Jørgen is my spirit animal and Arctopus fucking rules but this take is hot as fuck my dude. Real people making real music with real instruments is art. Generative AI takes our art and makes emotionless, sloppy approximations out of it. If you despise cookiecutter pop now you’re going to be blown away by the absolute drivel that is already being pumped out thanks to genAI. The only reason the song you linked is ‘imaginative’ is because a real human already imagined it only to have it tossed into the slop pile for a computer to root through. Wouldn’t you prefer the ‘actual’ musicians making ‘actual’ music be recognized instead of being buried even further under exponentially growing pools of emotionless notes arranged into emotionless music? The musicians you and I both appreciate for their creativity and skill are having that skill and creativity stolen from them and you’re cool with it because pop doesn’t innovate? Because musicians with decades of knowledge of their instruments and a variety of styles want a paycheck? Record execs have leeched off actual creativity for a solid century now and you want to end them with an even more soulless product that still doesn’t pay artists? It might start with pop but if you think avante-garde, cerebral music will be ignored you’re mistaken.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
no one has cared since record executives have been generating AI generated tier music by hand.
What’s the fucking difference between a rich asshole comissioning music based around market resarch, to be made by some trendy female popstar, written by five different men, the singing gets autotuned, punch clock studio musicians play generic chord progressions and melodies, and it’s all straight ahead 4/4
At least with imaginative gen AI, you can get cool stuff like Pho-que
If you dislike Pho-que, you’ll probably dislike the human counterparts like Shining (Nor) or Naked City
UniversalBasicJustice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 day ago
by the way, do you like Zu as well? To see what I mean, check out the album carboniferous.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
You deserve a better reply and I will write you one later, but…
Arctopus fucking rules but this take is hot as fuck my dude.
Bro, the song skullgrid was generated by a Java program that Colin and a programmer friend of his, possibly Mike was working on. In 200X. You’ve been rocking out to AI generated before you even realised. Brian Eno also had some music that was meant to be generated by an automated system, and afaik, so did John cage.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
That is by no means AI generated, and certainly not by today’s understanding of the term. If I write a score and design an instrument (or sound, etc), that is still a creative process. Brian Eno literally created ambient music with algorithms like that, but it is still his creative work.
My point is just computer-generated ≠ ai-generated in general discourse.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
What’s the difference? Why isn’t it seen as a collaboration between the person writing the prompt (using a scripting language) and the programmer/designer of the generation software and curator of the Data set?
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 days ago
Synthesized music is not AI generated. 🤦♂️
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I remember talking to the guy that recorded that song about the composition of that song, and the evidence trail in this message. So yeah, it was generated by a program that is meant to compose music based on loose parameters or something you put into it instead of choosing where all the notes go.
And no, I’m not saying Bach did AI work.
UniversalBasicJustice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
I created the scores in JMSLscore
He created the score. If you equate using scoring software, MIDI and synths to creating slop with genAI we’re done here my dude.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 3 days ago
now, not to be an asshole, but I remember 1) talking to Colin before a Gorguts show in 2014 ish and 2) Hearing it confirmed in an interview.
Oh also, in the documentation for JMSL (Java Music Specification Language) its puropuse is to :
It is suited for algorithmic composition, live performance, and intelligent instrument design. At its heart is a polymorphic hierarchical scheduler, which means Java objects that are different from one another can be scheduled together and interact with each other in conceptually clean and powerful ways.
JMSL’s open-ended nature will reward your programming efforts and your creativity by offering you a rich toolkit for making music.
Just to beat on this idea a bit more, with JMSL you can make music based on experimental music theory, statistical processes, any algorithms you can implement… you can notate that music using JMSL Score, or leave it in the abstract. You can use Java’s networking tools to grab data off the Internet and sonify it. You can _________ (fill in the blank and start slingin’ code).
If you want to open a window with standard music staff notation and start entering notes, JMSL Score will let you do that as well. Straight out of the box. Later you can start writing your own custom note transformations, or generating musical material automatically, which JMSL Score will notate for you. Of course all music generated for and within JMSL Score can be mouse-edited, and transformed again!
www.algomusic.com/jmsl/download.html
JMSL_v2_20250209\JMSL_v2_20250209\html
Broadfern@lemmy.world 4 days ago
What’s the fucking difference between[…]
Multiple people are getting paid so they can make a living, more money flows through the economy and even if you don’t personally find it to your taste, it’s still the result of cumulative human efforts.
Gen AI has its uses in personal entertainment but I will spit on the corpo who tries to make me pay for art a person didn’t actually compose/play.
Spotify is no paragon of morality but at least I can find real, human artists via the platform and see/support them in other ways.
When it comes to human expression, I only want my money to go to human expression (even if it’s deemed “soulless”).
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
You still pay people, not AI. It’s people who do it, people who maintain it. People who maintain the AI itself etc. It just shifted from one tech-field to another tech-field.
But I get your point.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Your down votes are basically “programmers aren’t people”
Dyskolos@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
He he, yup. And all the others around that. REAL artists will never be replaced. The replaceable “artists” probably will. Those that do what the LLM does, just inferior.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
even if you don’t personally find it to your taste,
This is the bit that pisses me off though. Corporate music has always been soulless slop, and when you point it out “oh that’s just like your opinion man”.
To get philosophical, because that’s what the topic is; mathematics, life, human conciousness are based off similar patterns. Conway’s game of life demonstrates purely mathematical cellular automata; when you go down to the chemical level, life is cellular automata with chemicals, which give way to cells, and complex structures and human beings.
Corporate pop does the same fucking shit the godless AI does. People don’t sing, they don’t give a shit, and it’s just there as another piece of slop for idiots to fucking consume. It works in a similar way to the AI; it catches onto patterns, digid bullshit defined by someone more clue that says “hey, the millenial whoop is popular this decade, cram it into the songs we’re releasing for fiscal quarter 3”. “this year’s hot rhythmn is the reggeton clave, shove that in”. Then the zillionaire that teenage girls somehow get 1k dollars in order to see goes on stage , dances a bit and DOESN’T EVEN FUCKING SING.
The AI does the same shit “Oh, the guy put in sad, make it pianos and minor chords”. But now it’s not about fucking opinion, it’s a fucking abomination that must be extinguished. “It all sounds like slop” My brother in christ, have you heard 80s pop music?
It’s the same fucking pattern.
“oh noz, the AI is putting the real musicians out of bidness” Yeah, corporate pop doesn’t do anything like that. That’s why the greatest composers of our modern era have to manage touring schedules with working real fucking jobs and making losses on their tours, becuase fuck me, my opinion is worth fucking nothing. It’s the same thing. Fucking DJ sets are walking around using synths instead of analog instruments, but that wasn’t the crime putting honest musicians out of business, no, it’s the fucking guy in india typing in a generic description into sumo ai to turn a quick buck.
How do fake bands dominate spotify when regular ones don’t? It’s easy; corporate business practices mean that the business side of music (or any endevour, let’s fucking face it) is a zillion times more important than the actual musician aspect of music.
If this sounds like I’m on the side of AI; it’s not. The point is that it’s been too late for fucking decades, acting outraged about what’s happening now because it uses new tech is blaming the statistic department for rises in heatwaves.
Uebercomplicated@lemmy.ml 4 days ago
I wholeheartedly agree with you for the most part, but one thing confuses me. You say
Fucking DJ sets are walking around using synths instead of analog instruments […]
Synthesizers can be both analog or digital. Neither is even remotely comparable to AI music, as there is still a very real composer. Is this a typo/misunderstanding? Thanks for clarification!
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
just trying to contrast the use of synths to replace musicians that would have to perform with the DJ. Or drum machines, or whatever.
I wasn’t trying to contrast analog/digital synths, just “fake” instruments to “real” ones.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 days ago
I can still feel some kind of emotion through it. The emotion may just be greed, but it’s at least something. AI generated music doesn’t even have the soul of slime. It gives nothing. It feels like nothing. It’s completely empty and hollow instead of just mostly.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I can still feel some kind of emotion through it.
Ok, I’m pretty sure seeing a sunset behind a forest will also give you a kind of emotion as well. Who is the artist there?
Art is like a greasy mirror, there may be some intent there by the artist, but mostly you see yourself and your own feelings in the work.
Also, the AI generated music doesn’t come from nothing, someone is communicating an idea to the computer which then, based on as much human music as it has consumed, tries to give back something that sounds like what the original person intended. it’s not just a magic “music button”.
So with the AI music, there’s an expression and emotion you can feel coming from the original person (alongside the thousands of other people whose work has been fed into the machine)
If you don’t like it sure.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 days ago
I’m pretty sure seeing a sunset behind a forest will also give you a kind of emotion as well. Who is the artist there?
I did not say it gives me emotions. I am a super empathy; I can feel the emotion put into the work from the artist. AI created shit completely lacks anything to empathize.
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sure, whatever. I don’t think that you can tell the difference in a blind test, especially with instrumental music or something like Kraftwerk, but I am willing to assume your subjective sensations are subjective.
Even in that circumstance, the point isn’t that the AI music is “Just as good” it’s “people have been shoveling feelingless, useless slop for decades, and when the audience freaks out about AI being shitty, it rings hollow”.
rmic@lemmy.world 4 days ago
The main difference is that AI can’t be innovative at all
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Corporate pop has never been innovative; at it’s most Avant Garde it takes experimental aesthetics and crams them into tin pan alley song structures.
mang0@lemmy.zip 4 days ago
Agreed. Ultra commercial music has always existed. With AI, the threshold to creating it is simply much lower. There’s nothing magic about music just because it’s created by a human, they are very capable of producing bland and uninteresting music too.
shiftymccool@programming.dev 4 days ago
I listened to whatever that is for a full minute and it was literally a long screeching note the whole time… Wtf is it supposed to be? Music?
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Great, it fucked up. I have heard other people complain about this when I used it as an example, but I JUST NOW heard it too. Fucking whatever. If you actually care try again a few times. If you don’t whatever.
Sergio@slrpnk.net 4 days ago
Reminds me of this NYT video about how a pop song is made: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaAv5AiBRgY
At the beginning, a musician at a keyboard composes the basic tune. Then a whole series of MFers overproduce it to hell. At the end, the original musician happens to meet the singer who did the human part of the final rendering and is the “star” who everybody watches perform. In a better day, the original musician would be the star, but in this process they are insignificant.