1. Being able to have the AI fill in a track in the song, but use the whole song as input to figure out what to generate. Ideally for drums this would be a combination of individual drum hits, effects and midi so I'm able to tweak it after generation. If it used the Ableton effects and drum rack then that would be perfect.
2. Take my singing and make it both sound great and like any combination of great singers (e.g. give me a bit of Taylor Swift combined with Cat Power)
I've had a play with the style transfer between singers (bullet point 2 above) but when I last tried it, it was garbage in / garbage out, and my singing is garbage.
What I don't want: To just generate a whole song. Adobe does this style of assistive AI well in the photo editing space but no one seems to have brought it to audio yet.
It's a far cry from having a real drummer, but it works in a pinch.
If it could do that it'd give the tweakability it needs, but I think it would basically involve training a model for each instrument.
Fine-tuned on pure rap data to create an AI system specialized in rap generation Expected capabilities include AI rap battles and narrative expression through rap Rap has exceptional storytelling and expressive capabilities, offering extraordinary application potential
Using a certain other music generator I got it to accidentally say ***. It said it with a Latino American accent too.
In fact for whatever reason this tool couldn’t use a typical AAVE voice. Just Sage Francis / Atmosphere like dictionary raps and a few Latino American ones.
A big limitation of AI sloop is it tries to not offend anyone.
Art that can’t even try to offend is barely art.
That tends to be very true of major commercially-hosted and proprietary systems, and true (but somewhat less and less consistently so) of open foundation models from corporations and big labs, but community models (including community fine tunes of big-vendor open models) much less so. This is very visible in LLMs, image models, and video models right now.
Rap (and even music more generally) models don't have as much attention right now, but I suspect if/as they get more attention and community use the same dynamic is likely to emerge.
I do not believe that offense is a necessary or sufficient component of art. If I raise my middle finger at someone, that is not art, but rather offense. If I view Botticelli's Primavera, I'm looking at art, and I detect no intent to offend, nor do I take offense.
There is certainly room for offense within art: the iambic poetry of Archilochus and Hipponax manages to blend aesthetic beauty with ardent invective. But I do not think that art needs or is defined by offense. Offense is accidental to art as a concept.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primavera_(Botticelli)
If it's described as controversial, it obviously offended someone if not today, in the past.
Good art is secondary to avoiding some journalist writing a hit piece about how they used your company’s AI generator to depict Hitler saying the gamer word.
Shall it continue in an unholy loop until the end of time ?
It can challenge the old standards, it can push genres into new places.
AI music can’t. It’s too safe.
https://youtu.be/lI1LCfTx2lI?t=525
There is also Kits.ai https://www.kits.ai/tools/ai-instruments
Something like this maybe, doing the virtual instruments (VST/VSTI) review for saxophone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909398
Result: A generic pop-rock song without riffs or blast beats. Not even power metal or corset core, let alone anything even slightly resembling Black Metal.
Yup. Still doing what I expect from AI music.
I really wish people could make better diagrams.
Puh tss puh tss Kshhh ff kshhh ff Bmm tkk bmm tkk Drr-dr-d-d-dt
I’m similarly hyped and iffy. If you could have a model that listens to a looping segment to contextualize it, and then play with other patterns on top but through a more expressive way (or even humming/singing and allowing the LLM of sorts to compose it together), that could be interesting. Would it be panned for being AI-assisted? I’d hope not, I think?
“I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record. I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.”
We just add AI in whatever forms it takes to the list I suppose.
The main genre of music I listen to is electronic.
Many electronic songs are written to evoke a specific feeling, without meaningful lyrics.
When I produce electronic music, I have no particular lyrics or composition in mind.
I just fiddle around with different sound layers going for a particular "vibe" and mash things together until they sound good to me.
I see AI as another tool to expedite this process.
This is a good read on photography and art. Note that the rhetoric sounds almost identical to today's AI rhetoric.
“If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally." - Charles Baudelaire
https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...
I don't think AI is a threat to actual art at all. If I want art, I explicitly do not want slop churned out of a model. I want something created by a human being to communicate something. That's the entire point.
Some around here will argue that there have been double blind tests showing that people sometimes can't tell the difference between AI output and human art. That is missing the point too. Knowing who the artist is is part of the artistic experience. If someone deepfake calls you with a model imitating your friend, is it the same as talking to your friend? The parasociality of art is part of it.
It may -- as photography did with portraiture -- be a threat to some of the ways that artists make a living, and I do understand the pushback from that. Back before photography a lot of painters made a living being cameras, and all that work dried up pretty fast. Today AI is replacing all the "filler" churned out by artists. The only silver lining I guess is that artists generally hate this work and it never paid well.
Another thing I expect to happen is: actual AI art. I don't think this has happened yet. There has not yet been an AI equivalent of the Pictoralists.
AI art is art if the AI is used by a human being as a tool to communicate what art communicates, to do what art does. Art, I guess, does many things. It entertains, informs in a way, but also communicates matters of the emotional and spiritual aspect of human existence -- of consciousness -- that can't be communicated well in other ways. If someone uses AI as a tool to do that, it's art.
A lot of what we see today coming out of AI models is I think correctly called "slop" because it is not that. There's no artistic intention or craft behind it.
BTW I'd argue that "slop" exists in the realm of music, literature, painting, and other arts made with traditional methods too. For centuries there's been low-effort smutty pulp fiction, crappy imitative pop music, and gimmicky low-effort painting. Those things are slop made with lower-tech tools. A pretentious gimmicky painting where someone threw some paint at a wall has less artistic merit than a photograph that someone composed with care to communicate something.
Edit: people said this about writing too!
https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...
I'm not bashing people for being skeptical of AI and worrying about its effects on the arts. There are, like I said, very valid points, especially about the ability of artists to make a living and the effect AI "slop" can have on the population. I just think we have been here before, many times.
You narrowed down the important aspect: personal freedom. It's not about AI, or cameras, or samplers, or synthesizers, or automated this or that, it's about giving people the freedom to do an activity how they want. It's terribly sad that others cry for the removal of this freedom and brand it as some noble cause.
People all over the world are making great art. How do I find it in an ocean of human-made mediocrity and now AI-churned slop? How do we discover new artists?
I sometimes go looking for new writers and new music. It's very time consuming. I'll spend hours and hours to find maybe one new piece I like. Most of that time is sifting through stuff that's just unremarkable.
Social media used to help, but now social media is just a flood of dreck.
AI is making this problem worse, but not exactly for the reason the AI bashers say. It's not that AI makes art obsolete or that AI can't be used to make real art. It's the AI makes it so easy to make dreck, it's flooding the zone even more.
I’ve written instrumental/electronic music, too. When I do, it means something to me. The last thing I want is for an AI to make it for me.
Controversy and debate do not have to be offensive or even acrimonious, and controversies can arise around a subject like a painting without arising because of any offense given in the painting.
Offense doesn't need to mean that it's meant to shock.
I suspect most mainstream AI art generators would refuse to replicate it. Doing so would "offend" the original art.
But a human artist could, perhaps a talented woman flips the gender.
Humans will always be able to challenge us in ways AIs can't.
At home and around close friends I often speak in AAVE. It's apart of my culture and at a core level, me.
When an AI rap generator decides it can't do AAVE, it's saying the very identity that created rap in the first place is offense. I don't expect a masterpiece like Illmatic, but I've yet to hear anything decent from an AI rap generator.
https://suno.com/s/5bXmu47Iv1o0xR9U
The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky) has entered the chat!
And if that's not offensive enough, Music in Similar Motion by Glass, or Metal Machine Music by Pat Metheny or any of Glenn Branca's "guitar symphonies" will likely do the job for most people.
Or anything 4/4 in some areas at a certain time.
Pat Metheny - Zero Tolerance for Silence