[HN Gopher] Bach to the Future - Humanising Music with Neural Ne...
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Bach to the Future - Humanising Music with Neural Nets (2019)
Author : ash
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-01-03 10:39 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (futurice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (futurice.com)
| fxtentacle wrote:
| TLDR: They use a small LSTM model to predict the velocity and
| delay that a human player might have for each piano keypress
| based on the MIDI notes.
| tgv wrote:
| Unfortunately, that makes you lose the style. It's an enjoyable
| read, if a bit long, but it's easy to skim the details.
|
| For those wondering about other musical signatures:
| Shostakovich signed with D Es C H (Dmitri SCHostakowitsch, the
| German transcription of his name).
| chank wrote:
| > Bach to the Future - Humanising Music with Neural Nets
|
| Poor taste in title, IMO.
| anamexis wrote:
| Why?
| CharlesW wrote:
| Too soon!
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| Do you really need or want a NN for this?
|
| Wouldn't it be better to parametrize the agility of the various
| fingers, wrist and arms and then use a deterministic algorithm
| with a sprinkle of randomness to calculate how delayed the
| various notes are? This way you could even simulate someone
| getting tired throughout the performance!
| PeterisP wrote:
| That would work iff the velocity and timing would be determined
| by the agility of the various fingers, wrist and arms; however,
| those only specify the limits of the possible and the actual
| velocity and timing largely represent the pianist's musical
| interpretation of the piece, and we don't know of a good
| deterministic algorithm for that - the best we can do is to
| analyze a large quantity of music (e.g. by a NN) to determine
| what that algorithm should be.
| AstixAndBelix wrote:
| But musical interpretation is something you develop from your
| education and your lived experiences. It is meaningless to
| agglomerate the interpretations of thousands of pianists from
| an artistic perspective.
|
| If you want to simulate human physical limits then model the
| muscle agility, not the interpretation
| PeterisP wrote:
| There is no intent to simulate human physical limits, the
| goal of "Humanization" of MIDI music or musical notation is
| to provide an output that sounds "better" and more "human-
| like" than the default (very bad sounding) option of
| playing the notes at the exact timing and velocity that
| only follows the explicit notation (e.g. forte or
| crescendo) and is otherwise uniform.
|
| Attempts to agglomerate the interpretations of thousands of
| pianists from an artistic perspective can be used to
| provide a better-sounding outcome than pure random
| variation (the simplest 'humanizer' algorithms in various
| tools) or a deterministic algorithm with hand-crafted
| heuristics, so they are useful and meaningful because of
| that.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| But why strive to humanize something mechanical? Why
| pretend it's as if a human played it? Why exclude rather
| than plug in some human in the form of collaboration? I'm
| a bit dismayed with the current direction, tools are no
| longer developed for humans to use but for humans to be
| excluded. I hope it's a temporary direction because if
| this becomes a general trend in the future it will be
| depressing for humanity. Many more things will seek to be
| 'humanized' while actual humans will be few and far
| between
| PeterisP wrote:
| Because it sounds better in many contexts, and people who
| use tools to make music or parts of it (e.g. drum
| machines, automatic accompaniment, electronic music,
| synthesis of instrumental parts) want these parts to
| sound good, so 'humanization' has been a key feature of
| these tools for decades. The concept is not new, it's
| widely used and widely accepted - the article is simply
| about how modern tools can do it slightly better than
| before.
|
| It's perfectly normal for someone to want to, for
| example, use a drum machine instead of needing the
| collaboration of a human drummer - not needing
| collaboration lowers the barrier of entry and opens up
| possibilities of independent creativity.
|
| It's also perfectly normal for someone composing an
| orchestra-like part for some project to be able to
| synthesize that without actually needing to involve (and
| pay for) a full orchestra of musicians. The orchestra
| might be able to interpret the score _better_ and play
| the parts better than the synthetic instruments, so for
| large-scale projects this extra effort and cost often is
| appropriate, but not for all projects.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| I do make music and am aware of what humanize means in
| terms of arpeggiators and sequencers: not too great but
| okay and leaving room for my own input. From a tool like
| that to to a tool making a 'perfect' humanized sounding
| is quite a step forward in making the human redundant.
| Where are my options as an artist other than pick a few
| options from a bucket of the trained AI? I understand the
| allure to making everyone able to compose music, sing,
| draw, paint and do all kinds of artful things at the
| click of a button with zero time spent understanding the
| space too well, it is indeed very attractive idea...
| rch wrote:
| Maybe with reservoir computing methods?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've been working off-and-on on a closely related problem: to
| figure out for a given handspan what the right fingering for a
| piece is. This is not simple, or, at least, it isn't simple for
| me.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Coolest thing I've read this year, acknowledging it's from a few
| years back. A number of interesting lessons, in terms of both
| machine learning and music.
|
| I hope we don't replace human performers, even if and when we
| can. Live performance rather than recordings needs to be
| prioritized by listeners. And acoustic, non-autotuned only!
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