I asked it to "create 10secs of a rhythmical Argentine tango in the style of the golden era." (golden era of tango is 1935--1950).
What it gave me was some horrible ballroom-tango like abomination with prominent tempo, like a paso doble. The typical Ballroom tango sound that gives you ear cancer. I.e. it completely failed (Argentine tango sounds nothing like this).
P.S.: You can't mention any names btw, I asked for D'Arienzo (instead of "golden era") but it refused the prompt on copyright grounds.
It also refused for edad d'oro, with the same reasoning, i.e. it seemed to think this was an artist of some sort ("edad d'oro [de tango]" is just the Spanish name for golden era of tango -- go figure).
And re. copyright: as of 2024, all of Juan D'Arienzo's recordings from the 1940s are in the public domain in Argentina.
tlaverdure · 5h ago
I've played guitar for 23 years, and there is something just off-putting about most of the music on that page, but particularly "Yellow Bus Jam".
The guitar solo sounds very unnatural, especially the phrasing, which is totally random. Blues musicians are actually attempting to say something through their instrument. This was just a random number generated solo played by a 6 finger three handed robot. No thanks, lol.
mrtksn · 2h ago
I know right? AI is in the uncanny valley still. But every now and then I stumble upon something made with AI.
I think it has to be. It's very similar to others[1].The channel has a SoundCloud link in it's description but this song isn't there.
[1] often being 'modern song lyrics set to a historical style of music'. I don't know how to describe them exactly but they feel 'wrong', in the same way AI text is hard to critique but feels wrong.
JKCalhoun · 2h ago
I think we're just going to have to get used to it. That is, just drop worrying too much about whether something is AI and just stop at whether you like it or not.
mrtksn · 2h ago
It doesn't work like that, art is a package. At this point it's interesting that AI can do these things but the momen it wears off it stops being worthwhile. Artist + AI as a tool is working fine I believe but stuff produced by people who don't have taste shows.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Well, that kind of bolsters my point though: if it sucks, hate it. Why invest so much energy and angst into whether it is AI or human?
BizarroLand · 1h ago
Every time something comes along like this there's a revolt.
Photoshop.
First Analog synthesizers and then digital synthesizers.
Multitrack audio recording.
Digital Recording.
Autotune.
Vocaloids.
These things change the nature of the game and invalidate the labor of the people who used to be winners, and I get it.
If you take the money and the fame out of the equation, though, the point of art is not to become rich and famous, it's to communicate.
Eventually, we will find artists who are finally able to send in a way that others want to receive thanks to AI.
And there will be people like me and probably you that prefer to only hear what a human had to say straight from their own mouths. And that's fine. There are no walls.
BizarroLand · 1h ago
I mean, even the presence of the ability to overdub audio on a record let people cast aspersions on the "genuineness" of artists like KISS:
"“There is a lot of controversy about KISS’ ‘Alive!’ Did they play their own record or did they overdub? News Flash! You’re allowed to overdub! You’re allowed to do that. It’s not a crime. If you’re making an album and you want to overdub one part, that’s completely allowed, and everybody does it. "
Even modern musicians call studio composing "cheating"
"In a way it's kind of like cheating cause you can play stuff over and over again, and be like, no, that's bad, cut this, move it over, and then kind of fit the lyrics to it."
But if there is art there, you should not dismiss it because of the tools used to make it.
Right now I imagine there is so close to no art from AI that it can be said that there is none at all.
I also imagine that will change in the next 20 years.
gosub100 · 1h ago
I think there should be a legal mandate for truth in labelling just like there is on food. If I could, I would block all AI generated and TTS-voiced videos on YouTube. I don't want AI-generated anything. the fact that it's being forced on us from all angles is proof that it is no good.
JKCalhoun · 1h ago
Or whether any tools were used to retouch a photo?
We've been living in an age of artificiality for some time now.
gosub100 · 1h ago
Retouching is not generation.
ilvez · 4h ago
Reminds those early youtube days shredding overdub videos.. These were funny, but the Yellow Bus Jam seems just hollow and wrong. Feeling there's something from Steely Dan in that song..
freetonik · 3h ago
Reminded me of Steely Dan as well, but somehow off.
aatd86 · 3h ago
Have you tried suno? How does it compare?
Freedom5093 · 4h ago
I thought it was pretty rhythmic
I would've believed he's real, just passionate about music on his big yellow bus.
electrondood · 4h ago
I had the same sentiment, but also recall what generated human hands looked like a year ago vs. now.
The solo was pretty funny though.
stronglikedan · 4h ago
Get used to it, because it's much cheaper than a musician, and to the average person "attempting to say something through their instrument" and "random number generated solo" are largely the same thing.
rogerrogerr · 14m ago
As a non-music person, can confirm - if someone tried to tell me something through their instrument I would probably tell them it should have been an email.
I can generally understand that music has moods, but don’t think I could distinguish human-generated music from silicon-generated music at this point (unless I recognize a specific artist, of which there are vanishingly few I’m capable of)
nyecombinator · 5m ago
As a musician, I find your lack of interest in the expression of emotions through music innocent, amusing, and daft. I respect your ability to listen to music however you want, but am confused what the point would be without the above.
tlaverdure · 4h ago
I'm not anti-AI, but I strongly believe the human element of music can be imitated but not fully replicated. Listening back to that song I can hear the attempt to stylistically play slightly off-beat to get the feel of a band playing without a metronome. The auditory illusion is there, but it still sounds off. Playing behind the beat is a feeling; it's not a calculation.
As a drummer keeps time, the band reacts by looking at the drummer’s hands and the sway in their posture. A drummer intensifies their playing as they respond to the feeling of air being pushed from guitar cabinets. A lead guitarist looks back at their friends and smiles when they are about to play that sweet lick that the bass player likes to play along with.
These are just simple examples that make all the difference when you listen back. I also can't imagine paying hundreds of dollars to go see an AI "perform" this solo at a concert. When I listen to music, I'm remembering the moment, the feeling, what the artist was doing to create their art. So still... no thanks!
nyecombinator · 2m ago
That feeling of connection with other musicians while playing is something else.
I was live-reading lyrics sheets to some songs I’d never heard while jamming with a big group. Hit a chorus with some really great phrasing and bungled it the first time through. But the second time, the other guy singing and I just automatically made eye contact and had a whole conversation through body language.
“I’ve got it this time”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah”
“Oh fuck yeah”
“Fuck yeah indeed, my good fellow”
kev009 · 3h ago
Anthony Marinelli (guy behind MJ's Thriller synth jams) and Tim Pierce (accomplished session guitarist) riff on this https://youtu.be/OzuADujnEhQ?t=1205 recently. This whole video is a treat, as are most of Marinelli's.
When I see AI salesmen thinking they can attack into art, I think they naively see it as inherently imprecise or arbitrary, and they think because their technology has these properties it will easily cross over. This is going to lead to a lot of faux pas (remember NFTs?); it would be prudent to attack problems where some kind of correctness can be mechanically judged... OCR and software development are reasonable verticals at opposite ends of complexity to focus on, and pursue artistic rendition in a more experimental way letting artists approach the technology and show how it is useful.
conradfr · 3h ago
These things won't replace rock stars, they will (or at least want to) replace the vast majority of the industry which is tv shows, movies, ads, etc, which the disclaimer as the end alludes to.
The thing I notice time and again in all this is they want you to believe technology is displacing labor at one end but there's usually a lot of retraining consumers/society to accept something qualitatively different to cover up or re-conceive what was. That's not a moral judgement, just an observation. But the end result is usually the same, some group of current or wannabe oligarchs playing musical chairs at the top without regard for the rest of the system.
kev009 · 4h ago
The "Don’t Let Me Go" and "Yellow Bus Jam" examples made me laugh out loud. This kind of thing would be great for a cyberpunk game that dynamically generates a reality, with (unintentional?) faux pas and jank.
If you are an artist you could always slice, embellish, or otherwise process outputs into something so I guess it's not totally silly. But I get at best real estate video vibes, or unironic early '90s clip art and Comic Sans vibes and presumably some team of expensive marketers worked hard to select these examples, which is doubly hilarious.
JKCalhoun · 2h ago
It's live music for the win then.
GuinansEyebrows · 3h ago
> Get used to it, because it's much cheaper than a musician, and to the average person "attempting to say something through their instrument" and "random number generated solo" are largely the same thing.
it's okay to just say you're not that interested in music
jfengel · 33m ago
People do often freak out when I say that.
amradio1989 · 7h ago
I could be wrong, but I think the use case here is mainly for non-artists in domains where the music is not particularly important.
For example, a podcaster/youtuber may want a short intro track. An entertainer or a marketer may want some generic or silly background music.
Does it have a use case for a producer/musician? Maybe. It might give them ideas for chord progressions, melodies, etc. But real music does that too, and much more effectively.
liotier · 9m ago
Polemics about generative AI might indeed benefit from separately addressing art and entertainment. Generative AI in art is worth debating, but entertainment is not even a question: entertainment is a proven market for mass-produced slop, where artless works just fine and art is marginally valued.
weego · 4h ago
It definitely has a use case for prototyping sound design, which can be either incredibly time consuming or require an awful lot of niche expensive gear. Something like playing around to get an unusual drone can take a lot of time and effort. Being able to 'describe it' and get 80%+ there is a huge win.
And if you're focused on chopping up samples and sounds on an ableton push or similar this can be a tool of endless possibilities.
lmpdev · 1h ago
Probably useful for placeholder musical elements (often you just need something in the mix of a certain sonic palette)
But most studio-bunnies already have memorised catalogues of sample libraries like Omnisphere for that
bigfishrunning · 8h ago
Having a machine-learning algorithm crank out generic music seems like peak dystopia to me
lc9er · 2h ago
Just wait until the rush of commenters that insist you’re wrong about being offended that they want to automate and commodify every aspect of your life.
rpdillon · 2h ago
Made this point elsewhere, but the music industry has been on a downward slide towards making music as cheaply as possible for some time now.
If you look at Taylor Swift's first 12 number one hits, each of them was written by a different writer. Compare that to bands from 30 years ago, many of whom wrote and recorded all the songs themselves.
Labels don't sign rock bands anymore because actually recording a rock band well in a studio is 10x the cost of just using a sampler and a single artist singing. I know folks want to blame AI, but it's really just enabling the latest iteration of this trend.
I'm not defending the whole thing. It's a shame, and I love going back and listening to my old Rush albums. But AI is not the problem here. It's the incentives.
lmpdev · 1h ago
I disagree on the rock album being overly expensive to record
Any decent studio can make a U87 on vocals, DI bass, Fender amp and several SM57s on drums sound as good as almost any album from 1970-2010
Hell I’ve seen a five part band get away with three mics total including drums and it was a smash hit
Rock “died” because culture moved on, not because of it being inherently expensive to record (which it’s not)
rpdillon · 1h ago
I don't have any special industry experience. I went on a tear a few weeks ago and watched a bunch of Rick Beato's videos on YouTube. I didn't know the guy before running across his work, but he has 5 million subscribers and he sure sounds like he knows what he's talking about. He's been a music producer for 30 years.
Anyway, he was the one that made the point that we don't sign rock bands anymore in the sense that they're not moving the industry. All you gotta do is look at the top songs that folks are listening to on Spotify or the radio and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.
He was also the one that walked through the process of setting up mics for a drum kit and pointed out that it's just very expensive to get the studio time and the expertise to do all that correctly. He actually walks you through a studio where he's set up mics for a drum kit and explains why it's so difficult to do well. He then contrasts that with simply using samples that are professionally provided and that the cost difference is just immense.
Anyway, I don't need to die on this hill. My point was the music industry is going downhill regardless and AI is just one of many tools paving the way.
satyrun · 1h ago
There is all kinds of music being made with guitar/drum/bass still.
All kinds of indie, all kinds of metal, all kinds of rock, all kinds of everything.
The main difference is no MTV or rock radio. Prog rock? There is probably more prog being made now than ever.
Q6T46nT668w6i3m · 2h ago
Who wrote the last 12 Taylor Swift hits?
rpdillon · 1h ago
She only had 12.
satyrun · 2h ago
Machine-learning for audio is just a different form of audio synthesis.
That is not the issue. The issue is how incredibly generic the music is.
It also doesn't let you combine genres to make really strange sounds like audioLM can do.
This is just another Muzak generator like they use to play at Dennys. As generic music as possible to the appeal to the most average of average listener.
I think you really need to train your own model if you want to explore creative sound design or algorithmic composition. It just isn't going to be a mass market product worth venture capital money.
whoamii · 7h ago
Wait until someone auto tunes an AI generated song.
Is it more or less dystopia than an army of musicians trying to eke a living out of creating stuff like this (https://www.chosic.com/free-music/presentation/) to go behind your company's PowerPoint about how its Q3 woodchip sales didn't quite exceed expectations?
Maybe the fundamental issue is that this shouldn't compete with a human picking up a guitar and having fun with it, and the only reason it does is because we keep tying questions like "survival" to whether someone can make woodchip earnings reports less boring to read instead of trying some other way to be a community?
bigfishrunning · 6h ago
Why does a powerpoint about woodchip sales need music? Also, I don't see how anyone is making a living on the royalty-free music you linked, unless there's some business model I'm not understanding.
shadowgovt · 3h ago
> Why does a powerpoint about woodchip sales need music?
So the audience doesn't get bored.
abdullahkhalids · 8h ago
OT: Has anyone tried the opposite - ask AI to listen to music and determine the notes or chords being played? Or watch someone playing an instrument and give a textual output of what notes/chords they are playing.
TuringNYC · 5h ago
I did this for my graduate capstone (https://www.deepjams.com/)
We extracted chord progressions from existing music you would upload and then riffed based on those chords. there are open source libraries for this.
thepryz · 7h ago
There’s a ton. Haven’t used any personally. AnthemScore, ScoreCloud, Melody Scanner are just a few I found after a quick search.
abdullahkhalids · 7h ago
I think these are all using old machine learning techniques and not the modern transformer based architectures that underlie LLMs. These tools won't be able to match the abilities of an expert musician replicating a song by listening to a live recording of it. Check this video channel where they ask professional drummers to replicate a song after only one listen [1].
I would love this! There's a song I like by a band that broke up in 2013 and I am transcribing it by watching a live performance they did and trying my best but realizing I'm trying to take a mandolin/guitar and put it to acoustic. Even just being able to do a similar rendition would be nice by telling the AI "hey, do a twist on this and give me the chords/tabs".
I use https://moises.ai/ multiple times a week for practicing / figuring out chords being played. For the notes (say in a guitar riff), I dont know if such a thing exists
abdullahkhalids · 5h ago
Being able to isolate instruments, if it works well, is already a pretty big achievement.
nemo1618 · 7h ago
I'm very interested in this too. We're beginning to see models that can deeply understand a single image, or an audio recording of human speech, but I haven't seen any models that can deeply understand music. I would love to see an AI system that can iteratively explore musical ideas the same way Claude Code can iterate on code.
lioeters · 7h ago
Reminds me of an example in a similar direction, where AI was used for audio processing to filter out everything except a person's voice. If I remember right, it was able to focus on different people in a crowded room. It might have been also for music, to pick out an instrument and listen to it, filtering out the rest of the band.
ethan_smith · 7h ago
There are several tools that do this already - AnthemScore, Spleeter, CREPE, and even Google's AudioLM can transcribe music to MIDI with varying accuracy depending on instrument complexity and audio quality.
ElectricalTears · 7h ago
A while ago (maybe a year) I asked chatgpt to make a guitar tab from a song that had no available tabs and it worked surprisingly well.
neonnoodle · 7h ago
No, that would be useful, and as such AI is incapable of doing it.
gosub100 · 1h ago
It's not as lucrative. For human produced songs you can usually get the sheet music for them. If not, musicians can listen and do it manually, but it's not common enough to need AI to do it. Just transcribing for one instrument isn't that useful for many cases. Often they need an arrangement for multiple instruments, and depending on which instruments, the key may need to be transcribed. This is mostly referring to classical music and traditional western songs.
KerrAvon · 7h ago
LLMs can do this well, though, and there are such. They weren't calling themselves AI when I last looked a couple of years ago, but I'll bet any of them looking for VC money have rebranded since.
reactordev · 36m ago
I tried to create a song similar to their examples. After it generated half of a song. I stopped, asked it to add a bass line - it generated a whole new song, still without a bass line. I was then out of credits. (shrug)
stillpointlab · 7h ago
I really hope we move on from these boil-the-ocean models. I want something more collaborative and even iterative.
I was having a conversation with a former bandmate. He was talking about a bunch of songs he is working on. He can play guitar, a bit of bass and can sing. That leaves drums. He wants a model where he can upload a demo and it either returns a stem for a drum track or just combines his demo with some drums.
Right now these models are more like slot machines than tools. If you have the money and the time/patience, perhaps you can do something with it. But I am looking forward to when we start getting collaborative, interactive and iterative models.
krat0sprakhar · 6h ago
Very well said. I'm in the same boat. I'd love AI to write down a drum groove or a drum fill based on my guitar riff.
Currently, all these AI tools generate the whole song which I'm not at all interested in given songwriting is so much fun
nartho · 3h ago
Most VST drum sequencers have pretty powerful groove libraries nowadays. It's not a model or anything like that but just mix-matching and modifying the patterns some give extremely good results
viccis · 6h ago
RIP session musicians if that ever comes to pass, which is one of the main ways to make money if you are a good drummer.
pacifika · 6h ago
I’d recommend GarageBand for this.
stillpointlab · 6h ago
I haven't used the virtual drummer feature of GarageBand recently, but my experience with it was pretty disappointing. The output sounds very midi or like the most basic loops.
I believe there is massive room for improvement over what is currently available.
However, my larger point isn't "I want to do this one particular thing" and rather: I wish the music model companies would divert some attention away from "prompt a complete song in one shot" and towards "provide tools to iteratively improve songs in collaboration with a musician/producer".
amohn9 · 5h ago
Suno can already do that
feoren · 7h ago
We imagined a utopian future where robots did our menial work so we were free to be creative. Instead we got a dystopian future where we do more and more menial work so our robots can poorly emulate creativity. It's not too late to turn it around, but that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people, and the 0.1% who own everything would rather create their own synthetic (subservient) humans than recognize the basic rights of the ones that already exist (and can make fun of them on Twitter).
janalsncm · 1h ago
I hate to beat up on this because I agree with the spirit of it. But I think this is a little too cliche for my taste:
> that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people
I will go as far as to say there was never a time in history when people got rights because some other group “recognized the humanity in them” or something. No, it was through necessity. The plague in Europe caused a shortage of workers and brought an end to feudalism. Unions got us Saturdays off through collective action. The post-war boom and middle class prosperity happened because employers had no other options. Software engineering was lucrative because there was a shortage of supply.
Even if there is some future where robots do chores, that’ll only leave time for more work, not poetry writing time, unless there is a fundamental change in how the economy is structured, like I outlined above.
krapp · 7h ago
They said the same thing about automation when the Industrial Revolution began a century or so ago. That the common worker would be liberated from the drudgery of labor and be free for creative and intellectual pursuits. The people who protested were ridiculed as Luddites who simply feared technology and progress.
Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,) the end result was just that workers worked more, and more often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
asukumar · 4h ago
Are you suggesting that subsistence farmers were better off than workers after the industrial revolution? I find that hard to believe.
_DeadFred_ · 59m ago
The dream then was to go to America and become a farmer and OWN your own farm. No one dreamt to immigrate to America to work in the industrial factories.
Why was that the American dream at the time if farming was the worse option?
krapp · 4h ago
In some ways, yes, they were.
Subsistence farmers weren't cramped in filthy disease ridden workhouses, getting paid in company scrip, getting mangled by machines (OK they were but probably not as often) or being locked into burning buildings because preventing theft of stock was more important to owners than the lives of employees. And subsistence farmers owned what they produced and the means by which it was produced, whereas industrial workers owned nothing but the pennies in their pocket, and likely owed more than that to the company.
It took years of often violent protest for workers to return to even the basic level of dignity and rights once afforded to craftsmen and farmers. Not that the lives of subsistence farmers and craftsmen were good, but they were better than what the dehumanization of mass production and automation created.
But then comparing farmers and workers in this context is a bit specious. It would be more fair to compare, say, textile workers before the automated loom and textile workers after. Obviously the former had it much better off, which was precisely the problem automation was intended to solve.
GuinansEyebrows · 3h ago
> I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
people are, unfortunately, and collectively, not ready to seriously interrogate the economic or political situations in which we find ourselves. we will never see the utopian promise of automation under capitalism. there will always be an underclass to exploit.
kingstnap · 6h ago
It's only from a position of extreme arrogance that you can complain that machines have not yet done enough for you.
But it's the fun thing about being humans, I suppose. Our insatiable greed means we demand endlessly more.
janalsncm · 1h ago
It’s not greedy to want economic stability and good health. It is greedy for people who have more wealth than they know what to do with to hoard it.
lmpdev · 1h ago
It’s not greedy nor did they demand anything
anigbrowl · 5h ago
This comment doesn't engage with the critique at all, it's just reflexive moralization.
CompoundEyes · 46m ago
This music sounds like the visual equivalent of one of those motion settings on a tv that cause the "Soap Opera Effect".
I'm wondering if the LLM is failing to emulate the odd and even harmonics of real recordings and that's why it seems so unnatural. It makes me feel sick. It's different than the sterile straight to digital recordings of the late 80s early 90s too.
Do any of these let people download the individual track stems? I'd be curious if taking all the stems and running them through analog hardware would remedy it. The LLM needs a producer.
neom · 28m ago
Suno lets you download the stems, also no affiliation at all just really like the took and have spent a lot of time with it: Suno is night and day better than this product, by a mile. https://soundcloud.com/charlielabs/charlie (everything on this account I made with Suno, sometimes through Abelton if I'm not feeling lazy)
jefftk · 30m ago
> I'm wondering if the LLM is failing to emulate the odd and even harmonics of real recordings
What do you mean? If you screw up even/odd harmonics it will sound far less natural, like confusing flutes and clarinets.
two-sandwich · 7h ago
If you consider that Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.
The tech here is fantastic. I love that such things are possible now and they're an exciting frontier in creation.
It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties. I'm not an artist, so I don't feel personally attacked. Much like image gen, this seems to be aimed at replacing the bare-minimum artist (visual or auditory) with a "fill in the blanks" entertainment piece.
moritzwarhier · 7h ago
> Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art intends to challenge
This is a fruitless and snobby dichotomy that was attempted so many times in human history, and it makes no sense.
There will always be art made for success and/or money, but drawing a line is futile.
Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.
And intellectual snobbishness or noble ideas do not make art more valuable.
A kid singing Wonderwall can be art, too. As can be a depressed person recording experimental field sounds.
Feel free to call art bad, but assuming an obvious and clear separation between art and entertainment is the exact opposite of the spirit that enables people to make or appreciate art, in whatever form, culture or shape.
viccis · 6h ago
>Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.
Handel was never a "bit like a pop musician." This fundamentally misunderstands how music during his time, mostly funded and enjoyed under religion and wealthy patronage contexts, was listened to. Mostly only the wealthy listened to his works, and those elite audiences were prone to viciously enforcing stylistic norms. The only real way the working class heard his works were in the occasional public concert and occasionally in church. At no point in any of these settings was there a lack of stylistic gatekeeping or snobbery.
I know this kind of nihilistic "everything is good, I guess, good doesn't even mean anything" attitude is popular in some spaces, but this lack of standards or gatekeeping in favor of a tasteless desire for increasing slop production regardless of quality is how we got poptimism and the current state of music. No longer is there any taste making, just taste production via algorithms.
Sometimes we need a bit of snobbery to separate the wheat from the chaff, and being a gatekeeping snob against AI music is what our current day and age needs more of!
Krasnol · 4h ago
Well, in the end, the only thing this snobbery does is that it makes you look/sound old.
Nobody cares. I've heard the same thing when electronic music came up. The old ones couldn't stop complaining about this "computer music" where nobody does real handwork anymore.
I see it as democratisation of art. Everybody can do it now and this is a good thing.
Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on reddit. Things people came up with and would have never gotten the budget to be made. It's great.
gosub100 · 1h ago
It's not art. It's democratization of crap.
Krasnol · 1h ago
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
kelseyfrog · 7h ago
Art is a framing device largely independent of the content. It's how we get Fountain[1], Piss Christ[2], Comedian[3], Mother![4], 4’33”[5], and Seedbed[6] to name a few among countless others. To claim that AI content is incapable of being framed as art is nonsense when we have example after example of the diversity of what art can be. Let's remember, bad art is still art.
1. Marcel Duchamp. 1917
2. Andres Serrano. 1987
3. Maurizio Cattelan. 2019
4. Darren Aronofsky. 2017
5. John Cage. 1952
6. Vito Acconci. 1972
janalsncm · 1h ago
My favorite was David Datuna eating the $120k banana duct taped to the wall in 2019. A banana doesn’t transubstantiate into capital A “Art” just because someone paid a lot of money for it. In fact eating the banana was more Art than the original duct taping imo.
It is reminiscent of Fountain. Not sure if there was an intentional connection.
fruitworks · 7h ago
If that was true, then the development of a new urinal factory would have the same impact on art as the development of a new AI art models.
The framing is dependent on the content
janalsncm · 1h ago
The point of Fountain was to say that whether something is art should depend on the content and its absurd that a urinal could be considered art.
But the art isn’t in the content, it was in the statement it was making about the absurdity surrounding the fact you could pay to put anything in an art exhibition. Swap out the white urinal for a blue one, it’s the same point.
kelseyfrog · 6h ago
Framings require creators; they don't arise spontaneously. Someone could turn a urinal factory into art, but art doesn't validate itself. Belief alone in artistic essentialism doesn’t make it so.
fruitworks · 6h ago
That's such a great pile of bullcrap, you could frame it and hang it up in a museum!
The point I'm making is that a unique framing only results in a single piece of worthwhile conceptual art. You can't have an infinite factory of ducamp's fountain. What makes the piece worthwhile is that it was an original idea.
Conceptual art is different from decorational art in this sense. The AI music is a largely a homogenous synthesis of existing works. The AI "art" is decorational, not conceptual art. You could make an arrangement of AI art that is conceptual, but how many arrangements can you make that are actually worthwhile conceptually if AI art is generally homogenous?
It's like asking how many worthwhile works of conceptual art can you produce with a urinal factory that makes identical clones of the same urinal? 0 to 1.
And besides, it's not nessisarially true that all framings have creators. Nature is an example of a system that cultivates and curates a certain type of life without any rational process.
kelseyfrog · 5h ago
I don't disagree that being novel has it's place in framing art, and I still believe that a Fountain Factory could certainly be framed as art.
To your other point, sorry, but artistic/aesthetic essentialism hasn't been serious position for at least a hundred years.
As long as there is a perceiver, there is a frame.
The idea that nature is intrinsically beautiful is a frame. It's fine to hold that but it shouldn't be confused with not having a frame.
recursive · 4h ago
There's a difference between a factory that is art vs a factory that produces art.
There's only one factory, and the concept works only once.
kelseyfrog · 3h ago
Mass-produced art is still art as long as people frame it as such and all indication suggests that they do.
recursive · 2h ago
I have some mass-produced art on my wall. But it's definitely not conceptual art, as some ancestor post was discussing.
blargey · 7h ago
Art is communication.
That "generic" and "indescribably lifeless" feeling you get is because the only thing communicated by a model-and-prompt generation is the model identity and the prompt.
orbital-decay · 2h ago
Then most music is not art, because I struggle to find non-generic music, at least for the genres I like. In 2020s, 4/5 artists are bent on trying to create a blend of aesthetics of the past, instead of even attempting doing something that sounds fresh and authentic. And very few of these who do succeed. This has been going on for a while.
sekai · 7h ago
> and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.
Art is, above all, subjective.
> It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties.
Painters said the same thing about the camera.
Photographers said the same thing about Photoshop.
fruitworks · 7h ago
This art is subjectively bad
ronsor · 7h ago
The fact that these models have so many people irritated like there's sand in their pants is enough proof that they're pushing boundaries and making some uncomfortable.
thefaux · 6h ago
Yes, because the people pushing the boundaries do not understand the value of the thing they are trying to commoditize. If they did, they wouldn't be trying to commoditize it. There is a pervasive attitude among technologists that they can improve things they don't understand through technological efficiency. They are wrong in this case and getting appropriate pushback.
Personally, music is sacred for me so making money is not a part of my process. I am not worried about job loss. But I am worried about the cultural malaise that emerges from the natural passivity of industrial scale consumerism.
nonhaver · 4h ago
Well put and reflects my thoughts exactly. It's borderline concerning there are people who consume this type of media by choice and forethought.
CamperBob2 · 4h ago
And they consume it without checking with you first. That's got to be the worst part.
nonhaver · 56m ago
wild take: critique != censorship. people can consume whatever they want and we can call out when the supply chain is built on unconsented scraping and zero stewardship CamperBob2
Levitz · 4h ago
Not every boundary is worth pushing.
I'm hoping it will eventually become better, or maybe I haven't quite seen stuff prompted properly yet, but all I've heard coming from an AI feels aggressively mediocre and average, not in a "bad" way but in the "optimizing towards being palatable to the average person" way. Like the perfect McDonalds meal that the algorithm has found out can be 30% sawdust and still feel appetizing. I don't want that boundary being pushed. I feel we will live in a worse world if we do.
recursive · 4h ago
Besides the point, but I think that's basically what happened to Subway.
fruitworks · 7h ago
the boundaries of unemployment perhaps
omnimus · 6h ago
boundaries of copyright
sorushn · 2h ago
Epstein, the ultimate pusher of boundaries.
qgin · 7h ago
If your art can be replaced by a model that recycles what’s already been done, maybe you were just recycling what’s already been done too.
anigbrowl · 5h ago
How do you expect people to get good when AI is pushing them out of the entry-level stages where they were previously able to earn a modest living while developing their craft?
> oh now they won't have to do that boring mindless stuff like playing cover versions any more
That's how most musicians make their first $, doing covers or making something generic enough to be saleable as background music
_DeadFred_ · 4h ago
AI eats the seedcorn. Anyone that needs space to grow? Crowded out. Entry level incomes, replaced. No more entry, sorry.
For all of human civilization the future has been built on the backs of those the came before (on the backs of giants). But that climb is slowing, maybe halting. Which then compounds when the new giants that would have risen up don't. AI replaces the messy, slow process of becoming with instant regurgitation, replaces those that would have grown. The future, built on the backs of giants, stalls when those giants never get the chance to rise.
AI is entropy weaponized against every layer of future progress. But everyone is too busy salivating at potential cost savings to see it.
CuriouslyC · 3h ago
Sorry, but no. I use AI as a writing tool, and its understanding prose and storycraft is nowhere near there, it's mostly useful for rough drafts and minor rewrites. Even in a hypothetical future where it's perfect at prose and storycraft, and it just asks you a few questions to get at the details of what you want then cranks out a technically outstanding novel, it still won't be there. People crave novelty, freshness and and a sense of the auteur, and AI will ALWAYS be bad at that (until someone creates an AI writer that simulates a fictional human author with a rich interior life before it starts writing, anyhow).
Ultimately we'll reach a technical "peak" in AI writing, and humans will still be the ones driving the AI, feeding it with the alchemy of their lived experience, directing creation at a high level. We'll even purposefully inject very minor imperfections into the writing in the name of voice, tweaking minor details in the name of personal harmony. The author will go from "creator" to "brand."
paxys · 7h ago
Tech is tech. What you create with the tech can be art.
bix6 · 7h ago
These feels different than experimenting with a new synth or something though. It’s just feeding a sentence to the model.
altruios · 7h ago
'Just' is a loaded word here.
In image gen: comfyUI gives a node-based workflow that gives a lot of room for 'creative' control, of mixing, and mathematically combining masks, filters, and prompts (and starting images / noise {at any node in that process}).
I would expect the same interface for audio to emerge for 'power users'.
kingstnap · 7h ago
I draw a very sharp line: curating the outputs and crafting the sentence is enough to make it art. If neither of those happen, it's just slop.
It's actually a bit like photography. A bunch of randomly taken pictures piled together is not art. It needs to be done with purpose and refinement.
Basically, in my own opinion, art ≠ a function of technical difficulty.
Art = Curation, Refinement, and Taste
fruitworks · 7h ago
Curation, refinement and taste is practicially worthless on its own. The technical difficulty of art is the investment that makes it worth considering.
So if you are right, then art will pretty much be worthless in the future. You can just iterate over the search space defined by "good taste" and produce an infinite amount of good art for no work.
kingstnap · 6h ago
Curation is not worthless. It's the exact opposite, in the abundance of stuff, it's extremely valuable.
Search is not free, and it can never be free. What happens when search gets easier and easier is that your demands for quality and curation will get higher until all time saved in search efficiency is spent on search breadth.
blargey · 6h ago
Disagree that curation and prompts adds artistry (dense intent reflected in the output) to AI generations.
"Curation" in AI can only surface the curator's local maxima among a tiny and arbitrary grab-bag of seed integers they checked among the space of 2^64 options; it's statistically skewed 99% towards the model's whims rather than anyone's unique intent or taste.
Prompt crafting is likewise terribly low fidelity since it's a constant battle with the model's idiosyncratic interpretation of the text, plus arbitrary perturbations that aren't actually correlated with the writer's supposed intent. And lord spare me the "high quality high resolution ultra detailed photorealistic trending on artstation" type prompts that amount to a zero-intent plea for "more gooder". And when pursuing artistry, using artist names / LORAs are a meta-abandonment of personal direction, abdicating artistic control and responsibility to a model's idea of another artist's idea of what should be done.
Fancier workflows generally only multiply this prompt-and-curate process across regions/iterations, so can't add much because they're multiplying a tiny fraction by a fixed factor.
kingstnap · 6h ago
I agree with you on the idea of prompts and seeds leaving much to be desired. So that's why I think more sophisticated steering is necessary.
The models' latent space is extremely powerful, but you get hamstrung into the text encoders whims when you do things through a prompt interface. In particular, you've hit exactly an issue I have with current LLMs in general in that they are locked into wors and concepts that others have defined (labelings of points in the latent space).
Wishy washy thinking: I'd be nice if there were some sort of Turing complete lambda calculus sort of way to prompt these models instead. Where you can define new terms, create expressions, and loops and recursion or something.
It would sort of be like how SVGs are "intent complete" and undeniably art, but instead of vector graphics, it is an SVG like model prompt.
_DeadFred_ · 40m ago
Ah yes, my porn hub search prompts are the highest form of art and human connection.
_DeadFred_ · 42m ago
How dare you! Next you will say my current pornhub prompts refined over years aren't art either! Or that prompt results are purely for personal gratification and no one else cares about them.
CamperBob2 · 6h ago
"It's just pushing a button on the camera."
anigbrowl · 5h ago
This is a stupid argument, because even with the most automatic camera you have to point it at something and make a decision about what to frame in. AI music is more like buying a bunch of old unlabelled records from a bargain bin and then praising yourself whenever one of them turns out to be worth listening to.
CamperBob2 · 5h ago
Of course it's a stupid argument, but it's exactly what the ancestors of today's AI naysayers said when photography became practical.
Then again, it's possible for an art form to exhaust its own possibilities. To the extent that "prompt engineering" is sufficient to generate any music or artwork we have in mind, that seems like an indication that we've reached that point. To the extent that it's not sufficient, that seems like an indication that there's still interesting stuff left to do.
Either way, if you are hoping that things will stay the same, then I'm afraid that neither art nor technology are good career choices.
thepryz · 8h ago
Maybe I’m a Luddite, but this seems like it will just lead to music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I say it, soul.
crazydoggers · 8h ago
I think you just described pop music
thepryz · 7h ago
It’s easy and popular to hate on pop music, but even pop music has value and requires a certain skill to understand what resonates with people.
This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure out a way to either market the music or just game search and digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and repeat.
shadowgovt · 7h ago
The current solution for creating the kind of music this tool can back-fill is to go on a site like "Free music for presentations" and click line after line after line after line of 10-second samples hoping to find one that "vibes" with you.
If anything, this is a lateral move.
colechristensen · 7h ago
>music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I say it, soul.
This phrase though could be plunked down at any point in the last hundred years and you'd find someone making it.
About autotune or electric guitars or rock or jazz or punk or disco or Philp Glass or Stravinsky... one could go on for a long time.
thepryz · 3h ago
You’ll always have naysayers, but I think there’s a difference between someone who doesn’t understand or share the appeal of rock or jazz or an artist like Philip Glass where music is made by someone choosing what notes to play, what rhythms, what words and the music that comes out of a statistical model.
You can’t tell me that Philip Glass didn’t understand or agonize over the music when creating it. The creative process is vastly different and that’s my point.
Oh course, there will be artists who use AI in new and creative ways, someone like Brian Transeau who routinely codes tools for creating electronic music. but for most artists, I fear it will just lead to mindless button clicking and prompt manipulation until it’s formulaic because the base model is the same. Or it will result in fewer people learning instruments or music theory and truly experimenting with things that haven’t been done before.
I see AI as having great potential in both art and productivity but maybe it’s just that I don’t trust people to use it responsibly. We’re inherently lazy and easily distracted by anything that will give us that dopamine fix.
darth_avocado · 7h ago
A lot of criticism of AI in music seems to be around the lack of originality and it being generic slop. But unfortunately that’s true for pretty much the entire music industry. Handful of people write songs for all the artists, “artists” don’t create the songs as much as they perform them, most of the music isn’t created but rather sampled or is “inspired” by other music and pretty much most of the artists sound like other artists.
Yes there are smaller creators who are trying to make something net new, but unfortunately 99.9% of the small artists are also derivative and lack originality.
I see AI music as just continuation of the sad state of the industry at the moment. Hopefully it accelerates the demise of the industry as we know it and restarts the cycle of creation.
feoren · 7h ago
None of that is new, but there were ways for the genuinely new, inspired, and genius to actually shine through before. It was hard, but possible. Humanity is making decisions that make that even harder: AI music, Spotify's revenue model, etc. They're all to the benefit of cookie-cutter slop (AI or human-made) over creativity.
This wouldn't necessarily be a problem as long as people were still free to create on their own. But instead, everyone is forced to spend more hours in menial bullshit jobs for less and less (relative) pay just to survive. Give everyone enough resources to live at least a simple life, and both human creativity and AI creativity can blossom at the same time. But of course that means fewer yachts and hookers and drugs for the billionaires, so it is verboten.
hudo · 7h ago
AI is great, I can see it benefit so many industries, except music. There's something profoundly wrong with AI generated music.
RyanOD · 7h ago
I'm dreading the day I discover a new "band" I'm totally into only to discover it's entirely AI.
cschmidt · 7h ago
I worry how often that is happening already on Spotify.
drivers99 · 6h ago
At least I still have all my old CDs.
krat0sprakhar · 6h ago
Hope your favorite new band is not "The Velvet Sundown"
HelloUsername · 4h ago
But you were enjoying the experience..
shadowgovt · 7h ago
Oh boy, do I ever have bad news about how pop music is currently created...
RyanOD · 5h ago
Increasingly I can't get into new music. For a while, I couldn't understand why as I've been a rabid musician / music lover my entire life. Even music I thought was cool, I couldn't really get into. I always preferred the music I grew up with.
Eventually, the reason why became obvious. I grew up listening to all that music with my closest friends. It's the memories I associate with that music that keeps me coming back. I moved away 30 years ago and never established friendships like that again. New music feels hollow to me because I don't have buddies to share it with and build associated memories.
footy · 5h ago
this would only be bad news for that commenter if they're into pop music
pr337h4m · 7h ago
This could be repurposed for really good stylistic search for music (similar to how CLIP powered stylistic search for images on same.energy)
throwaway1280 · 7h ago
This is an incredible achievement, but as a musician, I wish this would go die in a fire.
I'm a bedroom hobby musician with no dreams of ever making it big, but even so, I'm looking at the hours I'm spending trying to improve my skills and thinking what's the point, really, when I could just type in 'heavy metal guitar solo at 160bpm, A minor' and get something much much better?
I know there is value in creating art for art's sake. I've always been up against a sea of internet musicians, even when I started back in 2000. But there's just something about this that's much more depressing, when it's not even other people competing with me, but a machine which hasn't had to invest years of its life in practice to beat me.
J_McQuade · 3h ago
I am not sure if this will be any help to you at all, but the technical skill of music - especially in (from your comment) heavy metal - has only ever been a tiny part of it. You probably know a guy in a local pub band who can note-for-note play every singly thing that Toni Iommi ever recorded, for instance.
There are hundreds of bands who play three-chord doom or mindless-shredding grind who just learned one thing and do it well, and who play to hundreds of people multiple times a week (often including me). We go to see these bands not to see what they can play, but to see what they are saying with what they play.
This is why I feel that I can never describe LLM-generated content as 'art'. Art is about the story. People will go and see a punk band who only know three chords if they play songs about things that resonate with them. Bit of a tangent, but this is the same reason that I genuinely believe that if you could bio-engineer a steak that tastes exactly like one from a well-looked-after cow from a notable breed and a good farm, most people would still prefer the cow. The story matters - the fact that a person put effort and experience into something really is important.
"This solo is sick" is a fun plus-point, but it doesn't matter if the song doesn't mean anything to you. If proficiency was the only thing that mattered then we'd all be listening to the worst kind of prog.
freedomben · 6h ago
As a fellow (hobbyist) musician, I feel you, but after doing a lot of introspection I realized that it's the art (and the process) that I really like, not (just) the end result (though that is of course a rewarding aspect). For example, jamming out to a kickin' song is fun, even if I'm just covering something. I also realized that my own ability to produce things isn't affected by this (as long as you don't want to make money on it). As someone who loves to play bass but is generally bad at writing bass riffs, I also see some fun potential to use AI to get bass tracks that go along with my main guitar riffs. I can always throw them out and rewrite from scratch later, or just iterate on them to get them where I like them. I do think I'll feel a bit lof a loss of "artistic purity" with doing something like that, but the more I think about it, the biggest reason that might bother me is because I'd feel judged by other musicians :-D
rootforce · 7h ago
I can't see the future, but I imagine that the human art community may actually get more vibrant when divorced from being a way to make a living. Perhaps a return to something like a patronage system for the exceptional artists.
Open mics, music circles and concerts also remain untouched for the moment.
dillutedfixer · 4h ago
Like you, I am just a hobbyist making beats in my room. No expectations of ever being a real musician. But when I'm jamming and I create a beat and synth line, start adding other instruments and really get a song going, there is a feeling that I get that an generated song will never ever ever be able to recreate for me. It's like a rush, an almost a euphoric tingling (and no I'm not on drugs) that happens that almost feels like a runners high. No output from a prompt-driven AI algorithm would ever do that to me. That's the value I see in making art for arts sake, for practicing a craft and for trying to just get better at something for the sake of getting better at it.
shadowgovt · 7h ago
When Harmonix was in the concept phase for Guitar Hero, there were two slides in the presentation. The first was the "con" slide: novel game style risks not finding a market, technical challenges of the new style of gameplay, requiring peripherals for a game is a famous pathway to low-volume sales.
The next slide was labeled "pro," and it was just a picture of Jimi Hendrix on-stage mid-performance.
I'd submit to you the notion that even if the machine can create a billion billion iterations of music, it still cannot create what you will create, for the reasons you will create it, and that's reason enough to continue. Hendrix wasn't just "a guy who played guitar good." And a machine that could word-for-word and bar-for-bar synthesize "Foxy Lady" wouldn't be Hendrix.
Hendrix, also, can't be you. Nor you him.
thefaux · 6h ago
It is embarrassing how much time I spent playing that dumb game instead of actually practicing a more versatile instrument.
thefaux · 6h ago
I would suggest that instead of feeling demoralized by ai that you instead ask what can you offer musically that an ai cannot. I also would suggest trying to let go of the notion that music is primarily about achieving a certain level of technical proficiency. There are no limits on your growth musically unless you artificially constrain them because you are deluded by a technology to believe that you don't already have what you need inside of you.
Do you regularly play with other people? That is a good way to disabuse yourself of the notion that all that matters is technique.
fidotron · 7h ago
What struck me more than the output is the absolute marketing talk of the prompting, so not only is the output kind of creepy but in order to get the best results you have to translate your intention into the worst corpo-speak imaginable.
TrackerFF · 6h ago
I'm a musician
I haven't used the elevnlabs one, but I've checked out suno and udio, and to be honest the tech is amazing. But like with a lot of genai images, the current music models have the same smell to it.
These models can def be used to crank out commercially sounding music, but I have yet to hear any output that sounds fresh and exciting. If your goal is to create bro country, these models are a god-send.
With that said, I do believe that musicians will start to create music with these tools as aid. I've tried to use them for generating samples and ideas, and they do work well enough.
MarcelOlsz · 6h ago
>With that said, I do believe that musicians will start to create music with these tools as aid.
The more tech advances the cooler it is to bury your head in the sand. Studying by paper & candlelight has never been more of a flex.
Unless you're talking about EDM people and those adjacent. Not that they're not "real musicians" but they're much more about tech and gadgets so I can see them using it more.
TrackerFF · 5h ago
I'm a "real" musician, and have done session / studio work, as well as made a living by playing live music in my younger days, before getting a "real job" in tech.
While there will no doubt be many that feel they're above using tools like these, the reality is that if you want to make money out of music - you're going to make music for the masses.
And if there's one thing these models really excel at, it is to make commercial sounding music. Everything sounds nice and bland.
MarcelOlsz · 4h ago
Ah yeah, I don't even register the commercial world so didn't mention it as it's a given. Doing that type of work would suck so bad IMO.
anigbrowl · 5h ago
I'm an electronic musician and AI music is banned on my favorite forum. Someone popped up a few months back challenging everyone to listen to their AI-generated music album and ended up being flamed to a crisp - not because people didn't engage with it, but because they did and pointed out in detail what was so bad about it.
exitplanetary · 1h ago
Eleven labs killed Omnivore.
Never forget, never forgive.
yanis_t · 7h ago
Did anyone compared
to Suno quality wise? Seems like one benefit being the API availability
Can we get a new quantum leap in model quality to stave off the feeling that modern AI stuff is just a sloppy hustle for venture capital
wturner · 7h ago
Write a song about the billionaire social engineer Peter Thiel getting robbed and murdered by a broke minimum wage worker with no healthcare.
"That is not allowed by our terms of service"
I think the rebellious nature of art inherently has boundaries these people won't cross.
recursive · 7h ago
> Studio-grade
The vocals are definitely not that.
throwawayoldie · 7h ago
I would like to say this categorically now: if you're using AI to generate any kind of art, go die in a fire.
ebiester · 4h ago
Is that LLMs? Generative AI? Anything with machine learning? Anything using a public model? Does that include something like Baby Audio TAIP? Noise removal software that uses ML?
How about Refik Anadol?
throwawayoldie · 4h ago
Yes.
dawnerd · 4h ago
It's already bad enough before this came out on the different streaming platforms. People are grifting off known musicians and labeling them as album artists to get their awful ai songs put into mixes.
throwawayoldie · 3h ago
This is a shitty timeline and I would like to transfer to a better one. Hey, maybe these AIs can tell me how to do that.
sys32768 · 7h ago
I think AI will spark a revival in "organic" human culture and art, with people flocking to see real musicians play real instruments, and real artists using real materials.
It will probably also extinguish quite a few mad musicians and mediocre artists.
asadm · 7h ago
Do we yet have a way to "autocomplete" music from existing music? or from humming to music (music-to-music?)?
I am less interested in the "one-shot" approach here with text-to-prompt. I see seamless transitions but that seems like an afterthought.
bigbuppo · 7h ago
Well, they've done it boys, they've made creative fulfillment obsolete. They've DISRUPTED the concept of going to big music festivals, and small cozy shows. Just plug your ear holes with the AI slop bucket's pure beeps and boops and never have to worry again about paying artists for music. You can pay a techbro instead.
This is like the dotcom era of where every idiotic idea that ended with, "but on the internet", would get a pile of cash thrown at it. We are officially at the beginning of the end. It's only going to get dumber from here.
shadowgovt · 7h ago
There isn't any relationship whatsoever between a concert or music festival and this tech. Two entirely different experiences.
zubzubi · 6h ago
Can it do differently-styled covers of songs or improvisations upon melodies like Suno can?
As a musician, that's what I find most compelling about Suno. It's become a tool to collaborate with, to help test out musical ideas and inspire new creativity. I listen to its output and then take the parts I like to weave into my own creations.
The AI music tools that generate whole songs out of prompts are a curious gimmick, but are sorely lacking in the above.
artninja1988 · 7h ago
The context length seems super small. The prompt needs to be shorter than 2k characters, which is super limiting. Hope they address this soon.
neom · 4h ago
It's interesting to me people really hate AI gen'd music, some people I know literally won't listen to it and just like... get kinda angry I even tried to show them what I made (so I stopped showing people for now). I have a good memory for sound, but whatever neurodiversity I have makes learning instruments (and math, and written words, and and) super challenging. I loved screwing around remixing stuff in Abelton, but I've not touched it since suno. I just looked at my suno library, I've gen'd 1,100 tracks since March 18th, 2024. The levels of audiophile or...musicophile? is pretty wide, but I don't think I'm a total n00b and I think some of the stuff I've made is actually pretty good, even if I do say so myself (and I'm fine even if I just make it for myself to listen to, as that's what I always did anyway). :)
prussia · 22m ago
> what I made
But did you really make it? Or was it the AI? If someone commissions a piece of art from an artist, I don't think the commissioner would be able to truthfully say they made it, even if they had a specific vision for what the piece of art should look like. But if you've edited or changed the track enough yourself, maybe it would be fair to call yourself a co-author...
neom · 3m ago
I'm not going to defend against that position generally. Your point is well taken, I don't know if I put enough into it to consider it real to you. I think about the lyrics, I write the MVP of them by hand, and then I have 4.5 give me variations of them, I write all my instrumental prompts by hand I don't use any LLM for that because I typically know exactly what I want and I tend to be quite precise with my instructions there. Suno allows you a lot of fine grain control, and you can also create personas from tracks and then use those personas in new tracks so as you can imagine you can spend a long time trying to get exactly what you want... last night I gen'd over 60 songs before I got it dialed in how I wanted it and I'm still not totally happy with it. I understand the position though, I was on original team that took deviantart from zero to millions of artists through the early 2000s and have a few Emmy awards from the film to digital transition days, I'm no stranger to these conversations.
Oceoss · 7h ago
I've been waiting for this AI development for a while
It's amazing that the songs sound pretty natural
everfrustrated · 7h ago
Finally non-repeating muzak is here
bjt · 4h ago
What did you train the model on? Assuming it was trained on all the music online, without permission, it's kinda shitty to take all musicians' work like that and use it to make a product to put them out of business.
I draw a distinction here from LLMs used for writing code. Plenty of people freely put their code on Github or in Stack Overflow with the expectation that people could freely copy and use it. Relatively little music is shared so permissively.
(And before someone cries "fair use", I'm making an ethical argument, not a legal one. A fair use defense can protect you from a copyright claim, but it doesn't make it any less shitty to take other people's art, blend it all together, and use the result to threaten their livelihoods.)
matthewfcarlson · 4h ago
> Created in collaboration with labels, publishers, and artists, Eleven Music is cleared for nearly all commercial uses, from film and television to podcasts and social media videos, and from advertisements to gaming. For more information on supported usage across our different plans, head here.
Not sure what that actually means but it suggests they at least tried to get their training material legally.
bjt · 1h ago
A few thoughts...
First, where are you seeing that? And where does the "head here" link point? I'm not seeing it on the linked page or on https://elevenlabs.io/music-terms.
Second, that language is not saying "we got permission to use all the music we trained on". It seems more directly addressed at the rights they're giving you, as opposed to the rights they have to the training material. It could just as well be based on an opinion from their general counsel that it's fair use to train on all the music they downloaded, so it's "legal enough".
Third, and as I tried to emphasize above, legal is not the same as ethical. Even if they win the legal argument about fair use, it would still be shitty to take someone else's work and use it to train a model that put them out of business.
throwaway_32u10 · 7h ago
Behold, we are one step closer to a world where "AI will do the mundane tasks, and the we all are going to engage in creative hobbies such as music creation"... Oh... wait...
iamsaitam · 7h ago
The silver lining to any of these models is that what AI generates is total shite.
jp1016 · 7h ago
lot of ai progress today, open ai, claude and now eleven labs
nonhaver · 4h ago
Absolutely horrendous - well and truly. Ignoring the dystopic undertones of a product like this - the audio quality is low and filled with artifacts and destroyed transients. Voices are robotic and generic with basically zero emotion. Lyric generation is frankly embarrassing. Everything about this is horrible. Additionally the UI broke for me multiple times and I couldn't play the track without downloading it.
What is going on at ElevenLabs? Is everything vibe coded now? Is there nobody testing these products before pushing them out? This is the first time I'd characterize a product from a top AI company as complete slop from a conceptual and implementation perspective.
I feel like there's some sort of disconnect between the minds of tech CEOs and the general population's wants/needs especially in regards to creative domains. What kind of human wants this? Is there some grudge of tech people who never learned music/art/etc so their solution is to optimize it and create models so they can feel something?
joshwcomeau · 3h ago
This stuff is such an abomination. What a terrible thing to release into the world.
TheAceOfHearts · 5h ago
Well, here's a few points of comparison:
Suno's version of Mandate of Heaven [0]. This is my baseline, it was generated with their v4 model and so far it has remained my favorite AI generated song. I regularly listen to this one track and it brings me joy. There's many places where I think it could be drastically improved, but none of the competitors have managed to surpass it nor have they provided tools to improve upon it. The pronunciation is a bit bad sometimes and it fails to hold notes as long as I wish, but overall it has gotten the closest to my vision.
Eleven Music's version of Mandate of Heaven [1]. They don't allow free accounts to export or share the full song so you can only try a small fragment. It has much crisper instruments and vocals, but it has terrible pacing issues and pronunciation. The track is 4 minutes long, but the singer is just rushing through the track at wildly unexpected speeds. I cannot even play the song after it finished generating, so I haven't even been able to listen to the whole thing, it just gets stuck when I press play. Maybe some kind of release-day bug. The only tool that Eleven Music gives you for refining and modifying sections is "Edit Style", which feels pretty limiting. But I can't even try it because the track won't play.
Producer.ai's version of Mandate of Heaven [2][3]. This one has slightly worse instruments than Eleven Music, but the vocals are a bit better than Suno v4. It also has severe timing issues. I tried asking it to generate the track without a vibe reference [2] and also with a vibe reference [3]. Both versions have terrible pacing issues; somehow the one with the vibe reference is particularly egregious, like it's trying to follow the input vibe but getting confused.
It feels like AI song generation is just in a really awkward place, where you don't get enough customization capabilities to really refine tracks into the perfect direction that you're imagining. You can get something sorta generic that sounds vaguely reasonable, but once you want to take more control you hit a wall.
If one is willing to bite the bullet, there's a paid program for generating high quality synthetic voices while maintaining fine-grained controls: Synthesizer V Studio 2. But I haven't been able to try it out because I'm cheap and there's no Linux support.
The ideal workflow I'm imagining would probably allow me to generate a few song variations as a starting point, while integrating into a tool like Synthesizer V Studio 2 so I can refine and iterate on the details. This makes a lot of sense too, because that's basically how we are using AI tools for programming: for anything serious you're generating some code and iterating on it or making tweaks for your specific program. I would like to specify which parts of the track are actually important to me, and which ones can be filled with sausage in reaction to my changes.
Overall, Eleven Music generates instruments that sounds nice, but the singing leaves a lot to be desired (n=1). Eleven Labs is doing a ton of great product work so I'm really excited for the direction they'll take this once they're able to iterate on it a few times. A very strong showing for an initial release.
Mandate of Heaven does pretty much sound like a mid power metal track. The mixing is perfect but the production is "off" which is kinda weird, also the vocal delivery is flat and empty which is probably the biggest AI tell. The lyrics are cheesy but that's power metal for you.
Overall still quite impressive progress, though I'd prefer it if AI could remix existing artists songs that I already liked instead of being focused on tepid original content.
akomtu · 1h ago
Lifeless music? Made of chunks of someone else's music, stitched together and polished to hide the sews. I think this is what gives all AI slop such an uncanny vibe.
mixologic · 7h ago
Well, so much for culture. Every use case where you can plausibly use AI generated music removes one more method that provided an avenue to a reasonable career making music.
What it gave me was some horrible ballroom-tango like abomination with prominent tempo, like a paso doble. The typical Ballroom tango sound that gives you ear cancer. I.e. it completely failed (Argentine tango sounds nothing like this).
P.S.: You can't mention any names btw, I asked for D'Arienzo (instead of "golden era") but it refused the prompt on copyright grounds.
It also refused for edad d'oro, with the same reasoning, i.e. it seemed to think this was an artist of some sort ("edad d'oro [de tango]" is just the Spanish name for golden era of tango -- go figure).
And re. copyright: as of 2024, all of Juan D'Arienzo's recordings from the 1940s are in the public domain in Argentina.
The guitar solo sounds very unnatural, especially the phrasing, which is totally random. Blues musicians are actually attempting to say something through their instrument. This was just a random number generated solo played by a 6 finger three handed robot. No thanks, lol.
I have no proof but I'm convinced that the song here is AI made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL1Fg1QnDig
I liked it but it still feels like AI to me.
[1] often being 'modern song lyrics set to a historical style of music'. I don't know how to describe them exactly but they feel 'wrong', in the same way AI text is hard to critique but feels wrong.
Photoshop.
First Analog synthesizers and then digital synthesizers.
Multitrack audio recording.
Digital Recording.
Autotune.
Vocaloids.
These things change the nature of the game and invalidate the labor of the people who used to be winners, and I get it.
If you take the money and the fame out of the equation, though, the point of art is not to become rich and famous, it's to communicate.
Eventually, we will find artists who are finally able to send in a way that others want to receive thanks to AI.
And there will be people like me and probably you that prefer to only hear what a human had to say straight from their own mouths. And that's fine. There are no walls.
"“There is a lot of controversy about KISS’ ‘Alive!’ Did they play their own record or did they overdub? News Flash! You’re allowed to overdub! You’re allowed to do that. It’s not a crime. If you’re making an album and you want to overdub one part, that’s completely allowed, and everybody does it. "
https://rockcelebrities.net/sebastian-bach-addresses-the-ove...
Even modern musicians call studio composing "cheating"
"In a way it's kind of like cheating cause you can play stuff over and over again, and be like, no, that's bad, cut this, move it over, and then kind of fit the lyrics to it."
https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/6759-yeasayer/
Even Analog vs Digital records:
"Neil Young, who has been very expressive about analog vs digital and which digital medium he prefers. This undated quote is about cds:
“The mind has been tricked, but the heart is sad.”"
https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/quotes-from-musicians...
Like, you don't have to like it. That's fine.
But if there is art there, you should not dismiss it because of the tools used to make it.
Right now I imagine there is so close to no art from AI that it can be said that there is none at all.
I also imagine that will change in the next 20 years.
We've been living in an age of artificiality for some time now.
I would've believed he's real, just passionate about music on his big yellow bus.
The solo was pretty funny though.
I can generally understand that music has moods, but don’t think I could distinguish human-generated music from silicon-generated music at this point (unless I recognize a specific artist, of which there are vanishingly few I’m capable of)
As a drummer keeps time, the band reacts by looking at the drummer’s hands and the sway in their posture. A drummer intensifies their playing as they respond to the feeling of air being pushed from guitar cabinets. A lead guitarist looks back at their friends and smiles when they are about to play that sweet lick that the bass player likes to play along with.
These are just simple examples that make all the difference when you listen back. I also can't imagine paying hundreds of dollars to go see an AI "perform" this solo at a concert. When I listen to music, I'm remembering the moment, the feeling, what the artist was doing to create their art. So still... no thanks!
I was live-reading lyrics sheets to some songs I’d never heard while jamming with a big group. Hit a chorus with some really great phrasing and bungled it the first time through. But the second time, the other guy singing and I just automatically made eye contact and had a whole conversation through body language.
“I’ve got it this time” “Yeah?” “Yeah” “Oh fuck yeah” “Fuck yeah indeed, my good fellow”
When I see AI salesmen thinking they can attack into art, I think they naively see it as inherently imprecise or arbitrary, and they think because their technology has these properties it will easily cross over. This is going to lead to a lot of faux pas (remember NFTs?); it would be prudent to attack problems where some kind of correctness can be mechanically judged... OCR and software development are reasonable verticals at opposite ends of complexity to focus on, and pursue artistic rendition in a more experimental way letting artists approach the technology and show how it is useful.
It's a terrible thing.
The thing I notice time and again in all this is they want you to believe technology is displacing labor at one end but there's usually a lot of retraining consumers/society to accept something qualitatively different to cover up or re-conceive what was. That's not a moral judgement, just an observation. But the end result is usually the same, some group of current or wannabe oligarchs playing musical chairs at the top without regard for the rest of the system.
If you are an artist you could always slice, embellish, or otherwise process outputs into something so I guess it's not totally silly. But I get at best real estate video vibes, or unironic early '90s clip art and Comic Sans vibes and presumably some team of expensive marketers worked hard to select these examples, which is doubly hilarious.
it's okay to just say you're not that interested in music
For example, a podcaster/youtuber may want a short intro track. An entertainer or a marketer may want some generic or silly background music.
Does it have a use case for a producer/musician? Maybe. It might give them ideas for chord progressions, melodies, etc. But real music does that too, and much more effectively.
And if you're focused on chopping up samples and sounds on an ableton push or similar this can be a tool of endless possibilities.
But most studio-bunnies already have memorised catalogues of sample libraries like Omnisphere for that
If you look at Taylor Swift's first 12 number one hits, each of them was written by a different writer. Compare that to bands from 30 years ago, many of whom wrote and recorded all the songs themselves.
Labels don't sign rock bands anymore because actually recording a rock band well in a studio is 10x the cost of just using a sampler and a single artist singing. I know folks want to blame AI, but it's really just enabling the latest iteration of this trend.
I'm not defending the whole thing. It's a shame, and I love going back and listening to my old Rush albums. But AI is not the problem here. It's the incentives.
Any decent studio can make a U87 on vocals, DI bass, Fender amp and several SM57s on drums sound as good as almost any album from 1970-2010
Hell I’ve seen a five part band get away with three mics total including drums and it was a smash hit
Rock “died” because culture moved on, not because of it being inherently expensive to record (which it’s not)
Anyway, he was the one that made the point that we don't sign rock bands anymore in the sense that they're not moving the industry. All you gotta do is look at the top songs that folks are listening to on Spotify or the radio and you'll immediately see what I'm talking about.
He was also the one that walked through the process of setting up mics for a drum kit and pointed out that it's just very expensive to get the studio time and the expertise to do all that correctly. He actually walks you through a studio where he's set up mics for a drum kit and explains why it's so difficult to do well. He then contrasts that with simply using samples that are professionally provided and that the cost difference is just immense.
Anyway, I don't need to die on this hill. My point was the music industry is going downhill regardless and AI is just one of many tools paving the way.
All kinds of indie, all kinds of metal, all kinds of rock, all kinds of everything.
The main difference is no MTV or rock radio. Prog rock? There is probably more prog being made now than ever.
That is not the issue. The issue is how incredibly generic the music is.
It also doesn't let you combine genres to make really strange sounds like audioLM can do.
This is just another Muzak generator like they use to play at Dennys. As generic music as possible to the appeal to the most average of average listener.
I think you really need to train your own model if you want to explore creative sound design or algorithmic composition. It just isn't going to be a mass market product worth venture capital money.
visionary!
Maybe the fundamental issue is that this shouldn't compete with a human picking up a guitar and having fun with it, and the only reason it does is because we keep tying questions like "survival" to whether someone can make woodchip earnings reports less boring to read instead of trying some other way to be a community?
So the audience doesn't get bored.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=drummer+replica...
And then I found this live version here that I'm studying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPQZsp59szo
I was having a conversation with a former bandmate. He was talking about a bunch of songs he is working on. He can play guitar, a bit of bass and can sing. That leaves drums. He wants a model where he can upload a demo and it either returns a stem for a drum track or just combines his demo with some drums.
Right now these models are more like slot machines than tools. If you have the money and the time/patience, perhaps you can do something with it. But I am looking forward to when we start getting collaborative, interactive and iterative models.
Currently, all these AI tools generate the whole song which I'm not at all interested in given songwriting is so much fun
I believe there is massive room for improvement over what is currently available.
However, my larger point isn't "I want to do this one particular thing" and rather: I wish the music model companies would divert some attention away from "prompt a complete song in one shot" and towards "provide tools to iteratively improve songs in collaboration with a musician/producer".
> that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people
I will go as far as to say there was never a time in history when people got rights because some other group “recognized the humanity in them” or something. No, it was through necessity. The plague in Europe caused a shortage of workers and brought an end to feudalism. Unions got us Saturdays off through collective action. The post-war boom and middle class prosperity happened because employers had no other options. Software engineering was lucrative because there was a shortage of supply.
Even if there is some future where robots do chores, that’ll only leave time for more work, not poetry writing time, unless there is a fundamental change in how the economy is structured, like I outlined above.
Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,) the end result was just that workers worked more, and more often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
Why was that the American dream at the time if farming was the worse option?
Subsistence farmers weren't cramped in filthy disease ridden workhouses, getting paid in company scrip, getting mangled by machines (OK they were but probably not as often) or being locked into burning buildings because preventing theft of stock was more important to owners than the lives of employees. And subsistence farmers owned what they produced and the means by which it was produced, whereas industrial workers owned nothing but the pennies in their pocket, and likely owed more than that to the company.
It took years of often violent protest for workers to return to even the basic level of dignity and rights once afforded to craftsmen and farmers. Not that the lives of subsistence farmers and craftsmen were good, but they were better than what the dehumanization of mass production and automation created.
But then comparing farmers and workers in this context is a bit specious. It would be more fair to compare, say, textile workers before the automated loom and textile workers after. Obviously the former had it much better off, which was precisely the problem automation was intended to solve.
people are, unfortunately, and collectively, not ready to seriously interrogate the economic or political situations in which we find ourselves. we will never see the utopian promise of automation under capitalism. there will always be an underclass to exploit.
But it's the fun thing about being humans, I suppose. Our insatiable greed means we demand endlessly more.
I'm wondering if the LLM is failing to emulate the odd and even harmonics of real recordings and that's why it seems so unnatural. It makes me feel sick. It's different than the sterile straight to digital recordings of the late 80s early 90s too.
Do any of these let people download the individual track stems? I'd be curious if taking all the stems and running them through analog hardware would remedy it. The LLM needs a producer.
What do you mean? If you screw up even/odd harmonics it will sound far less natural, like confusing flutes and clarinets.
The tech here is fantastic. I love that such things are possible now and they're an exciting frontier in creation.
It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties. I'm not an artist, so I don't feel personally attacked. Much like image gen, this seems to be aimed at replacing the bare-minimum artist (visual or auditory) with a "fill in the blanks" entertainment piece.
This is a fruitless and snobby dichotomy that was attempted so many times in human history, and it makes no sense.
There will always be art made for success and/or money, but drawing a line is futile.
Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.
And intellectual snobbishness or noble ideas do not make art more valuable.
A kid singing Wonderwall can be art, too. As can be a depressed person recording experimental field sounds.
Feel free to call art bad, but assuming an obvious and clear separation between art and entertainment is the exact opposite of the spirit that enables people to make or appreciate art, in whatever form, culture or shape.
Handel was never a "bit like a pop musician." This fundamentally misunderstands how music during his time, mostly funded and enjoyed under religion and wealthy patronage contexts, was listened to. Mostly only the wealthy listened to his works, and those elite audiences were prone to viciously enforcing stylistic norms. The only real way the working class heard his works were in the occasional public concert and occasionally in church. At no point in any of these settings was there a lack of stylistic gatekeeping or snobbery.
I know this kind of nihilistic "everything is good, I guess, good doesn't even mean anything" attitude is popular in some spaces, but this lack of standards or gatekeeping in favor of a tasteless desire for increasing slop production regardless of quality is how we got poptimism and the current state of music. No longer is there any taste making, just taste production via algorithms.
Sometimes we need a bit of snobbery to separate the wheat from the chaff, and being a gatekeeping snob against AI music is what our current day and age needs more of!
Nobody cares. I've heard the same thing when electronic music came up. The old ones couldn't stop complaining about this "computer music" where nobody does real handwork anymore.
I see it as democratisation of art. Everybody can do it now and this is a good thing.
Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on reddit. Things people came up with and would have never gotten the budget to be made. It's great.
1. Marcel Duchamp. 1917
2. Andres Serrano. 1987
3. Maurizio Cattelan. 2019
4. Darren Aronofsky. 2017
5. John Cage. 1952
6. Vito Acconci. 1972
It is reminiscent of Fountain. Not sure if there was an intentional connection.
The framing is dependent on the content
But the art isn’t in the content, it was in the statement it was making about the absurdity surrounding the fact you could pay to put anything in an art exhibition. Swap out the white urinal for a blue one, it’s the same point.
The point I'm making is that a unique framing only results in a single piece of worthwhile conceptual art. You can't have an infinite factory of ducamp's fountain. What makes the piece worthwhile is that it was an original idea.
Conceptual art is different from decorational art in this sense. The AI music is a largely a homogenous synthesis of existing works. The AI "art" is decorational, not conceptual art. You could make an arrangement of AI art that is conceptual, but how many arrangements can you make that are actually worthwhile conceptually if AI art is generally homogenous?
It's like asking how many worthwhile works of conceptual art can you produce with a urinal factory that makes identical clones of the same urinal? 0 to 1.
And besides, it's not nessisarially true that all framings have creators. Nature is an example of a system that cultivates and curates a certain type of life without any rational process.
To your other point, sorry, but artistic/aesthetic essentialism hasn't been serious position for at least a hundred years.
As long as there is a perceiver, there is a frame.
The idea that nature is intrinsically beautiful is a frame. It's fine to hold that but it shouldn't be confused with not having a frame.
There's only one factory, and the concept works only once.
That "generic" and "indescribably lifeless" feeling you get is because the only thing communicated by a model-and-prompt generation is the model identity and the prompt.
Art is, above all, subjective.
> It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties.
Painters said the same thing about the camera. Photographers said the same thing about Photoshop.
Personally, music is sacred for me so making money is not a part of my process. I am not worried about job loss. But I am worried about the cultural malaise that emerges from the natural passivity of industrial scale consumerism.
I'm hoping it will eventually become better, or maybe I haven't quite seen stuff prompted properly yet, but all I've heard coming from an AI feels aggressively mediocre and average, not in a "bad" way but in the "optimizing towards being palatable to the average person" way. Like the perfect McDonalds meal that the algorithm has found out can be 30% sawdust and still feel appetizing. I don't want that boundary being pushed. I feel we will live in a worse world if we do.
> oh now they won't have to do that boring mindless stuff like playing cover versions any more
That's how most musicians make their first $, doing covers or making something generic enough to be saleable as background music
For all of human civilization the future has been built on the backs of those the came before (on the backs of giants). But that climb is slowing, maybe halting. Which then compounds when the new giants that would have risen up don't. AI replaces the messy, slow process of becoming with instant regurgitation, replaces those that would have grown. The future, built on the backs of giants, stalls when those giants never get the chance to rise.
AI is entropy weaponized against every layer of future progress. But everyone is too busy salivating at potential cost savings to see it.
Ultimately we'll reach a technical "peak" in AI writing, and humans will still be the ones driving the AI, feeding it with the alchemy of their lived experience, directing creation at a high level. We'll even purposefully inject very minor imperfections into the writing in the name of voice, tweaking minor details in the name of personal harmony. The author will go from "creator" to "brand."
In image gen: comfyUI gives a node-based workflow that gives a lot of room for 'creative' control, of mixing, and mathematically combining masks, filters, and prompts (and starting images / noise {at any node in that process}).
I would expect the same interface for audio to emerge for 'power users'.
It's actually a bit like photography. A bunch of randomly taken pictures piled together is not art. It needs to be done with purpose and refinement.
Basically, in my own opinion, art ≠ a function of technical difficulty.
Art = Curation, Refinement, and Taste
So if you are right, then art will pretty much be worthless in the future. You can just iterate over the search space defined by "good taste" and produce an infinite amount of good art for no work.
Search is not free, and it can never be free. What happens when search gets easier and easier is that your demands for quality and curation will get higher until all time saved in search efficiency is spent on search breadth.
"Curation" in AI can only surface the curator's local maxima among a tiny and arbitrary grab-bag of seed integers they checked among the space of 2^64 options; it's statistically skewed 99% towards the model's whims rather than anyone's unique intent or taste.
Prompt crafting is likewise terribly low fidelity since it's a constant battle with the model's idiosyncratic interpretation of the text, plus arbitrary perturbations that aren't actually correlated with the writer's supposed intent. And lord spare me the "high quality high resolution ultra detailed photorealistic trending on artstation" type prompts that amount to a zero-intent plea for "more gooder". And when pursuing artistry, using artist names / LORAs are a meta-abandonment of personal direction, abdicating artistic control and responsibility to a model's idea of another artist's idea of what should be done.
Fancier workflows generally only multiply this prompt-and-curate process across regions/iterations, so can't add much because they're multiplying a tiny fraction by a fixed factor.
The models' latent space is extremely powerful, but you get hamstrung into the text encoders whims when you do things through a prompt interface. In particular, you've hit exactly an issue I have with current LLMs in general in that they are locked into wors and concepts that others have defined (labelings of points in the latent space).
Wishy washy thinking: I'd be nice if there were some sort of Turing complete lambda calculus sort of way to prompt these models instead. Where you can define new terms, create expressions, and loops and recursion or something.
It would sort of be like how SVGs are "intent complete" and undeniably art, but instead of vector graphics, it is an SVG like model prompt.
Then again, it's possible for an art form to exhaust its own possibilities. To the extent that "prompt engineering" is sufficient to generate any music or artwork we have in mind, that seems like an indication that we've reached that point. To the extent that it's not sufficient, that seems like an indication that there's still interesting stuff left to do.
Either way, if you are hoping that things will stay the same, then I'm afraid that neither art nor technology are good career choices.
This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure out a way to either market the music or just game search and digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and repeat.
If anything, this is a lateral move.
This phrase though could be plunked down at any point in the last hundred years and you'd find someone making it.
About autotune or electric guitars or rock or jazz or punk or disco or Philp Glass or Stravinsky... one could go on for a long time.
You can’t tell me that Philip Glass didn’t understand or agonize over the music when creating it. The creative process is vastly different and that’s my point.
Oh course, there will be artists who use AI in new and creative ways, someone like Brian Transeau who routinely codes tools for creating electronic music. but for most artists, I fear it will just lead to mindless button clicking and prompt manipulation until it’s formulaic because the base model is the same. Or it will result in fewer people learning instruments or music theory and truly experimenting with things that haven’t been done before.
I see AI as having great potential in both art and productivity but maybe it’s just that I don’t trust people to use it responsibly. We’re inherently lazy and easily distracted by anything that will give us that dopamine fix.
Yes there are smaller creators who are trying to make something net new, but unfortunately 99.9% of the small artists are also derivative and lack originality.
I see AI music as just continuation of the sad state of the industry at the moment. Hopefully it accelerates the demise of the industry as we know it and restarts the cycle of creation.
This wouldn't necessarily be a problem as long as people were still free to create on their own. But instead, everyone is forced to spend more hours in menial bullshit jobs for less and less (relative) pay just to survive. Give everyone enough resources to live at least a simple life, and both human creativity and AI creativity can blossom at the same time. But of course that means fewer yachts and hookers and drugs for the billionaires, so it is verboten.
Eventually, the reason why became obvious. I grew up listening to all that music with my closest friends. It's the memories I associate with that music that keeps me coming back. I moved away 30 years ago and never established friendships like that again. New music feels hollow to me because I don't have buddies to share it with and build associated memories.
I'm a bedroom hobby musician with no dreams of ever making it big, but even so, I'm looking at the hours I'm spending trying to improve my skills and thinking what's the point, really, when I could just type in 'heavy metal guitar solo at 160bpm, A minor' and get something much much better?
I know there is value in creating art for art's sake. I've always been up against a sea of internet musicians, even when I started back in 2000. But there's just something about this that's much more depressing, when it's not even other people competing with me, but a machine which hasn't had to invest years of its life in practice to beat me.
There are hundreds of bands who play three-chord doom or mindless-shredding grind who just learned one thing and do it well, and who play to hundreds of people multiple times a week (often including me). We go to see these bands not to see what they can play, but to see what they are saying with what they play.
This is why I feel that I can never describe LLM-generated content as 'art'. Art is about the story. People will go and see a punk band who only know three chords if they play songs about things that resonate with them. Bit of a tangent, but this is the same reason that I genuinely believe that if you could bio-engineer a steak that tastes exactly like one from a well-looked-after cow from a notable breed and a good farm, most people would still prefer the cow. The story matters - the fact that a person put effort and experience into something really is important.
"This solo is sick" is a fun plus-point, but it doesn't matter if the song doesn't mean anything to you. If proficiency was the only thing that mattered then we'd all be listening to the worst kind of prog.
Open mics, music circles and concerts also remain untouched for the moment.
The next slide was labeled "pro," and it was just a picture of Jimi Hendrix on-stage mid-performance.
I'd submit to you the notion that even if the machine can create a billion billion iterations of music, it still cannot create what you will create, for the reasons you will create it, and that's reason enough to continue. Hendrix wasn't just "a guy who played guitar good." And a machine that could word-for-word and bar-for-bar synthesize "Foxy Lady" wouldn't be Hendrix.
Hendrix, also, can't be you. Nor you him.
Do you regularly play with other people? That is a good way to disabuse yourself of the notion that all that matters is technique.
I haven't used the elevnlabs one, but I've checked out suno and udio, and to be honest the tech is amazing. But like with a lot of genai images, the current music models have the same smell to it.
These models can def be used to crank out commercially sounding music, but I have yet to hear any output that sounds fresh and exciting. If your goal is to create bro country, these models are a god-send.
With that said, I do believe that musicians will start to create music with these tools as aid. I've tried to use them for generating samples and ideas, and they do work well enough.
The more tech advances the cooler it is to bury your head in the sand. Studying by paper & candlelight has never been more of a flex.
Unless you're talking about EDM people and those adjacent. Not that they're not "real musicians" but they're much more about tech and gadgets so I can see them using it more.
While there will no doubt be many that feel they're above using tools like these, the reality is that if you want to make money out of music - you're going to make music for the masses.
And if there's one thing these models really excel at, it is to make commercial sounding music. Everything sounds nice and bland.
"That is not allowed by our terms of service"
I think the rebellious nature of art inherently has boundaries these people won't cross.
The vocals are definitely not that.
How about Refik Anadol?
It will probably also extinguish quite a few mad musicians and mediocre artists.
I am less interested in the "one-shot" approach here with text-to-prompt. I see seamless transitions but that seems like an afterthought.
This is like the dotcom era of where every idiotic idea that ended with, "but on the internet", would get a pile of cash thrown at it. We are officially at the beginning of the end. It's only going to get dumber from here.
As a musician, that's what I find most compelling about Suno. It's become a tool to collaborate with, to help test out musical ideas and inspire new creativity. I listen to its output and then take the parts I like to weave into my own creations.
The AI music tools that generate whole songs out of prompts are a curious gimmick, but are sorely lacking in the above.
But did you really make it? Or was it the AI? If someone commissions a piece of art from an artist, I don't think the commissioner would be able to truthfully say they made it, even if they had a specific vision for what the piece of art should look like. But if you've edited or changed the track enough yourself, maybe it would be fair to call yourself a co-author...
It's amazing that the songs sound pretty natural
I draw a distinction here from LLMs used for writing code. Plenty of people freely put their code on Github or in Stack Overflow with the expectation that people could freely copy and use it. Relatively little music is shared so permissively.
(And before someone cries "fair use", I'm making an ethical argument, not a legal one. A fair use defense can protect you from a copyright claim, but it doesn't make it any less shitty to take other people's art, blend it all together, and use the result to threaten their livelihoods.)
Not sure what that actually means but it suggests they at least tried to get their training material legally.
First, where are you seeing that? And where does the "head here" link point? I'm not seeing it on the linked page or on https://elevenlabs.io/music-terms.
Second, that language is not saying "we got permission to use all the music we trained on". It seems more directly addressed at the rights they're giving you, as opposed to the rights they have to the training material. It could just as well be based on an opinion from their general counsel that it's fair use to train on all the music they downloaded, so it's "legal enough".
Third, and as I tried to emphasize above, legal is not the same as ethical. Even if they win the legal argument about fair use, it would still be shitty to take someone else's work and use it to train a model that put them out of business.
What is going on at ElevenLabs? Is everything vibe coded now? Is there nobody testing these products before pushing them out? This is the first time I'd characterize a product from a top AI company as complete slop from a conceptual and implementation perspective.
I feel like there's some sort of disconnect between the minds of tech CEOs and the general population's wants/needs especially in regards to creative domains. What kind of human wants this? Is there some grudge of tech people who never learned music/art/etc so their solution is to optimize it and create models so they can feel something?
Suno's version of Mandate of Heaven [0]. This is my baseline, it was generated with their v4 model and so far it has remained my favorite AI generated song. I regularly listen to this one track and it brings me joy. There's many places where I think it could be drastically improved, but none of the competitors have managed to surpass it nor have they provided tools to improve upon it. The pronunciation is a bit bad sometimes and it fails to hold notes as long as I wish, but overall it has gotten the closest to my vision.
Eleven Music's version of Mandate of Heaven [1]. They don't allow free accounts to export or share the full song so you can only try a small fragment. It has much crisper instruments and vocals, but it has terrible pacing issues and pronunciation. The track is 4 minutes long, but the singer is just rushing through the track at wildly unexpected speeds. I cannot even play the song after it finished generating, so I haven't even been able to listen to the whole thing, it just gets stuck when I press play. Maybe some kind of release-day bug. The only tool that Eleven Music gives you for refining and modifying sections is "Edit Style", which feels pretty limiting. But I can't even try it because the track won't play.
Producer.ai's version of Mandate of Heaven [2][3]. This one has slightly worse instruments than Eleven Music, but the vocals are a bit better than Suno v4. It also has severe timing issues. I tried asking it to generate the track without a vibe reference [2] and also with a vibe reference [3]. Both versions have terrible pacing issues; somehow the one with the vibe reference is particularly egregious, like it's trying to follow the input vibe but getting confused.
It feels like AI song generation is just in a really awkward place, where you don't get enough customization capabilities to really refine tracks into the perfect direction that you're imagining. You can get something sorta generic that sounds vaguely reasonable, but once you want to take more control you hit a wall.
If one is willing to bite the bullet, there's a paid program for generating high quality synthetic voices while maintaining fine-grained controls: Synthesizer V Studio 2. But I haven't been able to try it out because I'm cheap and there's no Linux support.
The ideal workflow I'm imagining would probably allow me to generate a few song variations as a starting point, while integrating into a tool like Synthesizer V Studio 2 so I can refine and iterate on the details. This makes a lot of sense too, because that's basically how we are using AI tools for programming: for anything serious you're generating some code and iterating on it or making tweaks for your specific program. I would like to specify which parts of the track are actually important to me, and which ones can be filled with sausage in reaction to my changes.
Overall, Eleven Music generates instruments that sounds nice, but the singing leaves a lot to be desired (n=1). Eleven Labs is doing a ton of great product work so I'm really excited for the direction they'll take this once they're able to iterate on it a few times. A very strong showing for an initial release.
[0] https://suno.com/s/HfDUqRp0ca2gwwAx
[1] https://elevenlabs.io/music/songs/TGyOFpwJsHdS3MTiHFUP
[2] https://www.producer.ai/song/aa1f3cc4-f3e4-40ce-9832-47dc300...
[3] https://www.producer.ai/song/3d02dd17-69f1-41ba-a3ea-967902f...
Overall still quite impressive progress, though I'd prefer it if AI could remix existing artists songs that I already liked instead of being focused on tepid original content.
Oh wait.