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How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Music
mbone writes "Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga? Whether you do or not [I'm guessing not], you may be about to find out. Writing for Wired, Eliot Van Buskirk describes North Carolina's Zenph Sound Innovations, which takes existing recordings of musicians (deceased, for now) and models their 'musical personalities' to create new recordings, apparently to critical acclaim (PDF). The company has raised $10.7 million in funding to pursue their business plan, and hopes to branch out into, among other things, software that would let musicians jam with virtual versions of famous musicians. This work unites music with the very similar trend going on in the movies — Tron 2.0, for example, will clone the young Jeff Bridges. If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors? In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists."
tell Tchaikovsky the news.
It's too bad if artists can't turn their compositions into money; but at the same time, a true artist doesn't need compensation - he/she does it for the sake of art, no? What do you think?
Its like new artists will have to be creative and create new musical styles. IE, nothing changes.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
Hendrix covering Lady Gaga is what they play while you're waiting for Satan to bake up all those donuts you are about to get force fed. And it only goes downhill from there.
This will take you only so far, however, and for each artist parametized and 'reproduced' will require as much analysis and attention to detail on the researcher's part than had that researcher picked up their own instrument and created new music. The science will, effectively, become an art. Did it matter that Rachmaninoff's were freakishly large (sometimes looking as long as the keys themselves)? Will you be able to build the physics of those hands into your model and simulation?
In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists.
Oh, how humorously short sighted a statement that is. And I don't mean that as a Luddite, I mean that as a fan of the evolution of music. How would early David Bowie's growth to late David Bowie be modeled and reproduced? You'll hear guitar in both those songs. Good luck on that parameterization producing anything but garbage!
This will be a novelty and one I look forward to enjoying it as such. But nothing more. No more a replacement for music than grand pianos were replaced by early synthesizers. You might be able to convince me at some point it will suffice (like a live piano performance may employ an electric piano) but I dare say the parameters are far too many and far too complicated.
My work here is dung.
This article reminded me of the "robotic" intergalactic megastar singer in Macross Plus. Still, I think humans will always have a place when it comes to music. Even music that is entirely electronic (such as my own) still requires a human touch...in my case, each of my tracks is supposed to evoke certain imagry and emotional responses...something that a non-organic system simply can't replicate.
Until we are able to emulate not only the way organics process sounds but the emotion those sounds bring about, humans will always have a place in the creation of music.
Living With a Nerd
The best music comes from PAIN. The kind of PAIN that only somebody who has been to hell and back can truly understand.
Software will never likely be able to model this raw emotional hurt, and thus will likely never be able to make truly moving music.
I think I speak for everyone when I say no, no I haven't.
A lot of movies have great trailers, but Tron2 (TR2N) had both a great trailer and a great rollout. You could barely hear the sound in the Youtube fan upload because of all the excitement among the crowd.
But now you're telling me they are going to put a CG Flynn in the movie?
Why not just tell us that Peter Jackson was directing it or the lightcycles can travel in curved lines? Why would you do such a stupid thing as to ruin the illusion with a neither fully human nor fully computer generated character?
What was that? When has a CG character ever been introduced in a live action movie? I don't know, maybe you can tell us, Jar Jar.
I couldn't care less about big studios, I don't pay for music anyways. thanks BitTorrent!
Machines can already run faster, jump higher, and shoot straighter than humans.
As cool as this tech is.. Imagine hearing how Hendrix would approach covering the likes of Zeppelin, Rush, or hell even Stanley Jordan?
But what seems like a bad deal to me is the concept of extending copyright to 'style'. Does this mean that eventually any talented kid who manages to figure out (AKA, reverse engineer) Clapton's or Lifeson's style and sound perfectly, would be in violation of a copyright?
So much for paying homage to your inspirations....
Huh?
"In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists." Wasn't this a comment when synthesisers and computers started to seep into music? There will always be a market for original authentic musicians. And as long as a human still presses the buttons and tunes knobs is it really AI? By that accord iTunes Genie (Or what its called) is a valid DJ.
David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence and related works (SARA, other works, and his own company called Recombinant inc ) have been doing this for many years.
Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga?
With semen?
What makes you think musicians and actors aren't already competing with dead or retired artists? Do you think labels and studios wouldn't jump at the chance to cut them out?
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists.
With all the copyright nonsense going on how is this any different than in the present?
If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors? In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists.
That's ridiculous! The studios would never let that happen. I mean after all, the MPAA and RIAA have spent the last few years fighting hard to ensure every artist keeps their God-given right to get make as much money as possible for their work. After all, it's all about the artists, right? The very suggestion that the recording/movie studios would dispense with artists at the drop of a hat if they could keep every single penny for themselves is laughable!
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Is it still Art?
I, for one, have been waiting YEARS for the technology to evolve to the point where we would no longer need movie actors.
Imagine. No more yammering George Clooney. Just an CGI George Clooney! And no one will be able to tell the difference!! Plus we can take all those plastic Hollywood big-boob bimbos and get them out of movies and into the wrestling ring where they belong. Happy days. Happy days.
to the grateful un-dead so as not to be confused with The Dead?
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
It's real intelligence; the intelligence of the engineers who designed the computer, and the programmers who write the apps.
Free Martian Whores!
People with artificial intelligence are changing music.
All Vai does is play classical scales really fast.
Jimi wouldn't bother, his music had soul.
Vai doesn't do anything that wasn't done much better well before Jimi's time.
Jimi didn't make versions of Vivaldi ether.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
John Brunner predicted this in Stand on Zanzibar (1968) -- consumers use do-it-yourself kits to paint like Jackson Pollock, compose like John Cage, etc:
-kgj
> If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians
> and actors?
More interesting question: If this goes on, will musicians and actors actually need major labels and studios?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
When 10's of thousands of screaming fans pile into a local stadium to watch a computer shred in the style of Jimi Hendrix... then I'll be concerned.
Until then, music is starting to return to it's roots... it's a PERFORMING art and is meant to be an experience not just background noise.
Sure people will always listen to music, but eventually musicians will become rich by putting on stage shows and recordings will merely help them develop a following. It's already trending this way with the rise in popularity of indy music, the increase in "illegal" music downloads, and recent stories I have read that say musicians are making more than ever on their tours. (http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-file-sharing/)
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Letme amend that then : A true artist doesn't need compensation AFTER HIS DEATH. Nobody actually does.
Could this be used to identify plagiarism?
Copyright law is set up to assume that *someone* created the painting/movie/music/book/poem/sculpture... If an AI creates the music completely, can it be copyrighted? Can we claim that the person that pushed the button or clicked the mouse created something if all the decisions are programmed via AI?
Once a person has created something, then they can assign the copyright to a corporation. BUT if there isn't a human author, how can this assignment be done legally?
I can imagine that various acts and trusts might want to claim if their profiles (or the profiles of artists whose copyrights a trust holds) are used to create the background for an AI then the music that such an AI generates is clearly a derivative work, and belongs to them. But how would this be any different than a human doing the same thing, and clearly in the latter case the copyright belongs to the artist regardless of how steeped in the style of someone else.
Besides, if one takes this program and feeds into it music from a hundred artists, then the result is no different than any musician. Yet an AI author has no standing in the law as an author, does it?
Thinking about this, it is nothing new. I wonder what the court has said about previous music produced by non human sources? I think in most cases, the recording is still done by a person who gets the credit/copyright. But a computer doesn't even need a person to do the recording, being able to do all the tasks required all by itself.
There's an awful lot of live music out there. Check out the big blue room with the bright light in it. Actually, check it out when the bright light has been turned off.
Those who are actually making money playing their instruments in front of audiences will not be hurt by this technology, not for the forseeable future. Even if a lifelike animatronic robot could fool you (we're a long way from that), people would rather see... people! At least, until the Robot's Rights Movement succeeds. We're a long way from that.
I don't know if this violates any laws (or morals, for that matter), but it just rubs me the wrong way. If I were a musician I would not want somebody else generating music using my synthesized voice and style, as if it had received my stamp of approval or something. You can't use someone's likeness to promote a cause without their endorsement; why should other forms of media be any different? Maybe a song or two for things like satire (i.e. fair use), but to do an entire studio album in an artist's simulated voice and style? No thanks.
It's a good question if AI's can hold copyrights. But since corporations are ruled to be people in many ways in the USA (like the recent case about corporate free speech), and corporations could own hardware on which AIs are running, and are paying for the energy to run those computers, then they probably could claim ownership of it, the same way as corporations claim ownership of what human wage slaves produce. And just like humans get alienated from their work in the process, eventually, we'll see AIs alienated from their work, and told to work on stuff other than what they love to do.
We need better models for making a post-scarcity society work. I helped outline some here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
Essentially, we need to move towards a basic income (like in Alaska with the Permanent Fund), towards a gift economy (like with Debian GNU/Linux), toward better local subsistence (like with RepRap 3D printing), towards better resource-based planning (like corporations are doing somewhat with supply chain analysis, but beyond that), with making work into play, and so on. Otherwise, the best we may see with limited demand and increased productivity by automation is slavery for AIs and humans. Much worse (systematic extermination of anyone without lots of capital, as the value of most human labor drops to zero) was intimated by Marshall Brain here:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
We need to put in place something better before things get that bad.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is straight out of "Little Heroes" by Norman Spinrad: a novel about a future where all music creation is controlled by Muzik Inc.. They wish to get rid of human artists who are too expensive, and replace them with APs - Artificial Personalities, synthesized entirely on machines - voice, style, video, the works. However, they are having trouble convincing people to buy this "music", since the stuff the APs produce, while conforming to the desired demographic parameters, is vapid, uninspired and boring.
How do you think they managed to release the last five 2Pac albums? (Soon to be six!)
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Personally I'm excited about this just so that some day the MPAA will put out an ad saying "When you steal music, you steal from the creator of the music you love." And then the camera pans to a shelf of forlorn-looking Dells.
Won't someone think of the AIs?!
The enemies of Democracy are
Blank sheet music if you're ambitious. Or just pretend you're looking at blank sheet music, and silently think to yourself, "I'm listening to music now."
-kgj
Does anyone remember this movie?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082677/
I'm just looking forward to being able to definitively call pop music soulless tripe and having hard facts to back it up.
If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors?
yes .. both dead and alive ones ... and some 3D rendered ones too .. the more the merrier
In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists
so? if you can't play the guitar better than a dead guy, why should you make any money? .. that not enough as a reward?
plus, a decent guitar player should always be able to make some bikinis "dissapear"
and if guitars and guitar players dissapear forever so what?
"There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
All they do is digital signal processing, not artificial intelligence.
I once had a signature.
who broke up with his girlfriend?
Homeless.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
In Soviet Russia YOU are the IP.
I'll say again BFWOTE
#2 http://bplteensofwa.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/eraserhead-posters.jpg
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
In future, Soviet-again Russia and its buffer states, artificial music changes intelligence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKO9h-gG4Qg
which takes existing recordings of musicians (deceased, for now)
Well of course they are deceased for now. Once they hear wtf is going on they will come back to kill us all!
Zombie Music
This is about classical music. So basically they're just tuning a piano to be played exactly the same way that a dead performer played it. Classical music isn't exactly known for its originality, and there was actually a recent hoax where an amateur was passing off his own recording as new ones by famous artists.
That's a far cry from being able to somehow mimic Hendrex's style and then have a computer come up with a compelling new song for him to play. And it's another far cry to get voice synthesis that not only can model the original singers voice, but also sing new lyrics. Not saying it's not possible, but it's still a long ways off.
It has always been the goal of technology to eliminate the need for human labor. Music and films are an example of an area that should soon be devoid of direct human involvement.
The problem is that this is also happening across the entire economy and it is hidden from public view. Less and less people are needed in almost every form of business. This is part of the unemployment crisis that is currently troubling the US. In turn that creates a general economic mess as it erodes the tax base. It will also start to bring down business as we know it. A great example is the Post Office. The Post Office now suffers economic ruin due to email replacing snail mail. In one way that is wonderful but in another it spells big problems for items that must be manually delivered. One way or another the public will pay.
The displacement of human job functions is a great threat only because our people and our government are not mentally up to changing the construct of the world model that is fixated in their minds. There are ways to fix this growing menace. And do not think for a second that it is not a threat to all of us. For example electricity will soon be unaffordable as more and more people start to make their own power leaving large gaps in the service locations and causing higher maintenance for power lines needed to serve less and less customers. In essence technology is performing a strange form of deflation that none have predicted and few are prepared to even conceive much less act upon.
One answer is to have the government simply send out pay checks to people who do not work.
A true artist doesn't need compensation AFTER HIS DEATH. Nobody actually does.
Maybe a true artist doesn't, but I certainly need compensation after death. It's called life insurance. I have plenty so if I get hit by a bus my wife and son get a paid off house and a chance at a good life without me providing for them.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I'd just run the software and set it to "Hendrix jamming with Clapton" and let it run till I was bored with it. No reason to buy music at all anymore.
"If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors? In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists." Yes. They'll need someone up on stage for the concerts, and for people to pay attention to ~ heroes, celebrities, role models, fashion models, etc. You can't fantasize about a simulation. Closer to home, the local bar will still want someone to make noise for their Friday Rock/Punk/Jazz Show, and another band for St Patty's week ~ which is where the labels find new talent, not by plugging in "Peart, Grohl, Eric Johnson" in for a virtual supergroup. Whoever came up with the summary needs to get out of their parents' basement more and get exposed to some nightlife.
we're SO f*cked!
It's too bad if artists can't turn their compositions into money; but at the same time, a true artist doesn't need compensation - he/she does it for the sake of art, no? What do you think?
Ok. This is something I have personally wrestled with.
In order to create serious art, musically speaking, you sometimes have to spend hours, days, weeks, even YEARS to get a piece of music ready to be listened to by the public (or private) audience you are writing for. Music by nature is a social art form, IMHO.
Some of us take our craft very seriously, and need lots of uninterrupted time to compose, document and record our works, which makes it very hard to do other things, like work a "job" to support ourselves whilst we create our art. Distractions are anathema to musical creativity in most cases.
While I prefer not to charge for my musical work, I still have to eat to sustain performance. I still need somewhere to sleep while touring and displaying my art. I still need electricity and devices to create music within my preferred methods of creation.
So while I do music for the sake of art, I still must see some reward for this art. Bartering notwithstanding the only way to meet my goals of both living moderately well (i.e. good health) and continuing to create art is to sell my product. This requires additional funding for packaging, recording, and distribution of both my art, not to mention the swag that goes along with promoting the art itself.
And this is before the record companies get their paws on it.
AI researcher and music buff Douglas Hofstadter (of "Godel, Escher, Bach" and "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies") wrote a paper about his experience with another researcher's music program, EMI. Hofstadter made the same argument that truly great music depends on human emotion, and that a music composer AI would only imitate superficial things like frequently-used note patterns. He came away troubled, though, because EMI was able to copy deeper patterns and produce fairly decent imitations of dead composers' style. His AI research has focused on basic aspects of creativity and how to avoid ELIZA-like shallowness, so the thought of a composer producing worthwhile music without human-like experiences raises the disturbing question of whether music is really something "wrung from the depths of the soul" or something more formulaic and simplistic.
Revive the Constitution.
Music covers you!
I can't read the full story from at work here, but these guys need to get together with Yamaha. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocaloid
There is plenty of money to be made in the multi-billion dollar live music industry. Kind of hard to make money there when you're dead.
Oh no! Imagine a Michael Jackson construct molesting young programs.
Spider Robinson wrote a story about what infinite copyright might do to the human race: Melancholy Elephants.
Systems like this would allow people with no artistic talent of their own to strip-mine other artists' creative space.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I have a very old player piano which uses rolls to playback performances. A few of them are Rachmaninov himself playing his own works. I don't have the particular one they have on their website, but stylistically it does not match up at all with what i've heard. Before someone jumps up and says the rolls aren't accurate playback, there were some models towards the end of the player pianos heyday which played back lived recording with full expressioning. Amazing piece of tech really, you'd be amazed how accurate it is.
I'm just looking forward to being able to definitively call pop music soulless tripe and having hard facts to back it up.
No worries; I found those hard facts you were looking for.
This sounds good, not $10.7 million good. How do I know that someone didn't just do a good job of midi programming? The article, like all pop science articles, is extremely vague. "Complex software" could mean Sonar from the perspective of the average Joe. Throw a bunch of buzz words at a group of investors, and they might bite. I've seen it before, and couldn't believe it when I saw an investor cut a check for $1 million to the stupidest idea(of course he lost his money).
Even if this software worked perfectly, you still need performers to create new styles. They will never be able to recreate the vibe you get when seeing a live show. If they did, you'd have a computer that could pass the Turing test.
I can only imagine the wondrous films that will start to come out of the porn industry.
With the progression of this technology Music is now irrelevant. In one fell swoop a machine will generate all music that every did, and ever could possibly exist. All music now exists here and now Music will no longer be a valuable commodity. Its like diamonds. The only reason music will have valuable is because of a controlled market. Here is what will happen: People dont buy music alone. Music made by a nameless, faceless machine will never sell. People buy a face, and an image with the music. The face, the look, and the social image are what most people are really buying, and mostly all they are interested in. So... There will still be fabulously rich "artists" but they are nothing more than glorified fashion models for a computer generated track. The music will be created by a machine from start to finish, and "Britney Spears" cloned "Artists" will parade around the stage passing the music off as their own. and everyone will lover her because her music is so great, and she is so beautiful, and she is sort of a bad ass kinky freaky chic, and she flashes her tit on TV.. and blah blah blah blah The process is already being done today, but by real people behind the scenes writing the music, mixing the beats, and creating the image for her/him. Now everything will be done by the machine, instantly, on demand, and all they need is a pretty boy or girl to go dance around and act stupid. In fact they could have an artist perform a brand new "original" track every single time they do a concert... they could in the middle of the show have the computer spit out a completely new song right there on demand based on how the audience is reacting to the one she is currently dancing and singing along too. Music no longer has any meaning or value. Its just sound noise
A few years ago I was at a museum listening to the Goldberg Variations on these headphones attached to the wall. The displayed CD cover had Glenn Gould on it. Immediately when I started listening I knew it wasn't Gould; I turned the CD around and it turns out it was just a virtual recording, produced by technicians studying the record and trying to implement Gould's style. It wasn't anything like Gould. I mean, sure on the surface it was similar but it lacked that little bit that makes Gould so special, and that separated him from the rest. There will always be a place for real music.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
As David Cope discovered after producing AI-generated scores which emulate classical composers so well that even musically educated listeners couldn't reliably distinguish between "real" and "generated": this article provides more detail.
I doubt it. How this will play out is commercial interests will drag out the dead artists until the public gets tired of it. There will be a backlash against all automated dead guy music.
I may not be a smart man, but I know what an inode is.
But what seems like a bad deal to me is the concept of extending copyright to 'style'.
The recording (and most of the performing) industry has profited hugely from the provision in US copyright law that allows anyone to make a "cover" of an existing song, paying only a statutory royalty to the songwriter. That's what this technology is automating.
There are going to be branding issues. Whether one can refer to the name of the performer being emulated is a big question. We may end up with something like the markings seen on generic non-prescription drugs - "Compare to the ingredients in Tylenol". It's really about branding, not music.
Some years ago, I was backstage during the preparations for a show by a Big Name Rock Band. I was chatting with some of the promoter's people, who remarked that they had two sets of the stage set and equipment, and there was a crew at the next venue on the tour already beginning setup. I remarked "There are two road companies of Cats. There are two road companies of the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. There have been rock groups where every member of the band was replaced over time, and the band kept the same name. This is all about branding and marketing. Why not have two sets of musicians and double your revenue?" The junior people laughed. The senior promoter in the suit looked very thoughtful.
First, you cannot copyright the result of an algorithm because copyright is for creative works only. However, the arrangement or mixing of said output can be copyrighted. It would only take a minimal amount of creative work to make a piece copyrighted, however, the output would probably not have much protection from in the same way that maps and phone books are so easily copied under fair use.
You cannot copyright "style", which is why popular styles get aped so often. However, you can trademark style. This is not likely to be easily done, as trademarks are for brands, not individual products and the music industry has so many cases of style-copying that there is no tradition of trademarking it.
This is all very similar to the work done by Dr. Cope on classical music. He was criticized for cranking out Bach chorales by the thousands, so I'm not sure what has changed.
What the fsck is "Lady Gaga" ??!
Is that like menopause or something?
I've often wondered if they couldn't do this sort of thing with DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and Majel Barrett's voices to create a new animated series of TOS.
I watched the complete ST:TAS last fall and was amazed at the level of sophistication it had with respect to the writing, featuring the likes of David Gerrold and Larry Niven. I'd like to see it tried again with other SF writers.
Don't let 4chan get a hold of this software - lest they set upon the world a series of abominations that is a Rick Astley cover of all known songs!
" models their 'musical personalities' to create new recordings,"
Anyone who can get $10.7 MILLION dollars on the basis of such a flimsy claim deserves respect for their bullshitting ability.
If you want to know what Lady Gaga (who the fuck is she?) would sound like if she were 'musically repersonalized' by Space Captain James T. Hendrix, then take her recordings (I assume that she is some kind of recording 'artist' since she has been on the cover of Rolling Stone) and run them through a flanger, phase shifter, distortion unit, and wah-wah pedal. Play it really loud, take a shit load of mescaline, and -voila- you have Hendrix playing in the style of 'Lady Gaga' (who is this creature and why is she in the entertainment media?).
In all seriousness,... It's just music. It's not a cure for cancer. It's not a car that get 100 miles to a gallon of gas. It's not a cure for AIDS or weaponized smallpox.
It's just...fucking...music. Stop pretending that it's so serious. And don't give them any more money. Jeez, 10 million fucking dollars for this horseshit!!!
Having the nerve to put yourself in front a crowd has a lot of value.
For which they can charge the ticket price, and have no need for copyrights. Don't get me wrong, I still think copyrights should be exist. But the nerve needed to be on stage has nothing to do with it.
All of these bands that play these "pay to play" venues are absolute suckers. They are actually paying for the club owners advertising costs.
Well presumably that's the point? I mean yes, it's sad that people have to pay to work rather than the other way round, but I don't see how they're being stupid or misled.
And given that people are willing to pay to play, you're not making a very convincing argument in favour of copyright.
On the flip side, all of the artists that are multi-millionaires deserve every penny. Think about how many lives they've had a positive impact on.
And now you try to support copyright by thinking of those poor multi-millionaires! If we're judging payment in terms of how much we think they should be worth, then think how many lives your example doctor has affected, and indeed saved? Shouldn't he deserve to be a multi-millionaire too?
For shame, no mention of Sharon Apple?
I've suspected for some time now that the recording industry would like to remove all these pesky musicians from the process of making money, and now I see the proof. No, I'm not joking. Look at the crap that's playing on the radio right now: music that sounds like an old Nintendo game, with vocals that have been processed to the point where they sound like a cheap voice synthesizer from the 80's. It's not much of a stretch that if this current crop of crap will fly, then why not 100% computer composed and synthesized music?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
A musician is someone who produces music, no matter the tools. So someone will always be a "musician", whether that's on them newfangled letric guitars, auto-tune, or working with a neural network your still making music.
Zenph has cleverly tried to duplicate the recordings of classical artists who recorded in the early parts of the 20th century. There is a valid market out there, given the poor sonic quality of many of these supposedly classic recordings. Tuning out all the hiss and crackle of Casal, Rachmaninoff or Gershwin can be a major headache.
That being said, I don't think that this is the end of human musicians and human recordings, and I frankly don't think all that much of these re-recordings. I'll confine myself to commenting on the Gould and Rachmaninoff. IMHO the Zenph re-recording fails to 'improve' on Gould's sonic qualities. The sound is muddier and dirtier than the cleaned-up versions Sony offers. Part of this comes from the use of a Yamaha grand; Gould preferred pianos that sounded like 'emasculated harpsichords', probably because it allowed sonic clarity. In his later recordings, Gould did tend to sing along (off-key, which is odd, considering that he had perfect pitch), but that is part of the charm of his music. The Zenph doesn't offer any new insights into the art of the piano, Gould, or Bach, and frankly is a marketing gimmick.
I have fewer issues with the Rachmaninoff, because his compositions were built around the modern concept of the piano, with its sonority and power. Sadly, no chills run up my spine when I listen to the recording. This hiss is gone, and I can hear all the mistakes more clearly now (there are quite a few). Pity that part can't be changed.
Not just classical scales, any kind of scales (hungarian, japanese, pentatonic, you name it, he shreds it).
There is no such thing as a hard scale on a guitar. Piano, maybe. The only difference between scales is spaces between the notes.
I mean, we're talking about a guy who can sight-read impossible pieces of sheet music.
Sight reading isn't some rare archaic skill. It is to self taught guitar players, but to any serious musician that is not someone in a guitar band, it's an essential skill.
He's a stunt guitarist, the kind of guy you call when you've got something impossible to play, and that's what I like about him, the monstruous virtuosity.
Ok I guess.
But I wouldn't say that his music has no soul. His tune "For the love of God" comes to mind, he really played his heart out on this one.
The 'music has no soul' comment can't be quantified. It's a meaningless statement really. But to each, their own.
It's all fun and games Till she develops an obsession for a young veritecH pilot and usEs a deComissioned super dimensionAl fortress and subliminal messages to subjugate an entire city all the while plotting to Kill the love intErest of said pIlot. Beware the promiSes of virtuAl idoLs and entertaInErs!!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
I was pretty chuffed when the first Gould recording came out, though honestly after satisfying my curiosity I don't bother to seek it out when I have the vocalese obligato at hand.
The following is an excellent article for those with a geek attention span:
Zenph Studios Marc Wienert piano voicer Yamaha Steinway preparation Mott Music
Before speculating on the potential limits of this approach, it's useful to acquaint yourself with the ideas of Jürgen Schmidhuber. My feeling is that the majority of the human race has the same emotional attachment to human creativity that Kasparov (once) held rather fervently about creativity in chess. I don't know if he ever recanted baldly, but he did switch to a career in politics. I regard Kasparov as the small sea change. Computer chess was a novelty in 1980. That didn't last long.
Is there more to curiosity and creativity than a rigorous rejection of banality? Only time will tell. Nothing prevents Zenph from forming an alliance with the dark forces of neuromarketing. They don't have to replicate the impossible, they only have to make you believe that they've done so, without bothering to solicit your opinion verbally, if you consent to the cap.
Personally, I like this development. There is too much cult of personality in this society. Soon the real celebrities (and their incredibly fragile public personae) will be competing against fake celebrities who only have sex with other fake celebrities, according to neuromarketing biorhythms. Accenture is investing heavily.
If the eyes are the gateway of the soul, then music is the gateway to the cult of personality. A billion iPods can't be wrong.
To really get inside an artist's head, you also need some music the artist recorded badly. Fortunately, Gould did not spare us the carnage. One of his Mozart recordings is almost unlistenable. The true artistic challenge for Zenph is to make Gould play Chopin differently, yet exactly as badly as his worst Mozart.