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Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

This seems incredibly applicable to musical scores in movies. I can imagine a product where the editor/director/someone inputs a handful of variables (mood, genre, instruments, etc) and timing requests (crescendo beginning at 30s and ending at 75s, calm period from 90s - 120s, etc) and out comes a musical score for the movie that matches up with their scene editing.

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With hundreds of thousands of semi-professional and amateur musicians competing on the Internet for their 15 minutes of fame, getting film or computer game score just isn't a real problem.

Besides, this is already doable, without neural networks. E.g. Karma[1]. The fact that most "AI music" enthusiasts don't know/care about such systems is a clear indicator that they aren't really interested in music or helping creators and just want to shove AI in yet another niche where it doesn't belong, then pat themselves on the back for contributing to "progress".

Further commodification of what's left of out popular culture isn't something anyone should be excited about. I just can't wait for the endless wave of trite "style blends" and the inevitable "oh, but all human music is garbage anyway" justification.

[1] https://www.karma-lab.com/

Edit:

Also, some people don't seem to be aware of it either, but there is already a full-fledged genre of generative music where artists use anything from analog circuits[2] to randomized or algorithmic sequencers/arpeggiators[3] to custom-built digital devices[4] for creating entire tracks. Of course, the point of generative music usually isn't to replace the artist, it's to shift their focus.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8Hr4wBRbaY

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n6-4buAkts

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KdTIUlGULk

>just want to shove AI in yet another niche where it doesn't belong and then pat themselves on the back for contributing to "progress".

Can you elaborate on why AI doesn't belong in this niche? The results are too good? The results are not good enough?

The results are meaningless.

This isn't chess or go, where you either win or you don't. Chopin composed for a reason, and it wasn't just an excuse to throw a lot of notes at the page.

It might be possible for AI to work at that level someday, but it's not just a technical problem, and you won't be able to solve it by throwing a corpus of compositions at it.

Aside from that, this still sounds like aimless noodling. It's far more polished noodling with some awareness of genre cliches, but it's still essentially aimless - and so meaningless.

>This isn't chess or go, where you either win or you don't. Chopin composed for a reason, and it wasn't just an excuse to throw a lot of notes at the page.

I disagree based on your following quote:

> Aside from that, this still sounds like aimless noodling. It's far more polished noodling with some awareness of genre cliches, but it's still essentially aimless - and so meaningless.

This sort of problem can easily be reframed as a win or lose problem, we simply consider whether the music sounds good or not. More concretely: would this music be able to convince you that a gifted human composer created it?

I'm fine with the answer being no, but I don't understand why the original comment I replied to wrote off the entire exercise. No we may not be there yet, but this seems like a good step forward to me.

> More concretely: would this music be able to convince you that a gifted human composer created it?

Would a computer? If it could, then in theory it could use that as an optimization goal...

Yes, that is what he is saying...

I think the core difference of opinion here seems to stem from a different interpretation of "meaningless".

You're arguing an academic definition of meaningful: can you design an AI that solves a hard problem?

gambler (and I think TheOtherHobbes, who you are replying to) are arguing a practical definition of meaningful: does it solve a problem people actually have?

It's neat that you can make artificial music, but actually generating music, per gambler's original comment, isn't a problem people have. It also doesn't actually add too much to culture. Essentially, the results are "meaningless" in that, even if it was successful at sounding good, what value would it actually have besides novelty?

One thing I can think of is making it faster and easier, maybe even for people who are less skilled in music to generate music that sound good.

That is valuable to me.

Maybe more interesting for video games, where you can have a realtime input of gameplay variables.

There have been covers of people taking a pre-recorded segment of a game (say, a 1v1 fight), and improvising a jazz score around it. How awesome would it be to have this happen live for any game? Anything from mood to specific sound effects.

That could be very interesting.

Every gameplay a different soundtrack. Sounds fun.

Contrast with this very human representation of writing gameplay musical scores. Including the simple chart used to show segued clips.

http://www.audiogang.org/chance-thomas-composer-of-dota-2s-2...

Even more interesting if it allows variations in the same soundtrack according to different dramatic moments in the same scenarios. Example: a man is walking down the street vs a man is walking alone in the night down the street vs a man is walking alone in the night down the street unaware of a bright red dot on his back. All these scenarios could use the same soundtrack, but require different dramatic levels. The game would send data to the music algorithms so that the soundtrack would reflect the right mood.

Brilliant idea.

Or take real-time input from Fitbit and generate a soundtrack for you in real life.

Something similar was done in the Left 4 Dead series with the AI Director:

Tim Larkin: We took several steps to keep the music interesting enough that the players would be inclined to keep it on as they play. We keep it changing so it won't become tedious; to this end, we created a music director that runs alongside the AI director, tracking the player's experience rather than their emotional state. We keep the music appropriate to each player's situation and highly personalized. The music engine in Left 4 Dead has a complete client-side, multi-track system per player that is completely unique to that player and can even be monitored by the spectators. Since some of the fun of Left 4 Dead is watching your friends when you're dead, we thought it was important to hear their personal soundtrack as well. This feature is unique to Left 4 Dead.

For single-player it works really well for building tension leading up to being attacked by waves of zombies and creating calm spots after high-stress encounters.

In the online versus mode however players got really good at using the musical hints as "tells" for when certain actions happen in the game. Most notably there were musical signatures consisting of a few notes that would play when the special infected characters spawn. Coordinated teams could use this to their advantage know when the infected team is about to stage an attack (like an ambush at a choke point in the map).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAYd8ihcUVA

You don't need AI for that. Just see Filmstro [1] with its previous HN discussion [2]:

[1] https://filmstro.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17132462

I see the applicability more for video games. There are a bunch of problems that don't exist in other forms of music, e.g. when you want to make the music adapt to user actions.

"The Double-Edged Nature of Video Game Music" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZB2_hlgKoA

Wouldn't solve all the problems, but I think there could be very interesting results if a composer provides skeletons of themes used, and "AI" adapts them to world and player state dynamically.

And do the same for the actors, script, lighting and sound effects. And also have some AI for the 'input variables', after all Netflix already does that to select their content.

And then we'll have Utopia!

It might be a way off that for "production", but for editing, when a score isn't finished yet, as filler to help the editing process, this could be an amazing tool.

Will it ever create something that really sticks with you though. Something you can whistle or hum after watching?

Like the game of thrones melody, or star wars.

Most big blockbusters already have such generic, boring, inoffensive scores already that going to a computer won't be much of a stretch.

YouTube maybe, but movies? I could think of nothing worse. The score for a movie is just as important to me as the visuals.

Low budget movies/videos?

Maybe quick youtube tutorial videos.

the line between movies and games will blur dramatically. think bandersnatch, but it's the viewer saying "open the door" and the directorGAN will generate a new storyline.

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