Comment by echelon
1 day ago
There are plenty of electronic artists who can't sing. Right now they have to hire someone else to do the singing for them, but I'd wager a lot of them would like to own their music end-to-end. I would.
I'm a filmmaker. I've done it photons-on-glass production for fifteen years. Meisner trained, have performed every role from cast to crew. I'm elated that these tools are going to enable me to do more with a smaller budget. To have more autonomy and creative control.
We've had Yamaha Vocaloid for over two decades now, and Synthesizer V is probably coming up on a decade too now. They're like any other synth: MIDI (plus phonemes) in, sound out. It's a tool of musical expression, like any other instrument.
Hatsune Miku (Fujita Saki) is arguably the most prolific singer in the world, if you consider every Vocaloid user and the millions of songs that have come out of it.
So I don't think there's any uncharted territory...we still have singers, and sampled VST instruments didn't stop instrumentalists from existing; if anything, most of these newcomer generative AI tools are far less flexible or creatively useful than the vast array of synthesis tools musicians already use.
Miku is neat but not a replacement for a human by any stretch of the imagination. In practice most amateur usage of that lands somewhere in a cringey uncanny valley.
No one was going to replace voice actors for TV and movie dubs with Miku whereas the cutting edge TTS tools seem to be nearing that point. Presumably human vocal performances will follow that in short order.
Yes, the flipside of this is that we're eroding the last bit of ability for people to make a living through their art. We are capturing the market for people to live off of making illustrations, to making background music, jingles, promotional videos, photographs, graphic design, and funnelling those earnings to NVIDIA. The question I keep asking is whether we care to value as a society for people to make a living through their art. I think there is a reason to care.
It's not so much of an issue with art for art's sake aided by AI. It's an issue with artistic work becoming unviable work.
This feels like one of those tropes that keeps showing up whenever new tech comes out. At the advent of recorded music, im sure buskers and performers were complaing that live music is dead forever. Stage actors were probably complaining that film killed plays. Heck, I bet someome even complained that video itself killed the radio star. Yet here we are, hundreds of years later, live music is still desirable, plays still happen, and faceless voices are still around, theyre just called v-tubers and podcasters.
> This feels like one of those tropes that keeps showing up whenever new tech comes out.
And this itself is another tired trope. Just because you can pattern match and observe that things repeatedly went a certain way in the past, doesn't mean that all future applications of said pattern will play out the same way. On occasion entire industries have been obliterated without a trace by technological advancement.
We can also see that there must be some upper ceiling on what humans in general are capable of - hit that and no new jobs will be created because humans simply won't be capable of the new tasks. (Unless we fuse with the machines or genetically engineer our brains or etc but I'm choosing to treat those eventualities as out of scope.)
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Tin Pan Alley is the historical industry from before recording: composers sold sheet music and piano rolls to publishers, who sold them to working musicians. The ASCAP/BMI mafia would shake down venues and make sure they were paying licensing fees.
Recorded music and radio obviously reduced the demand for performers, which reduced demand for sheets.
umm, I don't know if you've seen the current state of trying to make a living with music but It's widely accepted as dire. Touring is a loss leader, putting out music for free doesn't pay, stream counts payouts are abysmally low. No one buys songs.
All that is before the fact that streaming services are stuffing playlists with AI generated music to further reduce the payouts to artists.
> Yet here we are, hundreds of years later, live music is still desirable, plays still happen, and faceless voices are still around...
Yes all those things still happen, but it's increasingly untenable to make a living through it.
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The amount of artists that managed to actually earn enough to pay the rent and bills was already very very small before AI emerged. I totally agree with you, its heartbreaking to watch how it got even worse, but, the music industry already shuffled the big money to the big players way before AI.
What happens to lyricless electronica if suddenly every electronic artist has quality vocal-backing?
Oh no.
Maybe we did frig this up.
On the other hand, maybe we'll get models capable of removing the lyrics from things without damaging the rest of the audio. Or better yet, replacing the lyrics with a new instrument. So it might yet work out in our favor.
This was one of the first things they were doing with neural nets,
and there are even a couple SaaS options for it now.
More choices for artists is not a bad thing.
Indeed.
But it does change who can be an artist in each niche,
and that’s been interesting to briefly pause and consider here with the community.