Will AI replace or even destroy humanity?
I prefer the scenario where we play like friends, and so I decided to onboard on a journey of using AI generated material to compose something I like.

I have started with this track, composed by the Magenta project from Google, you can find the link here and download the Midi track.

[URL unfurl="true"]https://magenta.github.io/listen-to-transformer/#a1_5810.mid[/URL]

To orchestrate this piece I followed those simple two rules:

- 1 Only use notes created by the AI
- 2 Notes can be transposed by octave up and down

 

Art is about expressing feelings. AI is like a wanna-be who copies and mixes others creativity in a mediocre level. It can only compete at speed but it will never bring value, for those who are skilled enough to recognize real, valuable art. Unfortunately for the average Joe it can be good enough, just like how they listen to the most popular musicians of today.
AI is not intelligent at all, it's just a search engine using some intentional modifications – to seem unique – based on real human's pre-codings.
It's like an automated cashier, it can save time and human interactions about pre-defined tasks. It can serve for that purpose well.
Actually the first AI everyone has used in were the calculators. AI is not a magic word, it just gets more and more advanced with new technology, faster/higher and more complex computing power.

 

your post mentions being ok with transposing full octaves; but there are a few clunkers in there which could benefit from some semitone moves instead. It's surprising there aren't more than there are. I am sure you could easily fix them and just didn't, based on your starting rules.

How long did this take you to create? (any rough estimate is fine). I would suspect this piece of having a few bad players, much more than I would guess that it is from your AI method only. Only a small bit of work would make it "correct", but that is alarming; or should be.

Pretty cool and nice job. I wouldn't ever listen to it for my own enjoyment; but I could easily see this tech/technique (and it's results) used in lower budget films. Nothing would blatantly tip me off to it being solely AI/computer music.

 

It's a weird mix of avant garde and conventional romanticism to me, and they seem squished together in an arbitrary way that shows it's an AI project. I like your orchestration but it makes me like the piece less. Not your fault, it just highlights the stylistic wonkyness to me. I'd like to keep the dissonant parts, jettison the conventional parts and make it more choral and ethereal, like a Ligetti piece for voices.

Overall though, very cool experiment!

 

Music-alike environmental noise.

It doesn't relate to your work, Marco. It is about the melodic and harmonic material.

You'll never achieve really good results in orchestration with some bad or just mediocre material.

Rework this material, use pieces of it. Make it yours. May be, it makes sense.

 

Last edited: Sep 24, 2023

Hi,
indeed I tried to follow the rule to not alter any note other than octaves, just to see what it would get, I intentionally did not change any note also where my feeling is hurt (like yours I suppose) :D
Intention was to just add a bit of colors to the AI composed track

 

Indeed!
I think in the end I might keep on working it and do a 5-6 minutes track out of it, adding lot of mine and fixing a few parts.
So far this was just a simple exercise and honestly I was even myself very curious to see what it would get in the end :D

 

The mix is what made me curious about this track, a human would have never had the courage to mix such different styles, so I thought it was a good excuse to try
Not to say that myself I mix a lot of tonality and atonality into the same piece or album, but never so evident like AI can do :D

 

true, but I think it might take a role in the future, where people is more and more used to standardized music, and budget for composing is very low. Imagine how easy it would be today to do the typical stereotyped trailer, or any Hans Zimmer alike music.
Probably most people will not hear the difference and they might even like it
So let's be prepared ;)

 

Here's a small example of what A.I. could do with human compositions - four years ago:

A.I. starts at 24:34

 

Yes, it was just an exercise, it was implied by me. Your approach is naive and simplistic but it's OK. We all have to start from something. You made your work well.

I've meant it's better don't relate trustingly upon AI and other tools. We think (believe) that they are smarter than we are but it's not necessarily true. May be, they are smarter in some ways (they do make calculations faster) but they don't listen to what they make. They aren't able to listen. So they are blind and deaf. They are able to calculate, no less, no more.

Don't idealize such tools, it's a big mistake.

We really must make some calculations (in background) when we create music. But music isn't calculations. Never was and never will be.

Listen to music you make. If AI is your composer then be a genius as performer. May be not a genius. But then a really, really good performer.