I'm just Lager, If you don't mind please ask the masters of the both approaches. They can guide you better through the difficulties of each of them.

 

Discussing this will be nice to be back on topic, even if I'm talking about general rather than personal.

So, @Lager you've described a rough framework with a spectrum of possibilities.
It's a good idea, so I'd like to try and tidy it up a bit.

The spectrum (version 1) (drawn vertically only cos its easier in a forum post)
Creativeness-based
.
.
Awareness-based

I like the spectrum. I don't like the labels, but off-hand I can't think of better labels.
I like (some of) the extra words you added to describe each end of the spectrum, so let's put those in and add a few similar words

The spectrum (version 2)
Creativeness-based (letting the inspiration and subconsciousness be their guide)
.
.
Awareness-based (choose deliberation for making art, letting conscious abstractions be their guide)

Note I deliberately threw out the comment that says Awareness-based approach rejects the Creativeness-based approach.

Then your comment: "The non-hard-shelled tend to choose compromises between the two"

That is pointing in a useful direction, but doesn't quite hit the mark.
So, lots to say about that. I'll add the comments into the spectrum

The spectrum (version 3)
Creativeness-based (letting the inspiration and subconsciousness be their guide)
.
....Everyone that actually makes music is in this middle ground.
....There are no practioners that are stuck at either end totally rejecting the other end.
....Very few (weird) practitioners see the ends of the spectrum as being in conflict.
....Practitioners are not looking for compromises between the two.
....Practitioners are trying to embrace as much of the spectrum as they possibly can.
....Practitioners may lean more to one direction than the other.
.
Awareness-based (choose deliberation for making art, letting conscious abstractions be their guide)

---
Using this updated version of the framework, here's an interesting question that goes all the way back to...@the real Pict's question

Although, no human practitioner ever lives at the extremes of the spectrum, software tools that assist with generating music definitely do live at an extreme end. They are (as yet) entirely based on the 'Awareness-based' thinking approach. Even if and when they get infused with AI, they won't be doing anything instinctive (discussions of very advanced AI being ignored here)
So, might it be true that as more and more music gets generated using software support, then the musical artefacts that get produced will reflect leaning more towards the 'Awareness-based' end of the spectrum?
And as a personal-only opinion, I would say those musical artefacts are more likely to be impoverished as a result of that.

 

Last edited: Jan 19, 2020

Recommendations

80 Black Sabbath - Master of Reality (Guitar Recorded Version)
A difficult read - but apparently digestible if you strap it onto your ears instead!
Hard (but not impossible) to be more really boring than this.

1584 The Porn Myth: Exposing the Reality Behind the Fantasy of Pornography
Don't get too excited, lots of sensible words, short on titillating pictures.

and the biggest joke of all....
The parody list contains truly beautiful gems that people will just sneer at.
as Bertrand Russell said.... "Most people would rather die than think and many of them do"

 

Wait, did you just say Master of Reality is boring?

 

No I said it was really boring.
But it didn't stop me exploring the ancient ruins,
and when I got as far back as their 1st album "Black Sabbath" I thought that was superb.

 

A composition from the playlist of a DAW full of audio clips of recorded material and additional samples put together. The video was made to support the theme:

Your question sparked these general thoughts:
Creation is an art, whether you work with sounds, colors or objects.
Just about anything is possible.
The HOW depends on WHAT and that depends on WHO.
Though it's the end result that counts,
There is always a story behind a work, whether intentional, accidental, inspired or mundane, there is an intention, and a process that has to account for the finished product.
We learn from each other, in one way or another, by influence, admiration and even dislike from something we heard or saw!

 

This seems to be catching on as a method of composing people actually pay to use this.It can be used for free but if you pay you get the copyright(whoopee)

https://www.aiva.ai/

 

This is my method, and I'm not claiming it to be superior to anything else, it's just one that works for me.

Let me introduce you to "The Bucket". The Bucket is where every single thing I do ends up in, be it an idea, a patch, a guitar riff, a recorded loop, a clip from my voice recorder on the phone, some lyric fragments, a song title etc etc.

Now, I use the word "compose" in it's very literal sense: putting things together to produce a composite, the end result. A composition for me is a frame, examples are like "I want to create an acid house song using this sound", "the producer wants a haunting ambient track for the ending credits", "I hear a thing that's using 6 notes of this scale in the bass and 2 in the melody region, but reversed after the turnaround", "verse-chorus-verse-chorus-outro" and so on.

Given the frame I reach into The Bucket to pick the pieces to assemble together to create the composite. Consider it my bag of tricks.

Now, for composition, let's say at the last rehersal the bassist came up with a killer groove in F# minor, then after at home I pick up my geetar and try out some chords that suit it. I then reach into the bucket for some suitable rhythmic patterns and maybe some nice distorted tones. Hopefully sounding nice at this point I again reach in to the bucket to get some lyrics to fit the mood. Then the same thing again for the vocal melodies and so on.

Then when I feel I've got enough stuff I mold and melt the entire thing to come up with the composite.

 

This will never compose a good song.

 

I agree I didn't like any of the examples on the youtube page.The output has been played back by a real orchestra in one of the youtube videos.I would never consider using it but I can imagine film,tv,or game producers using it or something like it in order to cut costs.

 

Great post.

 

But that's just your opinion about what good means.

And that's just your opinion about what good means.

Are you feeling provoked yet?
Provoked enough to read on and discover that I personally agree with your comments and I suspect that if we unpacked our personal definitions of what good means we would find lots to agree about.

But our personal opinions and our shared opinions on what good means are just our shared cultural artefacts with no more cultural stability (and no more objective reality) than the value of a dollar. Culture is fickle and will dump our opinions into the trash can without batting an eyelid.

Kids in some near future may be getting rat-arsed at some rave where the EDM is being generated live by AI and is being conducted in real-time by some pseudo celebrity waving his prick around in a figure of eight twirl, all controlled by the audience waving their wireless implants that have replaced smartphones.
Those kids will tell you that the rave soundtrack (which they collectively composed) is great music (great not good).
When you tell them that their definition of great is moronic they will tell you to put your boring old-fart definition of good back into the museum where it belongs.

Are you ready for that? If not then start preparing your isolation bunker and get ready to retreat.

I think AI will be (ain't yet) one of humanity's most creative, most powerful, most profound, and most dangerous achievements.
I have no quarrel with AI at all - it will offer huge potential for people wanting to be creative.
My lament (if I had one, which I don't) would be with the age-old problem of people thinking it's cool to be dumb.
People who develop that mentality before puberty, and then fail to grow out of it, always outnumber creative people.
People who think it's cool to be dumb will find their greatest ally (their most useful crutch) in AI, and that will be a problem.

 

Last edited: Jan 20, 2020

Not feeling provoked in the slightest Ad It's just personal preference which of course is the essence of subjectivity.I'm fairly sure that AI will be used increasingly in music and that many people will enjoy it.I am somewhat of a Luddite in that respect I enjoy creating music employing my own mind and using the crude tools of traditional instruments and methods.AI as it pertains to music is merely an evolution of arranger keyboards and band in a box etc in my opinion.I do think that there will always be a desire for human input in music making and that there will always be an appreciation for the human craft element of Art.I really don't care if others don't enjoy what I enjoy or expect anyone to share my taste in music or my methods for creating it.As with automation in industry there is no stopping the inevitable march of technological progress and the creative fields will not be spared.Self driving cars will reduce driving jobs,automated checkouts have removed human checkout jobs so it would be reasonable to expect that the creative fields will be subject to the same pressures whether that is a good thing or not is a whole other discussion.

 

I obviously never really expected you to be provoked ,
it just made for a better intro to the comment about 'recognising what is subjective'

But I'm sure you've met people that actually would want to argue the opposite and assert that there is some universal backup authority that makes their personal definition of good absolutely right rather than just being a possibly transient feature of our culture.

I agree with your preferences about choice of music making methods, with the focus on endlessly getting lost exploring our own brains.
I also agree with your characterising current AI-music dabbles as being little more than an evolution of arranger keyboards and band in a box etc. AI's current passionless bag of music mining tricks is merely a little bit cleverer than Arranger keyboards and BiaB, etc.

But it will get really interesting when more advanced, more generalised AI starts to emulate our cognitive tricks, the stuff we think is so uniquely human, and becomes very efficient at doing so. Even while the AI is still utterly devoid of consciousness, we may find ourselves mistakenly attributing human qualities to the AI, in ways that vastly exceed what the AI deserves. We will willingly con ourselves, and start failing to tell the difference.
The standard joke is when you are talking to a help line support system and you find yourself saying...
"I must be talking to a human, no machine could be this stupid"
The day is not that far off, when many, if not most, human listeners will many times fail to tell the difference between human generated music and machine generated music. Not because AI music is so good but because human listening is so poor.

p.s. I think your comment "I really don't care if others don't enjoy what I enjoy or expect anyone to share my taste in music or my methods for creating it"
is my favourite comment so far.

 

I'm almost 64, have arthritis and a legal cannabis prescription for 3 grams a day.
Too much to smoke or vape so I bake it into bran muffins.
As a result I hear the music my unconcious mind generates in my head all day and it kills me to go into stores or shopping centers and have their muzak conflict with what I'm already hearing.
What I hear in my head, I try to put into recordings. With modern tools its getting easier than when I was using a Minimoog or EMS AKS, athough those beasts had their own plusses.
I look forward to retirement to do this all day long without fear of starvation because I'll have a pension and can afford to be really different.

 

Most definitely and on this forum too like I said in another thread it seems to me that what most people deem to be "good" or "pleasing" is really only what is familiar yet it is amazing to me the lengths some people will go to,to try to convince you of the reality of an objectively provable "good" ,"better","best" as it pertains to creativity.

 

Last edited: Jan 20, 2020

.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Jan 20, 2020

Well, we don't really understand real mechanics of intelligence or consciousness (or - here we go into metaphysical and mystical - the soul); it is super naive to expect our algorithms to construct (or perform) real music in the near future. Currently the best are style based and... sound formulaic, because they are basically randomizing some stylistic parameter ranges, while imitating bunch of models that serve as the basis for their style.
(Btw, our current civillization is not sustainable or self-sufficient, so it's stupid to expect bright technological future).
Let's say we create intelligent machine; this thing would be a human, actually more than human, it will be capable of composing and performing music.( But I doubt this will happen at all cuz our civillization in the near future will collape - basically we need to fix to global warming, massive dying of wild species, pollution of water and soils, degradation of soils, deforestation and the depletion of various valuable resources for industries. Good luck even with one of these. )
Some food for thought:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#New_mysterianism

 

There's a reverse relationship between the complexity of music and technology over time.

Spoiler

Your possible response:
It's not real. Based on which facts? (in italic)