AI and Music

SmoothOperator

Gold Member
One of the milestones in Artificial Intelligence has been this program, AlphaGo that beat all of the top Go players, the last and possibly most complex game strategy game yo be conquered by computers.

Something very peculiar happened in the Go playing community, in that instead of killing interest, AlphaGo actually increased interest in the game. Kids that were normally playing video games were showing up at the local clubs and the board games were selling out.

I'm wondering if an AI program that could really play music and interact with musicians, would increase interest in hood old fashioned music playing.

I think what is missing is some sort of test for AI to be deemed as good. I am thinking that some sort of Turing test where either a human or AI musician would be obscured with a feed of both music and video, and from this observers would need to determine which sounds better the AI or the human.

Any thoughts? Part of the reason AlphaGo was so successful as compared to the chess programs, was that AlphaGo was deemed to be creative and came up with whole new lines of play, whereas the chess programs were a reverse engineering of what professionals knew anyway(more or less).
 
I'm sure there are lots of aspiring musicians who have gone through the effort of learning an instrument, play along their favorite songs, etc., but have no one to form a band with, maybe because none of their friends play an instrument or because they like other genres. It would be very interesting if there was such a thing like a "virtual bandmate" to play along with humans.

It's not an easy task, though. I've done a bit of research in algorithmic music, have coded my own algorithms and recorded several pieces (using synths, not live instruments) and while I'm pretty sure very few people could distinguish between parts composed by me and those generated by an algorithm, each algorithm is very limited in its own and is ultimately based in rules I fed to it. I haven't found a way to make an algorithm that is actually "creative" and goes far beyond its initial design, but I'm no AI expert.
 
It's already happening.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LSHZ_b05W7o

That was written by an AI. The lyrics, performance, and arrangement was done by humans. It probably won't be long (relatively speaking, probably within a decade) where the AI will make choices on on virtual instruments as well.
 
I'm sure there are lots of aspiring musicians who have gone through the effort of learning an instrument, play along their favorite songs, etc., but have no one to form a band with, maybe because none of their friends play an instrument or because they like other genres. It would be very interesting if there was such a thing like a "virtual bandmate" to play along with humans.

It's not an easy task, though. I've done a bit of research in algorithmic music, have coded my own algorithms and recorded several pieces (using synths, not live instruments) and while I'm pretty sure very few people could distinguish between parts composed by me and those generated by an algorithm, each algorithm is very limited in its own and is ultimately based in rules I fed to it. I haven't found a way to make an algorithm that is actually "creative" and goes far beyond its initial design, but I'm no AI expert.

I think the technology is there, if AI can drive cars AI can rock and roll. AlphaGo was a subversion of the car driving technology, which IMO wasn't ideal for the task unlike real time music playing, however they were able to throw crazy amounts of compute at it.

The biggest problem would be getting the data. Game playing is easy win/lose, but music I guess the first step would be to train the computer to determine what is good err popular.
 
All these cute projects like game playing and music playing AI are just research for future big ticket technologies-- mainly military-related-- with all kinds of negative implications for humanity, so I'm not real thrilled about this notion. I have no doubt that AI will be able to create music pleasing enough to most humans to unemploy whatever's left of the music business, and all that revenue can be redirected to Google et al.
 
All these cute projects like game playing and music playing AI are just research for future big ticket technologies-- mainly military-related-- with all kinds of negative implications for humanity, so I'm not real thrilled about this notion. I have no doubt that AI will be able to create music pleasing enough to most humans to unemploy whatever's left of the music business, and all that revenue can be redirected to Google et al.

IMO the new lines of play that AlphaGo developed were interesting, because they were some of the things that I as amateur kind of already knew, just wasn't good enough to execute and prove and all the local good players kept telling me were wrong.

I think you have similar situations in music where the "employed musicians" have chosen certain styles of play and business models that depend on over marketed mega-pop hits. Suppose you had a robot that could churn out songs that were just as good as these pop hits, would people maybe be more interested in seeing local live musicians?
 
Sure, they'll tell us that composing is an obsolete profession, and that music has always been about X and Y shrinking categories of creation and revenue anyway, until their media devices are so compelling and addictive on their own that most people don't care if they ever see anything human created again.
 
Sure, they'll tell us that composing is an obsolete profession, and that music has always been about X and Y shrinking categories of creation and revenue anyway, until their media devices are so compelling and addictive on their own that most people don't care if they ever see anything human created again.

Now that'd be entertaining! I guess I'm thinking it should be possible to make something even more entertaining an interactive AI machine.
 
... and a few months after the release of "virtual bandmate", the AI realizes that their human bandmates suck and leave them to form their own AI-only bands, just like a certain movie (edited to avoid spoilers). :)
 
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... and a few months after the release of "virtual bandmate", the AI realizes that their human bandmates suck and leave them to form their own AI-only bands, just like the movie Her. :)

It was actually the best part when DeepMind released a bunch of AlphaGo vs. AlphaGo games, like I said whole new lines of play that no one had thought of before, simple forms that had never been found to be functional by the top pros. Almost like finding a simpler and cooler way to play money beats.
 
... and a few months after the release of "virtual bandmate", the AI realizes that their human bandmates suck and leave them to form their own AI-only bands, just like a certain movie (edited to avoid spoilers). :)

The one who got pissed-off and left was because not everyone agreed that white Saturn's are the best drums on the planet...


Oh sorry, wrong movie.
 
Everything, as in one hundred percent, heard on popular radio (or pop streaming) has been either programmed or digitally corrected. As for the music itself, I don't hear anything remotely interesting rhythmically or harmonically either. As far as I'm concerned, we're almost at rock bottom already. Nowhere to go but up. If it takes artificial intelligence, so be it. Right now there is NO intelligence making all the "music".
 
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