Comment by serf
16 hours ago
easily liking any kind of music only on the merit that it is human generated seems lazy, too.
similarly, firing up a music gen system rather than listening to a billy joel song for the 30,000th time seems less lazy.
say what you want about AI systems, people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them. The thing is easier but the engagement seems greater for a lot of people. It's not as black and white as "oh you're lazy." -- and, by the way , that seems so wildly inappropriate to label an unknown third party as site-unseen -- dare I say that seems lazy?
Nobody does that. Literally nobody likes a piece of music just because it was made by a human.
But consider an album I found a couple of years ago, called "The Unfinished Violin". A UK folk musician, Sam Sweeney, bought a violin he thought sounded really good, noticed a name in it. Researched who he was. Turns out he was a music hall performer from Leeds. He had made the parts for the violin, but before he could assemble it, he was sent to fight in WW1 and died in Flanders. The violin had laid unfinished in an envelope for the better part of a century. Sweeney arranged a lot of time-appropriate, military related music for the album, and wrote a few himself too.
I didn't know any of this when I first heard "The highland soldier" on Spotify DW. I just thought, wow, that was a beautiful tune. And it sounded like it meant something to someone. And it, turned out, it did. It meant something to Sweeney, it meant something to the folk music collector George Butterworth who wrote it down (and then also died in WW1), it meant something to the people he recorded it from.
If I heard a Suno tune, it's entirely possible I'd also think, wow, that's a beautiful tune. But there's almost no human connection. Nobody cared about that music. It's not entirely devoid of humanity, because of course Suno was trained on the music of people who cared and had something to express, and there's an echo of it. But the link is severed. It has no human provenance.
You can cut yourself off from humanity, just use audio as a drug and not care where it comes from. Certainly a lot of people did that long before AI. But why, when there's so much human music to connect with?
> people that I used to see idly sit at a screen and ingest things all day purely are creating things they like now and sharing them
Like what? People say this kind of stuff all the time and it's either not true or they're generating things with very questionable taste.
Like the music being described literally in the thread you're responding to.
definition of "very questionable taste"
Yeah, I would absolutely classify that as "questionable taste" lol.