Comment by grokys
6 hours ago
I do wonder why AI music is so lame. Every previous technological advancement in music produced amazing new sounds and styles but AI music seems to just be emulating lowest common denominator pop sludge. Where's the Bruce Haack or Kraftwerk of AI? Surely there's a previously unimaginable sound palette out there that we could be pulling from. Why is it all so BAD?
If I had to guess, three related factors:
1. Platforms like Suno lack the granular control that can make a song distinctive and interesting. A prompt is an all-or nothing paradigm. There is no gradual build towards a final result like in normal creative processes. Yes you can supply lyrics but that’s hardly a substitute. And on top of that it’s painfully slow due to the nature of the technology.
2. As a result of 1, experienced music producers (familiar with regular DAWs) don’t want to use it. They probably prefer something with instant feedback. Tweak a synth param, you can instantly hear its effect. And changing one instrument doesn’t randomly affect unrelated things.
3. As a result of 2, the majority of AI generated music is throwaway and or created by amateurs who don’t have the ear for what makes a song good.
I have a background in painting but this is 100% the same problem in that domain. Without the ability to make precise isolated changes it's not very useful. I expect most creative software to integrate gen AI eventually, but it needs to be in a way that gives you a lot of precision
I think that you're probably right here - it's the granularity. We'll probably see that improving as things move along and hopefully get something interesting out of it at some point. Quite frankly the alternative is too depressing to think about.
Emulating the lowest common denominator is the function of an LLM. It works better for things like code because boring code is actually the best code.
I think it's because its main use in this particular context is to produce results that the creator does not have the skill to produce and/or does not want to invest the time to produce.
I guess you could argue that drum machines offered simplification/automation when they first appeared compared to the option of a human drummer, but also, those machines opened up all sorts of creative and stylistic possibilities that simply couldn't be done by sitting someone at a traditional drum kit. Using AI to make music doesn't do this -- it's a shortcut that has no argument in its favor whatsoever except that it saved the person making it time (and/or enabled them to generate something they couldn't have produced through their own work). That's why it is fundamentally uncool in a musical context, and always will be.
Idk, man, I beg to differ: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DCR2BlygrTP/?igsh=c203NmQwYnI...
I hope you're trolling.
Actually not! Lyrics aside, it's a banger.l, especially towards the end. If this was crated by any tech house/electro flash producer, Tiga for example, it would be huge.
I don't know about music, but there are plenty of pioneers of AI art who were pretty interesting in my opinion. Mario Klingemann, Tom White, Memo Akten and Samim Winiger are some names I remember who made a lot of cool stuff. I admit I haven't kept up at what they're doing today, though (maybe because I left Twitter, and I think many of them did too).
>emulating lowest common denominator pop sludge.
So the stuff that is most popular?
But (semi) jokes aside, I think that AI music tools are just not fully developed yet. The current approach is more or less one shotting a track. Whereas I think a system that allows one to generate layers would bring in many new sounds. Something like a "speak to instument" system, where you can hum melodies and then generate instruments to play those, then compose a track with all those individual parts.
I find AI Iran to be the best hip-hop in a long time. What's bad about this?
https://youtu.be/i0u_BNPOsMw?si=IQ49AkUM-4tFTqKX
On the subject of AI music with a political message, there are much better examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3B4524ot5BM
That is awful, sorry. You need to clean your ears.
I mean this respectfully, I encourage you to listen to more music if you find this to be “the best hip hop in a long time”
Any recommendations?
Because people don't put the effort in. A lot of electronic music can be considered lazy - just press button, turn a knob, boom you have music. Right? But then you have someone like Aphex Twin and they make something unique out of these easy machines.
I'm sure someone can make unique or passable music with the help of AI tooling, but they can't do it by just saying "make me this music", no matter how much effort they think they have put into the prompt.
It is the same with anything else. I use AI to write a lot of code - but I'm constantly tell it to fix some things - often the same type of error I told it yesterday (things that a junior engineer would have learned a few months ago it is still getting wrong)
I don’t think it’s just about effort. It’s the nature of the technology.
If you practice piano, you will get better in some predictable way, even if it takes a long time.
If you spend more and more time tweaking a prompt, you will be pulling songs from some distribution of possible songs but you will never have the level of control that conventional music producers have.
When modern DAWs like FL Studio started democratizing music production, there was immediate backlash in the music production community. I know this because I lived through it. Music made with FL Studio was considered garbage, not by serious musicians, amateur. "FL Studio users are incapable of making good music", etc. Of course now well-respected musicians like Tyler the Creator and Porter Robinson use FL Studio and there isn't really a question. This is a common theme every time some new method of creating music comes around - just look at how they called Dylan "Judas" when he debuted electronic guitar, etc.
"Every previous technological advancement in music produced amazing new sounds and styles" is classic hindsight bias. In retrospect, once everything has sorted out, and all the good music has risen to the top, it's easy to look back in history and point to the highlights. But when you live through it, it looks a lot more like a mess with no redeeming qualities.
It's easy to apply the same pattern of "people hated it, then liked it" but I think something's different about AI. I think a lot of the kneejerk reactions are subconscious but I don't think that means they're unfounded or invalid, they just haven't articulated the reason yet.
When AI image generation was a thing that hobbyists were messing around with (before it became good sometime in 2023) a lot of the creative-type people that abhor AI today were interested in it. Same thing with LLMs and stuff like AI Dungeon. ( I don't think AI music generation had a similar hobbyist era but not sure. )
I think the main thing that changed was how big and commercial it became. There's nothing counter-cultural about AI anymore, it's become the polar opposite. Nobody was making billions selling synthesizers & convincing investors it would replace 99% of musicians.
FL Studio was absolutely a massive commercial success. I mean, sure, nothing compared to AI, but in the music community bubble, it was enormous - and still is. It did what AI is doing today - it made a very expensive and time consuming process before (buy a thousand dollar guitar or other expensive instrument or synthesizer, rent a studio, get a producer, blah blah, etc) extremely cheap. This then led immediately to complaints - why is it that all music made with FL Studio so lame?
If we are going to say that the knee-jerk reaction to AI is somehow different I'd be curious to know what the difference is.
FL Studio has advanced a long way since it first came out. The software professionals are using today is nothing like it was 00's. The name at the time "FruityLoops" also didn't help its image as a pro tool.
It's probably not all so bad. There probably are people out there intentionally creating things with AI assistance that sounds pretty rad.
But the idea of being able to just create endless music with low effort is too compelling for too many, so the good stuff is drown out by the mass amounts of low-effort slop being produced.
It is really easy to produce slop. However humans generally don't inflict it on the rest of the world when that make it. Trust me, you don't want to hear my latest efforts on my 4-track recorder (which is why only I've heard it via headphones, and it will stay that way until/unless I get a lot better. I learned a lot about what I need to study, but fixing rhythm is not easy)
This is exactly what everybody said about rap and drum machines and sampling when I was growing up in the mid to late 80s.
They were right and wrong. A lot of it was really formulaic bullshit, and much of it doesn't hold up at all. But it also spawned one of the most creative and exciting periods in music history.
Will this be the same? It feels like it won't, but that's how things feel in general because I'm old. So who knows?
Not a valid comparison, I feel. I may be hindsight, but rap and electronic music came from vibrant underground scenes and to many critics and music fans of the time was seen as at least interesting and at best ground breaking.
AI music on the other hand comes not from the underground, but from corporations. You'll be hard pushed to find any critics or music connoisseurs singing its praises.
It's hindsight. At the time it was a pretty mainstream opinion that it wasn't music at all, just talking over fake drums and stolen copies of other people's songs.
The culture changes.