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Comment by robbedpeter | Hacker News Reader

As a musician, I'd love automated composition of human level music. Especially if you could navigate and blend and transform the space of styles, artists, and instruments. Co-composition has a place.

The reason such tools have historically been viewed as oddities is because they were and are objectively bad. 3 year old prodigies can exceed even the best output of software. In recent years, the models have improved, but the problem space is huge and the algorithms aren't human level yet.

When the tools reach human performance levels, people won't care if it's human or software. They'll only care if it's enjoyable.

All creative endeavors are at risk of being automated by ai in the next few decades. Software will exceed the best of human creativity, and that's a good thing.

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No, it isn't. It'll make people stop making music. Even if all you care about is one particular way to evaluate the end product, it means there will be no new inputs, resulting in the death of creativity. And once that's been reached, it's almost impossible to revive.

People will most definitely not stop making music, if only because the physical act of playing an instrument can never be replaced by software.

Nobody is talking about playing music. And physical playing has been replaced by software quite a while ago. Not if you play it for your own fun, but almost nobody can distinguish a computer rendering from the real thing on a recording.

Agreed. Moreover, if a genuinely sentient AI or MI as Minsky called it, comes to pass then it would then be fascinating to listen to it if it cared to compose music; in its absence musical composition is always the result of someone's human experience of being in this universe - necessarily as a human organism. And this is true even if the music is a research exploration of evocative (to a human of course) sound patterns.

Very True! I play guitar but i’ll never be a Tommy Emmanuel. I don’t care, I play for the joy of it :)

> if only because the physical act of playing an instrument can never be replaced by software.

As an instrumentalist, I would love to believe this but more and more this does not appear to be the case.

I have talked to many people of different ages who really don't see any difference between someone actually playing an instrument in front of you and listening to pre-recorded music.

It's funny because it's in the context of me liking to play live music, and they never seem to realize they're saying, "What you do is meaningless."

I think it's that they have no personal experience with playing an instrument, combined with the fact that the dominant forms of pop music now don't have much if any place for instrumentalists.

This is cynical. The existence of skilled grandmasters and unattainably higher skilled computers hasn't killed chess.

> This is cynical.

Just because it doesn't subscribe to the utopic "computers will create the best music ever" fantasy?

> computers hasn't killed chess

Because there's very little monetary value in seeing computers play chess. That's not the case in music: the entire infrastructure, from tools to conservatoires, comes from selling music. If that chain crumbles, music will be dead.

The infrastructure isn't about the music, though. It's about people, whether they are pop stars, ferociously good classical virtuosi, temperamental maestros, introverted but sympathetic innovators, or even just amateur bands/ensembles that enjoy the social aspects of making music.

That's where the big money is, not elevator music generated by computers.

The big money is where mass audiences are. Music's infrastructure is for a large part dependent on it. It encompasses everything from instrument manufacturers to piano teachers to concert organizers to masterclasses. If --as assumed the post I responded to-- software starts producing better music than people, or does so cheaper, or gets more clicks, etc., the infrastructure will disappear. It'll take a few decades, but that can kill off teaching and affordable instruments, taking everything except amateur music for the wealthy with it.

Chess is a great analogy. Now, because of great computers, folks can choose to play against a “master” chess player whenever they like, whether they have an internet connection and a proper rank or not.

Being able to jam with an AI group of your favorite jazz bests seems like a great stand-in for when you can’t get a real trio or quartet together, and if sufficiently good at attending to the ideas of the “live player”, would probably “raise all boats,” making better composers overall.

I agree that what you propose would be better than nothing, but it will still be lacking.

Assuming the software can get there, we also need to add more sensors. The head nods, eye contact, subtle facial gestures, and other body language that are such an important part of a collaborative jazz ensemble will have to be sensed. However, even if the computer can be enhanced with sensors, now you've got to communicate from the computer(s) back to the other players. So, either advanced robotics, or ensembles adapt other signaling schemes that the computer player(s) can engage. It is not a simple problem even if AI can made to be "creative" and "musical," that is not the whole story.

I don’t think “equal or better than human” is the bar we’re trying to beat.

I was more responding to both the claim that “AI will kill human composition” (it won’t) and “talking about computer-based music composition is framing the question wrong, since it doesn’t provide value” (it does)

Computers can already generate convincing telephone calls and news articles. Yet people haven't stopped answering the phone or believing the news. /s

Actually, I have stopped answering the phone.

In my view there's already a sufficient quantity of perfect classical music, that for most people, they could listen endlessly, and it would always seem new to them. Especially if hearing some familiar material once in a while is part of the enjoyment.

Yet musicians and audiences got violently sick of perfect classical music, and started creating "bad" music, just for the experience of trying something new. And this has happened over and over in music and other art forms.

I won't say computers won't ever be able to do that, but it suggests a level of AI beyond simply curve fitting the existing sequences of notes in recorded or written tunes. At the same time, what music evolves into with the use of AI may open up new areas for exploration of new human music.

As a kid, I played music that my mom didn't recognize as music. Eventually the AI will be motivated to create music that humans don't like, but that the computers prefer. That will be the singularity. ;-)

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