Wow, AI really will democratize music creating. This is an awesome way for people to translate their ideas to music without needing to be privileged enough to get violin or guitar lessons.
I see a future where we all make our own music and share it freely with family and friends. This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit. This will still happen of course but at least we'll have another option.
> an awesome way for people to translate their ideas to music without needing to be privileged enough to get violin or guitar lessons.
What gets lost in this short-circuited process is the physical involvement with an instrument, a sort of embodied cognition. I suppose profound and/or interesting musical ideas could spring from someone without such experience, I’m skeptical.
The part about privilege: a lot to unpack. I’m a professional musician in classical music. There are a lot of paths to learning one’s craft. In my own experience, privilege - at least as defined by access to resources of finance and influence wasn’t part of my training. Still there’s much to be done to broaden access in my field.
>without needing to be privileged enough to get violin or guitar lessons.
I'm not being funny but this is a poor take when the excellent guitarist Mdou Moctar learned on a guitar he built himself using the brake cables from a bike for strings. The guitar at least is not an inaccessible instrument.
I was quite surprised by this. I played some guitar in my teens and a good guitar was quite an investment (mid-late nineties). My dad is a bit of a guitar collector and it is surprising what guitars he finds for ~300 Euro, quite respectable quality.
(Maybe it also has to do something with the lack of demand now, guitar music was still very popular in the 90ies.)
I think the big changes that caused prices to drop was online shopping and the move to East Asian manufacturing outside of Japan. There are "store-brands" like Harley Benton that target below $150 for some instruments, the Internet is awash with positive reviews.
I'm not sure if demand has changed. Guitar music is less popular but it's much easier to learn right now.
I'm sorry, but we've had the other option for hundreds of years. Playing an instrument or using your voice to make pleasant sounds isn't rocket science.
How about "AI will further democratize music"? Anyone can make music today, but ask any musician and they'll be mindblown by the idea that they can hum a melody and immediately generate a sax/percussion track matching it.
You can learn to play the guitar, and buy a guitar, but it's very hard and expensive to also learn the 3-4 other instruments you need to make a full song.
(my brother learned both the guitar and percussions; this took a lot of time and was quite expensive, if he had a tool like this he would probably focus on the guitar and just rely on this to generate a background track)
I learnt to play 3 (serious) instruments during my lifetime. Guitar, traverse flute and piano. While I dont play any of them actively today, I would still miss the overall skills I gained from learning them. Motor coordination, memory, just to name two. If I had this AI thing back then, I probably wouldn't have learnt any of them, and missed out on a lot of side effects.
Learning something difficult is rewarding on several levels. To boil it down to just the intended outcome is a rather narrow view of the matter.
You need free time and money to learn to play. You then need commercial support to make it full time.
let us side step the binary "privileged" argument which is disruptive here.
The issue for us now is given that level of talent, would Hendrix, Johnson or anyone else be able to make a career in 2028? Or will it be the preserve of people with free time and money?
This gives me the eerie feeling of a future in which we let AI do all fun, creative things, thereby freeing up spare time in which we don't need to learn to play guitar anymore, giving us more hours to spend on work.
Shouldn't we aim for a future that is the exact opposite of this?
How caught up can you get that somehow using your built-in and free instruments (see human voice and hands/feet for percussion) or a cheap $50 guitar/uke is a privilege but having an internet connection and a modern smartphone that can run this kind cutting edge software is not?
This comment tree is discussing how AI will provide a new way to music creation. Cheap smart phones are seen in poorer countries and communities. In the future, there will be models that run on these types of phones locally. They might not be the state of the art models at the time but they will be available.
If we assume the above to be correct then the "cheap" guitar is an additional cost whereas the AI music model isn't. In addition, guitar lessons cost money and spending time practicing is harder for some people than others due to their circumstances.
No. Smaller creators of art gain their markets through uniqueness not through how easy it is to create. If music is a commodity that does not require a personality or skillset to produce, then the individuality of artists becomes irrelevant. Whoever has the means of production to pump out as much as possible as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible while investing in as much advertising as possible with as many connections as possible, will be the only people that matter. Allowing AI to take over labour for us means that the people who make money from these products are only the people who own the servers. Under capitalism, the capitalists own the means of production and hoard most of the fruits of the labouring class, who are only able to make money by selling themselves. In moving straight from capitalism to an age of AI technofuedilism, we remove even labour and skill as a means of making money for the masses. The only means of making money is owning a server farm. This means wealth continuously flows into the hands of a few tech companies. Even smaller capitalists will be paying their dues to the server owners that control the entire economy. No small man will have a place in any industry.
What will it mean to "make music" when the amount of necessary skill, experience and insight approaches zero?
> This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit
Unfortunately, unless we replace capitalism, this is exactly what you can expect. The veil of false corporate authenticity grows every day, you can see it in the opening sentence of this press release:
"From jazz to heavy metal, techno to opera, music is a much loved form of creative expression."
The statement, while true on the surface, takes on a different tone when you remember who the speaker is, who the audience is, and what their ultimate goal is.
I am excited as a musician to explore this coming age, and I am also deeply saddened and fearful of how things will shake out.
It first resides in your own, personal, self appreciation: do you feel yourself legitimate to sing, to play, to say something, for yourself, or to present to others?
That's the only valid question.
The rest, all the rest, comes from that. And it does not require to be complicated or complex or clever music at this point.
Sure, you may start with the practice, with the education, the experimentation, if you have not answered for yourself that first question, you won't create/play music or songs, you'll just apply a rulebook.
Then, another totally different question may be, can you find a way to get a sufficient revenue from that activity. But that's another question still.
I think you're looking at this wrong. If I have an idea for a song I my head, I could record myself humming or sining it. While it might represent a thought, feeling or experience it's not going to be very pleasant. With AI, I will be able to transform it into something enjoyable. That is creation and not just generation.
Between someone that generated music from ideas, and someone that spent time and thinking and practicing to refine and these ideas, each will not relate the same to the end result. If only because the latter will know which happy/sad accidents made it to the end, and which did not, based on a specific judgement, or moment.
I've already done both. Generators are only good to produce specific ideas to integrate sometimes, at most.
It's exactly the same difference between writing your own novel, and getting it written by a text generator. You don't relate to the story, and to the characters, the same way. You may not even _explain_ them the same way.
But you can use AI and still refine these ideas. The entry is just easier.
On a walk -> Idea -> hum melody into website -> listen if that is something that floats your goat. And then you can follow the traditional way of midi keyboard + daw or however you produce.
Did you reply to me? I'm the OP of this comment tread so it's not me who is missing the point at all. In the context of my original post, AI in music will be a barrier to entry for _creation_. It is not relevant how Spotify use AI in music.
It's your conjecture that using AI tools doesn't involve a creative act. That conjecture may be true inside your mind, but so far you haven't provided support for it through your words - all you did was scream into the void as if everyone who doesn't agree with your conjecture is mad.
I see a future where we all make our own music and share it freely with family and friends. This means less listening to manufactured pop songs written by suits with the sole aim of making a profit. This will still happen of course but at least we'll have another option.