AI-created death metal

[narad]

I hope it will be still going and as I said before, music created by humas has something to it. Like, I don't know, a soul? Emotions poured into it. things that machines can't have. At least for now. I don't know, like TedEH said - it's a rabbit hole.

People said the same thing about the game of Go. Would a computer ever beat a grandmaster? How could a computer have the foresight to construct effective strategies in the face of Go's huge space of possible moves at each turn? Could it play creatively? And then Alpha Go happened, besting every human Go player and playing moves described as "so beautiful" by professionals.

And human-produced music comes similarly at all levels. Would we say "Baby Shark" has a soul?

The music presented in this thread is crap, but I think it's also a non-serious effort that is getting press for trendy reasons. It's very hard to do music generation in the real audio space -- I mean, this isn't AI that plays these instruments, mind you. I think the music generation work that's been done in the symbolic space is showing good progress (but naturally is also not applied much to non-classical genres unfortunately).

 

[narad]

Weird timing -- new stuff in music gen from Open AI with generic big transformer networks:

https://openai.com/blog/musenet/

 

[Fathand]

I think the only genre that has enough bands / music to actually train an AI/Neural Network/whatnot is Brutal Gore/Slam/Death Metal. There is a lot of those bands. Actually, you might be able to train the model just with the bands named "Disgorge".

But come to think of it, when it would refine the model of writing that music it would just sound like Devourment's early material..

But humour aside - it's interesting to see all the stuff they are throwing into deep learning/neural networks these days. But I think until they throw all the stuff (visual, audio, text etc.) in they can't actually create an "Artist AI". It would have to immerse some depiction of actual reality and then we could ask it to create a piece of music, or other art ("Draw a somber mood"). That interpretation would be interesting to see.

...Unless it's a desolate landscape, broken by missile impact craters.

 

[ixlramp]

I think that it's interesting, sure. But It'll never repleace or even be close to music created by humans

This music is created by humans. The analysed source material is an album of composed music, the AI was designed and programmed by humans. The results released on the Bandcamp page were chosen by human judgement because they seemed to have some artistic value. It's just a more complex instrument and process.
You imply that 'music created by humans' would mean singing and whistling only.

Some people probably said similar things when electric guitars were invented, then it was synthesisers that 'weren't instruments', then it was the use of computer technology that caused some to claim that 'computers were making music'.
As long as there is a human on one end and a sound at the other, it is an instrument and it is human-created music.

 

[narad]

Some people probably said similar things when electric guitars were invented, then it was synthesisers that 'weren't instruments', then it was the use of computer technology that caused some to claim that 'computers were making music'.
As long as there is a human on one end and a sound at the other, it is an instrument and it is human-created music.

I mean most synthesizers have had built-in arpeggiators for decades. That's like having a Jason Richardson AI.

 

[MetalHex]

This music is created by humans. The analysed source material is an album of composed music, the AI was designed and programmed by humans. The results released on the Bandcamp page were chosen by human judgement because they seemed to have some artistic value. It's just a more complex instrument and process.
You imply that 'music created by humans' would mean singing and whistling only.

Some people probably said similar things when electric guitars were invented, then it was synthesisers that 'weren't instruments', then it was the use of computer technology that caused some to claim that 'computers were making music'.
As long as there is a human on one end and a sound at the other, it is an instrument and it is human-created music.

That's not in the same ballpark though. This is someone sitting back in a chair while a computer "makes" a song......not talking about the individual sounds themselves.

The computer doesn't even need the guy sitting in the chair.

The computer can actually eat popcorn while it is making the song, the guy is not even needed to eat the popcorn

 

[c7spheres]

Depending on what you count as AI, this discounts a lot of art created via Photoshop. I don't think content-aware fill quiiiiite counts as AI if you're being pedantic, but from a practical standpoint, it might as well be.

Technically AI doesn't exist, only the illusion of AI, even when that line is blurred and we can't see it anymore. It still will not exist. It can't think. I say destroy all the machines and boycott it all. Unless it serves us, I don't want it. It's starting to turn the tables with people constantly in their phones all the time. We are serving it. Oh boy. Now I'm screwed!

 

[Hollowway]

I actually don't understand AI. Like, from a coding perspective. What I need to do is sit down and read a fuck ton of wikipedia on this. I understand that you just feed it a bunch of "this bad, that good" stuff, but I don't understand how it constantly improves.

Not sure why I shared that with all of you.

 

[MetalHex]

^ In all fairness, no one even knows how the human mind works exactly either. The irony is that no one is wondering how to improve their own mind; they're banking on computers to improve everything for them.......now even music.

End rant

 

[p0ke]

Wouldn't it be more interesting to give an AI all the possible "notes" of every instrument, and then try to teach how those are used? For example by giving it every guitar pro tab in the world to analyze. It could then generate death metal midi's and those could be turned to actual songs using VST's and stuff.

 

[Fathand]

I actually don't understand AI. Like, from a coding perspective. What I need to do is sit down and read a fuck ton of wikipedia on this. I understand that you just feed it a bunch of "this bad, that good" stuff, but I don't understand how it constantly improves.

Not sure why I shared that with all of you.

When people talk about AI, they usually mean these fairly complex deep learning neural networks. And there are a few of those models, some less complex than others.

A high level basic description would be pretty much this: you input a lot of data, which is either categorized (supervised) or uncategorized (unsupervised) and let the algorithm determine the results, which you might then want to evaluate and input again ("teach") into the model which then takes the changes into consideration and produces a new result. This evaluation could of course be also automated, and the most complex models do internal feedback within the layers of the neural network that teach the model internally.

Coding wise a simple (1-5 layer) neural network is relatively easy to build in Python (with Keras / Tensorflow as backend), but understanding what it actually does and how you can tweak it accordingly (and of course you need to know your data and the expected results) is the much more difficult part. And this is coming from someone who is not a data scientist (by education), but has to dabble with some of this stuff at work.

 

[TedEH]

I find it interesting that a lot of the points being made now were things I said a while back, but I was just told I didn't know what I was talking about. I still tend to think that even if a machine is capable of expressing "real intelligence", it's really only expressing the intelligence of it's creators and users, not it's own.

The computer doesn't even need the guy sitting in the chair.

The computer does still need inputs to operate on, which require the guys in the chair to create and hand to it. The original human-made music needs to exist for the machine to aspire to, otherwise it doesn't function. Humans are always needed in this equation.

Technically AI doesn't exist, only the illusion of AI

I mean... the A already stands for artificial.

What I need to do is sit down and read a fuck ton of wikipedia on this

Realistically, anything that tries to give the illusion of a decision making process could be considered AI. Video game "AI" is dead simple a lot of the time (not always, obviously). Machine learning is a whooooole other thing on it's own though, and something that I think I understand on a surface level, but not in terms of implementation. I'll jump in that same boat of "probably should read up on this properly".

 

[MetalHex]

Wouldn't it be more interesting to give an AI all the possible "notes" of every instrument, and then try to teach how those are used? For example by giving it every guitar pro tab in the world to analyze. It could then generate death metal midi's and those could be turned to actual songs using VST's and stuff.

But........why?

 

[c7spheres]

"IT"S EVIL! DON"T TOUCH IT!" (old Time Bandits reference)

 

[777timesgod]

I still tend to think that even if a machine is capable of expressing "real intelligence", it's really only expressing the intelligence of it's creators and users, not it's own

Well it "borrows" from the past, as do we when we create something. When you structure a song for Intro-Verse-Chorus-etc. you are following a pattern of the past. When you intentionally do not then again you are guided by the past experiences. When you write a song using a note you heard before, you are not creating a new single note but a new collection of pre-existing notes. Even when a new instrument was created or a new device which did not have a predecessor in its line, there was still an idea based on the past (a need and the notion of instrument/device).

One could say we are all AIs of the origin of our existence. Even what I am writing right now is predetermined from the way I was sculpted psychologically as a person over my life.

 

[TedEH]

One could say we are all AIs of the origin of our existence

I'll re-iterate, the A stands for "artificial", as in it's a process of mimicking the human (or any biological) decision making process. We aren't AIs, we are what AI is trying to duplicate.

Well it "borrows" from the past, as do we when we create something.

This part is essentially what I was saying before about how a lot of the creative process comes from pattern recognition. I don't think that's the whole process, but it's a big part of it.

 

[p0ke]

But........why?

Just to see what it'd do
Basically the same idea as in the stream in the OP, but playing original music instead of just mashing existing stuff together.

 

[narad]

Just to see what it'd do
Basically the same idea as in the stream in the OP, but playing original music instead of just mashing existing stuff together.

I think you hit on the smart thing. The 'mashing stuff together' AI in the OP is the same sort of model, which would also try to play original music, but because it's working in real audio space the data is very high-dimensional, and the structure patterns we consider music are difficult to recover. The lower-level model structure latches on to roughly what archspire sounds like (audio space), without understanding anything about what music structure is representative of the genre (or even archspire).

Working in music notation / symbolic space makes the problem of learning music structure a bit easier, so the model may have a chance at generating something we'd call "new" music.

 

[p0ke]

I think you hit on the smart thing. The 'mashing stuff together' AI in the OP is the same sort of model, which would also try to play original music, but because it's working in real audio space the data is very high-dimensional, and the structure patterns we consider music are difficult to recover. The lower-level model structure latches on to roughly what archspire sounds like (audio space), without understanding anything about what music structure is representative of the genre (or even archspire).

Working in music notation / symbolic space makes the problem of learning music structure a bit easier, so the model may have a chance at generating something we'd call "new" music.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant!

Also, even giving it every instrument separately would help, I think.

 

[MetalHex]

My engineer friend said about it, "If anything, the coding of the AI could be considered art, not the music produced."