Nah not really - if you want the real sh!t show version from a few years ago...
https://audiosex.pro/threads/what-is-the-best-songwriting-plugin.49981/

and this one already mentioned (a bit more civilised)
https://audiosex.pro/threads/software-for-inspiration-in-musical-composition.51464/

One interesting distinction you can find in these threads, which seems to influence people's preferences quite a lot, is whether the software is (allegedly) offering to shield people from music theory (and hence very popular) or, the opposite, requires some knowledge of music theory and is maybe even offering to support people getting to grips with that music theory (much less popular).

 

I think it's worth pointing out that people who write symphonies, full orchestral music, are very unlikely to ever hear any of it performed by real orchestras. I think, though I'm not sure, they make their money within the commercial world writing for ads, TV shows and movies etc. Also, logistically you would need to do something really special to command the time of such a large group of people, not to mention the running costs of orchestras and venues. Classical music is elitist and somebody without a posh name and private education/connections won't get anywhere near a real orchestra. Before DAWs people were writing orchestral pieces that were never heard, even by themselves.

 

Woof, woof!!

 

How dare you!
You would just make Lady Xena unemployed (and she may be a fully paid up member of a musician's union)
You should both feel ashamed.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MEHkB27oZg

Not to mention protests from the country music fraternity

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTGjCfYKk8I

 

Last edited: Jun 20, 2022

Emulating that live piano player improvising to a silent movie would represent a fabulous double challenge for an AI system.
(1) To visually interpret movie scenes (with or without spoken dialogue) i.e., scenes not pre-categorised by humans.
and
(2) In real-time generate an 'appropriate' soundtrack. (with comedy of errors interpretting what 'appropriate' means)

That would be some kind of musical Turing test.
I would be gobsmacked if I ever saw/heard an AI system delivering something even vaguely acceptable.
I don't expect to see/hear that any time soon - but would not be reckless enough to say it couldn't be done eventually.
Especially bearing in mind that it won't be an intelligent audience doing the judging.
The AI will only need to convince dummies.

 

Last edited: Jun 20, 2022

As I said before, I believe that everything is possible.
In fact, everything that the human being imagines can make it possible. It will only cost time.
if not look at this
The human being wanted to be able to talk to another over a long distance and invented the telephone.
the human being wanted to listen to recorded music, and the radio was invented.
The human being wanted to be able to travel several kilometers, and invented the ship, train, plane, etc.
In fact, now the AI works to be able to talk to the dead and so that the human being can live forever, transferring the information from the brain to a robot.
(they are working on it)
So why couldn't a program be made that emulates a symphony orchestra and styles?

In fact, the color filters could be used as references to the program. I mean for example.
I have seen that for certain movies or scenes they use filters (blue, red) to give that feeling or atmosphere to the movie. This could serve as a reference if that filter was applied to "x" scene and that color tells the program what kind of music to play

 

Or simply emotions - bach, beethoven, chopin, etc have music with endless emotional colors. You could tell the program to generate an arragement in certain style with certain emotional content - all of this just pressing a botton- I'm sure it can be done

 

I'm sorry, I'll never do that again

 

@juggz143 I've been checking a video (quite superficial, that's true) of version 1.5 and man, I'm sorry, but it sounded horrible to me! - poor arragements, poor sounds... but may be I missed something..

 

I'm looking for some youtube reference of another option presented in this thread - Yamaha styles in Pizzicato Professional - but found no videos or tutorials about this.. anyway I'm getting general information about yamaha styles, I have no idea what is it about.. I'll keep you informed

 

Ur right, I deleted that software, don't waste your time

 

Yamaha Style files - There are hundreds of thousands of them freely available on the web.

The plus side...
If only 5% of those styles are interesting to you (and that would be an optimistic score), you can still find some real gems that can easily throw some surprising strange ideas at you, ideas you probably wouldn't have dreamt up yourself.

The down side...
The other 95% - there are thousands of Yamaha styles that are good - but in genres that you're just not interested in.
For example see a typical set of style categories that would be found on a typical Yamaha Arranger keyboard.
https://psrtutorial.com/sty/yamaha/Tyros5/tyros_5.html (a good site to explore)
and see also a typical set of expansion packs available (note the breadth of music styles is huge)
https://ca.yamaha.com/en/products/m...oards/arranger_workstations/psr-s770/vse.html

There are also many thousands more style files that really are just awful - by any definition.
The breadth of muzak to cringe at in the world is huge and Yamaha styles just try to cover all of it - for better or worse.
So you have to see past all that cringe and see the potential of style generators when very selectively applied to stuff that you are personally interested in. It's a bit like remembering that the same technology (e.g., a piano) that one person uses to play something beautiful can also be used by a hundred people to play total garbage.
If you only hear the garbage you might end up hating pianos - your tragic loss.
That is what happens with this old technology for styles. It's too easy to associate Yamaha styles with faded cabaret artistes playing cringy muzak on cruise ships - you have to see past that very grim imagery.

Try the video below and notice a few things...
- The guy is still playing the melodies in real time with his right hand.
- His left hand is steering the chord progressions, but there's no way his left hand is playing all that stylistic backing.
- That stylistic backing is being auto generated. A musician ought to see the value and potential in exactly that (quite old) technology.

But anyone who just wants to "press a button and hear a finished production" with no idea about what's going on musically,
will get absolutely nothing from this - that's their loss.

Russian Classical Symphonic Music Styles Package

www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBsLrxPISj8

 

I'm interested in good music, no matter the style

Yes, very interesting

I'm building the puzzle.. yamaha styles are like real time band in a box right? you enter chords and melody and the program fixes them into the arragement right? and can this be made step by step - like programming the chords - pass them to pizzicato - to generate the background and after this enter the melody or whatever - I'm guitarist, I can not physically do this.

Another issue is quality/interest in the styles. Do you know a good site where to download styles with certain quality?

 

Ahhh should have pointed that out, It's not intended for you to use its sounds... the stock sounds are pretty bad, lol (now its like you want a tool that literally does everything for you).
You were asking for a tool that does orchestral composition and arranging and this is pretty solid for that specific task. You can let it randomly generate stuff OR you can tell it the chords you want, the intruments you want, the movements you want, the mood you want, and it literally spits out the melody's and rhythms and such according your parameters.

Also depending on what vid you watched they may have either skipped, assumed you were already aware, or maybe they weren't aware of the fact you can load vst's as the sound source within Orb or route the midi to control other vsti's. With that being said I'd typically use kontakt libraries in this scenario, but you can substitute VSL or EastWest or whatever you want.

A few things to keep in mind, for one, a lot of the folks who compose orchestral music are snobists and moreso trying to prove that an algorithm can't possibly be that good and aren't interested in showing how this can be useful. Another point is that the stock sounds are horrible and will clearly skew your perception of what the algorithm is able to accomplish. A third thing to keep in mind is that a lot of youtube videos are more so glorified ads trying to get you to click their affiliate link and not true reviews showing an actual complete use-case so they just point out what the program itself does and don't want to also mention some other brands library/instrument/tool thus they don't load another instrument. So yeah you are still absolutely in control of the sound design. You still have to add as much of your own creativity as you would with say scaler or remidi or captain plugins, ezkeys etc. its just a different workflow. Honestly I typically blend tools of this type when I'm looking for inspiration. Its funny tho because none of those others help with the arrangement and structure which is what you seemed to be most focused on earlier in the thread.

When I get a moment I'll try to find a few particular vids I recommend to get the gist because there are quite a few that make this program look bad but I honestly think that was the intention. Orb can be kind of how someone was mentioning they initially overlooked remidi until something later finally opened their eyes to its true potential.

 

For now I'll start with this one as its quick and demonstrates something eerily close to what you were asking for here

Although this example does use the stock sounds which may further put you off lol
But if you can see past that and imagine the next step being replacing the sounds or this same idea but controlling other vsts you might start to see where this could go.
You could start a melody in Scaler or Ezkeys for example and then have it fully orchestrated in a drag and drop #shrugs

Also to be clear the midi file he starts with is ONLY THE MELODY not the full orchestration, orb did the rest.

 

Last edited: Jun 21, 2022

These features did not appear in the video I watched. If so, this could be a great program.

Yes, that's what I thought. But the arragements, I mean the richness of the background/foreground in movement & harmony that I listened were very poor too

Yes please!

EDIT: sorry , I did not noticed that you already shared the videos. I'll take a look!

 

I'm in minute 1:45 of the video and my mouth is opened to my belly

 

@juggz143 this video has nothing to do with what I watched before! and these are the program sounds? lol, well it's not awesome, but sounds really good, enough from the composer's point of view

1000 questions in my head now:
- can you edit chords/harmony?
- different styles of arragements or it's more or less the same once you have used a few?
- can you choose the type of arragement: blocks of chords/counterpoint/countermelody/countermelody+background, etc?
- can you edit the patterns of the background ? yes, I suppose you can do it in midi, but I mean if the program offers a facility not to do it note by note

 

SEE LOL

Lmao ok but seriously, yes you can edit the midi and it does have umm like moods to pick from, so like intense, angry, uplifiting, etc. And it doesn't mention counterpoint specifically but it can do variations on harmonies. You can assign each part in a block its role of melody, chords, arp, motif, or rhythmic. Its actually pretty deep. Now that I'm looking for vids I'm recalling how most folks were just hitting the random button and calling it a day and I was like these guys are missing the point of where this fits in the creative process. So I guess the best vids to watch are the tutorials on their youtube.

 

Ok here
https://www.youtube.com/c/Hexachords/playlists

Go to his page and I suggest the Masterclass playlist and the 1.5 tutorials playlist.
I also recommend the 1st masterclass video specifically because it demonstrates how it can start off bad (if you watch his face I don't think he intentionally did that but I respect him for leaving it in), so the first 5 mins are admittedly terrible but then it turns a corner and by the end of the 15 mins its a respectable piece of music. And then the 1.5 overview is probably the next best starting point to really see all the features.