Comment by alive2007 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alive2007 | Hacker News Reader

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I see this sort of application having a lot of use in the kinds of derivative pop music developed by ensembles of songwriters and manufactured purely to generate radio hits. Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer is genius. The average person listening to Taylor Swift just does not care about Bacon's Triptych of George Dyer.

In a way, Magenta's job is not besting Bach. By the definition of Bach (a human being who changes the way we view and enjoy music), a non-human being cannot best Bach. Magenta's job is besting a much simpler, if equally challenging role - Max Martin, or the writers of "Let it Go".

As it turns out, this kind of music is already pretty formulaic. Much has been written on repetitive chord progressions being spammed across hundreds of famous singles. In a way, artists shouldn't fear the potential of these technologies besting them - they should thank them.

Freed now are artists from loading their albums with eye-rollingly generic lead singles that they immediately get sick of ("Stairway to Heaven", "Creep", "Smells Like Teen Spirit") because record labels know that's what will get the most radio play. You can just let the machine do those. Now, an artists' reputation is determined purely by his relative mettle against other human artists.

The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to.

Pop is maybe 75% performance, sex, status, and charisma. The music isn't irrelevant, but it only really needs to be a committee-produced mashup of contemporary cliches to do its job.

The rest is posing and attitude.

>As it turns out, this kind of music is already pretty formulaic.

But it's less formulaic than it sounds. Discovering that it uses Standard Chord Sequence Number 7 (from the small standard pop set) won't get you close to an interesting song.

A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file.

Basically there are huge gaps between a MIDI cliche machine - buildable now, and not particularly difficult - to a full virtual artist who produces even moderately successful tracks without human help, to a musical AI genius who produces completely new musical styles that capture the human imagination for centuries.

You need a model of mind to do that last one, and we're at least 50 to 100 years away from that.

> The average person listening to Taylor Swift is thinking about Taylor Swift, and not what they're listening to.

I think this is a grand oversimplification. Personality certainly _contributes_ to pop stardom, but the music is still #1. Before anyone knew who Taylor Swift was, they connected with her through one or more song.

> A lot of creative detail goes into the production, arrangement, and the vocal performance. Not the MIDI file.

Of course, but even having an autonomous "songwriter" that could write _a_ hit would be a gamechanger for music (though obviously most immediately applicable to top 40 / pop)

> You need a model of mind to do that last one

I disagree. Machines already produce what would otherwise be considered "experimental" music, you just need some deep reinforcement learning to know what has mass appeal.

> Before anyone knew who Taylor Swift was, they connected with her through one or more song.

Only if by 'connected with her' you mean heard her debut hit over and over and over again on radio until it became an earworm.

I disagree about the songs creep and smells like teen spirit being generic. These were exceptionallu crafted pop songs that expressed heart wrenching emotion. Nothing like the typical pop song at all.

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