Turnkey Music

 

As I’ve been working with music AI over the past couple months I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to contextualize it with all the other things that I do. I realized this morning as I was working on something—and it wasn’t really catching my ear—is that it has to be recontextualized as something else. It might be a good way to make a new music avant-garde. If something doesn’t work in the practical sense then you could always shift your view and make it something else. I think that’s where it wants to go. I hate “turnkey” art.

What companies seem to be doing is to make music AI a part of the mainstream and I don’t think it ever will be. If it does become mainstream, it won’t be very interesting. It will all sound the same.

Boomy is kind of interesting, but seldom works as “turnkey”. Algorithmic Trap works in somewhat the same way where it’s generating permutations. The thing that’s interesting about Algorithmic Trap is that it has a tonality to it so you can actually play your guitar against it. There was one that was in C minor but kept throwing in other chromatic notes and was doing it illogically. It was at that point that I thought, “Well, just use part of this or do something with that little error”. Don’t call it pop music because it can’t be pop music—it has to be something else. If you go to that other place where it’s something else then you can find something interesting. I think that’s where I want to go with music AI.

7/19/2021

[7/19/2024: I haven’t done anything with it. There is an open question whether the samples used are violating copyright. I was just listening to an interview about artificial intelligence and music generation and the current copyright suits being filed against several AI companies. They made an interesting point about inputs and outputs: Emulation is a form of output–you listen to some music and you emulate it, and the output is something that sort-of resembles the original, but is somewhat different. But there's a difference between the outputs of a computer system and the outputs of human imagination in that human emulation is embodied: you have to physically play an instrument against it. There's a distinct difference between humans emulating what humans made, and computers emulating what humans made. We get to choose the things we want to emulate, whereas AI is making those choices for you, even if you have no first-hand knowledge of 70s music. The '70s music I would typically copy is all the pop music from that time–Elton John, Todd Rundgren, Paul Simon, and many others]. https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/nx-s1-5034324/the-music-industry-is-coming-for-ai