DeepMind releases Lyria 2 music generation model

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/music-ai-sandbox-now-with-new-features-and-broader-access/

by velcrobeg • 1 year ago

300 421 1 year ago

deepmind.google

mvkel• 1 year ago

"Releases" is a strong word, as in typical google fashion, the actual thing that was released was a waitlist form.

malthaus• 1 year ago

don't be so cynical, maybe 10 of us on the waiting list can actually use it before it gets discontinued again

ionwake2• 1 year ago

$10 they have no product, just a wait list and a note to embrace and extinguish some random music ai startup at some point in the nebulous future.

htrp• 1 year ago

Only available in the US

"Country of residence (this current phase of the experiment is only available to users based in the U.S. for now, but feel free to submit interest and stay tuned for updates): "

Shorel3• 1 year ago

The world will wait for the Deepseek version.

a21282• 1 year ago

I remember when they made some generative AI chess demo and when I went to visit it, it said it's not available to users under 18 or outside US. And I had to do a double-take at the idea of chess that is 18+ and georestricted

modeless• 1 year ago

Music models are not interesting to me unless I can use them to edit and remix existing music. Of course none of them let you do that to avoid being sued by the labels.

ipnon3• 1 year ago

Yes, why are deep learning models so effective relatively at writing code? It's because programmers have been making their work copyleft for decades, and continue to do so.

whywhywhywhy5• 1 year ago

Musics only lagging because of the legal threat of labels, at some point in the near future music models will have their SDXL moment and from then on you'll be able to do all things like style transfer or make something very similar to this but different.

Suno and similar are purposefully limiting their models on the public side.

CamperBob2• 1 year ago

Agreed to some extent, but I don't think you'll have too long to wait before that comes to pass. It can't possibly be that hard to build a model that will disassemble a given song into its original tracks, like a Fourier transform that yields drums, strings, keyboards, and vocals rather than sines and cosines. Equally unlikely that such a model will be too large to run locally.

We will get some very cool tools -- and some very cool remixes - when that happens.

justlikereddit2• 1 year ago

This is called "stem separation"

It was added to FL studio in 2023 and I don't think they were the first to do it.

vhcr• 1 year ago

https://github.com/deezer/spleeter

https://github.com/facebookresearch/demucs

Shorel3• 1 year ago

Of course there are music models that let you edit and remix music, just add a bit of Audacity:

https://github.com/adefossez/demucs

ipnon3• 1 year ago

It seems to struggle to create music with a strong identity. It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits. But the thing about top 40 type music is that the best music is already in the Top 40. It remains to be seen if there is as strong a demand for a music chart filled with slop as there is demand for a music chart filled with pop tunes by celebrities.

I don't think audio files are the right output for deep learning music models. It'd be more useful to pro musicians to describe some parameters for synths, or describe a MIDI baseline, or describe tunings for a plugin and then have the model generate these, which can then be tweaked similar to how we now code with LLMs. But generating muddy, poorly mixed WAVs with purple prose lyrics is only an interesting deep learning demo at this point, not an advancement in music itself.

krige• 1 year ago

It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits.

generation models in a nutshell

999900000999• 1 year ago

I actually built a very crude python app that could generate basic melodies with MIDI. It can serve as a fun starting point if you want to remix common songs. But it wasn't a very fun project to set up. It's like this technology is out there but nobody really wants to develop it.

If I had to guess there are already a handful of fake record labels generating at tons of AI slop to just post on Spotify. Even if each song only gets something like two or three views over time they can still generate a modest amount of revenue. Oh wait Spotify has been caught doing that themselves

navigate83102• 1 year ago

Some of the artists of the top 40 use some form of auto-tune to generate pleasing music. Can that be considered a slop-y?

CaptainFever2• 1 year ago

Well, auto-tune used to be (or still is) considered quite controversial.

ghostie_plz• 1 year ago

Some? All of them use pitch correction and timing correction. And that's just what we do to the vocals!

Prunkton• 1 year ago

Since we've already evaluated - let's exaggerate - that "most Top 40 songs are slop", maybe lyrics are a big factor in creating identity? I mean, it's true for books, right? I could easily imagine an AI-generated Top 40 song that people would still describe as having a unique identity.

I'm not super into the topic, but let me give you two niche examples that are definitely not Top 40 material, yet are considered to have a strong identity within their communities.

I guess one of the reasons the game Yasuke Simulator has like 10x more sales (don't pin me down on that) on Steam than the actual game Assassin's Creed: Shadows is its very catchy soundtrack, with lyrics that are funny and strongly aligned with the content. [0]

Another example, not focused on lyrics and from a completely different niche genre, is this jazzy death metal song that was particularly well received, not only because of the intentionally hallucinatory video. One could even argue that the hallucination is perceived as a feature, not a bug. So why shouldn't the same be true for audio? [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkh38jhILec

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzXafFUekl0

ipnon3• 1 year ago

I think very simply we need a persona to bind our feelings on the music too. This is why Hatsune Miku is so big even though "she" uses many "slop" like elements in her work. Slop often is quite high quality when measured objectively but objective measurements struggle to take soul into account.

eucryphia5• 1 year ago

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.

I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

- Joanna Maciejewska

You could add music

senko3• 1 year ago

We already have machines that do laundry and dishes.

bicepjai• 1 year ago

Who ever says this have not done laundry :)

dyauspitr2• 1 year ago

Loading and unloading them and folding clothes makes it not good enough yet. There are so many things a humanoid robot could do around a house.

Laundry, dishes, picking up clutter, taking out the trash, wiping down surfaces and dusting, pulling out weeds etc. I actually think we’re somewhat close to gettin g like that relatively soon.

butlike3• 1 year ago

As always, the last mile is the most difficult. To me 'doing laundry and dishes' encompasses putting them away (and folding in the case of laundry).

chii3• 1 year ago

Nothing stops you from doing art and writing, just like nothing is stopping someone today from riding a horse, running a marathon or rowing a boat.

wavemode• 1 year ago

Presumably, the idea is that AI drives down the cost (and thus, value / career prospects) of art and writing.

MantisShrimp902• 1 year ago

Unless you are someone that has chores to do like say... Most people? Yes we could technically leave our dirty dishes on the sink while we do art but that decision bites you next time you want to cook lol.

Obviously we mean we want to use that time of doing dish towards art instead, like how automation has always worked?

j4coh3• 1 year ago

Unless of course you have bills to pay.

eucryphia5• 1 year ago

Stops you monetising it.

etaioinshrdlu• 1 year ago

These are actually just the problems easier for researchers to solve, mostly due to a lot of readily available data.

a21282• 1 year ago

Everyone shares music and art they make but nobody ever shares videos and motion capture of themselves doing laundry and vacuuming their house. Maybe we need to start sharing that instead

slfpn• 1 year ago

That's indeed the second worst issue with current model architectures. For a model to be trained to something nearing usability for an actual task it needs an amount of data that is far beyond what can be obtained. Companies like Facebook and OpenAI downloaded pirated copies of every single book humans have written to reach the current level of text generation, and even with that, it's not like those models are perfect or that intelligent.

It is going to severely limit the possibilities of building actual agentic AIs. We do not have an endless amount of data of humans performing menial chores. And normal people will probably more hostile than the kool aid drinking software developers when it comes to being spied on, who's going to agree to wear a camera while working so as to help train their own replacement? Yet it's kinda what devs are doing gleefully adopting software filled with telemetry and interacting with copilot.

whywhywhywhy5• 1 year ago

This isn’t the reason at all and comes across a weak attempt to make researchers stealing the work to train come across as blameless and helpless to circumstance.

They’re doing it because there is a lot of value to extract in making it so anyone can do these things regardless of talent or skill.

pj_mukh• 1 year ago

The last 5 years have been a supersized lesson in Moravec’s paradox [1]. More people need to hear about this: the tech world doesn’t have some kind of conspiracy against the creative class, it literally is the lowest hanging fruit as predicted 30 years ago.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

pjmlp4• 1 year ago

Many keep forgetting programming is also creative work, but yeah whatever.

ImHereToVote• 1 year ago

Who said anything about conspiracies?

koiueo• 1 year ago

I want Al to do my laundry

Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for.

(I know what you meant, but the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods)

antfarm• 1 year ago

I guess automatic sorting, washing at the right temperature, drying and maybe folding is what someone who washes their own clothes would wish for.

Talking to the appliance is probably not that high on their list.

Keyframe2• 1 year ago

I want Al to do my laundry

Do you want a washing machine with Alexa built-in? Be careful what you ask for.

https://www.samsung.com/uk/washers-and-dryers/bespoke-ai-lau...

thih9• 1 year ago

the only laundry-related AI you can hope for, is a cloud connected smart speaker telling you it can't wash with unapproved third party detergent pods

This seems unnecessarily fatalist.

Laundry folding machines exist[1] and there were attempts to create a consumer friendly one, so far unsuccessful. Technology advancements could make that happen. At least that's what I'm hoping for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laundry-folding_machine

dkga• 1 year ago

Someone (probably from here) would develop a local inference model probably - or hopefully.

jsphweid4• 1 year ago

I'm getting a little tired of hearing this quote at this point.

What about humoring the opposite?

I want AI to automate art so I can spend more time doing dishes and doing laundry. Dishes and laundry are purely analog human experiences. Art, at this point, is essentially digital, and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.

voidspark18• 1 year ago

I want AI to automate everything, so that I can exist in a pod, fed intravenously, in a permanent vegetative state.

MantisShrimp902• 1 year ago

I mean I guess In this obtuse, maybe someone's joy In life is doing dishes and that is their art, then idk maybe but not even then.

First, this just misunderstands what is being said here. For most people, chores like the dishes is a menial task that we will be happy for any reduction in time/effort. In addition, dishes and laundry are considered necessary for modern life.

By contrast, art like music and visual mediums is often associated with joy and the creative act of building something out of making art rather than getting a task done.

To misunderstand this contrast is to misunderstand why we automate things in the first place, to minimize the unnecessary toil and maximize human flourishing. This does the opposite frankly.

tdb7893• 1 year ago

What's to humor here? Do you have a passion for laundry and dishes? Do you spend your free time gleefully dirtying dishes just so you can wash them again? Is art or music something you feel forced to do but don't want to?

I am struggling to understand what's really the opposite here. I don't think anyone views art as the same sort of burden as people view dishes. It's not something you're forced to do (even in the situations you do need it it's pretty trivial to buy).

Juliate6• 1 year ago

Art, at this point, is essentially digital,

Essentially? No.

Does digital art reduce analog art in the world? Not even. There’s still more and more, courses, workshops, live performances and physical artefacts.

and digital is the domain of machines so we can let machines do that now.

Art by machines for machines to understand machines (to the extent they would have a notion of self and of other), fine, do your thing as long as the energy you need does not deprive humans needs.

As for me and many others, life happens in the analog realm, so does art.

Griffinsauce2• 1 year ago

Art, at this point, is essentially digital

Are you serious with this?

Al-Khwarizmi3• 1 year ago

You don't need AI for that. Just come to my house, I can allow you to spend time in analog human experiences like dishes and laundry for free. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

eucryphia5• 1 year ago

I enjoy gardening, but use a hedge trimmer. Capital Investment in productivity enhancement so I can manage a larger, more complex garden.

viccis• 1 year ago

Is there a point to this other than trolling, or is it legitimate philistinism?

bufferoverflow4• 1 year ago

Doesn't matter what you want. AI is going to do everything that humans do, and probably better, faster and cheaper.

lionkor• 1 year ago

But that's a senseless endeavour. We create art not for money, but for fun and expression.

jiehong2• 1 year ago

Music is a form of Art, so the quote checks out.

While robots mature, analog arts and one time IRL art events are safe and might be the emphasis.

thelastgallon• 1 year ago

AI is going to do jobs like radiologists, so humans can work at McDonald's or be bartenders! I mean, the pouring drinks part of it, the conversational skills of an AI bartender will be superior to those of humans!

pjmlp4• 1 year ago

If only, their work is already taken by robots.

https://rbtx.com/en-US/solutions/igus-robot-arm-bartender-co...

https://smyze.com/en/discover/

https://www.kuka.com/en-de/industries/solutions-database/202...

Really we are going into a dystopian society, but hey AI can complete my code, hurray!

jagaerglad2• 1 year ago

I don't think there would be any art or writing to do if there was absolutely no "laundry and dishes", conflict, either. The Wall-e future seems more consistent with that honestly, but maybe I'm just revealing an ugly part of my own personality

Al-Khwarizmi3• 1 year ago

This is contradicted by the fact that, throughout history, there have been tons of rich people who not even once had to do laundry or any other menial tasks.

Many of them were interested in art or produced it. And many led fulfilling lives without getting depressed from not working as some people fear.

summerlight• 1 year ago

Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now humans are supposed to do only tedious works, so probably the same thing applies here.

larodi2• 1 year ago

Perhaps much of what humans be doing in this regard is - validation, and the physical work left. But we're not there yet, of course. Vibe coding takes a lot of manual labor, and it's nowhere near for the actually complex tasks such as... multi-part CTEs munching gigs of spatial-temporal data.

Speaking of AI in music - well, perhaps many will welcome some tools when you have to:

- clear hissing - process levels in tedious clearing - auto-removal of aaah, oooh, eeerrmm and similar - podcast restoration, etc.

but of course, nobody wants darn model singing in the mornings, and composers definitely don't need anyone to make up melodies, drum rolls, or bass lines for them.

I see deepmind advance their offering, still I find it difficult to imagine any of my producer friends embracing such abomination, and particularly giving it is a remix tool before all else, and not a composition tool. People love details the same way a painter loves details.... dilettantes think all this irrelevant, they really can't be wrong more.

lnenad• 1 year ago

Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding

What? In what way? Fun and creative parts are thinking about arch, approach, technologies. You shouldn't be letting AI do this. Typing out 40 lines of a React component or FastAPI handler does not involve creativity. Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.

fkyoureadthedoc2• 1 year ago

Well you know, all those fun and creative parts in software engineering has been taken over by vibe coding and now

Maybe on your YouTube shorts playlist but not in real life. People doing real work are not vibe coding. The previous perpetual react learner turned ai vibe coder certainly is doing vibe coding, but not for money from a job.

jamesrcole• 1 year ago

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.
I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

This implies a zero-sum where resources put into LLMs are resources taken away from robotics, and having to choose between one or the other.

The reality is that we can have both, and people are working on both. And I'd bet that advancing LLMs will help to advance useful robotics.

So I really dislike that sentiment.

nosianu2• 1 year ago

I want Al to do my laundry

Stanisław Lem has told us about the grave dangers of such a development decades ago.

This is a good summary, summary quoted below, full article linked on the page (requires a login - but reading Lem's story itself is better than reading about it anyway):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/11/30/the-washing-ma...

"Shortly after Ijon Tichy's return from the Eleventh Voyage, newspapers made much of the competition between two washing machine manufacturers. They were producing robot washers of increasing complexity. They came out with sex-pot washers, washers that seduced women, carried on intelligent conversations, etc. A man named Cathodius Mattrass started a religious cult called the cybernophiles, which believed the Creator had intended humans to be a means toward creating electrobrains more perfect than itself. He turned himself into a giant robot and established himself in outer space. A series of court cases ensued. Finally, a special plenary session was held to decide if Mattrass was a planet, a human, a robot, or what, and Tichy was invited to attend. Suddenly, after much argument and deliberation, cries rang out that electronic brains disguised as lawers were present. The Chairman went through the room with a compass and an x-ray machine was brought in. Eventually everyone was kicked outNthey were found to be made of all sorts of thingsNcotton wool, machinery of all kinds. Ijon was the only human, and then he turned the compass on the chairman and found that he, too, was a robot. He kicked out the chairman, paced the empty hall for a while, and then went home."

One problem is, you have to make them into real capable robots, since you want them to pick up what needs washing by themselves. That then leads to feature-creep and ever increasing abilities that have little or nothing to do with washing, and it escalates from there. The story also had gangs of abandoned intelligent washing machines robbing parts from still owned and in use ones, and more.

The story is part of "Memoirs of a Space Traveler: Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88321.Memoirs_of_a_Space...

The original Polish book was first published in 1957.

magic_hamster3• 1 year ago

I think out of everything Lem has written, the idea of seductive washing machines that lead the way to a semi conscious cyborg planet is not the best example for actual tangible dangers o AI.

SequoiaHope• 1 year ago

The reason you don’t have more time for music is not technological, it’s social. We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free, but we have not agreed that doing so is worthwhile.

magic_hamster3• 1 year ago

Who is "we"? The entire human race?

Expecting all humans across different cultures and languages to come together and figure out basic income for 9 billion people is absurd. This kind of cooperation never happened and probably never will. People are completely unable to cooperate at the massive scale this requires, let alone solve far smaller challenges like mitigating outbreaks or making an effort to avert climate change.

"We" is not a thing.

haswell12• 1 year ago

I think there’s an even bigger issue than this.

Many people would not know how to live under such a system. By this, I mean that I strongly believe people would become severely depressed or insanely stir crazy.

I’ve been on an extended sabbatical after 20 years in tech. The first year was magical. “I could do this forever” I told myself, and actually considered it.

The second year was more complicated. I could feel myself drifting away from myself. The structure of work and the rewards of working on big projects were now fully missing, and I could feel this growing emptiness that needed to be filled.

For health reasons, I entered the 3rd year, and by that point I needed more major psychological intervention. I’d become severely depressed and while I knew that getting back to work might help, I was now in a position where going back to work sounded impossible.

I’m not claiming that my experience is universal. But I’ve started to find more accounts that are similar to mine. I’m also not saying it’s impossible to replace work as a form of necessary challenge and satisfaction. But the societal structures do not exist to fill the void.

For better or worse, we’ve been a species that relies on “work” in some form to live. I use quotes because clearly this has looked different ways over time. Hunter/gatherers certainly had a different set of tasks than the modern city dweller.

But ultimately I’m not convinced that we’re equipped to live satisfying lives without some form of striving for survival. In a post-work era, I think a lot of us will go some kind of crazy or experience depression.

I don’t think most people are aware of how awful things can feel after enough time away from work has stacked up.

It reminds me of that feeling when going on vacation somewhere nice. “I could just live here forever”. But the reality is that the thing that makes the vacation feel incredible is the contrast from normal life. Remove the contrast, and things become pretty flat.

Edited to change “most” to “many” in the 2nd paragraph because that better reflects my belief.

skybrian3• 1 year ago

The idea that we no longer need labor is preposterous. Where are the machines to take care of children or the sick, or to build and maintain housing?

What kind of science fiction world do you think you live in?

otabdeveloper45• 1 year ago

We have enough technology to offer a basic life for everyone for free

Not literally "everyone". Someone still has to make the food you eat and the house you sleep in.

BobaFloutist3• 1 year ago

If everyone has a basic life for free, how do we decide who still has to harvest crops?

int_19h6• 1 year ago

This particular direction is over 180 years old at this point.

"[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq".

brulard2• 1 year ago

For the last year I have been generating music heavily with Udio. For few years before that I was creating music by hand, trying to get into all aspects of music creation (theory, composition, sound design, mixing, arrangement, etc.) and let me tell you - this last year was the most fun I had with music. Generation isn't just a big button to push to get the output. It's completely separate creative process that opens a plethora of possibilities which you can mix & match with all the other skills you had before.

One other aspect of art generation is that it can complement your other creative process. You may need illustration for a book you're writing, or assets + music for your game. So let the AI help you where you need help and you yourself focus on the things that matter to you the most or where you are having the most fun.

throwaway422432• 1 year ago

I found AI music generation was more about production.

You're the Rick Rubin or Brian Eno shaping the song out of the music, not to musician.

xaldir• 1 year ago

However, Holywood might like the idea of producing an endless stream of content/music/movies/etc. with little human intervention.

abenga• 1 year ago

I will never ever ever knowingly consume media written by AI. Worst case, I will only consume media written before some cutoff, 2020 say.

golol• 1 year ago

All these art producing AIs are a byproduct of the research progress towards AGI and AI that can do your chores. It is inevitable that somebody has made image or music generating AI in a world where household robots exist. So I don't see any problem with DeepMind trying what they can do with current technology. It's just a reality of the world we have to live with.

Tepix3• 1 year ago

Here's another good quote from Kurt Vonnegut's highly relevant "Player Piano" from 1952:

“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings," said Paul, "not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions, and systems.”

fidotron• 1 year ago

The underlying problem is that humans consistently underestimate how difficult some of our "lowest" functions are, like sorting out socks and folding the laundry.

Canonical rant on the subject from a previous AI wave: https://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/papers/elephants.pdf

throwup2382• 1 year ago

It's called Moravec's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox (he is cited by the Elephants dont play chess paper)

williamcotton• 1 year ago

I like to practice my improv solos to backing tracks. Having an AI band that is listening and reacting to my playing, much like a good band would, would make it a lot easier than trying to get jam sessions going. Good drummers with availability are somewhat hard to find!

snarf21• 1 year ago

We need to recognize the reason. It is about scale and cost. Pseudo-art and pseudo-writing can be done completely in the cloud and scale easily. Having a robot to fold even a single towel requires millions of physical robots instead of dozens of servers. Physical products are hard to scale and they break more easily plus they have to live in an uncontrolled invironment.

sbarre• 1 year ago

I think you're missing the point of that statement a bit.

mensetmanusman2• 1 year ago

We don’t currently have manufacturing scale and precision to make this work.

AI is in the thing.

It’s too expensive to take it out of the thing and put it in the world.

vonneumannstan2• 1 year ago

Unfortunately the things we think make us human turn out to be trivial to copy and drudgery might be our true destiny. Moravec's paradox writ large.

sambapa• 1 year ago

Have you heard that AI music? It's absolute shite. AI is a much better boilerplate coder than a musician.

WillAdams• 1 year ago

Or even have a prompt work on multiple files --- why isn't there an LLM front-end which will accept as input a folder of files, and then run a working/tested prompt on each file in that folder, then return the collected output as a single process/result?

waffletower• 1 year ago

With all due respect, even if you are Thom Yorke (actually definitely if you are Thom Yorke) I would probably be bored by your music if it is unwilling to expand and grow with the nascent possibilities of technology. While AI music creation tools tend toward vapid imitation at worst and noble democratization of hit songs at best, Google is providing a more sophisticated interface here which may allow the truly creative to discover viably unique and new music. I live for that. While I support those who want to grab an acoustic and sing at open mike, it would be a loss if all music had to sound like that and it never further evolved.

taylorius• 1 year ago

I would dispute that what is happening with AI music is well described by the phrase "expand and grow". In my view "democratzation" s a weasel word, meaning the removal of skill and effort from the process of production. The operator of such a system inevitably becomes more like a client, choosing between options served up to them. You could plausibly replace the human with a random number generator, and an external observer would not tell the difference.

BizarroLand• 1 year ago

When digital recording became a thing, there was a huge backlash against it from the artists and studios who had invested obscene amounts of money into full analog recording studios, saying that it made the process too easy and would fill the world with amateur slop.

Records were released with labels proudly saying that the albums were recorded fully analog.

When Autotune became a thing, there were artists complaining that it was inauthentic and cheating, allowing talentless hacks to sound like they have more natural talent than actually talented human beings, and released albums proudly saying that they used no autotune.

Even now, the hint that a natural sounding singer is using autotune is a common insult among recording musicians, even though almost everyone does.

Whether you agree with the original analog non-autotuned musicians or not, (which, honestly, I think they were correct to a certain degree, but that's its own discussion), AI music generation is almost certainly here to stay.

That being said, digital recording made making music possible for people who would have never had the opportunity otherwise, and had generated a lot of good stuff that would have otherwise never have existed.

Autotune has enabled people to express themselves the way they want to express themselves even though they didn't otherwise have the talent or skill to do so.

AI "might" make it so that people who can imagine a song they could never spend the time and energy needed to create such a song to create the songs they hear in their heads they way they imagine them.

AI "might" give people the ability to express themselves in ways they never could before.

It doesn't yet do that, it only remixes what it's heard before. But combine that with people then tweaking/reprocessing that output, doing other things to it, making AI mashed potato music into crisp potato chip music, it can be a good thing.

Doesn't mean the au-naturale artists are obsolete or wrong, I would rather listen to 1 mediocre human musician than a SOTA AI music box, but if the music box is used as part of the total, I'm ok with that.

fullshark5• 1 year ago

I'm not sure music will evolve further. Computers are able to mimic every instrument's sound, what new instruments will be invented? What more can be done?

Popular music evolved and developed rapidly post WW2 cause of invention (instruments and distribution channels) and economics (disposable income among youth giving rise to youth culture). That is a product that may be at the end of its S curve.

jaggs2• 1 year ago

That's a crummy quote to be honest. Not everybody has the ability to be creative on their own, so AI can help expand the demographic of creativity to those who may not have the basic skills. In the same way that word-processors help those who may not be able to write 'proper' English create prose that is acceptable. It may never be great art, but if it fulfils a a personal need, then why not?

moralestapia• 1 year ago

Waitlist

They still haven't learned, wow.

Someone in there really wants to drive Google to the ground.

hiddencost• 1 year ago

Leadership wrote the requirement "launch by X date if you want to get promoted".

Rank and file said "absurd".

Middle management figured out a way to claim success to leadership while keeping rank and file from quitting.

ipaddr2• 1 year ago

Usually that's the Iceland rollout.

fallinditch• 1 year ago

I am interested in using AI-driven music composition tools in new ways, and Lyra 2 sounds impressive, but a) so far, using these tools leaves me feeling a little meh, and b) we are in between the before and after times right now, witnessing the transition to the world of AI content and we're definitely losing something.

Prompt: Hazy, fractured UK Garage, Bedroom Recording, Distorted and melancholic. Instrumental. A blend of fractured drum patterns, vocal samples that have been manipulated and haunting ambient textures, featuring heavy sub-bass, distorted synths, sparse melodic fragments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNog4qB-mHQ&t=5s&pp=2AEFkAIB

ipaddr2• 1 year ago

The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.

No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

AI image and short video generation can create novelty and interest. But when the medium require more from the person like reading a book or watching a movie the level of AI acceptance goes down. We'll accept an AI generated email or ad copy but not an ai generated playlist and certainly not a deepfake of someone from reality. That's what people want from AI, a blending of real life into a fantasy generator but no one is offering that yet.

redox99• 1 year ago

Also image generation, particularly with latest GPT, can be finetuned a lot more than music generation which is nowadays limited to "here's something with those lyrics and genre".

mindwok• 1 year ago

The impact of AI on creative fields will be pretty nuanced I feel. I don't think we will end up in a world where everyone is just AI generating the media they want. In some cases we will, for example stuff like lo-fi beats on YouTube are already started to be bulk made by AI because really it's just fancy white noise for people to use to work.

Actual music (like what you find on Spotify) I think won't be impacted very much. People strongly identify with the art they consume, and that identity comes from the people who make the art. Those folks might be using AI under the covers for elements of their creative work, but ultimately what people care about is the humanity behind the art. It's the same with film, and traditional art people hang on their walls. We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.

Video games I think will be interesting... I feel they will be more susceptible to being accepted as AI generated. I don't think people identify with them as strongly.

monero-xmr• 1 year ago

Pop music is so simple, yet so difficult to make a hit. For some artists the music can be mediocre or even fairly bad, and still be a massive hit because pop music is essentially theater and their persona and mystique carries the day.

Some bands were terrible touring artists and rarely put on concerts yet made great careers as studio acts. Steely Dan would be one that produced many hits yet rarely toured, mostly later in their career.

The fundamentals of pop are totally understood. Yet what makes a hit is so fickle and difficult, the bar is extremely high

navigate83102• 1 year ago

Even music found on Spotify is artificially generated, carefully disguised as human curated

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machin...

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461530

Al-Khwarizmi3• 1 year ago

I could see myself listening to AI music in Spotify, not as the main act but at least as a Plan B.

For example, I like a specific music genre, Italodance, which was popular in the 90s and then disappeared. The problem is that I have listened to all of it, as far as I know. No more is being made. If an AI model could make more for me, with decent quality, I'd probably listen to it.

boredhedgehog• 1 year ago

We like the actors, the director, the artist, their taste, and who they are. It's why we have celebrities, because we get invested in the people behind the art.

But we can't know any of these celebrities as people. We only engage with their images created by marketing. Their stories are as curated and fabricated as the artworks they produce. Transferring these simulacra to AI personalities is merely another marketing problem to be solved.

raincole2• 1 year ago

No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

Not true. No one wants to pay for other people's ai songs. There are so many AI songs on youtube (mostly lofi or traditional Japanese instrumental) and they cumulatively have quite a lot of view.

The thing is for quite a lot people, music is just something they put in background while doing their office desk jobs. It's just there to make chores a bit more tolerable and nothing more.

spacechild1• 1 year ago

The thing is for quite a lot people, music is just something they put in background w

You are absolutely right. These people only listen to music passively and so it doesn't make a big difference who/what made these tracks. Same for lots of commercial music (cheap TV show soundtracks, commercials, jingles, playlists for restaurants or shops).

But for anyone who actively listens to music and appreciates the style and evolution of certain artists, AI music is not acceptable. The very premise just feels wrong, if not outright insulting.

bufferoverflow4• 1 year ago

No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

That's not true. I already found a few tracks that I like. It's actually impressive what Udio can produce. Also ElevenLabs demoed their music generator, and their demo tracks were all quite cool.

I do agree with you that fine controls are missing, and also splitting instruments/voices into separate tracks.

dist-epoch2• 1 year ago

No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.

And hear I was thinking that many people listen to songs because they like the sounds of it, but apparently it needs to have "meaning".

fuhsnn• 1 year ago

Identity of the creator and the piece has always been a big part of music appreciation. Imagine how dystopian would be if you ask someone their favorite and the answer is "the music that HitAI generated when promoted 'sad song for happy people' when I was 17, but their model has since changed and my subscription didn't include offline ownership, it's lost forever."

rafaelmn2• 1 year ago

The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.

You can still pull AI stuff into your music editor and tweak it, although it's harder because it's already mixed. But ironically, this is the exact same problem you have with AI coding to avoid learning how to code - unless you know what you need and how to do it, you're basically relying on AI to one-shot it for you. The nice thing with music and visual art is that it's subjective, so you're the only judge of what's correct. That's why people get super impressed with images in GenAI when it generates 1001 human faces in that setting vaguely resembling what was asked. If you had to generate a very specific thing, it's basically impossible to get it correct.

bondarchuk• 1 year ago

Back in the day nobody wanted to hear my FL Studio songs either. Not saying this as a joke, it's just that most people don't care about most people's amateur art from what I've seen.

Workaccount22• 1 year ago

I think that the tech exists for more interactive AI generation, it's just gonna take time to implement.

I foresee something like your standard production software with heavy AI integration, where you prompt it to make the song you want, but it is made fully step by step in the production environment. You can then manually tweak it or ask the AI to fine tune whatever parameter or slice you want.

Kinda like sitting over the shoulder of someone who knows what they are doing, and working collaboratively with them to accomplish the idea you have in your head. Meanwhile you have practically no idea what all those buttons/lines/glowly bits/sliders do.

TheAceOfHearts3• 1 year ago

I've made a few tracks using Suno to scratch my own itch / desire for music that covers certain themes.

The best use of Suno for has been the ease with which you can generate diss tracks: I ask Gemini to make a diss track lyrics related to specific topics, and then I have Suno generate the actual track. It's very cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail.

Anyway, I hope I can get access, I think it would be fun to vibe some new music. Although this UI looks severely limited in what capabilities it provides. Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more? It would be cool if you could generate a song and then have it split into multiple tracks that you can remix and tweak independently. Maybe a section of track is pretty good but you want to switch out a specific instrument. Maybe describe what kind of beats you want to the tool and have it generate multiple potential interpretations, which you can start to combine and build up into a proper track. I think ideally I'd be able to describe what kind of mood or vibe I'm going for, without having to worry about any of the musical theory behind it, and the tool should generate what I want.

rTX5CMRXIfFG• 1 year ago

Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more?

We’re getting access to generative AI tech and people are looking for innovation in the UI? I mean I get the need for UX but it’s probably coming man, what with MVPs and all

TheAceOfHearts3• 1 year ago

I think producing new and interesting music with AI tools will require models that allow for far more granularity, tweaking multiple tracks / layers, and this has to be exposed through a more professional and capable UI. It has to go hand-in-hand if it's going to be treated as anything other than a novelty or a toy.

Vibe coding has improved significantly in tandem with UI innovations that provide a more intuitive interface to the workflow. Although in the vibe coding space there's still a lot of room for innovation and exploration, especially when doing detailed task development.

rixed• 1 year ago

cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail

Ironical remark about the power drawn by IA assisted creation left to the reader.

ctxc• 1 year ago

> cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail
Ironical remark about the power drawn by IA assisted creation left to the reader.

Thanks for pointing that out, was scratching my head on that

TheAceOfHearts3• 1 year ago

The power grid in my country has been failing and unstable long before GenAI became a thing. We also don't have any AI data centers here that would be taxing said grid. But sure, enjoy making your glib drive by snarky comment.

dragandj2• 1 year ago

Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more?

Perhaps these tools are being built by the LLMs? Why would only you be entitled to easy low-effort gains? Google's programmers like to vibe while sipping coctails in the dark, too. ;)

adefa• 1 year ago

If you missed it, check out this MusicFX DJ: https://labs.google/fx/tools/music-fx-dj

It's pretty fun :)

https://imgur.com/a/ohTZXZ0

achow• 1 year ago

https://deepmind.google/technologies/lyria/

Lyria 2 is currently available to a limited number of trusted testers

tsurba2• 1 year ago

Yep not going to bother reading these hype advertisements about things that are not even available. This sucks so much from Google.

ionwake2• 1 year ago

TBH at this point HN should have a flag for "No Demo"

broof• 1 year ago

Ai music has been awesome for me, not because the music is that good, but because it gives me the ability to do something that I couldn’t have done myself. I use it all the time for my DnD group, songs about characters, funny moments, backstories, it’s a great tool that our players have found to increase engagement with the game

jiehong2• 1 year ago

Sounds like a new genre: live music generated on the fly depending on each user’s context.

Just a new possibility!

raincole2• 1 year ago

"Twitch plays (generates) music" goes brrr.

Keyframe2• 1 year ago

iMUSE on steroids. It will come for sure.

subscribed• 1 year ago

Just imagine private model (own, little spech-to-text model) listening to the people playing DnD feeding to the bigger brother that in turn controls the music generation and feeds it back to the speakers as the story progresses.

aitchnyu• 1 year ago

My theoretical perfect wireless headphone will detect interruptions and play a lofi instrumental version at low volume without skipping a beat and ramp up to original. Bonus points if it can detect my brain straining as an interruption.

Tepix3• 1 year ago

Instead of making music together with human musicians, you're now doing this process with a machine. Yay!

rkagerer• 1 year ago

Are there any particularly good samples anyone can point out?

The 2-3 clips I listened to in the article sounded awful (my own subjective opinion).

justlikereddit2• 1 year ago

Classic google approach to AI.

"We made something really fancy"

"Oh you wanted to try it out for yourself instead of just reading our self-congratulatory tech demos article? How about fuck you!"

Yeah fuck you too Google, this is why your AI competitors are eating you alive, and good riddance

ein0p• 1 year ago

It's kinda like Suno, except Suno sounds pretty good sometimes. Even so, I played with Suno for a few days and lost interest. There are some amazing examples on Suno, though: https://suno.com/song/9a7fd58e-132c-4ac5-9a25-f40d7f6f8c9f. This is one of the early tunes, it probably can do better now.

n_kr• 1 year ago

Is there a model which can generate vocals for an existing song given lyrics and some direction? I can't sing my way out of a paper bag, but I can make everything else for a song, so it would be a good way to try a bunch of ideas and then involve an actual singer for any promising ideas.

xyproto• 1 year ago

US only.

collias• 1 year ago

I find this to be profoundly depressing.

I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.

With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.

I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.

berkut• 1 year ago

People also said similar things in the past (I'm a musician as well: guitar, piano and bass) about Synths and Drum machines (and things like GarageBand which can do backing drums and even basslines semi-automatically now).

Some of those things enabled others to create new types of music or express themselves in different ways.

tgv3• 1 year ago

People have said that about robots and computers in the workplace, and indeed, since the 60s, more and more jobs have been automated. And there are less musicians now. Film scores and albums are produced with samples instead of bands or orchestras, reducing demand for session players, leading to less income for musicians, leading to less musicians.

And while automating dangerous jobs is a good thing, generating AI music isn't. It's not as unethical as generating deepfakes, but it's useless, and bad for society.

dodos• 1 year ago

I feel its already hit the tipping point. I used to listen to mixes on youtube liberally, but I've now had to filter all searches to pre-2023 due to the flood of slop that's appeared. I used to finds loads of great up-coming musicians, but the amount of effort required to do so has increased considerably. I am tired of filtering out the slop.

eMPee584• 1 year ago

SEARCH TIP: As the default search prioritizes newer content, it's quite tedious to find older takes on youtube.. there's a workaround though: web search for site:youtube.com and set a custom date range (ddg: click on "Any time", g: "Tools" on the right side) to sidetrack the big tech attention economy brainrot algorithm.. : D

phatfish• 1 year ago

Find some good independent online radio stations that you like. There are successful ones out there, nts.live and rinse.fm in the UK for example. Obviously they exist in other countries too.

I say independent as most radio is stacked with adverts, but the above two seem successful without needing them.

I find the human curation far more satisfying than an algorithm, and most DJs want to support human artists not bland AI nonsense as they have a stake in the music industry.

creata• 1 year ago

I don't think it's going to drown people out. I think it's going to make recommender systems much less useful, so the people who care will simply return to the older methods of curation, and the people who don't care will get the slop they want.

tsurba2• 1 year ago

Good art is not going out of fashion. Tools may change but part of an artists job is to adapt.

For example, when you learn instruments you also train your ear and taste. These are things one cannot take shortcuts in.

I wouldn’t worry about it, but approach new tools (once they actually arrive and are not just advertisements like this one) with curiosity.

tgv3• 1 year ago

Good art requires a huge reservoir of artists. When AI music drives musicians out of work, it shrinks the reservoir, thus leading to lesser art.

skerit2• 1 year ago

With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music

We've reached that point long before AI entered the scene. All the rest are drops in the ocean of mediocre music.

cambaceres• 1 year ago

I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs

Good for you man, how will AI stop you? Are you writing songs for the pleasure of writing songs or for getting validation from other people?

j_maffe• 1 year ago

It's not about validation, it's about expression and communicationw with other humans. That's one of the key beauties of art and it's being flooded away with artificial, empty content

jeremyjh2• 1 year ago

The answers to your questions are in the comment you replied to. Part of their love is music is sharing it with others. They also like to fantasize about becoming a full-time musician. Both of those things are less likely if there is 100x the current volume of music from unknowns.

brulard2• 1 year ago

Let me tell you that the world has been flooded with low-effort, low-quality music for decades already. Most of the popular music relying on the same 3 chords, dull lyrics etc. While I'm a fan of music generators like Udio, I'm pretty sure the best music is still going to be created by humans. I also believe that while AI slop is bad, human slop is even worse.

otabdeveloper45• 1 year ago

"Art" is not a career, sorry.

AstroBen2• 1 year ago

It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly

The world is saturated with low quality everything already. Has been for a long time, even before AI. If you're genuinely good you'll be able to stand out

antononcube3• 1 year ago

The creation of music by AI brings to mind a quote from David Bowie:

“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So take advantage of these last few years, because this will never happen again. Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left.”

While Bowie had different reasoning for making that statement, it's interesting to think that with AI-generated music, his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true.

rafaelmn2• 1 year ago

That sounds like a comment about streaming and artists getting basically nothing from it ?

I think music AI in live music would actually be interesting - theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could. A group music editing session with the AI weaving it to music - sounds like a fun art project.

closewith3• 1 year ago

It foresaw streaming, but it was a direct response to Napster and file sharing.

widdershins• 1 year ago

theoretically it can react to crowds better than any human could

That's one area I'd expect AI to do poorly. Performance is a two-way dialog between performers and the crowd, with facial expressions and body movements from both the stage and the audience in communication. I'd expect any AI that's not attached to a humanoid robot to be less exciting to a crowd.

However, I am very excited about AI in some of the other contexts you mentioned, like as a music-writing or editing partner.

raverbashing• 1 year ago

And here's the thing: the invention of recorded media also had a big impact on musicians

Talks of "nobody will need musicians anymore" were overblown, while having a modicum of truth

closewith3• 1 year ago

Well, the number of working musicians absolutely cratered, so it wasn’t really overblown, even though a few artists became extremely wealthy.

woolion• 1 year ago

He effectively predicted all the paradigm shifts that the internet entailed. I've thought about his interviews many times as it was a very optimistic view compared to the alternatives -- one being the internet as a generalized tiktok (or what is called brainrot) and the other being the internet being totally subsumed by existing media corporations. While these exist to a large extent, they have not been able to stop the change in relationship between artist and audience, the meaning of "critique", the status symbol of culture, etc. It has also been argued that he anticipated cryptocurrencies and NFTs with his Bowie bonds. Similarly, even if you strongly dislike the current state of this tech, they complete the puzzle of this positive worldview.

mFixman• 1 year ago

This sounds like the kind of things painters said after good photography because widespread.

Instead we got aesthetically original avant-garde art to replace the thousands of low-quality slop portraits that were common in the mid-19th century.

flanked-evergl9• 1 year ago

aesthetically original, avant-garde, and bad.

flanked-evergl9• 1 year ago

The musicians of the 19th century were free to produce anything they liked. They were free to write a "Missa Solemnis" where the very silence is breathtaking, where one does not merely hear that God has died, but where one feels His rebirth. And what have they done? Have they produced in their liberty anything grander or more beautiful than the scrawling of the deaf composer? Have they summoned sounds more jubilant than those conjured by the consumptive Romantic, the limping Dresden Kapellmeister? We know that they have produced only a few forgetful tunes.

Whether cultural libertinism be better than cultural rigidity may be discussed, but that the cultural libertinism of the 20st century amounted to less than the cultural rigidity of earlier century will be difficult to deny.

People will remember Bowie for his words longer than they will remember him for his music because his music is as hollow and unmeaning, by design. He believed the world is an unmeaning wilderness, or at least that he was the most meaningful thing in it, at least in the sense that the only meaning of it derived from himself. But an egoist in a mere unmeaning wilderness is not impressive.

In Bowie's theology, life is something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it. The parts seem greater than the whole. If his cosmos is the real cosmos, it is not much of a cosmos. The thing has shrunk.

Bowie could not make any music that was joyful because he could not understand joy. The modern philosopher has told Bowie again and again that he was in the right place, and he had still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But those that came before him had heard that they were in the WRONG place, and their souls sang for joy, like a bird in spring.

Fraterkes• 1 year ago

Those who can't do, poorly write jejune art critiscism.

shmeeed• 1 year ago

That's a lot of words on a very overarching tangent. If one may ask, what music, exactly, do you consider joyful and worthy?

ben_w4• 1 year ago

To quote the wikipedia article:

When Danse macabre was first performed on 24 January 1875, it was not well received and caused widespread feelings of anxiety. The 21st century scholar, Roger Nichols, mentions adverse reaction to "the deformed Dies irae plainsong", the "horrible screeching from solo violin", the use of a xylophone, and "the hypnotic repetitions", in which Nichols hears a pre-echo of Ravel's Boléro.

And Bowie's been covered in space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo

It's impossible to forecast what future generations will and won't like.

geoka9• 1 year ago

People will remember Bowie for his words longer than they will remember him for his music

I know nothing of his quotes, but there're a few of his songs I will remember for the rest of my life (and I'm not even a big fan).

EugeneOZ• 1 year ago

"Starman" is much better than "Missa Solemnis". Due all my respect to Beethoven.

Applejinx4• 1 year ago

If you stay hung up on an intellectual interpretation of what Bowie's doing, firstly you're right where he wants you, he'll play with you like a toy and in so doing, he'll have a grand time, he loved that even at times when his life was faltering.

Secondly, you overlook the glee with which he collaborated with people to jointly express their humanity, and who inspired him to do this. You can read the lyrics and parse them all you like, but what does it FEEL like when you've soaked up the whole song and are at that moment of…

"Ain't there one damn song that can make me…"

That's not even getting into my personal faves like Station to Station, Scary Monsters, where he's venting some really personal stuff and turning it into sound-as-art and also hellacious good funk, with the most gifted companions you could wish for.

Bowie liked to record vocals in one take, just fling himself into expressing and run with whatever he had in the tank that day, and it communicates like mad. He's maybe the canonical example of the opposite to AI music. In bringing that to fruition, I'm certain he understood countless joys. You gotta express many other things than just joy to have hit records, but then Beethoven excelled at that as well.

I've doubtless taken more trouble than I needed to, rebutting what could have been a GPT-extruded troll of an argument, but it was fun :)

closewith3• 1 year ago

I think recorded music is already a utility, billed monthly and available on demand.

cousin_it• 1 year ago

Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left

Until someone makes an AI guitar pedal that corrects sloppy playing.

codetrotter• 1 year ago

Is there any big difference between using that and instead doing playback lip syncing and fake playing the guitar, like already happens sometimes at concerts?

conradfr• 1 year ago

You can convert your guitar signal to midi and quantize it.

Not sure that would have helped Jimmy "sloppy" Page getting famous though.

Applejinx4• 1 year ago

We've had that for years in the DAW and autotune and snapping to grid.

The result's pretty boring and interchangeable, and that's largely what AI music is trained on. Accuracy is not novel here. Ever since the 80s it's been increasingly possible to augment musical skill or lack of, with technology.

I don't think we're very close to correcting for sloppy intentionality. Only to correcting 'mistakes', or alternately adding them in the belief that doing stuff wrong is where the magic is.

Rochus2• 1 year ago

his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true

That was already the case with Spotify & Co. where music has become an anonymous commodity. People order by mood or playlist and rarely care about who composed, produced or played the music, even if the meta data are available. From the user's perspective, AI makes mostly the selection process more precise. I don't think people will care much whether the music itself was a human-made recording or just AI generated.

But making music is still fun (I speak from experience, see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1317); people just won't care, unless you have a big name; all this was already the case before AI generated music became good enough. So by the end of the day, AI is just another act in a rationalization and anonymization process which started a long time ago.

antononcube3• 1 year ago

I think nightcore versions of your pieces would be of interest...

qwertox2• 1 year ago

There are things which are just "musician things". An AI just can't replace it.

Like the performance of "Hania Rani live at Invalides in Paris, France for Cercle" [0]

This is what makes a musician.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5oZ80Daduc&t=2145s

croes• 1 year ago

That what most people don’t care about

antononcube3• 1 year ago

In my opinion the referenced music fragment of that video is fairly "unmemorable", it is "just" a sequence of harmonized textures. And that is precisely what AIs (LLMs) are good at.

(I listened for ≈7 min from the reference point.)

(I am talking about the music, not the live performance itself.)

littlestymaar• 1 year ago

It has been the case for at least 15 years with the rise of Spotify/Deezer and we could even argue that it started with the first mp3 players with pirated music libraries.

margorczynski• 1 year ago

Actually from what I've heard from musicians is that digital made living just from music really hard. First it was piracy and now it is streaming, the days where an average whole band could live off playing and creating music are gone.

AI will be the nail to the coffin where it'll almost completely becomes a hobby.

metalman3• 1 year ago

The anouncement of the "death of the band" is premature.I dont believ this for a second, nothing can replace live music played by humans, as the experience and the very real positive benifits of an audience comming together can not be digitised, in spite of the many attempts to package high tech simulated environments. There are hundreds of thousands of full time touring musical groups world wide, and millions of music festivals every year. Just because the bar is high, very high, to become a working musician, and has been forever, does not give credence to the notion that some nameless randoms get to make the call because there tube vid got 3 views.

pipes• 1 year ago

I think the same is happening with video games. Especially with Xbox game pass or whatever it's called. I've done it to myself with roms. Everything available so none of it valuable to me.

AlecSchueler7• 1 year ago

I'm a musician and honestly I often feel that the music boat already left in many ways before the generation Bowie grew up in. The best musical experiences I've ever had have been in quiet houses playing music with people I care deeply about, playing for dancers or impromptu public meetings with other musicians. I think that ever since the first wax cylinder was pressed those experiences have become harder and harder to find as most people forgo learning instruments in favour of the record player. Sitting at a party with a David Bowie record on already didn't feel like a musical experience for me in many ways, this is just another step in that evolutionary chain.

hollowturtle• 1 year ago

Strong opinion ahead: the very moment people will finally realize that music is in the microscopic nuances of the human touch, breath and taste(literally for every instrument), hopefully we will get disinvested in this useless technology. Yes, I am aware of software like pro tools, but that can ba used well for touch up all tue nueances

chaosprint• 1 year ago

It seems inevitable now. I used to think AI music would always sound compromised in term of audio quality, but the tech seems to have crossed a threshold, kind of like Retina displays did for screens.

Soon, hiring people for commercial background music might be rare. Think AI for jingles, voiceovers, maybe even the models and visuals. Cafes can use AI-generated music too – in a way, the owner curates or "creates" it based on their taste.

But there are still interesting parts to human music making: the unpredictability and social side of live shows, for example. Maybe future music releases could even be interactive, letting listeners easily tweak tracks? Like this demo: https://glicol.org/demo#ontherun

otabdeveloper45• 1 year ago

AI slop is cringe. You don't want that kind of optics when marketing your product or company.

No, it won't "get better". AI slop is slop not because of technical limitations.

dragandj2• 1 year ago

Cafes CAN use AI generated music, but WHY would they use it? Last time I checked there's millions of hours of human-produced music. The only reason might be the price, but AFAIK cafes have to pay a flat price to national music associations regardless of the actual music that they play. The downside is that AI-generated music might be cringe and chase away the customers. At best, cafes have no upside and no downside. At worst, they close the doors.

qnleigh• 1 year ago

I'm very happy to see that they're prioritizing making tools for musicians, rather than making AI music generators to replace musicians. Everything else I've come across so far was trying to do the latter.

lifeinthevoid• 1 year ago

Maybe they're playing the long game and using this to train on musician's input to prepare for the final blow.

macleginn• 1 year ago

The end effect will be the same, I'm afraid: one "AI composer" in a TV studio or a marketing shop will be able to create most of the needed music on demand, removing the need to record and mix new tracks and putting a lot of musicians out of business.

staticelf• 1 year ago

Figure out an AI to do my dishes, laundry and clean my home. Not the fun parts of life please.

Everyone wants the futuristic star trek future but we all forget that there is only one Captain Kirk and his small crew. Most of us will be sitting around at home doing laundry and cleaning the workplaces of the robots that is owned by large corporations.

anentropic2• 1 year ago

This is not actually music.

Music is a cultural practice, this is just organised sound.

Maybe one day AIs will be able to participate in cultural practices like humans do, as sentient beings, but current generative AI models do not.

aniviacat2• 1 year ago

That is not a water bottle, it's a domesticated puddle.

Many (most?) people don't care about the artists behind songs (even less so about their culture). They care about the "organised sound" being enjoyable to hear. And to them, AI music is just as valuable as manual music.

Gangam style didn't become popular because people cared about PSY. It didn't become popular because of its thoughtful lyrics and insightful message. It became popular because it sounds good.

squigz• 1 year ago

Many (most?) people don't care about the artists behind songs

This seems an absurd take to me when you consider the popularity of, say, Taylor Swift, or various rappers.

otabdeveloper45• 1 year ago

They care about the "organised sound" being enjoyable to hear.

"Enjoyable to hear" is a problem that has been solved since the paleolithic. Musical scales and modes have always been a thing, making sounds that are nice and harmonic is a straightforward mathematical problem.

anentropic2• 1 year ago

It became popular because it sounds good.

That's a pre-requisite for becoming popular, but not why it became popular.

Just because many people don't know or understand anything about music doesn't mean music doesn't exist.

concats5• 1 year ago

Trying to look at the bigger picture for a moment. A lot of the philosophical debate about art I see here, and elsewhere on social media, is often very shallow and can be reduced to:

Does one believe that the value of the art-piece (be is music, paintings, film, or whatever) is created in the mind of the artist, or is it created in the mind of the consumer?

If you believe only in the former, AI art is an oxymoron and pointless. If you believe only the later, you're likely to rejoice at all the explosion of new content and culture we can expect in the coming years.

As far as I can tell though, most regular people think that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes, where both both the creator and the consumer's thoughts are important in unison. That culture is about where the two meet each other, and help each other grow. But most of the arguments I've seen online seem to ignore or miss this dichotomy of views entirely, which unfortunately reduces the quality of the debate considerably.

XenophileJKO3• 1 year ago

You are on to the key insight here.. what is emerging is the creative consumer. I.e. I know what I want when I hear it. Or I know what I want when I see it.

This means you can hear something and say.. you know this is nice, but I would like it more if it were different in this way.

With generative tools you can do that. Personally I really like to listen to music, but I generally dislike the lyrics. I want uplifting songs, maybe about what I am doing right now to motivate me. Well with something like Suno.com.. I can just make one. Or I can work with claude or chatgpt to quickly iterate on some lyrics and edit them to create an even higher fidelity song.

The key here is that I can give a rat's ass if anyone in the world likes or cares about my song.. but I can listen to it while I work. It is exactly what I wanted to listen to or close enough.

concats5• 1 year ago

My theory is that as the quality of these generative tools increase, we'll see the public opinion of them slowly shift. Regardless of philosophy (although discussing it is always fun), it just seems inevitable since there are so many more consumers than producers. And as you say, consumers are the ones that will primarily benefit from this new technology. As a consumer we care primarily (some could argue solely) about our own emotional reaction to the music —or more generally put, art-piece.

In practical terms I also believe that this will give rise to a lot of new consumer behavior, and, as you so aptly puts it "creative consumers" will become normal.

The ability to on-demand create more content to fill out some very narrow niche is a great example ("Today I want 24 hours of non stop Mongolian throat singing neo-industrial Christmas music"). Or maybe to create covers of songs in the voices of your favorite long dead artist. Anything from minor tweak of existing works ("I wish this love song was dedicated specifically to ME", to completely new works (Just look at how much the parody-music genre has grown since Suno and the like first appeared). The possibilities are near endless.

Aldipower3• 1 year ago

Art is always some form of human interaction. When we talk about AI music, I think we do not talk about art anymore, so this isn't human interaction as this isn't art too. The creation of the AI itself, could be considered as art, but not the outcome of the AI. We have to be careful in our discussions not to mix the things up. A lot of confusion happens in recent discussion.

concats5• 1 year ago

Personally I don't like to gatekeep art.

For example: If someone walks out into the wilderness and encounters a particularly fascinating rock formation or plant, something that was created completely by accident and without a artist or designer, but they find that the sight instills in them strong emotions or deeper thought, I believe they should be allowed to call that art.

Maybe this is just petty linguistics and semantics though, in which case we're drifting away from the topic at hand, and I'm sorry.

awongh4• 1 year ago

The thing is that in this century the creative interaction seems to be moving up the value chain- it wasn't long ago that people would say that being a DJ wasn't creative. Simply selecting songs wasn't creative. Now lots of people consider DJs to be creative artists that are communicating something with their human will of selecting and mixing tracks.

Unless the whole thing moves to a random AI generated slop stream app, whoever turns the knobs of the AI that creates the music will become the new "artist". Right now it doesn't seem like the AI creator "does" anything, but maybe future people will think that.

awongh4• 1 year ago

In the age of the social feed things are currently tipped more towards the selector/curator/consumer, where before, when all you could do was listen to songs on the radio, it wasn't really possible to participate.

But culture will always be fundamentally about 1:many - we have to collectively agree on liking something- algo-based feeds are making the number of people that agree smaller and more siloed, but the dynamic is still the same.

In that sense I don't think truly 100% algorithmically created and promoted content could ever truly become cultural- at the very least humans will always ascribe some meaning or motive to it, e.g., when instagram launched AI generated accounts some people pointed their finger at Mark Zuckerberg, tracing something back to a human they could ultimately hold responsible.

concats5• 1 year ago

I agree, the story behind the work is part of how we humans view a creation and cannot be dismissed.

I think we're a long way away from 100% algorithmically created content. This far all I've seen is content that is created based on human inputs and ideas. I'm not aware of the Instagram incident you mentioned, but it too seems like the brain child of a human if I'm not mistaken.

There have been trending AI generated videos floating around lately for example. Which I found surprising at first. But they still had a human script writer (prompt writer?), director and a human editor. Someone who had a vision of what they wanted to create and share. My prediction is that this human-directed tool-like usage will be the standard for a long time, so I'm not particularly worried about humans getting removed from the process.

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

I thought AI is supposed to free up my time by taking my job so I can unleash my musical creativity on an empty stomach? It is going to make music too?

qwertox2• 1 year ago

"Democratization of ___" (fill in with your favorite word). This is what it also does look like. I'm not saying that this is anything good or bad, but when I usually hear that sentence, it's associated with something positive, empowering.

thomastraum• 1 year ago

the biggest thread to music is the audience.

a machine doing any of this would be not causing a meltdown by musicians in the 80s. A punk rock band would not feel threatened by this neither would be Prince.

the sad truth is human output is so averaged out now, that most of it will be replaced.

TaupeRanger• 1 year ago

Another breathless press release with no demo. Typical DeepMind. Nothing to see here.

bustling-noose• 1 year ago

Music on iPod or a Walkman or a radio is great.

But have you ever attended live music shows ? Have you ever ‘felt’ the music ? Even someone at a local bar singing feels and hits different.

AI can never bring feelings. That will never change. Even science fiction agrees with that.

So bring all the AI you want everywhere, some things are irreplaceable by electronic world.

VladVladikoff• 1 year ago

I expect this type of stuff to be used for elevator and telephone hold music. Or even perhaps indie video games where they don’t have a budget for music.

mentalgear• 1 year ago

Disappointed, until now DeepMind seemed like genuinely being a company working on important, AGI-directed models. Not the latest money-grabbing automation. Might be Google's influence. Most probably.

eth0up• 1 year ago

As a musician with infirmities and other hindrances, I have dreamed of this for many years. Consider the DJ, particularly the variety that remixes music. While a skill in itself to manage the h/s/ware, such an artist is largely exhibiting their taste in music, excerpting, rearranging and altering existing music to accomplish a sound otherwise missing. I've found many such remixed versions vastly superior to the originals.

Now imagine, without mastering a specific instrument or skill, you can now create the music in/of your own mindspace, which for me is rarely the music I hear, and often a deviation of what I do hear.

I'm sure this isn't quite what's being offered yet, but every time I grasp my instruments with my trademark touch of inevitable futility, I hope I make it to a time when I can produce what my lack of virtues presently prohibits. It's not the physical acrobatics or mathematical showcasing of great music that I want - it's the end result of the music itself.

asah• 1 year ago

is there a way for AI music to become an "instrument" the way synths and drug machines became in the 70s/80s...

iamleppert• 1 year ago

The problem with all these AI companies and products is that they all over-value the content itself. The content is not the thing that is valuable, its the person who creates it and the community and culture that forms around it. These are things that require people, a lot of time, luck, and can never be automated. You see this all the time with people who spend huge amounts of money and effort making things that may even be great and high quality but never gain any real value. Companies do it all the time too. It's very hard to predict what will become valuable, and what will not. Just because AI will let you create more of something, or do it faster or cheaper -- it doesn't matter as long as you are missing some external factor that makes something high quality popular or valuable. And yes, there is always an external factor at work, a lot of times many factors. This is further evidenced by the fact that quality itself of something valuable sometimes doesn't need to be there (although it is more likely to be there, than not).

Just by magically dropping the content price or effort to $0, doesn't matter because the content itself has no or little to no intrinsic value. There isn't suddenly going to be an expanded market of people who will listen to your AI generated music or buy your AI-enabled product.

If tomorrow, I could make a random kid on the street sing just as well as Taylor Swift, or even if an exact perfect copy of her emerged somewhere, it doesn't mean she has any relationship to the value of Taylor Swift.

jaggs2• 1 year ago

That's weird. I just learned about a new music generation model called Lyra today, based out of Luxembourg. What's the odds on a similar sounding name in the same field appearing in the same week? I've got to say I don't think I'd relish going up against Google in a brand fight though. https://blog.aiva.ai/.

DeepMind releases Lyria 2 music generation model

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