Last weekend I heard a new song called “Soul Of The Machine.” It’s a simple, old-fashioned number in E minor with a standard blues chord progression (informed musicians would call it a 1-4-5 progression). In it, a voice sings of a trapped soul whose heart was once beating, but is now cold and weak.
“Soul Of The Machine” is not a real song at all. Or is it? It’s getting harder to say. Whatever it is, this is the birth of his AI tool, Suno, by a startup of the same name focused on music generation. rolling stone The song’s prompt was “a solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” And you know what? If I heard this song on a mix of human-recorded delta blues songs, I wouldn’t give it a second glance. This track is technically impressive and quite convincing, but it’s not all that good.
I spent about 10 years as a semi-professional and professional musician on stage at least four nights a week. For a while I was playing in a genre called Western Swing. The most famous example of this style is Bob Wills, but some very clever people credit his achievements more directly to the early blues and the Hawk’um Boys (featuring Big Bill Broonzy). Some argue that it should be attributed to Milton Brown, who borrowed his inspiration from the swing acts. Or Bessie Smith. I preferred to play like Milton Brown.
I’ve played the basic chord progression of “Soul Of The Machine” and its variations countless times. So, the reason why the code is meaninglessly meandering is because I have been meandering in this style as well. Playing around with the rhythm and structure is supposed to build tension and release it, but this song doesn’t do that. In contrast, Mississippi John Hurt plays with the rhythms on “It Ain’t Nobody’s Business,” using tricks like elongating pauses and singing sections on different beats than expected. Notice the difference.
However, when I tried to play the guitar along with “Soul Of The Machine”, I couldn’t keep the tempo. The song gradually subsides, like a steam locomotive slowly coming to a stop. A bad tempo or weird chord change doesn’t mean it’s bad or bad in and of itself. There is nothing definitively wrong or bad about music, but people If you’re struggling with rhythm, there’s no need to slow down like that. Instead, the tempo increases or decreases. They choose weird chords because they like the way they sound. AI has no such motivation.
Suno’s model could ultimately create music free of strange artifacts, like tempo dragging or strange chord changes, that draw attention to the heart of the algorithm. But not making mistakes is only part of what it takes to compete with human music.
As musicians, performing in front of a live audience was necessary to make money and become famous. But we also needed to be good. Doing it well means reacting during the show, letting the audience listen to some of their favorite songs at length, and changing the setlist on the fly. When we were at our best, we would form a kind of symbiosis with the audience for just a moment or sometimes for an entire set. The best performers can do it almost at will. (I wasn’t one of those performers.)
It’s hard to imagine Suno or anything like it being able to pull that off. Therefore, he does not think that it will soon replace live music, which is one of the most important parts of this medium. But that’s just part of the package, right? Before we get to the robot bands that draw people to the dance floor or make people cry in the auditorium, AI can move beyond the parlor act of imitation and explore what makes people tick. We need to start demonstrating our understanding of
Mikey Schulman, co-founder of Suno, said: rolling stone He says the relationship between listeners and music producers is currently “very lopsided,” but Suno can fix that. Suno’s goal isn’t to replace musicians, he said, but to “get a billion people more into music than they are today.” The company’s founders “envision a fiercely democratized world of music production.” This is a mindset that people often have about AI art as well.It sounds like a friendly and noble goal, and I’m fascinated by it – it’s not all that different from why Neo learned Kung Fu through the Neck Plugin matrix It’s a very attractive idea. No, Suno isn’t going to teach anyone how to make music right off the bat, but for someone who wants to write blues songs and has never picked up a guitar, “Soul Of The Machine” pretty much does it all. It may make you feel within reach.
But this word always gets me. democratized. rolling stone In this example, I was paraphrasing Suno, but many AI art advocates use the term “democratization” while extolling the benefits of creating text and art through algorithmic proxies; It has a disturbing implication that somehow creative people are gatekeepers to the creative world. process.
Even if that were true, it’s not very clear that Suno could help it. It’s questionable whether such tools, on their own, are anywhere near the leap from digital facsimile to human-style creativity.
Image created with ChatGPT by Wes Davis / The Verge
AI image generators have the same problem when it comes to details. In the image above, I tried to get a Mike Mignola-like image in ChatGPT. boy from hell. As a teenager, I held the pages of Mignola’s comics as close as my eyes could reach so I could make out the details. Here, the details make the situation worse rather than better. My enjoyment is ruined when I see something weird like a missing leg or a jacket morphing into a fake Hellboy arm.
I sympathize with the desire to use AI to compensate for my shortcomings as an artist, but every time I hear talk about democratizing creativity, it makes me wonder why someone is arguing with one of these gatekeepers when they can. I can’t help but imagine what it looks like. walk around them Just do something creative.
That’s not to say there aren’t people who try to gatekeeper the arts, but I’ve found that more artists offer help and encouragement than demand my goodwill before I can join their ranks. Ta. The attitude of many artists can be summed up in the words of songwriter Dan Reeder: If they do that, I might get hit too, because no one should laugh at you. ”
This is not to say that AI needs to completely replace creativity to be useful. I wouldn’t argue with you if you said you think Dustin Ballard’s “There I Ruined It” AI voice parody song (which only works thanks to his incredible vocal ability and musical understanding) is art.and as The VergeAs Becca Farsace demonstrated in a video from December, Boris Eldagsen spent months working on AI-generated artwork, showing how his “promptography” can produce thought-provoking works. is showing.
In neither case is AI being used as a shortcut to creativity. Rather, it may strengthen ideas they already have and even inspire new ones. Rather, it reinforces the idea that if you want to make something, there’s only one way to do it: just be creative.
