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For Video Soundtracks, Computers Are the New Composers (npr.org)
Reader jader3rd writes: NPR has a story about computer composed soundtracks being used for small video projects.
Ed Newton-Rex, the company's founder, is a composer who studied computer programming, and says he started to ask himself: "Given what we know about how music's put together, why can't computers write music yet?" "You basically make a bunch of choices that really anyone can relate to," Rex says. "That's one of our aims. We wanted to make it as simple as possible, [to] really democratize the process of creation." Despite the successes there's been limited investment, because audiences and producers are uncomfortable with it. "On the credits they don't want to see 'Composed by Computer Program Experiments in Musical Intelligence by David Cope,' " he says. "It's the last thing they want to show their audience."
Ed Newton-Rex, the company's founder, is a composer who studied computer programming, and says he started to ask himself: "Given what we know about how music's put together, why can't computers write music yet?" "You basically make a bunch of choices that really anyone can relate to," Rex says. "That's one of our aims. We wanted to make it as simple as possible, [to] really democratize the process of creation." Despite the successes there's been limited investment, because audiences and producers are uncomfortable with it. "On the credits they don't want to see 'Composed by Computer Program Experiments in Musical Intelligence by David Cope,' " he says. "It's the last thing they want to show their audience."
But how much longer will that last, until audiences are comfortable with seeing that a movies soundtrack was computer composed?
until the entire movie is computer composed? It's not much of a stretch.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The audience really cares who makes the music? Aside of a few memorable scores, I couldn't even say who did it for most movies.
And producers? I am pretty sure you can convince them with "It's as good as human work but cheaper".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A movie will certainly have a computer composed soundtrack soon... but in 8-bit. Think Avatar 2 with "The Legend of Zelda" soundtrack running in the background.
Why would we need this?
That's why. They've found people simply don't care. It's the same with bands that used to play in bars and clubs. The venue owners found out they didn't have to pay live bands or performers, that people were fine with a DJ/karaoke, or just a jukebox with a decent speaker system. They still patronized and spent money at roughly the same rate, and the owners pocket a tidy sum in their cost savings.
And then people wonder why they can't find live bands in bars and clubs anymore, and why now movie scores will be generated by software going forward.
Because people have proven they'll tolerate it. That's why. If venue owners or movie producers/studios lost money without real performers, this would not be happening.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
They should just go into pop music. That stuff is already mass produced, with songwriters literally sitting in rooms together churning out songs (this is why songs from different artists can sound the same, because they essentially have the same parts in them). Seems like it should be pretty easy to automate that, especially given the formulaic nature of current pop music.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
The music for the video game "ballblazer" from 1984 was algorithmically generated, according to http://www.langston.com/Papers....
This is pretty much how pop music is written already. There it seems completely appropriate, since there is no skill or innovation required. But for actual film music? While algorithms can compose absolutely pleasing pieces (because we've been conditioned to like them), they cannot properly account for the various emotional complexities involved in an actual film. I fully expect this to replace film composers on crappy, network TV shows, perhaps even low-budget films. Everything is about budget and turning a profit, and cutting out musicians is an easy way to do that. It's happening everywhere, sadly.
We don't need background music when we read a book, so why do films need it?
Despite the successes there's been limited investment, because audiences and producers are uncomfortable with it. "On the credits they don't want to see 'Composed by Computer Program Experiments in Musical Intelligence by David Cope,' " he says. "It's the last thing they want to show their audience."
But how much longer will that last, until audiences are comfortable with seeing that a movies soundtrack was computer composed?
Do audiences pay any attention at all to credits? The only time I do personally is when I want to look up a specific actor / actress, when I am unfamiliar with them. I don't think I've ever paid attention to music credits... and I am a musician.
Set your browser to https://www.jukedeck.com/ and click "Make" in the top right corner of the screen. Once you've created an account (email required), you can start playing with AI compositions. The options are a bit limited right now - you choose genre, speed, how many seconds in the compositions peaks and so forth. Then their cloud tech composes the track and records the resulting composition through machine learning driven synthesis.This takes about a minute. They describe the tech in more detail on their research blog. This tech is clearly in its infancy. But the audio tracks created are actually quite pleasant to listen to. Not much worse than typical stock music you'd buy for video tracks.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
The hangup is on audience reaction? Pick a pseudonym. "Composed by Sound Tek featuring David Cope" would be sufficient. The audience would need to look it up in order to learn it's an algorithm written by Cope rather than a band.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Who would they sue when the computer spits out a riff of "Kookaburra"...
Of course not. We want to see "Soundtrack composed by CPE-MI v2.5, vocals by Hatsune Miku v3".
#DeleteFacebook
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html
I recommend anyone go to the TFA website and click on the two music samples, one written by a computer and one written by vivaldi. One sounds beautiful and one is repetitive and annoying. I correctly picked out the vivaldi one right away and I suspect most other people can as well. Machine composers are not ready if this is a demo of where they are today.
n/t
Beep-Boop-Beep
John Williams or Vangelis?
Then I'd be okay with it.
"That's one of our aims. We wanted to make it as simple as possible, [to] really democratize the process of creation."
Where, I suppose, "democratize" is supposed to mean, "characterized by the principle of social equality for all." Or in other words, everyone should be able to compose a movie soundtrack without regard to musical talent, training, or hard work. Sounds ideal.
Yes, yet another weapon of 'math' destruction of a creative art form. It's about time I go home and play my guitar and compose a song about the death of creativity.
I get the angle Ed Newton-Rex is coming at here; it would be a really nice plug-in addition to maybe some high-end studio engineering software, but to say we're going to completely deface human creativity in song writing? Bullshit, I say, sir. The best stuff comes from love, pain, suffering, hard times (and good times), and everything else --- I think I almost quoted an Alice in Chains tune there, but case in point that a living for musical creativity is a lifetime of milking scars to some, and entertainment, motivation, inspiration and fidelity to the rest of us.
I correctly picked out the vivaldi one right away and I suspect most other people can as well.
I only listened to the first 15 seconds of each one, but I didn't detect any significant difference. However, I find the vast majority of classical music to be monotonous and mundane. So it's possible that the issue isn't that the computer composed music is just as good as the human composed music, but rather that most human composed music is just as bad as computer composed music.
That being said, I was impressed with how authentic the computer composed music sounded. I suspect that the vast majority of people don't care enough about classical music to care about its origin, and would be completely indifferent to it while watching a movie as long as it elicited the proper emotions.
I'd be fine with no credits. Just movie. I'm sure the theaters would appreciate it if moves were 10 minutes shorter as well.
As a developer, I can't imagine making my customers look at a scrolling list of all the devs on the team every time they tried to open or close the software.
how does this even vaguely make it so?
Or is it like German Democratic Republic....
That's the only reason why 'computer composed music' will ever be a Thing. Meanwhile people with actual taste will wonder "Who wrote this garbage? Oh, it's computer generated, no wonder it sounds totally uninspired and generic".
GREY. EVERYTHING IS GOING TO END UP BEING GREY. That's what your so-called 'AI'/Robot world has in store for you all: Nobody will have any incentive to learn anything or learn how to DO anything themselves. Everything will be done half-assed by some shitty algorithm or by some half-assed robot, nothing will be high quality, there will be no creativity, just bland, bland, bland, and tasteless, and when things break down everyone will panic and nothing will get done because nobody will know how to DO anything for themselves anymore. Your shitty 'self driving car' breaks down and you'll panic because you don't know how to get yourself anywhere. Your robot kitchen stiops working and you starve to death because you can't even boil water let alone cook food. You won't know how to fix anything because there was some other goddamned machine that fixes the other machines and you have no idea how any of it works anymore. You can't even dial a phone because your shitty voice-activated so-called 'AI' assistant isn't working.
Idiocracy becomes a real thing!
I feel sorry for you people. You're ALL going to become slaves to your machines, thinking they're 'freeing' you. Yeah sure. You'll be about as 'free' as animals in a zoo.
Meanwhile, over here on my side of the fence, are going to be the remaining few who actually know how to operate a motor vehicle, have actual knowledge and skills, and can take care of ourselves WITHOUT machines to do everything. Don't worry, we'll be benevolent masters when your fully mechanized fantasy falls apart.
Must be all that classical training. The two samples were as different as night and day to my ear. They should do a blind test and see how many people can pick the real vs AI composition.
...who studied music theory, and programming. A few years ago he wrote an A.I. program that composes music. He mainly taught it to compose Jazz, but I am sure that it could be taught to compose any kind of music. It's a pretty cool concept.
Despite the successes there's been limited investment, because audiences and producers are uncomfortable with it.
No it's not. Not all that many people care who composes the music. But for anything big enough to have credits in the first place, the current state of the art AI is not going to be good enough. It's fine for a YouTube video of your cat, but AI can't yet score a dramatic moment or a sad death or a chase scene. Jukedeck is just an automated muzak generator.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
However, I find the vast majority of classical music to be monotonous and mundane.
No the issue there is definitely you lol. That's not a problem, there's no need for everyone in the world to understand music.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The only use it seems to have found so far is as a kind of advance white-noise filler for youtube videos. It is perfectly adequate for that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's precisely the problem. A computer can reasonably copy Vivaldi's sensibilities in chord changes, melodies, and arpeggios, but putting it together in a coherent way that's appropriate to the scene is the tough part.
This would probably be good enough for short commercials, but wouldn't be up to snuff for anything dramatic.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I've been using cgMusic as a source of compositions for a couple years now. I don't turn to it often, but it's good when I need something that doesn't fall into my own tropes. (It has its own limited set of tropes though.) I then handle the arrangement and the engineering, and do a bit of editing to the composition itself, all of which is simple because the program outputs MIDI files.
Here are three examples.
I've also used other procedural generators to take existing music and re-mix it, such as this. I had to do quite a lot to get a useful song out of this though, as the original procedural output was more of a joke than a finished product.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
But you incorrectly assume that virtuosity in playing an instruments equals to quality of the music produced.
Being able to do pretty much everything in a guitar (or any other instrument) doesn't mean that the things you play
are going to sound good.
I usually find boring when a music seems to play only to display his technical abilities.
If an AI composes a song, since it is transforming existing data through a neural network (not conscious "artistic creation") , it by definition did not create anything new. It's just a random number generator.
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I can easily pick that blindly as well but the major difference to me is in the number of instruments in the Vivaldi sample, and particularly the bass. The computer sample sounds tinny, simple, and repetitive, but I think for the two (?) instruments it is using, it's done pretty well.
The computer-generated one was fingernails on a chalkboard. But you could see where it could go.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Inception is known for a single note of a song they play throughout the film.
But for the most part, this allows amateurs and low budget studios to focus on what they're good at and have access to things they're not good at.
When starting out, plenty of people just rip off music or graphics or whatever they're missing from professional sources and risk copyright issues if they release their finished product.
Not everyone who wants to make computer games or movies is an artist or a composer or has access to one.
Work Safe Porn
Just a guess but whatever algorithm will sound progressively worse the more instruments are added.
love is just extroverted narcissism
To my ears, the computer-generated composition is cringe-inducingly bad.
As a composer, I can say that given current musical demands of directors which include a distinct LACK of memorable themes and lack of leitmotiv and that these directors want mostly background "noise" that a lot of this could indeed be machine written. But music such as John Williams writes ain't gonna be written by any computer.
Wake me when computer can make something like Francesco Manfredini
Pretty true, sample 2 is Vivaldi, and sample 1 is just... not. However, you are not going to get a world renowned composer to do a custom soundtrack for your YouTube video so as far as cheapo alternatives go the ersatz Vivaldi is a pretty good option, especially if the music generator could sync the music to the existing video.
Human music..... I like it!
...but to really f*** things up requires a computer. Music is human expression.
Specifically Japanese videogames, the music is the one thing that can usually stand out in an otherwise bad or mediocre game, unless the composer phones it in (I can only think of one example). A lot of those same composers do other work outside of games as well, and more recently some kickstarted western developed indie games have contracted a few of them.