{"id":618519,"date":"2023-03-16T09:49:02","date_gmt":"2023-03-16T14:49:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/16\/musicians-machines-and-the-ai-powered-future-of-sound\/"},"modified":"2023-03-16T09:49:02","modified_gmt":"2023-03-16T14:49:02","slug":"musicians-machines-and-the-ai-powered-future-of-sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/16\/musicians-machines-and-the-ai-powered-future-of-sound\/","title":{"rendered":"Musicians, Machines, and the AI-Powered Future of Sound"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Last November, at<\/span> the Stockholm University of the Arts, a human and an AI<\/a> made music together<\/a>. The performance began with musician David Dolan playing a grand piano into a microphone. As he played, a computer system, designed and overseen by composer and Kingston University researcher Oded Ben-Tal, \u201clistened\u201d to the piece, extracting data on pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Then, it added its own accompaniment, improvising just like a person would. Some sounds were transformations of Dolan\u2019s piano; some were new sounds synthesized on the fly. The performance was icy and ambient, eerie and textural.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This scene, of a machine and human peacefully collaborating, seems irreconcilable with the current\u00a0artists-versus-machines<\/a> discourse. You will have heard that AI is replacing journalists, churning out\u00a0error-riddled<\/a>\u00a0SEO copy<\/a>. Or that AI is stealing from illustrators, who\u00a0are suing<\/a> Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney for copyright infringement. Or that computers are rapping, or at least trying to: the \u201crobot rapper\u201d FN Meka was dropped by Capitol Records following criticism that the character was \u201can amalgamation of gross stereotypes<\/a>.\u201d In the most recent intervention, none other than Noam Chomsky claimed that ChatGPT exhibits the \u201cbanality of evil<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

These anxieties slot neatly among concerns about automation, that machines will displace people\u2014or, rather, that the people in control of these machines will use them to displace everyone else. Yet some artists, musicians prominent among them, are quietly interested in how these models might supplement human creativity, and not just in a \u201chey, this AI plays Nirvana<\/a>\u201d way. They are exploring how AI and humans might collaborate rather than compete.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCreativity is not a unified thing,\u201d says Ben-Tal, speaking over Zoom. \u201cIt includes a lot of different aspects. It includes inspiration and innovation and craft and technique and graft. And there is no reason why computers cannot be involved in that situation in a way that is helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speculation that computers<\/span> might compose music has been around as long as the computer itself. Mathematician and writer\u00a0Ada Lovelace once theorized<\/a> that Charles Babbage’s steam-powered Analytical Engine,\u00a0widely hailed as the first computer<\/a>, could be used for something other than numbers. In her mind, if the \u201cscience of harmony and of musical composition\u201d could be adapted for use with Babbage\u2019s machine, \u201cthe engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The first book on the subject<\/a>,\u00a0Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer,<\/em>\u00a0written by American composer and professor Lejaren Hiller Jr. and mathematician Leonard Isaacson, appeared in 1959. In popular music,\u00a0artists like<\/a> Ash Koosha, Arca, and, most prominently, Holly Herndon have drawn on AI to enrich their work. When Herndon\u00a0spoke to WIRED<\/a> last year about her free-to-use, \u201cAI-powered vocal clone,\u201d Holly+, she explained the tension between tech and music succinctly. \u201cThere\u2019s a narrative around a lot of this stuff, that it\u2019s scary dystopian,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m trying to present another side: This is an opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Musicians have also reacted to the general unease generated by ChatGPT<\/a> and Bing\u2019s AI chatbot. Bogdan Raczynski, reading transcripts of the chatbots\u2019 viral discussions with humans, says over email that he detected \u201cfright, confusion, regret, guardedness, backtracking, and so on\u201d in the model\u2019s responses. It isn\u2019t that he thinks the chatbot has feelings, but that \u201cthe emotions it evokes in humans are very real,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd for me those feelings have been concern and sympathy.\u201d In response, he has released a\u00a0\u201cseries of comforting live performances\u00a0for<\/em> AI\u201d<\/a> (emphasis mine).<\/p>\n

Ben-Tal says his<\/span> work presents an alternative to \u201cthe human-versus-machine narrative.\u201d He admits that generative AI can be unsettling because, on a superficial level at least, it exhibits a kind of creativity normally ascribed to humans, but he adds that it is also just another technology, another instrument, in a lineage that goes back to the bone flute. For him, generative AI isn\u2019t unlike turntables: When artists discovered they could use them to scratch records and sample their sounds, they created whole new genres.<\/p>\n

In this vein, copyright may need a substantial rethink: Google has refrained from releasing\u00a0its MusicLM model<\/a>, which turns text into music, because of the \u201cthe risks associated with music generation, in particular, the potential misappropriation of creative content.\u201d\u00a0In a 2019 paper,<\/a> Ben-Tal and other researchers asked readers to imagine a musician holodeck, an endpoint for music AI, that has archived all recorded music and can generate or retrieve any possible sound on request. Where do songwriters fit into this future? And before then, can songwriters defend themselves against plagiarism? Should audiences be told,\u00a0as WIRED does<\/a> in its articles, when AI is used?<\/p>\n

Yet these models still present attractive creative capabilities. In the short term, Ben-Tal says, musicians can use an AI, as he did, to improvise with a pianist outside of their skill set. Or they can draw inspiration from an AI\u2019s compositions, perhaps in a genre they are not familiar with, like\u00a0Irish folk music<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And in the longer term, AI might fulfill a wilder (albeit controversial) fantasy: It could effortlessly realize an artist\u2019s vision. \u201cComposers, you know, we come up with ideas of what music we would like to create, but then translating these into sounds or scores, realizing those ideas, is quite a laborious task,\u201d he says. \u201cIf there was a wire that we could plug in and get this out, that could be very fantastic and wonderful.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

More urgently, mundane and pervasive algorithms are already mangling the industry. Author\u00a0Cory Doctorow<\/a> has written about Spotify\u2019s chokehold on music\u2014how playlists, for instance, encourage artists to abandon albums for music that fits into \u201cchill vibes\u201d categories, and train audiences to let Spotify tell them what to listen to. Introduced into this situation, AI will be the enemy of musicians. What happens when Spotify\u00a0unleashes its own AI artists<\/a> and promotes those?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Raczynski hopes he will catch the wave rather than be consumed by it. \u201cPerhaps in a roundabout way, like it or not, I am acknowledging that short of going off the grid, I have no choice but to develop a relationship with AI,\u201d he says. \u201cMy hope is to build a reciprocal relationship over a self-centered one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Will Bedingfield<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last November, at the Stockholm University of the Arts, a human and an AI made music together. The performance began with musician David Dolan playing a grand piano into a microphone. As he played, a computer system, designed and overseen by composer and Kingston University researcher Oded Ben-Tal, \u201clistened\u201d to the piece, extracting data on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":618520,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2668,4444,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-618519","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-machines","8":"category-musicians","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/618520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}