[HN Gopher] Eleven Music
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Eleven Music
        
       Author : meetpateltech
       Score  : 145 points
       Date   : 2025-08-05 15:42 UTC (7 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (elevenlabs.io)
 (TXT) w3m dump (elevenlabs.io)
        
       | abdullahkhalids wrote:
       | OT: Has anyone tried the opposite - ask AI to listen to music and
       | determine the notes or chords being played? Or watch someone
       | playing an instrument and give a textual output of what
       | notes/chords they are playing.
        
         | thepryz wrote:
         | There's a ton. Haven't used any personally. AnthemScore,
         | ScoreCloud, Melody Scanner are just a few I found after a quick
         | search.
        
           | abdullahkhalids wrote:
           | I think these are all using old machine learning techniques
           | and not the modern transformer based architectures that
           | underlie LLMs. These tools won't be able to match the
           | abilities of an expert musician replicating a song by
           | listening to a live recording of it. Check this video channel
           | where they ask professional drummers to replicate a song
           | after only one listen [1].
           | 
           | [1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=drummer+repl
           | ica...
        
         | magicmicah85 wrote:
         | I would love this! There's a song I like by a band that broke
         | up in 2013 and I am transcribing it by watching a live
         | performance they did and trying my best but realizing I'm
         | trying to take a mandolin/guitar and put it to acoustic. Even
         | just being able to do a similar rendition would be nice by
         | telling the AI "hey, do a twist on this and give me the
         | chords/tabs".
        
           | sorrythanks wrote:
           | what's the song??
        
             | magicmicah85 wrote:
             | It's called Ark in a Flood by Churchill. There's the studio
             | recorded version here:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhBHxWrXQT8
             | 
             | And then I found this live version here that I'm studying:
             | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPQZsp59szo
        
         | neonnoodle wrote:
         | No, that would be useful, and as such AI is incapable of doing
         | it.
        
           | KerrAvon wrote:
           | LLMs can do this well, though, and there are such. They
           | weren't calling themselves AI when I last looked a couple of
           | years ago, but I'll bet any of them looking for VC money have
           | rebranded since.
        
         | nemo1618 wrote:
         | I'm very interested in this too. We're beginning to see models
         | that can deeply understand a single image, or an audio
         | recording of human speech, but I haven't seen any models that
         | can deeply understand music. I would love to see an AI system
         | that can iteratively explore musical ideas the same way Claude
         | Code can iterate on code.
        
         | lioeters wrote:
         | Reminds me of an example in a similar direction, where AI was
         | used for audio processing to filter out everything except a
         | person's voice. If I remember right, it was able to focus on
         | different people in a crowded room. It might have been also for
         | music, to pick out an instrument and listen to it, filtering
         | out the rest of the band.
        
         | ethan_smith wrote:
         | There are several tools that do this already - AnthemScore,
         | Spleeter, CREPE, and even Google's AudioLM can transcribe music
         | to MIDI with varying accuracy depending on instrument
         | complexity and audio quality.
        
         | ElectricalTears wrote:
         | A while ago (maybe a year) I asked chatgpt to make a guitar tab
         | from a song that had no available tabs and it worked
         | surprisingly well.
        
         | krat0sprakhar wrote:
         | I use https://moises.ai/ multiple times a week for practicing /
         | figuring out chords being played. For the notes (say in a
         | guitar riff), I dont know if such a thing exists
        
           | abdullahkhalids wrote:
           | Being able to isolate instruments, if it works well, is
           | already a pretty big achievement.
        
         | TuringNYC wrote:
         | I did this for my graduate capstone (https://www.deepjams.com/)
         | We extracted chord progressions from existing music you would
         | upload and then riffed based on those chords. there are open
         | source libraries for this.
        
       | bigfishrunning wrote:
       | Having a machine-learning algorithm crank out generic music seems
       | like peak dystopia to me
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | Is it more or less dystopia than an army of musicians trying to
         | eke a living out of creating stuff like this
         | (https://www.chosic.com/free-music/presentation/) to go behind
         | your company's PowerPoint about how its Q3 woodchip sales
         | didn't quite exceed expectations?
         | 
         | Maybe the fundamental issue is that this _shouldn 't_ compete
         | with a human picking up a guitar and having fun with it, and
         | the only reason it does is because we keep tying questions like
         | "survival" to whether someone can make woodchip earnings
         | reports less boring to read instead of trying some other way to
         | be a community?
        
           | bigfishrunning wrote:
           | Why does a powerpoint about woodchip sales need music? Also,
           | I don't see how anyone is making a living on the royalty-free
           | music you linked, unless there's some business model I'm not
           | understanding.
        
             | shadowgovt wrote:
             | > Why does a powerpoint about woodchip sales need music?
             | 
             | So the audience doesn't get bored.
        
         | whoamii wrote:
         | Wait until someone auto tunes an AI generated song.
        
           | ccozan wrote:
           | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Heroes_(novel) ?
           | 
           | visionary!
        
         | lc9er wrote:
         | Just wait until the rush of commenters that insist you're wrong
         | about being offended that they want to automate and commodify
         | every aspect of your life.
        
           | rpdillon wrote:
           | Made this point elsewhere, but the music industry has been on
           | a downward slide towards making music as cheaply as possible
           | for some time now.
           | 
           | If you look at Taylor Swift's first 12 number one hits, each
           | of them was written by a different writer. Compare that to
           | bands from 30 years ago, many of whom wrote and recorded all
           | the songs themselves.
           | 
           | Labels don't sign rock bands anymore because actually
           | recording a rock band well in a studio is 10x the cost of
           | just using a sampler and a single artist singing. I know
           | folks want to blame AI, but it's really just enabling the
           | latest iteration of this trend.
           | 
           | I'm not defending the whole thing. It's a shame, and I love
           | going back and listening to my old Rush albums. But AI is not
           | the problem here. It's the incentives.
        
             | Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote:
             | Who wrote the last 12 Taylor Swift hits?
        
           | satyrun wrote:
           | Machine-learning for audio is just a different form of audio
           | synthesis.
           | 
           | That is not the issue. The issue is how incredibly generic
           | the music is.
           | 
           | It also doesn't let you combine genres to make really strange
           | sounds like audioLM can do.
           | 
           | This is just another Muzak generator like they use to play at
           | Dennys. As generic music as possible to the appeal to the
           | most average of average listener.
           | 
           | I think you really need to train your own model if you want
           | to explore creative sound design or algorithmic composition.
           | It just isn't going to be a mass market product worth venture
           | capital money.
        
       | thepryz wrote:
       | Maybe I'm a Luddite, but this seems like it will just lead to
       | music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I
       | say it, soul.
        
         | crazydoggers wrote:
         | I think you just described pop music
        
           | thepryz wrote:
           | It's easy and popular to hate on pop music, but even pop
           | music has value and requires a certain skill to understand
           | what resonates with people.
           | 
           | This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all
           | music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then
           | click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure
           | out a way to either market the music or just game search and
           | digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or
           | slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and
           | repeat.
        
             | colechristensen wrote:
             | >music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or
             | dare I say it, soul.
             | 
             | This phrase though could be plunked down at any point in
             | the last hundred years and you'd find someone making it.
             | 
             | About autotune or electric guitars or rock or jazz or punk
             | or disco or Philp Glass or Stravinsky... one could go on
             | for a long time.
        
               | thepryz wrote:
               | You'll always have naysayers, but I think there's a
               | difference between someone who doesn't understand or
               | share the appeal of rock or jazz or an artist like Philip
               | Glass where music is made by someone choosing what notes
               | to play, what rhythms, what words and the music that
               | comes out of a statistical model.
               | 
               | You can't tell me that Philip Glass didn't understand or
               | agonize over the music when creating it. The creative
               | process is vastly different and that's my point.
               | 
               | Oh course, there will be artists who use AI in new and
               | creative ways, someone like Brian Transeau who routinely
               | codes tools for creating electronic music. but for most
               | artists, I fear it will just lead to mindless button
               | clicking and prompt manipulation until it's formulaic
               | because the base model is the same. Or it will result in
               | fewer people learning instruments or music theory and
               | truly experimenting with things that haven't been done
               | before.
               | 
               | I see AI as having great potential in both art and
               | productivity but maybe it's just that I don't trust
               | people to use it responsibly. We're inherently lazy and
               | easily distracted by anything that will give us that
               | dopamine fix.
        
             | shadowgovt wrote:
             | The current solution for creating the kind of music this
             | tool can back-fill is to go on a site like "Free music for
             | presentations" and click line after line after line after
             | line of 10-second samples hoping to find one that "vibes"
             | with you.
             | 
             | If anything, this is a lateral move.
        
         | darth_avocado wrote:
         | A lot of criticism of AI in music seems to be around the lack
         | of originality and it being generic slop. But unfortunately
         | that's true for pretty much the entire music industry. Handful
         | of people write songs for all the artists, "artists" don't
         | create the songs as much as they perform them, most of the
         | music isn't created but rather sampled or is "inspired" by
         | other music and pretty much most of the artists sound like
         | other artists.
         | 
         | Yes there are smaller creators who are trying to make something
         | net new, but unfortunately 99.9% of the small artists are also
         | derivative and lack originality.
         | 
         | I see AI music as just continuation of the sad state of the
         | industry at the moment. Hopefully it accelerates the demise of
         | the industry as we know it and restarts the cycle of creation.
        
           | feoren wrote:
           | None of that is new, but there were ways for the genuinely
           | new, inspired, and genius to actually shine through before.
           | It was hard, but possible. Humanity is making decisions that
           | make that even harder: AI music, Spotify's revenue model,
           | etc. They're all to the benefit of cookie-cutter slop (AI or
           | human-made) over creativity.
           | 
           | This wouldn't necessarily be a problem as long as people were
           | still free to create on their own. But instead, everyone is
           | forced to spend more hours in menial bullshit jobs for less
           | and less (relative) pay just to survive. Give everyone enough
           | resources to live at least a simple life, and both human
           | creativity and AI creativity can blossom at the same time.
           | But of course that means fewer yachts and hookers and drugs
           | for the billionaires, so it is verboten.
        
       | mixologic wrote:
       | Well, so much for culture. Every use case where you can plausibly
       | use AI generated music removes one more method that provided an
       | avenue to a reasonable career making music.
        
         | static_void wrote:
         | But at least there are jobs in tech!
         | 
         | Oh wait.
        
         | pimeys wrote:
         | One more avenue of making something creative...
        
       | recursive wrote:
       | > Studio-grade
       | 
       | The vocals are definitely not that.
        
       | two-sandwich wrote:
       | If you consider that Entertainment gives the viewer what they
       | want, and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here
       | is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or
       | satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.
       | 
       | The tech here is fantastic. I love that such things are possible
       | now and they're an exciting frontier in creation.
       | 
       | It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic
       | human-music with indescribably lifeless properties. I'm not an
       | artist, so I don't feel personally attacked. Much like image gen,
       | this seems to be aimed at replacing the bare-minimum artist
       | (visual or auditory) with a "fill in the blanks" entertainment
       | piece.
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | Tech is tech. What you create with the tech can be art.
        
           | bix6 wrote:
           | These feels different than experimenting with a new synth or
           | something though. It's just feeding a sentence to the model.
        
             | altruios wrote:
             | 'Just' is a loaded word here.
             | 
             | In image gen: comfyUI gives a node-based workflow that
             | gives a lot of room for 'creative' control, of mixing, and
             | mathematically combining masks, filters, and prompts (and
             | starting images / noise {at any node in that process}).
             | 
             | I would expect the same interface for audio to emerge for
             | 'power users'.
        
             | kingstnap wrote:
             | I draw a very sharp line: curating the outputs and crafting
             | the sentence is enough to make it art. If neither of those
             | happen, it's just slop.
             | 
             | It's actually a bit like photography. A bunch of randomly
             | taken pictures piled together is not art. It needs to be
             | done with purpose and refinement.
             | 
             | Basically, in my own opinion, art [?] a function of
             | technical difficulty.
             | 
             | Art = Curation, Refinement, and Taste
        
               | fruitworks wrote:
               | Curation, refinement and taste is practicially worthless
               | on its own. The technical difficulty of art is the
               | investment that makes it worth considering.
               | 
               | So if you are right, then art will pretty much be
               | worthless in the future. You can just iterate over the
               | search space defined by "good taste" and produce an
               | infinite amount of good art for no work.
        
               | kingstnap wrote:
               | Curation is not worthless. It's the exact opposite, in
               | the abundance of stuff, it's extremely valuable.
               | 
               | Search is not free, and it can never be free. What
               | happens when search gets easier and easier is that your
               | demands for quality and curation will get higher until
               | all time saved in search efficiency is spent on search
               | breadth.
        
               | blargey wrote:
               | Disagree that curation and prompts adds artistry (dense
               | intent reflected in the output) to AI generations.
               | 
               | "Curation" in AI can only surface the curator's local
               | maxima among a tiny and arbitrary grab-bag of seed
               | integers they checked among the space of 2^64 options;
               | it's statistically skewed 99% towards the model's whims
               | rather than anyone's unique intent or taste.
               | 
               | Prompt crafting is likewise terribly low fidelity since
               | it's a constant battle with the model's idiosyncratic
               | interpretation of the text, plus arbitrary perturbations
               | that aren't actually correlated with the writer's
               | supposed intent. And lord spare me the "high quality high
               | resolution ultra detailed photorealistic trending on
               | artstation" type prompts that amount to a zero-intent
               | plea for "more gooder". And when pursuing artistry, using
               | artist names / LORAs are a _meta-abandonment_ of personal
               | direction, abdicating artistic control and responsibility
               | to a model 's idea of another artist's idea of what
               | should be done.
               | 
               | Fancier workflows generally only multiply this prompt-
               | and-curate process across regions/iterations, so can't
               | add much because they're multiplying a tiny fraction by a
               | fixed factor.
        
               | kingstnap wrote:
               | I agree with you on the idea of prompts and seeds leaving
               | much to be desired. So that's why I think more
               | sophisticated steering is necessary.
               | 
               | The models' latent space is extremely powerful, but you
               | get hamstrung into the text encoders whims when you do
               | things through a prompt interface. In particular, you've
               | hit exactly an issue I have with current LLMs in general
               | in that they are locked into wors and concepts that
               | others have defined (labelings of points in the latent
               | space).
               | 
               | Wishy washy thinking: I'd be nice if there were some sort
               | of Turing complete lambda calculus sort of way to prompt
               | these models instead. Where you can define new terms,
               | create expressions, and loops and recursion or something.
               | 
               | It would sort of be like how SVGs are "intent complete"
               | and undeniably art, but instead of vector graphics, it is
               | an SVG like model prompt.
        
             | CamperBob2 wrote:
             | "It's just pushing a button on the camera."
        
               | anigbrowl wrote:
               | This is a stupid argument, because even with the most
               | automatic camera you have to point it at something and
               | make a decision about what to frame in. AI music is more
               | like buying a bunch of old unlabelled records from a
               | bargain bin and then praising yourself whenever one of
               | them turns out to be worth listening to.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | Of course it's a stupid argument, but it's _exactly_ what
               | the ancestors of today 's AI naysayers said when
               | photography became practical.
               | 
               | Then again, it's possible for an art form to exhaust its
               | own possibilities. To the extent that "prompt
               | engineering" is sufficient to generate any music or
               | artwork we have in mind, that seems like an indication
               | that we've reached that point. To the extent that it's
               | _not_ sufficient, that seems like an indication that
               | there 's still interesting stuff left to do.
               | 
               | Either way, if you are hoping that things will stay the
               | same, then I'm afraid that neither art nor technology are
               | good career choices.
        
         | kelseyfrog wrote:
         | Art is a framing device largely independent of the content.
         | It's how we get Fountain[1], Piss Christ[2], Comedian[3],
         | Mother![4], 4'33"[5], and Seedbed[6] to name a few among
         | countless others. To claim that AI content is incapable of
         | being framed as art is nonsense when we have example after
         | example of the diversity of what art can be. Let's remember,
         | bad art is still art.
         | 
         | 1. Marcel Duchamp. 1917
         | 
         | 2. Andres Serrano. 1987
         | 
         | 3. Maurizio Cattelan. 2019
         | 
         | 4. Darren Aronofsky. 2017
         | 
         | 5. John Cage. 1952
         | 
         | 6. Vito Acconci. 1972
        
           | fruitworks wrote:
           | If that was true, then the development of a new urinal
           | factory would have the same impact on art as the development
           | of a new AI art models.
           | 
           | The framing is dependent on the content
        
             | kelseyfrog wrote:
             | Framings require creators; they don't arise spontaneously.
             | Someone could turn a urinal factory into art, but art
             | doesn't validate itself. Belief alone in artistic
             | essentialism doesn't make it so.
        
               | fruitworks wrote:
               | That's such a great pile of bullcrap, you could frame it
               | and hang it up in a museum!
               | 
               | The point I'm making is that a unique framing only
               | results in a single piece of worthwhile conceptual art.
               | You can't have an infinite factory of ducamp's fountain.
               | What makes the piece worthwhile is that it was an
               | original idea.
               | 
               | Conceptual art is different from decorational art in this
               | sense. The AI music is a largely a homogenous synthesis
               | of existing works. The AI "art" is decorational, not
               | conceptual art. You could make an arrangement of AI art
               | that is conceptual, but how many arrangements can you
               | make that are actually worthwhile conceptually if AI art
               | is generally homogenous?
               | 
               | It's like asking how many worthwhile works of conceptual
               | art can you produce with a urinal factory that makes
               | identical clones of the same urinal? 0 to 1.
               | 
               | And besides, it's not nessisarially true that all
               | framings have creators. Nature is an example of a system
               | that cultivates and curates a certain type of life
               | without any rational process.
        
               | kelseyfrog wrote:
               | I don't disagree that being novel has it's place in
               | framing art, and I still believe that a Fountain Factory
               | could certainly be framed as art.
               | 
               | To your other point, sorry, but artistic/aesthetic
               | essentialism hasn't been serious position for at least a
               | hundred years.
               | 
               | As long as there is a perceiver, there is a frame.
               | 
               | The idea that nature is intrinsically beautiful _is_ a
               | frame. It 's fine to hold that but it shouldn't be
               | confused with not having a frame.
        
               | recursive wrote:
               | There's a difference between a factory that _is_ art vs a
               | factory that _produces_ art.
               | 
               | There's only one factory, and the concept works only
               | once.
        
               | kelseyfrog wrote:
               | Mass-produced art is still art as long as people frame it
               | as such and all indication suggests that they do.
        
               | recursive wrote:
               | I have some mass-produced art on my wall. But it's
               | definitely not conceptual art, as some ancestor post was
               | discussing.
        
         | ronsor wrote:
         | The fact that these models have so many people irritated like
         | there's sand in their pants is enough proof that they're
         | pushing boundaries and making some uncomfortable.
        
           | fruitworks wrote:
           | the boundaries of unemployment perhaps
        
             | omnimus wrote:
             | boundaries of copyright
        
           | thefaux wrote:
           | Yes, because the people pushing the boundaries do not
           | understand the value of the thing they are trying to
           | commoditize. If they did, they wouldn't be trying to
           | commoditize it. There is a pervasive attitude among
           | technologists that they can improve things they don't
           | understand through technological efficiency. They are wrong
           | in this case and getting appropriate pushback.
           | 
           | Personally, music is sacred for me so making money is not a
           | part of my process. I am not worried about job loss. But I am
           | worried about the cultural malaise that emerges from the
           | natural passivity of industrial scale consumerism.
        
             | nonhaver wrote:
             | Well put and reflects my thoughts exactly. It's borderline
             | concerning there are people who consume this type of media
             | by choice and forethought.
        
               | CamperBob2 wrote:
               | And they consume it without checking with you first.
               | That's got to be the worst part.
        
           | Levitz wrote:
           | Not every boundary is worth pushing.
           | 
           | I'm hoping it will eventually become better, or maybe I
           | haven't quite seen stuff prompted properly yet, but all I've
           | heard coming from an AI feels _aggressively_ mediocre and
           | average, not in a  "bad" way but in the "optimizing towards
           | being palatable to the average person" way. Like the perfect
           | McDonalds meal that the algorithm has found out can be 30%
           | sawdust and still feel appetizing. I don't want that boundary
           | being pushed. I feel we will live in a worse world if we do.
        
             | recursive wrote:
             | Besides the point, but I think that's basically what
             | happened to Subway.
        
           | sorushn wrote:
           | Epstein, the ultimate pusher of boundaries.
        
         | moritzwarhier wrote:
         | > Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art
         | intends to challenge
         | 
         | This is a fruitless and snobby dichotomy that was attempted so
         | many times in human history, and it makes no sense.
         | 
         | There will always be art made for success and/or money, but
         | drawing a line is futile.
         | 
         | Handel used to be a bit like a pop musician.
         | 
         | And intellectual snobbishness or noble ideas do not make art
         | more valuable.
         | 
         | A kid singing Wonderwall can be art, too. As can be a depressed
         | person recording experimental field sounds.
         | 
         | Feel free to call art bad, but assuming an obvious and clear
         | separation between art and entertainment is the exact opposite
         | of the spirit that enables people to make or appreciate art, in
         | whatever form, culture or shape.
        
           | viccis wrote:
           | >Handel used to be a bit like a pop musician.
           | 
           | Handel was never a "bit like a pop musician." This
           | fundamentally misunderstands how music during his time,
           | mostly funded and enjoyed under religion and wealthy
           | patronage contexts, was listened to. Mostly only the wealthy
           | listened to his works, and those elite audiences were prone
           | to viciously enforcing stylistic norms. The only real way the
           | working class heard his works were in the occasional public
           | concert and occasionally in church. At no point in any of
           | these settings was there a lack of stylistic gatekeeping or
           | snobbery.
           | 
           | I know this kind of nihilistic "everything is good, I guess,
           | good doesn't even mean anything" attitude is popular in some
           | spaces, but this lack of standards or gatekeeping in favor of
           | a tasteless desire for increasing slop production regardless
           | of quality is how we got poptimism and the current state of
           | music. No longer is there any taste making, just taste
           | _production_ via algorithms.
           | 
           | Sometimes we need a bit of snobbery to separate the wheat
           | from the chaff, and being a gatekeeping snob against AI music
           | is what our current day and age needs more of!
        
             | Krasnol wrote:
             | Well, in the end, the only thing this snobbery does is that
             | it makes you look/sound old.
             | 
             | Nobody cares. I've heard the same thing when electronic
             | music came up. The old ones couldn't stop complaining about
             | this "computer music" where nobody does real handwork
             | anymore.
             | 
             | I see it as democratisation of art. Everybody can do it now
             | and this is a good thing.
             | 
             | Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what
             | comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on
             | reddit. Things people came up with and would have never
             | gotten the budget to be made. It's great.
        
         | sekai wrote:
         | > and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is
         | "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or
         | satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.
         | 
         | Art is, above all, subjective.
         | 
         | > It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making
         | generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties.
         | 
         | Painters said the same thing about the camera. Photographers
         | said the same thing about Photoshop.
        
           | fruitworks wrote:
           | This art is subjectively bad
        
         | blargey wrote:
         | Art is communication.
         | 
         | That "generic" and "indescribably lifeless" feeling you get is
         | because the only thing communicated by a model-and-prompt
         | generation is the model identity and the prompt.
        
         | qgin wrote:
         | If your art can be replaced by a model that recycles what's
         | already been done, maybe you were just recycling what's already
         | been done too.
        
           | anigbrowl wrote:
           | How do you expect people to get good when AI is pushing them
           | out of the entry-level stages where they were previously able
           | to earn a modest living while developing their craft?
           | 
           | > oh now they won't have to do that boring mindless stuff
           | like playing cover versions any more
           | 
           | That's how most musicians make their first $, doing covers or
           | making something generic enough to be saleable as background
           | music
        
             | _DeadFred_ wrote:
             | AI eats the seedcorn. Anyone that needs space to grow?
             | Crowded out. Entry level incomes, replaced. No more entry,
             | sorry.
             | 
             | For all of human civilization the future has been built on
             | the backs of those the came before (on the backs of
             | giants). But that climb is slowing, maybe halting. Which
             | then compounds when the new giants that would have risen up
             | don't. AI replaces the messy, slow process of becoming with
             | instant regurgitation, replaces those that would have
             | grown. The future, built on the backs of giants, stalls
             | when those giants never get the chance to rise.
             | 
             | AI is entropy weaponized against every layer of future
             | progress. But everyone is too busy salivating at potential
             | cost savings to see it.
        
               | CuriouslyC wrote:
               | Sorry, but no. I use AI as a writing tool, and its
               | understanding prose and storycraft is nowhere near there,
               | it's mostly useful for rough drafts and minor rewrites.
               | Even in a hypothetical future where it's perfect at prose
               | and storycraft, and it just asks you a few questions to
               | get at the details of what you want then cranks out a
               | technically outstanding novel, it still won't be there.
               | People crave novelty, freshness and and a sense of the
               | auteur, and AI will ALWAYS be bad at that (until someone
               | creates an AI writer that simulates a fictional human
               | author with a rich interior life before it starts
               | writing, anyhow).
               | 
               | Ultimately we'll reach a technical "peak" in AI writing,
               | and humans will still be the ones driving the AI, feeding
               | it with the alchemy of their lived experience, directing
               | creation at a high level. We'll even purposefully inject
               | very minor imperfections into the writing in the name of
               | voice, tweaking minor details in the name of personal
               | harmony. The author will go from "creator" to "brand."
        
         | orbital-decay wrote:
         | Then most music is not art, because I struggle to find non-
         | generic music, at least for the genres I like. In 2020s, 4/5
         | artists are bent on trying to create a blend of aesthetics of
         | the past, instead of even attempting doing something that
         | sounds fresh and authentic. And very few of these who do
         | succeed. This has been going on for a while.
        
       | hudo wrote:
       | AI is great, I can see it benefit so many industries, except
       | music. There's something profoundly wrong with AI generated
       | music.
        
       | amradio1989 wrote:
       | I could be wrong, but I think the use case here is mainly for
       | non-artists in domains where the music is not particularly
       | important.
       | 
       | For example, a podcaster/youtuber may want a short intro track.
       | An entertainer or a marketer may want some generic or silly
       | background music.
       | 
       | Does it have a use case for a producer/musician? Maybe. It might
       | give them ideas for chord progressions, melodies, etc. But real
       | music does that too, and much more effectively.
        
         | weego wrote:
         | It definitely has a use case for prototyping sound design,
         | which can be either incredibly time consuming or require an
         | awful lot of niche expensive gear. Something like playing
         | around to get an unusual drone can take a lot of time and
         | effort. Being able to 'describe it' and get 80%+ there is a
         | huge win.
         | 
         | And if you're focused on chopping up samples and sounds on an
         | ableton push or similar this can be a tool of endless
         | possibilities.
        
       | bigbuppo wrote:
       | Well, they've done it boys, they've made creative fulfillment
       | obsolete. They've DISRUPTED the concept of going to big music
       | festivals, and small cozy shows. Just plug your ear holes with
       | the AI slop bucket's pure beeps and boops and never have to worry
       | again about paying artists for music. You can pay a techbro
       | instead.
       | 
       | This is like the dotcom era of where every idiotic idea that
       | ended with, "but on the internet", would get a pile of cash
       | thrown at it. We are officially at the beginning of the end. It's
       | only going to get dumber from here.
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | There isn't any relationship whatsoever between a concert or
         | music festival and this tech. Two entirely different
         | experiences.
        
       | everfrustrated wrote:
       | Finally non-repeating muzak is here
        
       | RyanOD wrote:
       | I'm dreading the day I discover a new "band" I'm totally into
       | only to discover it's entirely AI.
        
         | cschmidt wrote:
         | I worry how often that is happening already on Spotify.
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | Oh boy, do I ever have bad news about how pop music is
         | currently created...
        
           | footy wrote:
           | this would only be bad news for that commenter if they're
           | into pop music
        
           | RyanOD wrote:
           | Increasingly I can't get into new music. For a while, I
           | couldn't understand why as I've been a rabid musician / music
           | lover my entire life. Even music I thought was cool, I
           | couldn't really get into. I always preferred the music I grew
           | up with.
           | 
           | Eventually, the reason why became obvious. I grew up
           | listening to all that music with my closest friends. It's the
           | memories I associate with that music that keeps me coming
           | back. I moved away 30 years ago and never established
           | friendships like that again. New music feels hollow to me
           | because I don't have buddies to share it with and build
           | associated memories.
        
         | drivers99 wrote:
         | At least I still have all my old CDs.
        
         | krat0sprakhar wrote:
         | Hope your favorite new band is not "The Velvet Sundown"
        
         | HelloUsername wrote:
         | But you were enjoying the experience..
        
       | artninja1988 wrote:
       | The context length seems super small. The prompt needs to be
       | shorter than 2k characters, which is super limiting. Hope they
       | address this soon.
        
       | 65 wrote:
       | Yet Another Slop Machine(tm)
        
       | yanis_t wrote:
       | Did anyone compared to Suno quality wise? Seems like one benefit
       | being the API availability
        
       | wturner wrote:
       | Write a song about the billionaire social engineer Peter Thiel
       | getting robbed and murdered by a broke minimum wage worker with
       | no healthcare.
       | 
       | "That is not allowed by our terms of service"
       | 
       | I think the rebellious nature of art inherently has boundaries
       | these people won't cross.
        
       | pr337h4m wrote:
       | This could be repurposed for really good stylistic search for
       | music (similar to how CLIP powered stylistic search for images on
       | same.energy)
        
       | Oceoss wrote:
       | I've been waiting for this AI development for a while
       | 
       | It's amazing that the songs sound pretty natural
        
       | jp1016 wrote:
       | lot of ai progress today, open ai, claude and now eleven labs
        
       | feoren wrote:
       | We imagined a utopian future where robots did our menial work so
       | we were free to be creative. Instead we got a dystopian future
       | where we do more and more menial work so our robots can poorly
       | emulate creativity. It's not too late to turn it around, but that
       | requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people, and the
       | 0.1% who own everything would rather create their own synthetic
       | (subservient) humans than recognize the basic rights of the ones
       | that already exist (and can make fun of them on Twitter).
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | They said the same thing about automation when the Industrial
         | Revolution began a century or so ago. That the common worker
         | would be liberated from the drudgery of labor and be free for
         | creative and intellectual pursuits. The people who protested
         | were ridiculed as Luddites who simply feared technology and
         | progress.
         | 
         | Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital
         | (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,)
         | the end result was just that workers worked more, and more
         | often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the
         | extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
         | 
         | I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and
         | creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead
         | of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of
         | capitalism.
        
           | asukumar wrote:
           | Are you suggesting that subsistence farmers were better off
           | than workers after the industrial revolution? I find that
           | hard to believe.
        
             | krapp wrote:
             | In some ways, yes, they were.
             | 
             | Subsistence farmers weren't cramped in filthy disease
             | ridden workhouses, getting paid in company scrip, getting
             | mangled by machines (OK they were but probably not as
             | often) or being locked into burning buildings because
             | preventing theft of stock was more important to owners than
             | the lives of employees. And subsistence farmers owned what
             | they produced and the means by which it was produced,
             | whereas industrial workers owned nothing but the pennies in
             | their pocket, and likely owed more than that to the
             | company.
             | 
             | It took years of often violent protest for workers to
             | return to even the basic level of dignity and rights once
             | afforded to craftsmen and farmers. Not that the lives of
             | subsistence farmers and craftsmen were _good,_ but they
             | were _better_ than what the dehumanization of mass
             | production and automation created.
             | 
             | But then comparing farmers and workers in this context is a
             | bit specious. It would be more fair to compare, say,
             | textile workers before the automated loom and textile
             | workers after. Obviously the former had it much better off,
             | which was precisely the problem automation was intended to
             | solve.
        
           | GuinansEyebrows wrote:
           | > I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect
           | and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard
           | instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the
           | incentives of capitalism.
           | 
           | people are, unfortunately, and collectively, not ready to
           | seriously interrogate the economic or political situations in
           | which they find themselves. we will never see the utopian
           | promise of automation under capitalism. there will always be
           | an underclass to exploit.
        
         | kingstnap wrote:
         | It's only from a position of extreme arrogance that you can
         | complain that machines have not yet done enough for you.
         | 
         | But it's the fun thing about being humans, I suppose. Our
         | insatiable greed means we demand endlessly more.
        
           | anigbrowl wrote:
           | This comment doesn't engage with the critique at all, it's
           | just reflexive moralization.
        
       | throwaway_32u10 wrote:
       | Behold, we are one step closer to a world where "AI will do the
       | mundane tasks, and the we all are going to engage in creative
       | hobbies such as music creation"... Oh... wait...
        
       | iamsaitam wrote:
       | The silver lining to any of these models is that what AI
       | generates is total shite.
        
       | throwaway1280 wrote:
       | This is an incredible achievement, but as a musician, I wish this
       | would go die in a fire.
       | 
       | I'm a bedroom hobby musician with no dreams of ever making it
       | big, but even so, I'm looking at the hours I'm spending trying to
       | improve my skills and thinking what's the point, really, when I
       | could just type in 'heavy metal guitar solo at 160bpm, A minor'
       | and get something much much better?
       | 
       | I know there is value in creating art for art's sake. I've always
       | been up against a sea of internet musicians, even when I started
       | back in 2000. But there's just something about this that's much
       | more depressing, when it's not even other people competing with
       | me, but a machine which hasn't had to invest years of its life in
       | practice to beat me.
        
         | shadowgovt wrote:
         | When Harmonix was in the concept phase for Guitar Hero, there
         | were two slides in the presentation. The first was the "con"
         | slide: novel game style risks not finding a market, technical
         | challenges of the new style of gameplay, requiring peripherals
         | for a game is a famous pathway to low-volume sales.
         | 
         | The next slide was labeled "pro," and it was just a picture of
         | Jimi Hendrix on-stage mid-performance.
         | 
         | I'd submit to you the notion that even if the machine can
         | create a billion billion iterations of music, it still _cannot_
         | create what _you_ will create, for the _reasons_ you will
         | create it, and that 's reason enough to continue. Hendrix
         | wasn't just "a guy who played guitar good." And a machine that
         | could word-for-word and bar-for-bar synthesize "Foxy Lady"
         | wouldn't be Hendrix.
         | 
         | Hendrix, also, can't be you. Nor you him.
        
           | thefaux wrote:
           | It is embarrassing how much time I spent playing that dumb
           | game instead of actually practicing a more versatile
           | instrument.
        
         | rootforce wrote:
         | I can't see the future, but I imagine that the human art
         | community may actually get more vibrant when divorced from
         | being a way to make a living. Perhaps a return to something
         | like a patronage system for the exceptional artists.
         | 
         | Open mics, music circles and concerts also remain untouched for
         | the moment.
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | As a fellow (hobbyist) musician, I feel you, but after doing a
         | lot of introspection I realized that it's the art (and the
         | process) that I really like, not (just) the end result (though
         | that is of course a rewarding aspect). For example, jamming out
         | to a kickin' song is _fun_ , even if I'm just covering
         | something. I also realized that my own ability to produce
         | things isn't affected by this (as long as you don't want to
         | make money on it). As someone who loves to play bass but is
         | generally bad at writing bass riffs, I also see some fun
         | potential to use AI to get bass tracks that go along with my
         | main guitar riffs. I can always throw them out and rewrite from
         | scratch later, or just iterate on them to get them where I like
         | them. I do think I'll feel a bit lof a loss of "artistic
         | purity" with doing something like that, but the more I think
         | about it, the biggest reason that might bother me is because
         | I'd feel judged by other musicians :-D
        
         | thefaux wrote:
         | I would suggest that instead of feeling demoralized by ai that
         | you instead ask what can you offer musically that an ai cannot.
         | I also would suggest trying to let go of the notion that music
         | is primarily about achieving a certain level of technical
         | proficiency. There are no limits on your growth musically
         | unless you artificially constrain them because you are deluded
         | by a technology to believe that you don't already have what you
         | need inside of you.
         | 
         | Do you regularly play with other people? That is a good way to
         | disabuse yourself of the notion that all that matters is
         | technique.
        
         | dillutedfixer wrote:
         | Like you, I am just a hobbyist making beats in my room. No
         | expectations of ever being a real musician. But when I'm
         | jamming and I create a beat and synth line, start adding other
         | instruments and really get a song going, there is a feeling
         | that I get that an generated song will never ever ever be able
         | to recreate for me. It's like a rush, an almost a euphoric
         | tingling (and no I'm not on drugs) that happens that almost
         | feels like a runners high. No output from a prompt-driven AI
         | algorithm would ever do that to me. That's the value I see in
         | making art for arts sake, for practicing a craft and for trying
         | to just get better at something for the sake of getting better
         | at it.
        
         | J_McQuade wrote:
         | I am not sure if this will be any help to you at all, but the
         | technical skill of music - especially in (from your comment)
         | heavy metal - has only ever been a tiny part of it. You
         | probably know a guy in a local pub band who can note-for-note
         | play every singly thing that Toni Iommi ever recorded, for
         | instance.
         | 
         | There are hundreds of bands who play three-chord doom or
         | mindless-shredding grind who just learned one thing and do it
         | well, and who play to hundreds of people multiple times a week
         | (often including me). We go to see these bands not to see what
         | they can play, but to see what they are saying with what they
         | play.
         | 
         | This is why I feel that I can never describe LLM-generated
         | content as 'art'. Art is about the story. People will go and
         | see a punk band who only know three chords if they play songs
         | about things that resonate with them. Bit of a tangent, but
         | this is the same reason that I genuinely believe that if you
         | could bio-engineer a steak that tastes exactly like one from a
         | well-looked-after cow from a notable breed and a good farm,
         | most people would still prefer the cow. The story matters - the
         | fact that a person put effort and experience into something
         | really is important.
         | 
         | "This solo is sick" is a fun plus-point, but it doesn't matter
         | if the song doesn't mean anything to you. If proficiency was
         | the only thing that mattered then we'd all be listening to the
         | worst kind of prog.
        
       | throwawayoldie wrote:
       | I would like to say this categorically now: if you're using AI to
       | generate any kind of art, go die in a fire.
        
         | dawnerd wrote:
         | It's already bad enough before this came out on the different
         | streaming platforms. People are grifting off known musicians
         | and labeling them as album artists to get their awful ai songs
         | put into mixes.
        
           | throwawayoldie wrote:
           | This is a shitty timeline and I would like to transfer to a
           | better one. Hey, maybe these AIs can tell me how to do that.
        
         | ebiester wrote:
         | Is that LLMs? Generative AI? Anything with machine learning?
         | Anything using a public model? Does that include something like
         | Baby Audio TAIP? Noise removal software that uses ML?
         | 
         | How about Refik Anadol?
        
           | throwawayoldie wrote:
           | Yes.
        
       | asadm wrote:
       | Do we yet have a way to "autocomplete" music from existing music?
       | or from humming to music (music-to-music?)?
       | 
       | I am less interested in the "one-shot" approach here with text-
       | to-prompt. I see seamless transitions but that seems like an
       | afterthought.
        
       | fidotron wrote:
       | What struck me more than the output is the absolute marketing
       | talk of the prompting, so not only is the output kind of creepy
       | but in order to get the best results you have to translate your
       | intention into the worst corpo-speak imaginable.
        
       | stillpointlab wrote:
       | I really hope we move on from these boil-the-ocean models. I want
       | something more collaborative and even iterative.
       | 
       | I was having a conversation with a former bandmate. He was
       | talking about a bunch of songs he is working on. He can play
       | guitar, a bit of bass and can sing. That leaves drums. He wants a
       | model where he can upload a demo and it either returns a stem for
       | a drum track or just combines his demo with some drums.
       | 
       | Right now these models are more like slot machines than tools. If
       | you have the money and the time/patience, perhaps you can do
       | something with it. But I am looking forward to when we start
       | getting collaborative, interactive and iterative models.
        
         | pacifika wrote:
         | I'd recommend GarageBand for this.
        
           | stillpointlab wrote:
           | I haven't used the virtual drummer feature of GarageBand
           | recently, but my experience with it was pretty disappointing.
           | The output sounds very midi or like the most basic loops.
           | 
           | I believe there is massive room for improvement over what is
           | currently available.
           | 
           | However, my larger point isn't "I want to do this one
           | particular thing" and rather: I wish the music model
           | companies would divert some attention away from "prompt a
           | complete song in one shot" and towards "provide tools to
           | iteratively improve songs in collaboration with a
           | musician/producer".
        
         | viccis wrote:
         | RIP session musicians if that ever comes to pass, which is one
         | of the main ways to make money if you are a good drummer.
        
         | krat0sprakhar wrote:
         | Very well said. I'm in the same boat. I'd love AI to write down
         | a drum groove or a drum fill based on my guitar riff.
         | 
         | Currently, all these AI tools generate the whole song which I'm
         | not at all interested in given songwriting is so much fun
        
         | amohn9 wrote:
         | Suno can already do that
        
         | nartho wrote:
         | Most VST drum sequencers have pretty powerful groove libraries
         | nowadays. It's not a model or anything like that but just mix-
         | matching and modifying the patterns some give extremely good
         | results
        
       | sys32768 wrote:
       | I think AI will spark a revival in "organic" human culture and
       | art, with people flocking to see real musicians play real
       | instruments, and real artists using real materials.
       | 
       | It will probably also extinguish quite a few mad musicians and
       | mediocre artists.
        
       | zubzubi wrote:
       | Can it do differently-styled covers of songs or improvisations
       | upon melodies like Suno can?
       | 
       | As a musician, that's what I find most compelling about Suno.
       | It's become a tool to collaborate with, to help test out musical
       | ideas and inspire new creativity. I listen to its output and then
       | take the parts I like to weave into my own creations.
       | 
       | The AI music tools that generate whole songs out of prompts are a
       | curious gimmick, but are sorely lacking in the above.
        
       | TrackerFF wrote:
       | I'm a musician
       | 
       | I haven't used the elevnlabs one, but I've checked out suno and
       | udio, and to be honest the tech is amazing. But like with a lot
       | of genai images, the current music models have the same smell to
       | it.
       | 
       | These models can def be used to crank out commercially sounding
       | music, but I have yet to hear any output that sounds fresh and
       | exciting. If your goal is to create bro country, these models are
       | a god-send.
       | 
       | With that said, I do believe that musicians will start to create
       | music with these tools as aid. I've tried to use them for
       | generating samples and ideas, and they do work well enough.
        
         | MarcelOlsz wrote:
         | >With that said, I do believe that musicians will start to
         | create music with these tools as aid.
         | 
         | The more tech advances the cooler it is to bury your head in
         | the sand. Studying by paper & candlelight has never been more
         | of a flex.
         | 
         | Unless you're talking about EDM people and those adjacent. Not
         | that they're not "real musicians" but they're much more about
         | tech and gadgets so I can see them using it more.
        
           | TrackerFF wrote:
           | I'm a "real" musician, and have done session / studio work,
           | as well as made a living by playing live music in my younger
           | days, before getting a "real job" in tech.
           | 
           | While there will no doubt be many that feel they're above
           | using tools like these, the reality is that if you want to
           | make money out of music - you're going to make music for the
           | masses.
           | 
           | And if there's one thing these models really excel at, it is
           | to make commercial sounding music. Everything sounds nice and
           | bland.
        
             | MarcelOlsz wrote:
             | Ah yeah, I don't even register the commercial world so
             | didn't mention it as it's a given. Doing that type of work
             | would suck so bad IMO.
        
           | anigbrowl wrote:
           | I'm an electronic musician and AI music is banned on my
           | favorite forum. Someone popped up a few months back
           | challenging everyone to listen to their AI-generated music
           | album and ended up being flamed to a crisp - not because
           | people didn't engage with it, but because they did and
           | pointed out in detail what was so bad about it.
        
       | TheAceOfHearts wrote:
       | Well, here's a few points of comparison:
       | 
       | Suno's version of Mandate of Heaven [0]. This is my baseline, it
       | was generated with their v4 model and so far it has remained my
       | favorite AI generated song. I regularly listen to this one track
       | and it brings me joy. There's many places where I think it could
       | be drastically improved, but none of the competitors have managed
       | to surpass it nor have they provided tools to improve upon it.
       | The pronunciation is a bit bad sometimes and it fails to hold
       | notes as long as I wish, but overall it has gotten the closest to
       | my vision.
       | 
       | Eleven Music's version of Mandate of Heaven [1]. They don't allow
       | free accounts to export or share the full song so you can only
       | try a small fragment. It has much crisper instruments and vocals,
       | but it has terrible pacing issues and pronunciation. The track is
       | 4 minutes long, but the singer is just rushing through the track
       | at wildly unexpected speeds. I cannot even play the song after it
       | finished generating, so I haven't even been able to listen to the
       | whole thing, it just gets stuck when I press play. Maybe some
       | kind of release-day bug. The only tool that Eleven Music gives
       | you for refining and modifying sections is "Edit Style", which
       | feels pretty limiting. But I can't even try it because the track
       | won't play.
       | 
       | Producer.ai's version of Mandate of Heaven [2][3]. This one has
       | slightly worse instruments than Eleven Music, but the vocals are
       | a bit better than Suno v4. It also has severe timing issues. I
       | tried asking it to generate the track without a vibe reference
       | [2] and also with a vibe reference [3]. Both versions have
       | terrible pacing issues; somehow the one with the vibe reference
       | is particularly egregious, like it's trying to follow the input
       | vibe but getting confused.
       | 
       | It feels like AI song generation is just in a really awkward
       | place, where you don't get enough customization capabilities to
       | really refine tracks into the perfect direction that you're
       | imagining. You can get something sorta generic that sounds
       | vaguely reasonable, but once you want to take more control you
       | hit a wall.
       | 
       | If one is willing to bite the bullet, there's a paid program for
       | generating high quality synthetic voices while maintaining fine-
       | grained controls: Synthesizer V Studio 2. But I haven't been able
       | to try it out because I'm cheap and there's no Linux support.
       | 
       | The ideal workflow I'm imagining would probably allow me to
       | generate a few song variations as a starting point, while
       | integrating into a tool like Synthesizer V Studio 2 so I can
       | refine and iterate on the details. This makes a lot of sense too,
       | because that's basically how we are using AI tools for
       | programming: for anything serious you're generating some code and
       | iterating on it or making tweaks for your specific program. I
       | would like to specify which parts of the track are actually
       | important to me, and which ones can be filled with sausage in
       | reaction to my changes.
       | 
       | Overall, Eleven Music generates instruments that sounds nice, but
       | the singing leaves a lot to be desired (n=1). Eleven Labs is
       | doing a ton of great product work so I'm really excited for the
       | direction they'll take this once they're able to iterate on it a
       | few times. A very strong showing for an initial release.
       | 
       | [0] https://suno.com/s/HfDUqRp0ca2gwwAx
       | 
       | [1] https://elevenlabs.io/music/songs/TGyOFpwJsHdS3MTiHFUP
       | 
       | [2]
       | https://www.producer.ai/song/aa1f3cc4-f3e4-40ce-9832-47dc300...
       | 
       | [3]
       | https://www.producer.ai/song/3d02dd17-69f1-41ba-a3ea-967902f...
        
         | CuriouslyC wrote:
         | Mandate of Heaven does pretty much sound like a mid power metal
         | track. The mixing is perfect but the production is "off" which
         | is kinda weird, also the vocal delivery is flat and empty which
         | is probably the biggest AI tell. The lyrics are cheesy but
         | that's power metal for you.
         | 
         | Overall still quite impressive progress, though I'd prefer it
         | if AI could remix existing artists songs that I already liked
         | instead of being focused on tepid original content.
        
       | tlaverdure wrote:
       | I've played guitar for 23 years, and there is something just off-
       | putting about most of the music on that page, but particularly
       | "Yellow Bus Jam".
       | 
       | The guitar solo sounds very unnatural, especially the phrasing,
       | which is totally random. Blues musicians are actually attempting
       | to say something through their instrument. This was just a random
       | number generated solo played by a 6 finger three handed robot. No
       | thanks, lol.
        
         | ilvez wrote:
         | Reminds those early youtube days shredding overdub videos..
         | These were funny, but the Yellow Bus Jam seems just hollow and
         | wrong. Feeling there's something from Steely Dan in that song..
        
           | freetonik wrote:
           | Reminded me of Steely Dan as well, but somehow _off_.
        
         | stronglikedan wrote:
         | Get used to it, because it's much cheaper than a musician, and
         | to the average person "attempting to say something through
         | their instrument" and "random number generated solo" are
         | largely the same thing.
        
           | kev009 wrote:
           | The "Don't Let Me Go" and "Yellow Bus Jam" examples made me
           | laugh out loud. This kind of thing would be great for a
           | cyberpunk game that dynamically generates a reality, with
           | (unintentional?) faux pas and jank.
           | 
           | If you are an artist you could always slice, embellish, or
           | otherwise process outputs into something so I guess it's not
           | totally silly. But I get at best real estate video vibes, or
           | unironic early '90s clip art and Comic Sans vibes and
           | presumably some team of expensive marketers worked hard to
           | select these examples, which is doubly hilarious.
        
           | tlaverdure wrote:
           | I'm not anti-AI, but I strongly believe the human element of
           | music can be imitated but not fully replicated. Listening
           | back to that song I can hear the attempt to stylistically
           | play slightly off-beat to get the feel of a band playing
           | without a metronome. The auditory illusion is there, but it
           | still sounds off. Playing behind the beat is a feeling; it's
           | not a calculation.
           | 
           | As a drummer keeps time, the band reacts by looking at the
           | drummer's hands and the sway in their posture. A drummer
           | intensifies their playing as they respond to the feeling of
           | air being pushed from guitar cabinets. A lead guitarist looks
           | back at their friends and smiles when they are about to play
           | that sweet lick that the bass player likes to play along
           | with.
           | 
           | These are just simple examples that make all the difference
           | when you listen back. I also can't imagine paying hundreds of
           | dollars to go see an AI "perform" this solo at a concert.
           | When I listen to music, I'm remembering the moment, the
           | feeling, what the artist was doing to create their art. So
           | still... no thanks!
        
             | kev009 wrote:
             | Anthony Marinelli (guy behind MJ's Thriller synth jams) and
             | Tim Pierce (accomplished session guitarist) riff on this
             | https://youtu.be/OzuADujnEhQ?t=1205 recently. This whole
             | video is a treat, as are most of Marinelli's.
             | 
             | When I see AI salesmen thinking they can attack into art, I
             | think they naively see it as inherently imprecise or
             | arbitrary, and they think because their technology has
             | these properties it will easily cross over. This is going
             | to lead to a lot of faux pas (remember NFTs?); it would be
             | prudent to attack problems where some kind of correctness
             | can be mechanically judged... OCR and software development
             | are reasonable verticals at opposite ends of complexity to
             | focus on, and pursue artistic rendition in a more
             | experimental way letting artists approach the technology
             | and show how it is useful.
        
               | conradfr wrote:
               | These things won't replace rock stars, they will (or at
               | least want to) replace the vast majority of the industry
               | which is tv shows, movies, ads, etc, which the disclaimer
               | as the end alludes to.
               | 
               | It's a terrible thing.
        
               | kev009 wrote:
               | Once upon a time random corporate videos would have full
               | custom orchestral scores
               | https://youtu.be/q7hFJZf9fWk?t=162
               | 
               | The thing I notice time and again in all this is they
               | want you to believe technology is displacing labor at one
               | end but there's usually a lot of retraining
               | consumers/society to accept something qualitatively
               | different to cover up or re-conceive what was. That's not
               | a moral judgement, just an observation. But the end
               | result is usually the same, some group of current or
               | wannabe oligarchs playing musical chairs at the top
               | without regard for the rest of the system.
        
           | GuinansEyebrows wrote:
           | > Get used to it, because it's much cheaper than a musician,
           | and to the average person "attempting to say something
           | through their instrument" and "random number generated solo"
           | are largely the same thing.
           | 
           | it's okay to just say you're not that interested in music
        
           | JKCalhoun wrote:
           | It's live music for the win then.
        
         | electrondood wrote:
         | I had the same sentiment, but also recall what generated human
         | hands looked like a year ago vs. now.
         | 
         | The solo was pretty funny though.
        
         | Freedom5093 wrote:
         | I thought it was pretty rhythmic
         | 
         | I would've believed he's real, just passionate about music on
         | his big yellow bus.
        
         | aatd86 wrote:
         | Have you tried suno? How does it compare?
        
         | mrtksn wrote:
         | I know right? AI is in the uncanny valley still. But every now
         | and then I stumble upon something made with AI.
         | 
         | I have no proof but I'm convinced that the song here is AI
         | made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL1Fg1QnDig
         | 
         | I liked it but it still feels like AI to me.
        
           | JKCalhoun wrote:
           | I think we're just going to have to get used to it. That is,
           | just drop worrying too much about whether something is AI and
           | just stop at whether you like it or not.
        
             | mrtksn wrote:
             | It doesn't work like that, art is a package. At this point
             | it's interesting that AI can do these things but the momen
             | it wears off it stops being worthwhile. Artist + AI as a
             | tool is working fine I believe but stuff produced by people
             | who don't have taste shows.
        
       | bjt wrote:
       | What did you train the model on? Assuming it was trained on all
       | the music online, without permission, it's kinda shitty to take
       | all musicians' work like that and use it to make a product to put
       | them out of business.
       | 
       | I draw a distinction here from LLMs used for writing code. Plenty
       | of people freely put their code on Github or in Stack Overflow
       | with the expectation that people could freely copy and use it.
       | Relatively little music is shared so permissively.
       | 
       | (And before someone cries "fair use", I'm making an ethical
       | argument, not a legal one. A fair use defense can protect you
       | from a copyright claim, but it doesn't make it any less shitty to
       | take other people's art, blend it all together, and use the
       | result to threaten their livelihoods.)
        
         | matthewfcarlson wrote:
         | > Created in collaboration with labels, publishers, and
         | artists, Eleven Music is cleared for nearly all commercial
         | uses, from film and television to podcasts and social media
         | videos, and from advertisements to gaming. For more information
         | on supported usage across our different plans, head here.
         | 
         | Not sure what that actually means but it suggests they at least
         | tried to get their training material legally.
        
       | nonhaver wrote:
       | Absolutely horrendous - well and truly. Ignoring the dystopic
       | undertones of a product like this - the audio quality is low and
       | filled with artifacts and destroyed transients. Voices are
       | robotic and generic with basically zero emotion. Lyric generation
       | is frankly embarrassing. Everything about this is horrible.
       | Additionally the UI broke for me multiple times and I couldn't
       | play the track without downloading it.
       | 
       | What is going on at ElevenLabs? Is everything vibe coded now? Is
       | there nobody testing these products before pushing them out? This
       | is the first time I'd characterize a product from a top AI
       | company as complete slop from a conceptual and implementation
       | perspective.
       | 
       | I feel like there's some sort of disconnect between the minds of
       | tech CEOs and the general population's wants/needs especially in
       | regards to creative domains. What kind of human wants this? Is
       | there some grudge of tech people who never learned music/art/etc
       | so their solution is to optimize it and create models so they can
       | feel something?
        
       | neom wrote:
       | It's interesting to me people really hate AI gen'd music, some
       | people I know literally won't listen to it and just like... get
       | kinda angry I even tried to show them what I made (so I stopped
       | showing people for now). I have a good memory for sound, but
       | whatever neurodiversity I have makes learning instruments (and
       | math, and written words, and and) super challenging. I loved
       | screwing around remixing stuff in Abelton, but I've not touched
       | it since suno. I just looked at my suno library, I've gen'd 1,100
       | tracks since March 18th, 2024. The levels of audiophile
       | or...musicophile? is pretty wide, but I don't think I'm a total
       | n00b and I think some of the stuff I've made is actually pretty
       | good, even if I do say so myself (and I'm fine even if I just
       | make it for myself to listen to, as that's what I always did
       | anyway). :)
        
       | joshwcomeau wrote:
       | This stuff is such an abomination. What a terrible thing to
       | release into the world.
        
       | gnarlouse wrote:
       | Can we get a new quantum leap in model quality to stave off the
       | feeling that modern AI stuff is just a sloppy hustle for venture
       | capital
        
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