How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music (Podcast)

[Ted]

On The Media:

How AI and Algorithms Are Transforming Music

The best segment is the last one:

[28:39] Former OTM producer, and current composer and sound designer, Mark Henry Phillips, on how AI music generators could fundamentally upend the industry for good.

Phillips discusses how good AI music generation is, and how he uses it to revive his own unfinished ideas. And I have a lot of unfinished ideas.

Time:

0:00

Volume:

50

0

 Stop   Play   Pause   Vol   Vol   Mute   Repeat   Download

[StephenM]

to each their own but I don't ever plan to use it... for me there is too much joy in the actual instruments and the journey of "writing"....

but I realize most of modern music isn't very much human at all and to be fair I used alot of "AI" in my productions...
I suppose say auto tune is a sort of AI... so I guess I am sort of a cyborg? 

[Pru]

i agree with Stephen. much more joy to be found in writing and creating music with a human brain and your own hands than relying on some flashy computer to do it for you.

[Ted]

I don't ever plan to use it.

i agree with Stephen.

I somehow suspect that neither of you listened to the podcast (particularly the segment by Mark Henry Phillips that begins at about 28:39) and you just gave your general takes on AI. That's okay.

I found Phillips' take really interesting. I'm not really a gung-ho AI guy. I approach it with the same way I approach any new complex gadget: looking for how to break it, and make it do unexpectedly interesting things. I'm more resistant to using AI in music in particular. But Phillips made me rethink my resistance – the idea that using AI is stealing or cheating (which it definitely can be).

Phillips has begun incorporating AI music generation into his workflow, and uses it as a partner and a muse. I can definitely identify with that. Back in the ancient days of search engines, I used to use bad search results as a way of rattling ideas loose from my own brain. This podcast has offered me a way to do something similar with AI: Not doing the work for me, but using it as a sounding board when I'm stuck.

As murky as it is, it's the really appealing way to bring AI into my workflow. It'd be like having the best music writing partner ever. They're always awake. They're fast, enthusiastic and good.

...

It's easy to come up with the germ of something cool, but it's so hard to get it from 70% done to 100% finished, but now I have no excuse for leaving a song unfinished. I've never been more unsure of my future as a professional musician but as much as it pains me to say this, I haven't been so excited to make music in a long, long time. I have so many songs, so many projects that I feel like I can finish now, and that's really exciting.

...

This might be the last year I make money as a musician. If that's the case, it'll free up time for me to finish the half dozen unfinished albums I have. I'm excited to actually do them, using AI as a writing partner. Yes, that brings up all sorts of moral and legal issues, so I probably won't release them. I'll just make them because it's fun. Isn't that what making music is all about?

[Jean Pierre]

It's true that for the past 3 or 4 years, we've been served up AI "à toutes les sauces".
Not a minute goes by on a TV program without us being given new applications... a recent example heard in a news report this morning:: AI has revolutionized academic writing, offering powerful tools for creating and refining thesis statements
Teachers have even created AI content detection tools that use machine learning and natural language processing to determine whether a human created the content.

Here are the best AI detection tools
https://kinsta.com/fr/blog/detection-contenu-ia/

Getting back to music, I've updated BAND IN A BOX and it offers two AI-assisted composition tools, which I haven't tested yet
- a stem separator, which lets you separate the tracks that make up a song (at 8:20 in the video)
- a song-writing function (at 10:20 in the video)



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAMF5l8YzOM



 

[Oldrottenhead]

The kids I work with use ChatGPT to write lyrics for songs, but they are pretty crap. Writing very lazy lyrics , you know the moon in June trite stuff. I really hate rhyming couplets which I avoid like the plague. One of the kids even sang his song into an online app that turned it into a complete song with music and even a different voice. It sounded like everything you hear on pop radio..............,.. dire.
I'm sure in a few years time it will outdo cohen and Dylan.

[Oldrottenhead]

I got a new practice amp for Xmas a spark 2 which uses AI to generate guitar tones. Though at present it seems to be just a search engine for tones created by users of the amp and shared to a database. The app also has a thing where you can play and it creates a drums and bass backing track to go with your playing. Not tried it yet but it's not something I have an urge to use either.
The app is currently in beta stage so who knows what it will be able to do.
I have always used preset virtual effects rather than pedals but this app is now teaching me about pedals and the chains in setting them up. Noise gate has been a revelation as my noisy fender can be tamed a bit. All the other stuff is still a mystery to me.

[StephenM]

I don't ever plan to use it.

i agree with Stephen.

I somehow suspect that neither of you listened to the podcast (particularly the segment by Mark Henry Phillips that begins at about 28:39) and you just gave your general takes on AI. That's okay.

I found Phillips' take really interesting. I'm not really a gung-ho AI guy. I approach it with the same way I approach any new complex gadget: looking for how to break it, and make it do unexpectedly interesting things. I'm more resistant to using AI in music in particular. But Phillips made me rethink my resistance – the idea that using AI is stealing or cheating (which it definitely can be).

Phillips has begun incorporating AI music generation into his workflow, and uses it as a partner and a muse. I can definitely identify with that. Back in the ancient days of search engines, I used to use bad search results as a way of rattling ideas loose from my own brain. This podcast has offered me a way to do something similar with AI: Not doing the work for me, but using it as a sounding board when I'm stuck.

As murky as it is, it's the really appealing way to bring AI into my workflow. It'd be like having the best music writing partner ever. They're always awake. They're fast, enthusiastic and good.

...

It's easy to come up with the germ of something cool, but it's so hard to get it from 70% done to 100% finished, but now I have no excuse for leaving a song unfinished. I've never been more unsure of my future as a professional musician but as much as it pains me to say this, I haven't been so excited to make music in a long, long time. I have so many songs, so many projects that I feel like I can finish now, and that's really exciting.

...

This might be the last year I make money as a musician. If that's the case, it'll free up time for me to finish the half dozen unfinished albums I have. I'm excited to actually do them, using AI as a writing partner. Yes, that brings up all sorts of moral and legal issues, so I probably won't release them. I'll just make them because it's fun. Isn't that what making music is all about?

in my case you are right and I will listen to this Ted because i learned a while back what you offer is always worth checking out.  thanks

[Ted]

The kids I work with use ChatGPT to write lyrics for songs, but they are pretty crap. Writing very lazy lyrics

...

The app also has a thing where you can play and it creates a drums and bass backing track to go with your playing. Not tried it yet but it's not something I have an urge to use either.

This is what I think some people think of when they have knee-jerk reactions against AI: The shitty, lazy, AI-does-everything-because-I'm-creatively-bankrupt uses of AI. I remember when I first discovered ChatGPT and I gave it some prompts to generate lyrics. They weren't bad. They were about as good as the mediocre lyrics written by a lot of mediocre songwriters. In fact, they were usable, if you consider how many songs are out there with mediocre lyrics. But they weren't good or great. I wouldn't use them. I'd rather write mediocre lyrics all by myself, thank you. I never tried using it again for that purpose.

I use ChatGPT a lot – but not for music. I use it to generate programming code that I'm not knowledgeable enough to create. I use it to generate first drafts of tedious things I need to write. It's very much a "garbage in: garbage out" proposition. It's not like using a search engine. It's called chat for a reason. The back-and-forth with it – which can be phenomenally frustrating – is what moves the task forward. If I'm satisfied with the outcome, it's usually because I've put a lot of my own time and thought into the conversation. (And I sometimes wonder if I've ended up putting more effort into the task than had I just done it without ChatGPT.)

So what intrigues me about this particular podcast episode is that Mark Henry Phillips is using an AI music system in similar ways that I use ChatGPT – seeding it with his own ideas, arguing with it, and making creative decisions based on what the system spits back.

This is very different from prompting the system to write a song about something, and then taking what it shits out as the final product.

[Oldrottenhead]

I just listened to the podcast and get where the guy is coming from. Just not for me.