You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.
I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
- Joanna Maciejewska
You could add music
show comments
antononcube
The creation of music by AI brings to mind a quote from David Bowie:
“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So take advantage of these last few years, because this will never happen again. Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left.”
While Bowie had different reasoning for making that statement, it's interesting to think that with AI-generated music, his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true.
show comments
concats
Trying to look at the bigger picture for a moment. A lot of the philosophical debate about art I see here, and elsewhere on social media, is often very shallow and can be reduced to:
Does one believe that the value of the art-piece (be is music, paintings, film, or whatever) is created in the mind of the artist, or is it created in the mind of the consumer?
If you believe only in the former, AI art is an oxymoron and pointless. If you believe only the later, you're likely to rejoice at all the explosion of new content and culture we can expect in the coming years.
As far as I can tell though, most regular people think that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes, where both both the creator and the consumer's thoughts are important in unison. That culture is about where the two meet each other, and help each other grow. But most of the arguments I've seen online seem to ignore or miss this dichotomy of views entirely, which unfortunately reduces the quality of the debate considerably.
show comments
ipaddr
The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.
No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
AI image and short video generation can create novelty and interest. But when the medium require more from the person like reading a book or watching a movie the level of AI acceptance goes down. We'll accept an AI generated email or ad copy but not an ai generated playlist and certainly not a deepfake of someone from reality. That's what people want from AI, a blending of real life into a fantasy generator but no one is offering that yet.
show comments
collias
I find this to be profoundly depressing.
I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.
With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.
I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.
show comments
broof
Ai music has been awesome for me, not because the music is that good, but because it gives me the ability to do something that I couldn’t have done myself. I use it all the time for my DnD group, songs about characters, funny moments, backstories, it’s a great tool that our players have found to increase engagement with the game
show comments
TheAceOfHearts
I've made a few tracks using Suno to scratch my own itch / desire for music that covers certain themes.
The best use of Suno for has been the ease with which you can generate diss tracks: I ask Gemini to make a diss track lyrics related to specific topics, and then I have Suno generate the actual track. It's very cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail.
Anyway, I hope I can get access, I think it would be fun to vibe some new music. Although this UI looks severely limited in what capabilities it provides. Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more? It would be cool if you could generate a song and then have it split into multiple tracks that you can remix and tweak independently. Maybe a section of track is pretty good but you want to switch out a specific instrument. Maybe describe what kind of beats you want to the tool and have it generate multiple potential interpretations, which you can start to combine and build up into a proper track. I think ideally I'd be able to describe what kind of mood or vibe I'm going for, without having to worry about any of the musical theory behind it, and the tool should generate what I want.
Lyria 2 is currently available to a limited number of trusted testers
show comments
bustling-noose
Music on iPod or a Walkman or a radio is great.
But have you ever attended live music shows ? Have you ever ‘felt’ the music ? Even someone at a local bar singing feels and hits different.
AI can never bring feelings. That will never change. Even science fiction agrees with that.
So bring all the AI you want everywhere, some things are irreplaceable by electronic world.
show comments
mvkel
"Releases" is a strong word, as in typical google fashion, the actual thing that was released was a waitlist form.
show comments
noisy_boy
I thought AI is supposed to free up my time by taking my job so I can unleash my musical creativity on an empty stomach? It is going to make music too?
rkagerer
Are there any particularly good samples anyone can point out?
The 2-3 clips I listened to in the article sounded awful (my own subjective opinion).
htrp
Only available in the US
"Country of residence (this current phase of the experiment is only available to users based in the U.S. for now, but feel free to submit interest and stay tuned for updates):
"
show comments
chaosprint
It seems inevitable now. I used to think AI music would always sound compromised in term of audio quality, but the tech seems to have crossed a threshold, kind of like Retina displays did for screens.
Soon, hiring people for commercial background music might be rare. Think AI for jingles, voiceovers, maybe even the models and visuals. Cafes can use AI-generated music too – in a way, the owner curates or "creates" it based on their taste.
But there are still interesting parts to human music making: the unpredictability and social side of live shows, for example. Maybe future music releases could even be interactive, letting listeners easily tweak tracks? Like this demo: https://glicol.org/demo#ontherun
show comments
qwertox
"Democratization of ___" (fill in with your favorite word). This is what it also does look like. I'm not saying that this is anything good or bad, but when I usually hear that sentence, it's associated with something positive, empowering.
n_kr
Is there a model which can generate vocals for an existing song given lyrics and some direction? I can't sing my way out of a paper bag, but I can make everything else for a song, so it would be a good way to try a bunch of ideas and then involve an actual singer for any promising ideas.
thomastraum
the biggest thread to music is the audience.
a machine doing any of this would be not causing a meltdown by musicians in the 80s. A punk rock band would not feel threatened by this neither would be Prince.
the sad truth is human output is so averaged out now, that most of it will be replaced.
mirkodrummer
Strong opinion ahead: the very moment people will finally realize that music is in the microscopic nuances of the human touch, breath and taste(literally for every instrument), hopefully we will get disinvested in this useless technology. Yes, I am aware of software like pro tools, but that can ba used well for touch up all tue nueances
anentropic
This is not actually music.
Music is a cultural practice, this is just organised sound.
Maybe one day AIs will be able to participate in cultural practices like humans do, as sentient beings, but current generative AI models do not.
show comments
qnleigh
I'm very happy to see that they're prioritizing making tools for musicians, rather than making AI music generators to replace musicians. Everything else I've come across so far was trying to do the latter.
show comments
ipnon
It seems to struggle to create music with a strong identity. It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits. But the thing about top 40 type music is that the best music is already in the Top 40. It remains to be seen if there is as strong a demand for a music chart filled with slop as there is demand for a music chart filled with pop tunes by celebrities.
I don't think audio files are the right output for deep learning music models. It'd be more useful to pro musicians to describe some parameters for synths, or describe a MIDI baseline, or describe tunings for a plugin and then have the model generate these, which can then be tweaked similar to how we now code with LLMs. But generating muddy, poorly mixed WAVs with purple prose lyrics is only an interesting deep learning demo at this point, not an advancement in music itself.
show comments
modeless
Music models are not interesting to me unless I can use them to edit and remix existing music. Of course none of them let you do that to avoid being sued by the labels.
show comments
TaupeRanger
Another breathless press release with no demo. Typical DeepMind. Nothing to see here.
fallinditch
I am interested in using AI-driven music composition tools in new ways, and Lyra 2 sounds impressive, but
a) so far, using these tools leaves me feeling a little meh, and
b) we are in between the before and after times right now, witnessing the transition to the world of AI content and we're definitely losing something.
Prompt: Hazy, fractured UK Garage, Bedroom Recording, Distorted and melancholic. Instrumental. A blend of fractured drum patterns, vocal samples that have been manipulated and haunting ambient textures, featuring heavy sub-bass, distorted synths, sparse melodic fragments.
It's kinda like Suno, except Suno sounds pretty good sometimes. Even so, I played with Suno for a few days and lost interest. There are some amazing examples on Suno, though: https://suno.com/song/9a7fd58e-132c-4ac5-9a25-f40d7f6f8c9f. This is one of the early tunes, it probably can do better now.
moralestapia
>Waitlist
They still haven't learned, wow.
Someone in there really wants to drive Google to the ground.
show comments
justlikereddit
Classic google approach to AI.
"We made something really fancy"
"Oh you wanted to try it out for yourself instead of just reading our self-congratulatory tech demos article? How about fuck you!"
Yeah fuck you too Google, this is why your AI competitors are eating you alive, and good riddance
staticelf
Figure out an AI to do my dishes, laundry and clean my home. Not the fun parts of life please.
Everyone wants the futuristic star trek future but we all forget that there is only one Captain Kirk and his small crew. Most of us will be sitting around at home doing laundry and cleaning the workplaces of the robots that is owned by large corporations.
You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-Al is? Wrong direction.
I want Al to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for Al to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
- Joanna Maciejewska
You could add music
The creation of music by AI brings to mind a quote from David Bowie:
“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So take advantage of these last few years, because this will never happen again. Get ready for a lot of touring, because that's the only unique experience left.”
While Bowie had different reasoning for making that statement, it's interesting to think that with AI-generated music, his idea of "music like water or electricity" might finally come true.
Trying to look at the bigger picture for a moment. A lot of the philosophical debate about art I see here, and elsewhere on social media, is often very shallow and can be reduced to:
Does one believe that the value of the art-piece (be is music, paintings, film, or whatever) is created in the mind of the artist, or is it created in the mind of the consumer?
If you believe only in the former, AI art is an oxymoron and pointless. If you believe only the later, you're likely to rejoice at all the explosion of new content and culture we can expect in the coming years.
As far as I can tell though, most regular people think that the truth is somewhere in between these two extremes, where both both the creator and the consumer's thoughts are important in unison. That culture is about where the two meet each other, and help each other grow. But most of the arguments I've seen online seem to ignore or miss this dichotomy of views entirely, which unfortunately reduces the quality of the debate considerably.
The interest in ai music generation is lower than I initially thought. I jumped in but felt the exercise lacked the joy of making music physically or with software like pro tools. With pro tools you control the thousands of knobs which gives you more control. These AI models take away that connection. You can play around with different words to get different results but it's like painting with a shotgun.
No one wants to hear other people's ai songs because they lack meaning and novelty.
AI image and short video generation can create novelty and interest. But when the medium require more from the person like reading a book or watching a movie the level of AI acceptance goes down. We'll accept an AI generated email or ad copy but not an ai generated playlist and certainly not a deepfake of someone from reality. That's what people want from AI, a blending of real life into a fantasy generator but no one is offering that yet.
I find this to be profoundly depressing.
I've just recently re-discovered the joy of writing my own songs, and playing them with (actual) instruments. It's something I get immense pleasure from, and for once, I'm actually getting some earned traction. In another life, I may have been a musician, and it's something I fantasize about regularly.
With all these AI-generated music tools, the world is about to be flooded with a ton of low-effort, low-quality music. It's going to to absolutely drown out anyone trying to make music honestly, and kill budding musicians in their crib.
I suppose this is the same existential crisis that other professions/skills are also going through now. The feeling of a loss of purpose, or a loss of a fantasy in learning a new skill and switching careers, is pretty devastating.
Ai music has been awesome for me, not because the music is that good, but because it gives me the ability to do something that I couldn’t have done myself. I use it all the time for my DnD group, songs about characters, funny moments, backstories, it’s a great tool that our players have found to increase engagement with the game
I've made a few tracks using Suno to scratch my own itch / desire for music that covers certain themes.
The best use of Suno for has been the ease with which you can generate diss tracks: I ask Gemini to make a diss track lyrics related to specific topics, and then I have Suno generate the actual track. It's very cathartic when you're sitting at home in the dark because the power company continues to fail.
Anyway, I hope I can get access, I think it would be fun to vibe some new music. Although this UI looks severely limited in what capabilities it provides. Why aren't the people who build these tools innovating more? It would be cool if you could generate a song and then have it split into multiple tracks that you can remix and tweak independently. Maybe a section of track is pretty good but you want to switch out a specific instrument. Maybe describe what kind of beats you want to the tool and have it generate multiple potential interpretations, which you can start to combine and build up into a proper track. I think ideally I'd be able to describe what kind of mood or vibe I'm going for, without having to worry about any of the musical theory behind it, and the tool should generate what I want.
https://deepmind.google/technologies/lyria/
Lyria 2 is currently available to a limited number of trusted testers
Music on iPod or a Walkman or a radio is great.
But have you ever attended live music shows ? Have you ever ‘felt’ the music ? Even someone at a local bar singing feels and hits different.
AI can never bring feelings. That will never change. Even science fiction agrees with that.
So bring all the AI you want everywhere, some things are irreplaceable by electronic world.
"Releases" is a strong word, as in typical google fashion, the actual thing that was released was a waitlist form.
I thought AI is supposed to free up my time by taking my job so I can unleash my musical creativity on an empty stomach? It is going to make music too?
Are there any particularly good samples anyone can point out?
The 2-3 clips I listened to in the article sounded awful (my own subjective opinion).
Only available in the US
"Country of residence (this current phase of the experiment is only available to users based in the U.S. for now, but feel free to submit interest and stay tuned for updates): "
It seems inevitable now. I used to think AI music would always sound compromised in term of audio quality, but the tech seems to have crossed a threshold, kind of like Retina displays did for screens.
Soon, hiring people for commercial background music might be rare. Think AI for jingles, voiceovers, maybe even the models and visuals. Cafes can use AI-generated music too – in a way, the owner curates or "creates" it based on their taste.
But there are still interesting parts to human music making: the unpredictability and social side of live shows, for example. Maybe future music releases could even be interactive, letting listeners easily tweak tracks? Like this demo: https://glicol.org/demo#ontherun
"Democratization of ___" (fill in with your favorite word). This is what it also does look like. I'm not saying that this is anything good or bad, but when I usually hear that sentence, it's associated with something positive, empowering.
Is there a model which can generate vocals for an existing song given lyrics and some direction? I can't sing my way out of a paper bag, but I can make everything else for a song, so it would be a good way to try a bunch of ideas and then involve an actual singer for any promising ideas.
the biggest thread to music is the audience.
a machine doing any of this would be not causing a meltdown by musicians in the 80s. A punk rock band would not feel threatened by this neither would be Prince.
the sad truth is human output is so averaged out now, that most of it will be replaced.
Strong opinion ahead: the very moment people will finally realize that music is in the microscopic nuances of the human touch, breath and taste(literally for every instrument), hopefully we will get disinvested in this useless technology. Yes, I am aware of software like pro tools, but that can ba used well for touch up all tue nueances
This is not actually music.
Music is a cultural practice, this is just organised sound.
Maybe one day AIs will be able to participate in cultural practices like humans do, as sentient beings, but current generative AI models do not.
I'm very happy to see that they're prioritizing making tools for musicians, rather than making AI music generators to replace musicians. Everything else I've come across so far was trying to do the latter.
It seems to struggle to create music with a strong identity. It is great if you want to make a poor imitation of top 40 hits. But the thing about top 40 type music is that the best music is already in the Top 40. It remains to be seen if there is as strong a demand for a music chart filled with slop as there is demand for a music chart filled with pop tunes by celebrities.
I don't think audio files are the right output for deep learning music models. It'd be more useful to pro musicians to describe some parameters for synths, or describe a MIDI baseline, or describe tunings for a plugin and then have the model generate these, which can then be tweaked similar to how we now code with LLMs. But generating muddy, poorly mixed WAVs with purple prose lyrics is only an interesting deep learning demo at this point, not an advancement in music itself.
Music models are not interesting to me unless I can use them to edit and remix existing music. Of course none of them let you do that to avoid being sued by the labels.
Another breathless press release with no demo. Typical DeepMind. Nothing to see here.
I am interested in using AI-driven music composition tools in new ways, and Lyra 2 sounds impressive, but a) so far, using these tools leaves me feeling a little meh, and b) we are in between the before and after times right now, witnessing the transition to the world of AI content and we're definitely losing something.
Prompt: Hazy, fractured UK Garage, Bedroom Recording, Distorted and melancholic. Instrumental. A blend of fractured drum patterns, vocal samples that have been manipulated and haunting ambient textures, featuring heavy sub-bass, distorted synths, sparse melodic fragments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNog4qB-mHQ&t=5s&pp=2AEFkAIB
US only.
If you missed it, check out this MusicFX DJ: https://labs.google/fx/tools/music-fx-dj
It's pretty fun :)
https://imgur.com/a/ohTZXZ0
It's kinda like Suno, except Suno sounds pretty good sometimes. Even so, I played with Suno for a few days and lost interest. There are some amazing examples on Suno, though: https://suno.com/song/9a7fd58e-132c-4ac5-9a25-f40d7f6f8c9f. This is one of the early tunes, it probably can do better now.
>Waitlist
They still haven't learned, wow.
Someone in there really wants to drive Google to the ground.
Classic google approach to AI.
"We made something really fancy"
"Oh you wanted to try it out for yourself instead of just reading our self-congratulatory tech demos article? How about fuck you!"
Yeah fuck you too Google, this is why your AI competitors are eating you alive, and good riddance
Figure out an AI to do my dishes, laundry and clean my home. Not the fun parts of life please.
Everyone wants the futuristic star trek future but we all forget that there is only one Captain Kirk and his small crew. Most of us will be sitting around at home doing laundry and cleaning the workplaces of the robots that is owned by large corporations.