what do you think about Artificial Intelligence AI ?

[Jean Pierre]

These days, Artificial Intelligence is being shoved down our throats at every turn.
According to a report published in July 2017 by Gartner, artificial intelligence is on a roll. The Hype Cycle, a graphical representation of the adoption of technologies by the general public, goes even further, as it tells us that Gartner predicts massive adoption of deep learning and machine learning over the next 2 to 5 years. The adoption of intelligent robots, virtual assistants and conversational user interfaces, as well as deep reinforcement learning, is expected to grow over the next 5 to 10 years.

Well... what AI can achieve in certain fields is still pretty impressive, ... in music, for example, algorithms developed by AI can dissect complex musical arrangements and extract a particular instrument or voice from a mass of music.

That's what I've done here, for this Nougaro song "Il faut tourner la page" ("We must turn the page").

Sacked by Barclay in 1986 due to poor sales, Claude Nougaro left for New York with the address of Charly Mingus's widow as his "only luggage".

While there, he recorded Nougayork with some of the biggest names in American music. Among them was bassist Mark Egan, guitarist Pat Metheny's first bassist.

The AI extracted the entire musical arrangement of this song ... and erased Nougaro's voice! The good master must be turning in his grave

So that I can put my voice to it

I also grafted my guitar onto the final instrumental chorus

Admittedly my voice is somewhere between that of the Cow Boy of Aubervillier and that of the Barber of Belleville

...but playing or singing with the musicians of Django Reinhardt, the Quincy Jones orchestra or Count Basie, it's still pretty good 😁


Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

[Bishmanrock]

Not familiar with the original, so I have to say it sounded pretty seamless to me, no hint of Frankensteining going on, all still comes together in the mix to my ear

As for AI, I'm a big fan of it, but I see a lot of people get very angry with it, and to be honest AI is only as good as the hands of the person using it

Outside of music, I've used it for a lot of technical applications and absolutely loved it. From coding my own game engine, fiddling with my down Linux distro, to taking apart radios and sending photos of the innards to ChatGPT which then correctly identifies all the connectors, taking photos of my fish tank and ChatGPT correctly identifying the plants, fish, etc. Some real impressive stuff - with the caveat you do sort of need to know what you're doing in the first place, else you run the risk of giving it too generic prompts and get nothing back

I've started using AI splitter tools for when I'm doing covers now. Get the original track, split out the sections into vocals\guitar\bass\drums\synth (especially handy when no tabs exist and you need to study the parts individually), stick it in Cubase, then start removing parts, changing parts, re-recording parts. A lot easier than starting from a blank page, and you can use it for quick and dirty sequencing too. I've seen tools starting to circulate now that take this even further - give it a drum stem and it'll split out the hats/snare/kick/etc. Now that's really impressive, and also very handy for me who likes transposing everything to MIDI to work with. They're not affordable at a casual level yet, but it's nice to see the technology is out there.

Outside of stem splitting, I've used ChatGPT as an idle experiment asking it to generate guitar tabs in the style of other artists. To my surprise, it actually did start printing out guitar tabs for me. They were basic chord structures, and I'd never use any of them, but it was interesting as a curiosity piece that it could essentially write music. Further on from that I found another tool that generates MIDI music, and did a test project using these generations to see if they could be used to write actual songs on top of. It failed, but interesting the original generations worked well as ambient music - the sort of stuff you'd have on in the background when studying maybe, but not the sort of thing you'd want to release as an artist. I won't say that I don't think AI can ever write good music as technology is moving at such a pace I'd probably be proven wrong before I press to comment, but I will say I don't feel comfortable people being able to release music with even less effort in an already swamped market. I do believe AI music may well have a place - I'm thinking adaptable music in video games as a prime example - but outside of that we should be rewarding the human part of the craft.

I've seen AI models where you can add your own (or someone elses I guess) vocal stems into it, and it'll learn from them and you can basically put your voice over someone elses. You may have seen this used on parody YouTube videos, where someone will post a Queen song sung by Trump, as one bizarre example. It seems like a novelty at first, but I can think of one use - I'm a big fan of layering multiple voices, and don't always have backing singers to hand. Being able to record one 'oooh', but then have AI make multiple people harmonising that ooh, would be a very handy tool if it worked well. Don't think it'd be as useful for any lead vocals though.

I do like using AI as a proofer through. Sometimes I'll send it my lyrics and say "What do you think this is about?". It's interesting to get it to respond with no outside influence, no lead, only the lyrics to go off, as a sort of sanity check if I am actually portraying what I think I am.

I'm sure some of you will get your pitchforks out at this, but personally I'm hoping AI paves the way for one of the biggie VST instruments that has never been perfected: guitar. Having AI to understand finger pressure, amp feedback, or all the other nuances that prevent guitar VSTs from sounding realistic, would superpower my song writing. It'd never replace a lead guitarist, but I'd definitely use it for padding out rhythm seconds in the mix, can chuck a few power chords in in the matter of seconds.

Honestly, I love it and it's exciting, and I think we're nowhere near knowing what doors it could open. But it's also terrifying how it can be misused, by both the lazy and the malicious.

[kenny mac]

I will never use AI.
Never.
It frightens me ,the pace and acceptance of it.

[SteveB]

'...the possible is inevitable...', or somesuch written by someone,  whenever.



Even Stephen Hawking – and look what He survived – didn't believe that Mankind had a future. Looking at what and where we are, it's hard to disagree. While it's here and free enjoy it while you can, until it's owned by either a U.S. behemoth or the Chinese Govt and you have to give a mobile/cell phone number and sign-in again.

[AndyR]

I'm kinda ambivalent about it.

• Artificial Intelligence is the natural progression/evolution of man's ability to create and use tools.
  
• Some (most?) of the tools that man has made have been instrumental in the infliction of an awful lot of pain and suffering.
  
• Artificial Intelligence, like any man-made tool, can be very useful and highly effective when used by someone with intelligence, experience, and judgement.
  
• Sadly, in the wider world, it seems to me that Artificial Intelligence is being "marketed" or "touted" as something that has it's own (valid) intelligence, experience, and judgement.
  
• Even more sadly, in the wider world, Artificial Intelligence seems to be most eagerly anticipated either by people who want control of others or by people who want to abdicate their responsibility to acquire and exercise their own intelligence, experience, and judgement.
  
• See 2.

My own personal guidelines are:

• Use tools if I can afford them, if they're useful and if they don't harm others.
• While I'm using them I MUST accept responsibility for my actions and I MUST NOT abdicate my own ability to think and make decisions.

Those guidelines are the best I can do. The best any of us can do. I'm a very small cog in the machinery, and I now accept that if someone else doesn't follow those guidelines, and manages to cut my life short because of it... well... so be it, I can't stop them.

I don't object to AI.
It actually seems pointless to even contemplate doing so.
In the right/wrong hands it will do both good and bad things.

I have seen Jurassic Park, though
And Terminator...
Etc, etc, etc...
       

[Jean Pierre]

Thank you, friends, for your wise and relevant opinions.

what annoys me a bit is the hype surrounding artificial intelligence and the fact that it seems to be a mishmash of everything

Musical dissection algorithms that allow you to isolate the different constituent parts of an arrangement - bass, drums, strings, guitar choir, lead vocals - have been around for several years and seem to be improving considerably.
The trick is to make good use of them, while respecting copyright, of course.
 

[64Guitars]

The AI extracted the entire musical arrangement of this song ... and erased Nougaro's voice! The good master must be turning in his grave

So that I can put my voice to it

MP3 attachment deleted. As you're well aware, we do not allow copyright-protected recordings on our server.

See https://songcrafters.org/forum/index.php?topic=34759.0.

[Jean Pierre]

ok, ...to clarify this issue further
- can i republish this song with my own instruments?
- are musical and cinematographic quotations (short excerpts) allowed?
- is the use of BIAB's realtrack allowed (realtrack are tracks generated by BIAB from recordings by real musicians with real instruments)?

[Ted]

I have not yet used AI in a musical context, other than seeing how it might generate lyrics. (ChatGPT is very good at generating mediocre lyrics.)

I will never use AI.

I hate to be the one to tell you, Kenny, but you are already using AI. Never using AI is already like never consuming corn. You can avoid eating corn on the cob, but corn is in nearly everything.

you do sort of need to know what you're doing in the first place, else you run the risk of giving it too generic prompts and get nothing back

There's a big "garbage in/garbage out" problem with AI – and that is almost a good thing. It helps you recognize (for now) when something is AI generated. Whenever I get an email that begins, "I hope this email finds you well," I know that it was drafted with the use of AI.

But AI can help you be better at something you are already good at. The Songcrafters Podcast that I created was done with a lot of help from ChatGPT – because I don't have the PHP coding skills needed to code that myself, but I do have the skills to look over the code that GPT suggested and see if I like it or not.

In a way, the best use of AI is putting yourself in the position of an expert who can't actually execute the task to be done, but knows what they are looking for. Using AI is like being the coach of a world-class gymnast. Simone Biles' coaches can't do what she does, but the do bring knowledge and expertise to the work and get impressive results. A know-nothing schmuck like me wouldn't know what tell Simone Biles. "Jump around and stuff," I'd say. Similarly, the greatest coach in the world couldn't coach me to do what Simone Biles can do.

Speaking a strictly musical context: I think of AI as something that I will use as tool. I have some old recordings made on my cassette 4-track recorder. I'd love to be able to separate those tracks and remix them using modern tools.

Speaking in a broader context: I'm terrified at how AI is being used and will be used to more efficiently dupe and manipulate people in politics. All the ways that crooks, scammers, and con artists have always worked are being amplified by AI. Staying ahead of the bad effects of AI is a continuation and an escalation of the arms race we've been in for the last 30 years.

[Jean Pierre]

Speaking a strictly musical context: I think of AI as something that I will use as tool. I have some old recordings made on my cassette 4-track recorder. I'd love to be able to separate those tracks and remix them using modern tools.

yes, in my mind, when I started this subject, I was only thinking about the involvement of AI in a musical context



The first traces of AI date back to 1950, in an article by Alan Turing entitled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".

...and we all use artificial intelligence, sometimes without realising it
like Monsieur Jourdain in Molière's 'Bourgeois gentilhomme', who was writing prose without knowing it

BLAISE Pascal (1623-1662), the great thinker, was a visionary, as demonstrated by all his contributions to science and philosophy.
 Blaise invented the first calculating machine, which could mechanically add and subtract two numbers, as well as multiply and divide by repetition. These were the beginnings of artificial intelligence.