Machines cannot replace musicians in many circumstances yet. Music is emotional. It is improv. It is creative. Machines do as they are told, and even if they have some complex AI going on, they can still only function according to the parameters they are given.
I am a Music Information Retrieval researcher, and I would emphasize that while programs do not "create from scratch" yet, neither do humans. The notes do not come from the ether, and all that life experience plays a role (I'm also a composer, so I can verify this, too). Our programs do not yet have a lifetime of experience with music, so perhaps it is not a fair comparison?
Until someone makes a machine with the ability to improvise in response to the lead singer or soloist, convey emotion, *enjoy* music, and discover new things through taking risks and making mistakes, musicians won't become obsolete whatever that means, as if people won't still enjoy making music even if machines *could* do it better.
We don't have all of those things yet, but we do have many parts of this, and we had it a long time ago (check out the works of Robert Rowe and George Lewis for instance). George Lewis' software had a listener and could make musical decisions about what he was playing, as well as what it was playing. We don't have a universal improviser for every style, but not every musician plays every genre either. Still, there's more going on that just the commercial stuff...
I would also propose that Turing is a goal. We're quite a ways off, but there are examples: Phil Winsor has had the music generated by his programs used for TV commercials. There's been quite a bit of progress with machine learning algorithms and self-organizing maps in the field of Music Information Retrieval. We have rulesets for expressive performance (KTH and Generative Theory of Tonal Music) that give reasonably human performances of MIDI data, and we're working on combining these systems with analyses of expert performers.
I have no interest in replacing human performers with computers, but I would love to humanize computer performers.
namely that my über-speed metal band has already trademarked "Deathalyzer(TM). (and in England, Deathalyser(TM)) We are willing, however, to post a disambiguation notice concerning the article on our website as a favor, however. You can see it at www.ideathalize.com
2: You cant properly represent a 25kHz tone with 44.1kHz sampling without distrotion. For all we know the real tone may sound like Mozart.
With aliasing that's a 19.1 kHz tone, which is a far cry from Mozart, and quite a bit lower than 25kHz. Increasing frequency doesnt always work because of the Nyquist frequency rollover
I feel the same way about patent. If an inventor wants to monetize his invention, he should either develop it himself or license it to a company to develop. When he dies, it should become public domain.
hmmmm... Well, I like the gist of this, I'd certainly watch my back if I invented anything important...
Everybody pays the same percentage of their income. So every time you take the toll road, it's 0.0001% of your yearly income. The incentive will be highest for the people who have the most and can easily afford it, and lower-income folks will be substantially less affected.
This is not a troll. Please, free-market evangelists, try to imagine five things about this that might be interesting before replying.
...but in the meantime, they've made their money. In essence, the Lone Ranger rides in after the girl has already been run over by the train, and then chases down Snidely Whiplash (I'm blending kids' TV, so sue me) and tells him not to do that again or it might cost him. Markets work best where there is transparency, and this type of collusion is a blatant deception to the customer. As the parties involved have no incentive for competition, these types of deals will continue. Why argue over bread crumbs when we all can have a loaf?
Collusion is a VERY big deal, though maybe you don't think it affects you (though it does). Collusion is what allowed Enron to happen. If you allow it to go unpunished, it spreads. Why are CDs still so expensive after 20+ years? The media costs next to nothing, there's minimal problems with breakage, and shrinkage protection is substantially better due to inexpensive technology. Either we have collusion, or an example of the market taking an exceptionally long time to fix the problem. (Has it?)
Maybe it's not your life that's affected; you may have a decent paying job, but it does affect those at the bottom. In this case, it's printer ink, which is a small enough expense for most people. Imagine, however, if it was like this for everything. Imagine all the grocery stores in town decided to set minimum prices, and then used their influence on the zoning board to prevent other grocers from opening. Eventually the monopoly would probably be broken, but in the meantime, you've paid the price, and you will never get that money back from the market.
If you lose 15% of your retirement because one of the companies in your portfolio colluded with an auditor to pump up their stock by hiding losses and then got caught, the market will not give you a do-over. Many free market believers will mock your judgement, saying that you should have known; the purpose of collusion, however, is to keep you from knowing, and there is a reason that these types of business relationships are not publicized by the corporations involved. The market rewards profit, and bad behavior, if concealed well enough, is profitable.
Before this gets tagged "pinko commie bastard" I am simply saying that it is important to have regulated markets that operate in a transparent function because the market rewards what is profitable, not what is right. Sometimes, they work together, but sometimes they don't. Regulations lets investors have some security in knowing that they are not being fleeced; confidence is a pretty important thing to markets. We have rules for how large corporations can operate, and with very good reason, because there are certain things that the market does not sort out quickly enough for justice, and history is full of examples of these "minor road bumps in the market". If you're lucky they don't affect you, but there's plenty of people who they do affect.
Definitely agree on the sampling rate. For all those golden ears who insist on the higher sampling rates, they should also know that side by side double-blind listening experiments conducted have established that the higher sampling rates sound better not because of the increase in data, but because of the smoothness of the waveform. They pitted 48 kHz recordings upsampled with interpolation to 96 kHz with 96 kHz recordings of the same material and found that there was no discernible difference. This was recounted to me by a Tannoy rep. The real advantage of 96kHz is in the signal processing domain, particularly for plugins that use filters or delay. (having to do with interpolation)
I definitely disagree about the dynamic rate in certain cases. (I'm an audio engineer, DSP programmer, and electro-acoustic musician) The problem with dynamic range is that you have the same number of bits to represent 0 to -6 Db (mono) that you do for -6 to -inf Db. Once you get down to the softest sounds, you often don't have many bits left at all to represent the sound; you only get the full range for the loudest of sounds, and the distribution of bits is linear, while the distribution of loudness is logarithmic. For most music, it's not a problem, but it does cause problems for orchestral works which can have a huge range of dynamics. For instance, in Messaien's Éclairs sur l'au-delà there's a bit with two triangle players on opposite sides of the stage playing rolls as soft as possible, and that never sounds right in recording. Also, there's plenty of electroacoustic pieces that benefit from the increased dynamic range.
If you record at 16 bit but allow 12 Db of headroom just in case of really nasty spikes (which can definitely happen with an orchestra), then you are now effectively recording with 16384 possible values instead of 65536, meaning only 84 Db of resolution with which to record. For most listeners, though 16bit/44.1khz is fine, and
it absolutely destroys vinyl in terms of fidelity, aliasing, etc. be damned.
I've always argued that if we're going to have corporate personhood and the death penalty, we should also have corporate death sentences. Do something nasty enough, and your corporation is dissolved, all chief officers imprisoned, holdings distributed, child corporations borked, etc. After all, if the real death penalty's purported deterrent effect is at all true, we should see some results. )
I don't think it would probably help here, as Shentech will probably just reappear in a different guise with same backers, but it'd be a nice threat against corporate malfeasance. Also, it's a handy story for appearing combative at cocktail parties.
Yes, the early works are impressive--for a six year old--but they are nowhere near the level he would later achieve. While people do perform them on occasion (10 performance out of easily 10000+ performances of Mozart a year (chamber groups, operas, pianists, etc.) does not a trend make), they are a historical curiosity, and will never find favor the way the later works have because they are student works and lack the complexity and depth of his later music. (Could I do that at six? Hell no...)
It's certainly not fair to compare the boy with the man and expect similar results (though such a comparison is illustrative with Mendelssohn), and that is not my intention. My point is that he didn't come out of the womb writing, and though he did have many advantages such as a highly musical family which was completely dedicated into turning him into a star, and a quite stable set of styles and forms within which to work, he developed substantially over time, and doing music every day probably had quite a lot to do with it.
Talent is absolutely a factor, but it's certainly not everything. Being in Chicago, you may be familiar with a certain greatest basketball player of all time who got cut from his high school team and decided he didn't ever want that to happen again... I'm not arguing for mass delusions of grandeur; I just think many people feel like they aren't good enough to create, whether music, art, etc., and it's a shame.
IAAC (I Am A Composer), and I have to say that these arguments get applied too often to music, and this triggered my bullshit Mozart fact-o-meter. Mozart was 8 when he wrote his first opera, and nobody performs it, because his later operas are so much better. Lots of talent, but lots of learning.
Most people never learn to compose because they think they can't. They've bought into the Hollywood Amadeus nonsense that God comes and talks to you, and then you just write it down. It's less glamorous to admit that that person, although talented, also worked extremely hard, and that you, with a similar extreme effort, could do the same. Writing music is hard work; it's the toughest thing that I know how to do that I can do well, but I resent when people act like it's magic. Being the absolute best at something probably does require a bit of magic, but too often we just use that as an excuse. Though not everyone has the same innate talent for music, it probably didn't hurt either that Mozart's father was also a composer, and he would have been surrounded by excellent musicians and trained on the piano before the toilet. Music, and only music, is all that Mozart did from birth. He worked in one style, that had certain formulas for creating melodies, harmonies and forms. (check out his dice music!) He was damn good, but he was also incredibly hard-working.
Also, as per one other myth from Amadeus: "He could hear the music in his head!" Any composer worth his/her salt can do this with tonal music from the Classical Period. Same way a good mechanic can hear a certain sound from your engine and know that it's cause xyz. It's what they do, and sort of an expected skill amongst composers.
One partial solution would be to incorporate video and audio recording technology into the TASER. An ambient light sensor turns recording on when TASER is withdrawn from holster. When a TASER is fired, the last 30 seconds of activity are recorded. Though there are limits to the effectiveness of this approach (quality of camera, light, lens covered, etc.), it provides documented evidence of appropriate use or abuse.
We keep thinking things like this are a good idea. For instance, the Theremin, after a burst of initial popularity, never took off. Though it looks easy to play, it's in fact quite difficult, because there's no tactile feedback. Coming in at the right pitch after a long rest is hard, which is why you don't see many pieces for orchestra and Theremin; instead, the Ondes Martenot, which has a keyboard to indicate pitch, is used.
There's a rift in the Theremin world over people who play in the traditional touchless manner and people who slide their finger along the surface of the instrument. The latter is substantially easier as it reduces the mental calculation of distance to one dimension, and means that you can mark the exact location of pitches, which is a pretty good sign that touchless isn't all it's cracked up to be.
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I am a Music Information Retrieval researcher, and I would emphasize that while programs do not "create from scratch" yet, neither do humans. The notes do not come from the ether, and all that life experience plays a role (I'm also a composer, so I can verify this, too). Our programs do not yet have a lifetime of experience with music, so perhaps it is not a fair comparison?
We don't have all of those things yet, but we do have many parts of this, and we had it a long time ago (check out the works of Robert Rowe and George Lewis for instance). George Lewis' software had a listener and could make musical decisions about what he was playing, as well as what it was playing. We don't have a universal improviser for every style, but not every musician plays every genre either. Still, there's more going on that just the commercial stuff...
I would also propose that Turing is a goal. We're quite a ways off, but there are examples: Phil Winsor has had the music generated by his programs used for TV commercials. There's been quite a bit of progress with machine learning algorithms and self-organizing maps in the field of Music Information Retrieval. We have rulesets for expressive performance (KTH and Generative Theory of Tonal Music) that give reasonably human performances of MIDI data, and we're working on combining these systems with analyses of expert performers.
I have no interest in replacing human performers with computers, but I would love to humanize computer performers.
namely that my über-speed metal band has already trademarked "Deathalyzer(TM). (and in England, Deathalyser(TM)) We are willing, however, to post a disambiguation notice concerning the article on our website as a favor, however. You can see it at www.ideathalize.com
With aliasing that's a 19.1 kHz tone, which is a far cry from Mozart, and quite a bit lower than 25kHz. Increasing frequency doesnt always work because of the Nyquist frequency rollover
hmmmm... Well, I like the gist of this, I'd certainly watch my back if I invented anything important...
Here's an exceptionally egalitarian solution:
Everybody pays the same percentage of their income. So every time you take the toll road, it's 0.0001% of your yearly income. The incentive will be highest for the people who have the most and can easily afford it, and lower-income folks will be substantially less affected.
This is not a troll. Please, free-market evangelists, try to imagine five things about this that might be interesting before replying.
this instance of Collusion is slowly ending...
...but in the meantime, they've made their money. In essence, the Lone Ranger rides in after the girl has already been run over by the train, and then chases down Snidely Whiplash (I'm blending kids' TV, so sue me) and tells him not to do that again or it might cost him. Markets work best where there is transparency, and this type of collusion is a blatant deception to the customer. As the parties involved have no incentive for competition, these types of deals will continue. Why argue over bread crumbs when we all can have a loaf?
Collusion is a VERY big deal, though maybe you don't think it affects you (though it does). Collusion is what allowed Enron to happen. If you allow it to go unpunished, it spreads. Why are CDs still so expensive after 20+ years? The media costs next to nothing, there's minimal problems with breakage, and shrinkage protection is substantially better due to inexpensive technology. Either we have collusion, or an example of the market taking an exceptionally long time to fix the problem. (Has it?)
Maybe it's not your life that's affected; you may have a decent paying job, but it does affect those at the bottom. In this case, it's printer ink, which is a small enough expense for most people. Imagine, however, if it was like this for everything. Imagine all the grocery stores in town decided to set minimum prices, and then used their influence on the zoning board to prevent other grocers from opening. Eventually the monopoly would probably be broken, but in the meantime, you've paid the price, and you will never get that money back from the market.
If you lose 15% of your retirement because one of the companies in your portfolio colluded with an auditor to pump up their stock by hiding losses and then got caught, the market will not give you a do-over. Many free market believers will mock your judgement, saying that you should have known; the purpose of collusion, however, is to keep you from knowing, and there is a reason that these types of business relationships are not publicized by the corporations involved. The market rewards profit, and bad behavior, if concealed well enough, is profitable.
Before this gets tagged "pinko commie bastard" I am simply saying that it is important to have regulated markets that operate in a transparent function because the market rewards what is profitable, not what is right. Sometimes, they work together, but sometimes they don't. Regulations lets investors have some security in knowing that they are not being fleeced; confidence is a pretty important thing to markets. We have rules for how large corporations can operate, and with very good reason, because there are certain things that the market does not sort out quickly enough for justice, and history is full of examples of these "minor road bumps in the market". If you're lucky they don't affect you, but there's plenty of people who they do affect.
I definitely disagree about the dynamic rate in certain cases. (I'm an audio engineer, DSP programmer, and electro-acoustic musician) The problem with dynamic range is that you have the same number of bits to represent 0 to -6 Db (mono) that you do for -6 to -inf Db. Once you get down to the softest sounds, you often don't have many bits left at all to represent the sound; you only get the full range for the loudest of sounds, and the distribution of bits is linear, while the distribution of loudness is logarithmic. For most music, it's not a problem, but it does cause problems for orchestral works which can have a huge range of dynamics. For instance, in Messaien's Éclairs sur l'au-delà there's a bit with two triangle players on opposite sides of the stage playing rolls as soft as possible, and that never sounds right in recording. Also, there's plenty of electroacoustic pieces that benefit from the increased dynamic range.
If you record at 16 bit but allow 12 Db of headroom just in case of really nasty spikes (which can definitely happen with an orchestra), then you are now effectively recording with 16384 possible values instead of 65536, meaning only 84 Db of resolution with which to record. For most listeners, though 16bit/44.1khz is fine, and it absolutely destroys vinyl in terms of fidelity, aliasing, etc. be damned.
I've always argued that if we're going to have corporate personhood and the death penalty, we should also have corporate death sentences. Do something nasty enough, and your corporation is dissolved, all chief officers imprisoned, holdings distributed, child corporations borked, etc. After all, if the real death penalty's purported deterrent effect is at all true, we should see some results. )
I don't think it would probably help here, as Shentech will probably just reappear in a different guise with same backers, but it'd be a nice threat against corporate malfeasance. Also, it's a handy story for appearing combative at cocktail parties.
Yes, the early works are impressive--for a six year old--but they are nowhere near the level he would later achieve. While people do perform them on occasion (10 performance out of easily 10000+ performances of Mozart a year (chamber groups, operas, pianists, etc.) does not a trend make), they are a historical curiosity, and will never find favor the way the later works have because they are student works and lack the complexity and depth of his later music. (Could I do that at six? Hell no...)
It's certainly not fair to compare the boy with the man and expect similar results (though such a comparison is illustrative with Mendelssohn), and that is not my intention. My point is that he didn't come out of the womb writing, and though he did have many advantages such as a highly musical family which was completely dedicated into turning him into a star, and a quite stable set of styles and forms within which to work, he developed substantially over time, and doing music every day probably had quite a lot to do with it.
Talent is absolutely a factor, but it's certainly not everything. Being in Chicago, you may be familiar with a certain greatest basketball player of all time who got cut from his high school team and decided he didn't ever want that to happen again... I'm not arguing for mass delusions of grandeur; I just think many people feel like they aren't good enough to create, whether music, art, etc., and it's a shame.
IAAC (I Am A Composer), and I have to say that these arguments get applied too often to music, and this triggered my bullshit Mozart fact-o-meter. Mozart was 8 when he wrote his first opera, and nobody performs it, because his later operas are so much better. Lots of talent, but lots of learning.
Most people never learn to compose because they think they can't. They've bought into the Hollywood Amadeus nonsense that God comes and talks to you, and then you just write it down. It's less glamorous to admit that that person, although talented, also worked extremely hard, and that you, with a similar extreme effort, could do the same. Writing music is hard work; it's the toughest thing that I know how to do that I can do well, but I resent when people act like it's magic. Being the absolute best at something probably does require a bit of magic, but too often we just use that as an excuse. Though not everyone has the same innate talent for music, it probably didn't hurt either that Mozart's father was also a composer, and he would have been surrounded by excellent musicians and trained on the piano before the toilet. Music, and only music, is all that Mozart did from birth. He worked in one style, that had certain formulas for creating melodies, harmonies and forms. (check out his dice music!) He was damn good, but he was also incredibly hard-working.
Also, as per one other myth from Amadeus: "He could hear the music in his head!" Any composer worth his/her salt can do this with tonal music from the Classical Period. Same way a good mechanic can hear a certain sound from your engine and know that it's cause xyz. It's what they do, and sort of an expected skill amongst composers.
One partial solution would be to incorporate video and audio recording technology into the TASER. An ambient light sensor turns recording on when TASER is withdrawn from holster. When a TASER is fired, the last 30 seconds of activity are recorded. Though there are limits to the effectiveness of this approach (quality of camera, light, lens covered, etc.), it provides documented evidence of appropriate use or abuse.
We keep thinking things like this are a good idea. For instance, the Theremin, after a burst of initial popularity, never took off. Though it looks easy to play, it's in fact quite difficult, because there's no tactile feedback. Coming in at the right pitch after a long rest is hard, which is why you don't see many pieces for orchestra and Theremin; instead, the Ondes Martenot, which has a keyboard to indicate pitch, is used.
There's a rift in the Theremin world over people who play in the traditional touchless manner and people who slide their finger along the surface of the instrument. The latter is substantially easier as it reduces the mental calculation of distance to one dimension, and means that you can mark the exact location of pitches, which is a pretty good sign that touchless isn't all it's cracked up to be.