> Its boring as hell. Machines will never understand why
That statement seems to be overly strong. Perhaps we are far from having a machine that can figure out high level aspects of a song on its own, but I don't think it's implausible that with some more guidance (for example by learning also loop arrangements and filters instead of only the waveforms) these neural networks can potentially create quite interesting music today (especially in the EDM/IMD genre). This development might be scary because it possibly replaces human creativity to a large extent, but you can't stop it by claiming that it's impossible or that it will always be of poor quality. People have said the same when synthesized music arrived, that it lacks human aspects etc., and now it's has a high cultural significance, even though it uses things like auto-tune and consists of super clean loops.
> for example by learning also loop and sample arrangements instead of only the waveforms
This is what I mean - its not about the loop and sample arrangements.
I've been doing exactly that since the 90s and I've made some great twisted computer generated stuff. Logical or predictable methods will always result in logical and predictable music. Its all about setting up code environments so that you can generate accidents and mutations and capture them. Its all about reacting and capturing it and putting it on wax (historically speaking).
But that doesn't mean that a computer can understand why or even recommend what is amazing. We humans don't even know why some things are so great. A major thrill is finding some sound that is so twisted (ill, stoopid, sick) and totally bypasses the rational mind, shuts your thinking down and you get a big smile and start jumping up and down acting like an idiot.
Then somebody else copies your track, then it becomes a style, then it becomes a cliche, then beatport is filled up with boring copie, then it becomes a sample set that people can buy, then somebody makes an app that can auto-generate that style and then they claim that computers are making music.
But they are just playing it back, just like tall the human copycats further upstream.
And the entire network of software, creators, audience and cultural is what we call music.
> This development might be scary because it possibly replaces human creativity to a large extent, but you can't stop it by claiming that it's impossible or that it will always be poor quality.
That's what I've spent a lot of my life engaged in. It often makes great music, but the machine cannot understand why. You'll need strong AI for that and it will need to have tensions, depressions, a body, chemical feelings, sex drive, longing and a strong psychological need to be lost in song. Then it could say "David, I think I've found a song you might like."
This development might be scary because it possibly replaces human creativity to a large extent, but you can't stop it by claiming that
What is scary is the willingness of some people to accept dubious randomly-generated artifacts as "art" and as evidence of consciousness and intelligence. You should not trivialize actual human intelligence and creativity simply because you want to believe in strong AI.
GP post makes a very good points and (like usual, it seems) they get completely ignored in replies.
Setting up some 4/4 beat is easy. And you don't need an AI to throw is a randomly arpeggiated chord in there. It will sound okay-ish. Maybe it will even sound better than the stuff in this video. But that doesn't mean it is equivalent to proper music composition or that anyone would actually listen to that stuff outside of a technical demo.
BTW, if you want to see real procedurally generate music that is recorded by musicians for real listeners (as opposed to by CS grads for other CS grads) you might want to take a look at Karma: http://www.karma-lab.com .
I was actually referring more to the general public and not to people with highly sophisticated music tastes. This is a first cultural world problem, so to speak. The vast majority will probably be completely happy with an app that composes them their infinite personal soundtracks based on their Facebook profiles (similar to how Ray Kurzweil suggested that we may have chat agents that fool most poeple very soon). That might be a harsh reality to people in the first cultural world, but it wouldn't be the result of the general public wanting to believe in strong AI, but the music would actually give them the same satisfaction they receive from manmade music (or even more due to the personalization). I believe this is a somewhat plausible prediction and claims like "computers are incapable of human emotion and ingenuity!" will not change anything (except for your mood).
Are we discussing AI or the supposed lack of music taste in general public? Again, saying "people are stupid" does not demonstrate a particular AI is smart of interesting. And anyway, people are smarter than they often get credit for.
> the music would actually give them the same satisfaction they receive from manmade music
You believe this because...? None of the generated tracks I've heard so far is anywhere near the kind of music people would listen to for the sake of the music itself.
Some people do listen to music to drawn out distracting conversations around them. Perfectly sensible thing to do. However, in those cases music can be replaced with white noise of nature's sounds. This does not demonstrate that music is equivalent to noise.
...
The problem with such AI demos is that they lack a particular purpose (i.e. success criteria), use existing material for training and do not go a step beyond that material. You can take a track and slow it down by a random fraction to get a different pitch and tempo. Viola. "New music." Procedurally generated. But that does not mean you've composed something. You've used a randomized algorithm hand-crated to produce a particular effect. It has no generative power.
I've already given the example of auto tune, loops and synthetic sounds. People care surprisingly little about authenticity and the top charts are telling about the intellectual preferences of the masses. Perhaps an RNN could even be trained with recordings of human emotional responses like heart rate and goosebumps. It's not just about changing the pitch here and there, but learning deep features about what makes music interesting to listen to.
Music doesn't need to be as coherent as a text (in fact some space for interpretation is often preferred), which also increases my confidence about this prediction.
That statement seems to be overly strong. Perhaps we are far from having a machine that can figure out high level aspects of a song on its own, but I don't think it's implausible that with some more guidance (for example by learning also loop arrangements and filters instead of only the waveforms) these neural networks can potentially create quite interesting music today (especially in the EDM/IMD genre). This development might be scary because it possibly replaces human creativity to a large extent, but you can't stop it by claiming that it's impossible or that it will always be of poor quality. People have said the same when synthesized music arrived, that it lacks human aspects etc., and now it's has a high cultural significance, even though it uses things like auto-tune and consists of super clean loops.