Prog created with the help of AI

hI,

Ian Anderson, in that special he did for Rick Wakeman for his series of interviews, specified that "everything that can be done with "rock'n'roll" has been done". Which did not sit too well with RW since he is one of the most repetitive of players, with the same notes and chords that music history has identified for 500 years, more or less ... I kinda joke that he does not feel the music ... it's all chords and notes and let's make believe the identified ideas of what music is ... this is that and so on.

In many ways, it gets to the point of how many combinations you can come up with out of one note, or chord, and we end up with various exercises, that in the end, probably sound the same, but feel different.

I'm of the opinion that too much of music is special effects and this is the main reason why I state .. UNPLUG IT ... so you can see the meat of the work ... and a lot of metal bands will fail, but then, so will all the bands in the Red Lion circuit and all the other college circuits.

I think that taking it "literally", that is one note is supposed to be this or sound like this, then we have a problem ... which an actor can easily fudge ... Keith Michell did a King Lear and there is a section that the same word is repeated ... and the director, Peter Brook, specified that in the 200/300 performances he did not ONCE said it the same way ... now you know the problem with rock'n'roll and how we tied ourselves to a staff, and now we can't move ... the issue is with the music instructors and the fact that music history made a bad habit of interpreting the music to be this and that ... the same thing about major and minor ... the bizarest of ideas in music!

Hi,

A lot of dissonance is based on accidental errors and often, or an intentional idea ... a good example is XTC, with Andy Partridge continually going against the grain ... which would trip AI really quick. In this example, let's face it ... it's the dissonance that makes that band special! I don't think that anyone can code something to be as off his rocker as Andy.

KorgC3 wrote: ... 4.Time signature changes/odd time signatures - AI usually tries to apply an orderly logic to this. It fails miserably especially when different instruments do different time signatures at the same time. The shifts are usually unnatural or don't continue the melody logically. ...

AND, no doubt, one of the easiest ways to tell if AI is present or not ... like the dissonance idea, this is something that often is over looked, and a lot of progressive bands change time signatures to odd time ones and back, simply to say ... "look ma ... I'm doing progressive music!". To my ear, these always sound forced and not very good, and they are not defined properly within a composing context at all ... it's almost ... break it up right here with it! It is one of the things that take my ears out of the listening for that band. But part of the issue is how folks don't know, or study, how signature changes can be done. If it makes sense musically it works, but if the musicality is an idea ... or worse ... just a lyric to make you think this and that ... the chances are that it will fall apart. I doubt AI can deal with this well, but then, most bands are not musically well defined to do so, either ... comparing it to a classical format with lots of instruments, the simplicity of a rock band with 3 instruments (drummer doesn't count ... since more than half of them will do exactly the same thing slower or faster. That's not drumming .. that's time keeping, and guess what AI is gonna do?

KorgC3 wrote: ... 5.Tempo Changes - AI generally seems to struggle with Tempo changes. Even with seemingly simple melodies, it either clips, or "breaks" the tempo illogically and unnaturally. Basically a change for the sake of change. ...

See above. so much of music in the past 25 years has been DAW based (so to speak) as it is way too metronomic and not free enough, to the point where it makes me think that AI has been around since the day that Sonar and Ableton were battling it out for all bedroom and bathroom composers.

KorgC3 wrote: .... 6.Genre Fusion/Shifts - Once again, in-spite of all the information fed to the AI, it cannot create even a basic genre hybrid, because it cannot truly understand the logic behind what makes different genres work. It struggles even mix distinguishable features of different genres, to something that sounds like a natural hybrid. It always leans towards one structure. ...

Not sure about this, since someone might be aware of so many other musical scales all over the world and all of a sudden you get something that a Western Ear can not exactly duplicate ... but there it is! The idea of fusion, and other musical shifts ... is the same thing as before in time changes and compositional changes, ... depending on what they are based, which more often than not is the person singing the lyrics ... musically that is weak, as for 500 years, it has been the flow of the notes and chords that have told a story ... but now, none of the music matters if we allow the singer to be the one telling us what is happening, and the music? Who cares ... no one is listening anyway, and you and I will not LIKELY be whistling it any time soon!!!!

Interesting how so many of us look at this ... I'm not sure the whole thing is bad, but it tells you one thing about the "modern human" ... not only do we not trust it, we belittle it, and think it is not intelligent enough ... in this sense the advent of AI is scary and often ridiculous ... but that's the way of technology and greed. I call it Childhood's End ... I don't think there is a winning formula here but for money making a lot of businesses will use it ... see the overabundance of the Adobe advertisements lately?

Hi,

And let's not forget that 100 years ago we would not have been able to say that at all, since the ability to hear a lot of music, let alone different things, was similar to the very joke and idea about a man going to the moon around the 1900's.

No one would have even conceived something like that at that particular time, but these days, when we can hear anything from around the world, there is going to be a lot of folks thinking that their music has been stolen, or similar ... and in all honesty I have an issue with that ... since how you saw it and felt it, was not the same thing as another composer ... and sooner or later this will have to be addressed in the copyrights definitions ... in the end, the whole idea is messed up ... and that example I have mentioned before is the actor that was playing King Lear doing 200/300 performances and not once did he say that very same line that repeats itself the same way ... likewise the same set of notes can be played with a very different way and feeling that does not bring up necessarily the idea that it was stolen ... but this is an area that a lot of folks have gone after several times, although I'm not sure that all of them succeeded very well.

AI, in some ways, has a slight advantage if you take a strong computer that has billions of songs and musical anything in it, and it can find all the examples of the same section of notes through hundreds of years, then remove those and create something similar but not the same, even if all it takes is the switching of one note or chord around ... a sort of PDQ Bach ... turn it upside down. So, in this sense, AI will end up being more original from the way we look at it ... but when we define it in terms of EXPRESSION, now we have something very different, but are we now saying that the person that does Bob Dylan is not just inspired by him, but copying him? Now we have a different problem ... and immediately we will state that expression is not music ... the notes and chords are ... 

Heck, so much of what we are considering Prog these days is so AI like to my ears, it's not funny, which is the reason why I state UNPLUG IT so we can see the meat and the bones ... I imagine half the bands will die right there! ... and    DT will fall off even faster!  ???