, you're hardly pouring your soul out in any of them, are you?

What surprises me is you are happy to use orchestral libraries and sampled choirs so you are clearly not averse to outsourcing some of the work, which tells me your little red line is purely arbitrary and that you, like zerocrossing, are a hypocrite.

This is also why, conversely, song creation using text prompts —or iterative text prompts, if you want to be a bit more complicated — is empty, emotionless, and sterile.

Not compared to your music, it's not. Not even close. Listen to the vocals in this, it shits all over your vocals for passion and emotion -

https://soundcloud.com/novakill-1/silentconsent

Where you're just singing your songs, this is a vocal performance. It gets ridiculously overwrought and it doesn't always get passionate about the right things, but as a performance, it's f**king incredible.

Is the use of AI necessary for creating a song?

No, clearly not but what is the relevance of such a stupid question? It doesn't need to be "necessary" in order to be useful.

If you are a musician and a human being, why do you let AI take over the most interesting
and essential aspects of composition?

Because I don't place the value of those things over other considerations. Making the best song I can, for example, is for more important to me than either the fact of being a human being (which is a simple act of random chance of no consequence whatsoever) or being a musician, which is something I assign zero value to.

Last thing - by refusing to engage with me on this, you are letting me win. People will come here and read the thread, they will see you make your arguments, me shoot them down in flames and you failing to defend your point of view. That will lead people to assume you have no defence, that you are all at sea with no real idea what you are talking about. That, of course, is your choice (I assume you have me blocked) but it really does make you look either scared to engage with people who don't agree with you or like a troll who just wants to stir up trouble and has nothing of value to contribute. But, as I said, that's your choice.

[TechHaus]

When I see youtubers who pick a key in their sequencer, just paint in a random melody until it sound "good", and then get "placements", i start thinking that midi is just playback and disqualifies anyone as a musician.

I am anti-data center so my thoughts on ai music stop there pretty much. Maybe I will ask a local LLM for chord progressions later and see what it gives me.

[zerocrossing]

When I see youtubers who pick a key in their sequencer, just paint in a random melody until it sound "good", and then get "placements", i start thinking that midi is just playback and disqualifies anyone as a musician.

I am anti-data center so my thoughts on ai music stop there pretty much. Maybe I will ask a local LLM for chord progressions later and see what it gives me.

MIDI is just information. Just something like a digital equivalent to CV, or what your qwerty keyboard sends to your computer. It is neither evil nor good and has been a huge part of electronic music since the late 1970s.

What you're probably talking about is quantizing note events in time and key. That's something different.

[ksandvik]

And the MIDI notes came from a human mind creating it, not from an LLM algorithm that uses stolen music from producers.

[TechHaus]

I just said clicking randomly after setting a key! Reading comprehension, folks.

i am talking about mindless music.

Of course ai is worse and steals etc. I am just talking about levels of anti-musicianship. No corrections to what I said needed.

[Tiles]

Ah, the stealing "argument" again.

It’s technically not possible, that’s not how AI works. And what you call “mindless” isn’t an objective category, it’s just your personal threshold for what you consider meaningful.

Come on, guys, at least be honest with yourselves. This isn't about whether someone's no longer a musician because they use AI. You're just fed up with spending weeks slaving away to write a song, and then someone comes along, throws three words into the prompt, and gets a song back that's way better than anything you could ever create. Which is the proof that you don't know a sh*t about making music with AI, since this is not how it works.

[Zeisner]

I was looking forward to use generative AI to create instrument samples which is the only thing I was interested in. It was quite a disappointment to find out how bad the quality is and how much the improvement curve flattened over the last two years (even going down again like with Suno). So even for that it's completely useless, nothing more than a overhyped broken tech demo. I can only shake my head how people can feel threatened by generative AI. It doesn't need much for a human to compose, arrange, perform, mix and master way better. Even synthesizing instruments works better and faster by doing things the oldschool way. But I guess the majority of the "We are doomed" people are just as deaf as the AI fans...

[Zeisner]

I can't even get people to listen to my stuff for free.

Because it's poorly mixed. Like very poorly. That track in the "Something depressing" post belongs in the lowest quartile on KVR when it comes to mixing.

[BONES]

I can't figure out why asking for a track is better than just saying, "Pandora, make me a music station based on these artists."

Firstly, because when Pandora was available outside the US, it f**king sucked! It would play you anything other than the artist you asked it to f**king play. Beyond that, maybe it's easier to get exactly the music you want to hear when you get an AI to generate it? That's certainly been my/our experience - the stuff Tunee spits out, with careful direction from my bandmate, is EXACTLY the kind of music we both love. The kind of songs that if I heard one on YouTube or something (I don't do streaming services), I would spend an obsessive couple of days trying to seek out everything they had ever done and all the associated side-projects and all the suggested "similar artists" from Discogs and BandCamp and wherever else. That's why, if my efforts with vocals had failed, I'd have been very keen to release it as its own thing. To both of us it is music that deserves an audience, that deserves fame and fortune (which it will certainly never get with my vocals).

But it re-raises the question, do you make music to listen to yourself? I find it difficult to listen to our music without having my producer's ears on, which kind of ruins the experience.

Will I see that cornfield in someone else's image?

Will it matter if you do? Is the only value in your art its originality? I use stock images, videos, 3D models and illustrations all the time, like pretty much every professional graphic artist I know. The art comes from how you use the elements, not the elements themselves. Look no further than Andy Warhol to see the truth of this.

I've already seen Midjourney image from other people that were nearly identical to what I got. Multiple times, actually. Who owns it? The first person who asked for it? Midjourney?

Who cares?

Do I feel any connection to it, or is it just another bit of content to be shoved out there and abandoned?

Do you feel any connection to the work of other artists? Of course you do (or you can), so it's no different at all. The idea that you have to possess something, that it has to be yours, in order for it to have any value to you is such a self-centred view, it has to be a symptom of clinical narcissism or some form of psychopathy, I reckon. You can't really think like that, surely?

Probably not better, not anytime soon.

Better in what way? We know already that most people can't tell the difference and the AI music my bandmate has generated is already better to me than even 90% of the other music in the same genre, which equates to more than 99.9% of all other music. i.e. I'd rather listen to the AI music he's generated than 99.9% of anything else out there. It's just great music, perfectly tailored to my/our taste. And because it's not actually mine, I can listen to it and enjoy it, without having to put on my producer's ears and listen for all the problems with it.

And when it starts getting better, or at least as good, I’m both sure and hopeful that there will be more regulations and limitations on the extent to which you can monetize the music.

Why? Who f**king cares? If some soulless c**t wants to make a fast buck, why is that a problem for you or me?

Again, I can't really figure out why someone would buy your totally AI generated track when they can just do their own.

Why would anyone bother to make their own music when they can just buy it? But here we are.

Why wouldn't Spotify just generate the music and shove it in your stream and save you the bother of using Suno?

How does Spotify know what I really like? The algorithms break down pretty quickly once you move beyond mainstream genres. When you do it yourself, you get exactly what you want, not what someone else or an algorithm thinks you might want.

They already know what music you like.

Do they? When I skip a song, does the algorithm know whether I skipped it because I'd heard it too many times recently or because I'm not in the mood for it right now or because I was trying to concentrate on something else and it was a distraction or because I just plain don't like it? You know but the algorithm has no way of knowing that, it just knows that you skipped it so it probably won't serve it to you again.

I recently started using TikTok for this. Do a search for some music you like, and watch the algorithm start feeding. you new artists. It's quite good at it and I have found a lot of cool new music.

What I found with Pandora was that it would inevitable serve me stuff I already knew about and/or stuff I didn't like at all. The only useful discovery algorithm I've ever really encountered was Zune's but, to be fair, it's entirely possible that it found all the good stuff I hadn't previously known about before I got to try too many other sources, so it had an easier time of it.

I guess my main question is still this: if everyone now has access to a frictionless way of making good, but uninspired music, where is the shared experience?

FFS! The internet is awash with totally uninspired music made by humans. It's nothing new.

Where is the sense of satisfaction?

You seem to think that the process is easy. I've said it a dozen times in this thread already - it can be easy but you will always get out of it as much as you are willing to put into it. It took us three months to get an album's worth of usable songs from Tunee, which is about as long as it took us to get the songs together for our previous album, the old-fashioned way. We've spent another four months since then getting everything into shape, working harder and longer hours than I can recall for any previous album, and we're still about a month away from being ready to master it. At no point has it felt like the easier route. It's been a lot of hard f**king work but we have both found the process far less onerous. I might even go so far as to say I've enjoyed it, probably for the first time ever.

I think AI is a huge bubble that's going to burst soon, is due to how hard it's being marketed and shoved at us. I stopped using Gmail because it was constantly trying to make my writing more concise.

I use GMail at work and whilst it offers to do that shit at the start of every day, I ignore it and it goes away. I don't feel like AI is being shoved in my face at all. It's there if/when I want to use it but for the most part it stays completely out of the way. Mybe that because I stay as far away from Google as humanly possible.

but it does...collage art is still directly derivative...

But it's still art. If you're working in a genre then, by definition, you are doing something derivative. Same goes if you admit to having influences... and if anyone can hear those influences in your music, then what does that say? Personally, I like it when people can pick our influences and we regularly include little homages in our songs. Maybe a lyric from a song we like, or a little synth riff or sound, snuck into one of our own songs. If you know the influence, you'll probably pick it up but I guarantee that 99% of people who hear it won't. It's a simple acknowledgement that we are standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before. If you think you're not, you are dead wrong.

ur borrowing someone else's ideation, performance, and musicality...you are dependent on someone else to make music...

It's called "collaboration" and it's a good and powerful thing. Would Elton John have been as successful without Bernie Taupin? Would the Beatles have been as successful without both Lennon and McCartney? Rogers & Hammerstein, Gilbert & Sullivan?

the people you are sampling are not dependent on you to make music...that difference in dependency makes the two groups fundamentally different...

That would depend on how you define "dependency" in that situation. Would Soft Cell have been as successful if they hadn't covered Tainted Love? Would the writers have made as much money if Soft Cell hadn't covered it? Should Soft Cell feel ashamed of their success or was the art in their version in how they took the song and made it their own, in which case they should be extremely proud of the fact that they took some obscure Motown B-side and turned it into a worldwide hit.

...as if old record sample slice and trigger hip hop wasn't fisher price enough...now they made it even easier lol...

Why shouldn't it be easy? My first proper album required $10,000 worth of gear and cost me more than $5,000 to record and manufacture, 30 years ago. In today's money that would more than $32,000. Should money like that still be the barrier to entry? Should we all still have to work three jobs, as I did back then, just to pay to put an album together?

[BONES]

MIDI is just information. Just something like a digital equivalent to CV, or what your qwerty keyboard sends to your computer. It is neither evil nor good and has been a huge part of electronic music since the late 1970s. What you're probably talking about is quantizing note events in time and key. That's something different.

He did explain exactly what he was talking about and that wasn't it.

And the MIDI notes came from a human mind creating it, not from an LLM algorithm that uses stolen music from producers.

FFS! Can you people even f**king read? The example/explanation he gave was quite clearly not that at all. It was about someone who turns on a chord restriction and then just randomly paints notes into a piano roll. That has no more come from the mind of the person doing it than flinging paint at a canvas from across the room like Jackson Pollock.

[enroe]

I love how eager BONES is to replace his own lame music with computationally generated lame music. There's a beautiful symmetry to it. ...

Hajaa - exactly.

It was only a matter of time before Bones emotionally barged
in and took over half the thread. I'm a little afraid that Bones –
depending on what he's responding to and getting worked up
about – might have a heart attack.

--- Bones ---

It's important to note that "Bones" doesn't really fit into this
discussion. The topic of this thread is only relevant for
musicians who define themselves as musicians by being
composers and thus true creators of new music. It is precisely
for this type of musician that AI will become a threat in the
future. These musicians will no longer be able to call
themselves "musicians" if they use AI for composition — even
partially.

For everyone who simply plays music, whether live on stage
or otherwise – for whom it's not so important what kind of
music they play – this thread is irrelevant. As a playback
musician, I would also use AI to optimize individual tracks,
recreate them, or even create entire songs. The content – ​​the
songs themselves – is arbitrary anyway – practically a random
collection of original material, covers, and artificially created
material. It's more about the theatricality of the show itself –
Bones could also perform in a circus ... so I wish Bones the
best of luck!

--- Compositions ---

For genuine composers of new music – and everything
connected with it (authorship according to copyright, usage
rights, reach) – AI is, at least in the near future, a game-changer.
Anyone who underestimates or even celebrates this is, in my
view, extremely naive.

[ksandvik]

MIDI is just information. Just something like a digital equivalent to CV, or what your qwerty keyboard sends to your computer. It is neither evil nor good and has been a huge part of electronic music since the late 1970s. What you're probably talking about is quantizing note events in time and key. That's something different.

He did explain exactly what he was talking about and that wasn't it.

And the MIDI notes came from a human mind creating it, not from an LLM algorithm that uses stolen music from producers.

FFS! Can you people even f**king read? The example/explanation he gave was quite clearly not that at all. It was about someone who turns on a chord restriction and then just randomly paints notes into a piano roll. That has no more come from the mind of the person doing it than flinging paint at a canvas from across the room like Jackson Pollock.

That came from a human, same as Pollock flinging paint at a canvas. Pollock didn't run a prompt to generate splatter art that was printed out with a color printer. Same with someone painting notes in a MIDI editor, it was not stolen via prompting from shuffling around pre-existing music stolen for LLM datasets.

[Tiles]

It's important to note that "Bones" doesn't really fit into this
discussion.

You don’t get to decide who is allowed to take part in this discussion.

Redefining “real musicians” so that anyone who disagrees with you is excluded isn’t an argument, it’s just gatekeeping.

If you have a point, make it. But telling others they’re not allowed to have an opinion isn’t one.

... is arbitrary anyway...

Nope. You show again that you have no idea how it works.

[Zeisner]

If it's your composition ("I wrote a song"), then you will get the same song each time generative AI renders an output. There will be no deviation regarding tempo, key, melodies, harmonies, rhythms and instrument choice. And you will get the same song out of every single generative AI no matter if it's Suno or Tunee or anything else. Because it has all been written down in the prompt. But if that's not the case and you get different tempos, keys, melodies, harmonies, rhythms, ultimately different songs - then you didn't write, you didn't create the song but the AI did. And you only curated the output of this new fancy pseudorandom generator. Which is not creative by any means.

The same principle applies to performance. If you're a keyboarder then you can play on keyboards from all kinds of brands. Roland, Arturia, M-Audio, whatever. You can also play on a real piano too! There can be slight deviations when it comes to precision but you can play the same melodies and harmonies. But if you can't, well... you're not a performer then.

If you can't write nor perform music then you can't make music in any way and you're not a musician. It's as simple as that. There are no "alternative perspectives" on that, at least none that aren't based on serious degrees of mental illness. The King of the Sofa threads are the purest examples for that.

It doesn't stop at making music of course, it all applies to audio production as well. Lots of "mixing engineers" and "mastering engineers" who outsource everything to AI. Like pigeons conditioned to push a button whenever a light flashes without understanding anything. Which explains why it all sounds horrible. "But Ozone says..." - yeah, Ozone does not feature a model of human sound perception, not even partially. "But LUFS..." - yeah, that's just another "RMS loudness". Train your ears, get better equipment and acoustic treatment and practice, practice, practice. It takes decades to get somewhere but that's how it's done. There is no shortcut to excellence.