I am really interested in this. The current paradigm from e.g. Suno is an all or nothing finished product. Producing intermediate assets allows you to do simple things like proper mastering or swapping instruments or editing melodies etc.
An impressive achievement indeed. That's exactly what one'd expect from LLM. If someone wants to see/hear what real music is, listen to this, just to get a reference point. This will make you cry. Literally.
The pop composition was nice, if somewhat cliched. (And of course the MIDI instrumentation does it no favors). The guitar solo in the middle was fun - it kind of sounded like it reverted to some of the baroque pieces in its pretraining. Reminded me of the harpischord solo in the Beatles' "In my life".
This is where AI becomes a tool for the artists.
We need an AI DAW, not Suno.
A bit off topic, but is there any good recent Image to midi/XML/Sibelius stuff out there?
Generative music is boring not cause it’s necessarily bad sounding music but because there’s no vision behind it, they took in old music, garbled it around in their magic music machine and made new music based on that old shit.
As long as there’s music made by real people this AI music stuff will only be interesting to the very uninspired, the people that will hype up anything that’s AI and commercial projects who don’t have to pay royalties for the music in their advertisements, elevator, phone waiting music and whatever else they need a quick tune for.
Don’t get me wrong, the technology is nice but I don’t see myself consciously enjoying AI music, at least not till I start dementing or smth.
Even the cherry picked examples are boring milquetoast? Maybe this is an example of "this is worst version of this technology" but I'm still skeptical of any generative system that isn't publicly available for testing.
The major issue I can foresee going forward is that the only public domain sheet music available is in the classical idiom. And people don't really care about writing new pieces in a Baroque style. It's a fun exercise, but not really relevant to modern music. The "pop music" listed in the article sounds like "Baroque-pop" presumably because that's what is in the training data. That's why a DAW style system would be more useful and welcome, although there again - what data do you train on? There aren't just millions of publicly available "EDM DAW files" laying around to train on.
I follow a YouTube channel Gamma1734 [1] where the creator who runs it plays a bunch of piano sheet music from the past, a lot of it in the Romantic style. The artists played on the channel are all obscure to me. None of the names I consider "masters" from that period or style. And to be frank, the average quality of the compositions is not great.
My own opinion, as an amateur musician with no classical training, is the music I heard on this AI generated page would not have stood out to me compared to the rest of the pieces on that channel. I would wager that in a randomized test of these average middle of the road composers vs. an AI score generated by NoteGen that almost no average person would be able to distinguish them.
That leaves two categories. The highly trained individuals (e.g. professional composers or well educated amateurs) who may be able to tell a difference (I would love a real study on this and not just "vibes"). And the master composers (Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, etc.) which stand above the average human composers of their own times.
I would admit the pieces composed by the AI aren't at the level of the master, but they do feel indistinguishable to me from the average.
This is notably better than previous attempts. I hear the basic structures that make a piece of music more than a series of notes.
None of the pieces I heard were good, but I think they'd get a passing grade in a composition class.
Here is a great online service using NotaGen where you can directly listen to the pieces and follow the scores on screen: https://piano.fm/
Notes in the left and right hand that occur on the same beat don't line up properly.
The human performance at the bottom of the page was nice. But you can also give a great musician a zipper and paper bag and they can make it sound nice.
It’s just like LLM generated prose to me. The orchestration and motif development is musical sounding, but there’s these artifacts that are like the “It’s important to consider” or “Would you like further suggestions” of the aural world.
I think it would be fun to write up a detailed analysis of a full piece.