Do you fear AI as a composer?

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So the coming storm is in the form of hackneyed, poorly rendered, poorly orchestrated “epic music” that’s not commonly good even when done by humans? If I could count on AI wiping that off the face of the earth sometimes I think I’d make popcorn, sit back and watch.

Except for one thing: all of the clearly heartfelt statements about emotion in music or “soul” (I’m not going there) discount the most important thing to the continuation of any art - the audience. The problem with that sort of idealization of the universal preciousness of art would be that the average uneducated listener might be perfectly happy with that as a backdrop to a scene. Especially if it’s loud enough. And by and large the acceptance of mediocre music with a few things a listener might grab onto as familiar will be damaging enough. Nobody will want to hear your interesting horn choir or your awesome woodwind clusters (especially if they came from a library), and that will be too expensive for your potential clients anyway. Someone had said if the AI got that good they’d just buy the AI too - well, here’s the thing - something you can buy for a couple of hundred dollars - even a grand or two - isn’t really AI - it’s an algorithm. Real AI lives on big fast expensive computers none of us have. And NVIDIA or IBM aren’t going to sell you their app - they will license AI-generated music to clients directly, so clients don’t have to pay residuals anymore and pay less upfront. And you won’t be necessary.

Also, there’s good and bad AI. Good AI potentially knows all the music theory as applied to a style, references lots and lots of music both as model and as guide for knowing that certain things lead to a positive outcome. It can quantify elements of style a composer themselves may not consciously be aware of - and can even model the behavior of not consciously being aware of something. So there’s no point in saying that AI can’t do what humans can, because it’s all about what we tell it to do. If someone is truly knowledgeable about music and cares to teach a machine about it (instead of turning a machine loose on a music library and marveling at the patchwork lunacy it puts out), there’s no reason to assume that it might not be indistinguishable from that generated by humans - at least to someone who might buy it.

The thing is, there need to be laws in place that state that AI cannot be used to replace existing trades unless the company that generates it also pays for the people it renders obsolete, and cannot in any event replace creative arts because there is nowhere else to go for composers or painters or what have you. A mundane example - AI could be used to control a massive network of passenger cars to prevent accidents, but could not replace truck drivers carrying goods without very, very fair compensation to the drivers, because that’s replacing a human industry.

By the way - there is absolutely nothing inevitable about the use of AI in all fields to replace humans - nothing at all. To say so is to relinquish the limited control one has over one’s existence - it’s like
not voting because you don’t 100% love a candidate even if the other one is an obvious criminal. You know how you don’t use your favorite chord and favorite melodic cel in every piece you write? Same thing. It’s not a battle against inevitability - it’s a battle against corporations not wanting to pay people for work so they can profit more, and to my mind a misguided passivity on the part of artists of all kinds - who have already allowed music to become so devalued by their inaction and their willingness to be the first to play along with the “new model”. Think of how Playboy used to say that they were empowering women in the seventies. Sure, if by empowering you mean enabling them to do more things to please men when men wanted them to. It is not my intention to strap on the bunny ears and accept less to please someone who believes they are holding all the cards. Rant over.

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Just to add to a small part of that comment, it’s interesting to note that right now the industry is moving away from epic sounding music… trailer houses and film directors are putting out briefs to find “the new thing” in music… briefs I’ve had and I know others are getting are things like “I want beaaams but not braams, something new” or, “focus on textures, something fresh”. They are all sick of what they’ve heard for the past 20 years but they aren’t silure what they are looking for. Some are defaulting back to the orchestra which is fab for us but it’s only a lul in the market so I’m doubtful that trend will stick.

The first TENET trailer was the turning point. This is in nearly every epic brief st the moment as a reference… and that’s because it’s not your typical approach… nothing more. I’m so excited to see where this takes us.

But this could also be an argument against AI. As we don’t know what will be popular next so AI won’t be programmed to keep up… in that sense we will at least mostly be ahead of the curb?

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I think that’s why I haven’t focused too much on the ‘epic’ trailer music stuff; I really do like some of that music, but it all sounds the same, same format, same FX, and it’s gets tiresome quick. As you know, I’m writing (well, trying to anyway :sweat_smile:) a suite in the style of the Golden Age of Hollywood composers like Korngold, Steiner, Miklos (and yes I put Williams and Goldsmith into that category as well) andI just find that style more endearing. I don’t think it’ll make a comeback, but it will always be there.

But what will come next in the trailer music? Mostly atonal sound design stuff? I dunno. If I were a producer/director, I’d really look for something that suits the style of the film/show/game and even if it’s big action, does it really need to be ‘epic’ trailer style? Can AI come up with that? Not at the moment.

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Composer Everett does this style extremely well and makes a living from it, so it might be a good shout to chat to him about it! He’s awesome!

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Oh, yes! I do really like his stuff! That’s really the beginning of film music, that style, and it will always be there; it’s the most endearing to audiences in my opinion. I think, even if the style is “dated” it is still the gold standard and I feel most comfortable writing, even if it’s the most difficult since it’s essentially the closest thing to classical concert music. That’s why John Williams film music is constantly played as such (Sadly, he was supposed to come conduct my hometown orchestra next month, but, you know, COVID :sob:)

I’m just curious where trailer music goes from, “Riiiiiiser, woosh, boom, bang braaaaam, crash.” What’s the progression from that? What are directors really looking for? Let’s put that through the AI algorithm!

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Here are my two cents on the subject.

First of all… I don’t really fear AI in that regard because, well… my goal is to compose my own tracks for my own games and since my music will be directly integrated inside videogames… That’s not really an issue for me.

That said… I can understand people can fear this.

What I think is that while AI will probably be able to replicate a lot of what humans can do… it’ll always be lacking “genius” in it’s composition.

I’m positive only a human mind can have a genius intuition that goes behond the standards and as such humans will always be one step ahead regarding art :slight_smile:

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Well it is definitely the beginning of today’s style of film music… but there were a lot of other styles before that, such as big band which dominated the scene for at least 15 years, and before that the chamber orchestra… and before they simply the piano in silent film :slight_smile:

In Trailer music you have 3 distinguishable episodes or sections. Those sections are referred to as E1,2 and 3… but their functions are intro, build and climax.

Hits and risers will always be apart of Trailers as they are a great way to add tension and release. In one way or another they will be there, because before that we had cheesy drum kits in everything.

I think that the elements that will be changed are

Braams - in essence these are just pitched 808s that have a long tail and are distorted… they’ll find many more ways to do this thats new, but right now this is something a lot of publishers are trying to find (the new Braaam)

Orchestra vs synthetic sounds will be interchanged but one thing that is becoming more evident is that trailers go through phases of simplicity and complexity. In one sense all trailers are complex… but harmonically simple… right now they’re getting harmonically varied again… though this is down to adding atonal stuff in… especially hybrid soundscapes.

The progression for the crash sounds and percussion probably won’t change… but having said that, these are very genre specific, so maybe they don’t need to change?

To sum up it’s just turned into its own genre, so it now has its own codes and conventions just like other things… the only issue is it’s even more over saturated than most right now, so we may see a rise in this in the future but for a period of time I think something else will take its place

More and more I’m thinking that the next big thing for blockbuster films will actually exclude smaller trailer producers to an extent… as the next thing looks like it’s going to be Bands writing songs that are then trailerised by trailer companies. The smart ones of us who can sing, play guitar AND do the hybrid thing are already trying to implement these things into their work and sending them to the appt trailer companies.

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FYI, I’m not one of the smart ones :joy: I’m focussing on other things atm but I’m keeping my eye on things very closely for when I start to compose more trailers. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Like you said, I don’t dislike trailer music, but it’s very oversaturated. You may be right about bands, though. My friend’s band had one of their songs used for a trailer for a TV show here in the States and here you do hear more pop music being used in TV commercials. I’ve done the Evenant course and yes there is a definite structure and convention to follow and I’m not good at it :laughing: I like being more creatively free and focus trying to do more soundtrack music, even if that’s much harder to get into; I love writing big themes and memorable melodies.

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Haha I know what you mean about following the structure. I’ve created a strict template that I can follow in my DAW so I don’t care too far away from the brief. And I’ll be honest, I do vsts off quite often! :joy:

I’ve been toying with the idea of remixing and re orchestrating some of my old ideas that I didn’t get accepted a few years ago… just for fun. Otherwise they are just all sag there gathering dust!

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Yep. I have a full orchestral score set up in Notion that I use only for sketching themes and melody ideas on various instruments and go back to it often to see if I can use any of them in a piece.

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It’s really good that you do that. I speak to an awful lot of composers who fight against doing that… and their reasoning is because they deem it inferior to writing with a blank pallet… and their reasoning for that is simply because they don’t think it’s cool. That sounds so abstract to me but I do have to remind myself that composing these days is seen as a cool thing in some circles… an awful lot of people partly do it for that reason alone… and I guess we have to respect that… but when I started, composing wasn’t cool… especially in my rural village… and especially in the U.K. the U.K. sees itself as being a musical country but it really isn’t. Music is still kind of kept for the elite here so I was extremely lucky to study it.

Btw I. Not sure if you know this but you can buy individual sections of bigger libraries in orchestral tools sine player. It’s super cool and my favourite sample company atm. It makes it more affordable to get these bigger libraries too because you can get a bit each month. Genius way to do it in my opinnion. And it’s not stripped down unlike the essentials stuff from spitfire.

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Do you mean orchestral music? There’s so many great bands from the UK though, Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Sabbath, Dragonforce, Beetles of course. They don’t go out of their way to teach music here, but my city has a big music tradition with the biggest music fest in the US and one of the top pro orchestras in the US as well so it’s easy to get into music and find like-minded people.

I do have Sine player and like orchestral tools libraries but they’re hard to blend with others because of the thick reverb on their samples, but otherwise great.

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Yeah, I mean in terms of tuition and culture. Most over here appreciate music but it’s not like Europe. A LOT of European countries have music as a core subject. My friend from Prague said in her village they teach symphonic writing at the age of 8 :open_mouth:

I agree in terms of 60,70, 80srock, the U.K. basically dominate

Ah I haven’t found that with their libraries to be honest… at least not yet. I’m fairly new to the OT world but I’m very much enjoying what I have. Tableau strings are simply beautiful and seem to really blen well with spitfire, I’ve just bought a few packs from inspire 1 which I am excited to try… and even more exciting is my friend James from a trailer group inboxed me to tell me I won his competition and won his “Hurt” sample pack which is full of hybrid sounds. It’s an expensive sample pack as sample packs go so this is really cool! I’ll be trying all of these out! Might even make a few videos of them :slight_smile:

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Hi, Svallin85.

A few things to consider - and I don’t mean to single you out, I’m just thinking about these things, and you are entitled to your opinion like anyone else:

If you don’t have an issue with AI because you believe it won’t have any impact on you alone, then it’s possible you may think of yourself as an island In that regard and that other composers’ troubles may not apply to your situation. To each their own, I suppose, but consider that when you submit your budget to a backer at some point and they say, “hey, why are you charging us for music? AI-generated music is far less than that,” or if your product is obliged to cost less and less because AI- generated music and games cost less (regardless of perceived quality), then perhaps you will think differently about it. But as you say, you can see how other composers might not like it, so I’m not saying in any way that you lack empathy for other composers! Just that the implications of this idea will leave no composer or media creator untouched.

And to return to a previous point- what you refer to as genius is a process. All processes can be quantified - as time goes on, with greater accuracy and sophistication. It may be hard to conceive of that, but it’s no less true. There is a lot of magical thinking going on about “inspiration” and “genius” and so on, as if these things can only come from humans - but a human is not magic, and a brain isn’t either - though it is very complex, and our inclination often can be to mystify something we don’t understand.

Here are a few examples. First - the eye. Arguments have been made that the eye is proof of supernatural influence on life because it’s “simply too complex to have evolved on its own.” Except it isn’t. There is a clear line from early photon-sensitive bacteria to aquatic life to land dwellers to humans. And our eyes haven’t finished evolving from the aquatic version - they are in many ways still suited for underwater vision. It’s just that the process of that evolution is so slow- over such an inconceivable amount of time - as to be inscrutable to many people; and when people can’t imagine how something works, their pattern-recognition-based brains create all manner of hypotheses to resolve the unknown. Not dissimilar to the act of composing, really.

The second example is a massive simulation of an ecosystem, where countless rules of how things interact are in play. These exist on supercomputers in labs around the world. Their beginnings were in particle movement modeling but have developed to depict increasingly complex behaviors. A human observing this may not be able to conceive of the complexity involved - indeed, the creators of the simulation might not be able to fully conceive of it - but they don’t need to. They work on small parts of it, establish rules and algorithms, and stand back. But they don’t assign any mystical qualities to the process - they might marvel at it, but it’s just complex, not magic. And AI’s made to generate music don’t truly need to be aware of how neurons work - they just need to be able to model the result.

So the idea is that since the brain is a quantifiable mechanism, and since the parameters of music are quantifiable, and since style is quantifiable (in spite of some folks thinking it’s an ineffable “something”), and since the various effects that harmony and density and tempo have upon a listener are quantifiable, and since what we have decided to be great music can be analyzed to the last detail and relative to the output of the composer and also to all other composers for whom records exist - sounds like a lot of work, right? But not so much for an AI - then replication of these patterns is at least a theoretical possibility; and since variations in aesthetic from composer to composer can be quantified, and since at least in theory the process of how a composer arrived at a certain piece can be extrapolated and thus the stimulating mechanisms identified and described, it’s very possible that a machine could learn to write perfectly beautiful music (or imperfectly, as the scenario called for). No reason to assume this could not be the case now or ever. Because a sufficiently-advanced AI would not need to have had its own person human experiences to draw from - it could draw from all of them, or from a narrow range to make the music more “tortured”, or joyful, or idiosyncratic, or what have you.

Consider that Thelonious Monk wrote very singular music - driven by his individual filters, his mental condition for better or worse, the adversity he faced - but that not only can one know it when one hears it but as a musician or composer one can simulate it. Now take that process, a lot of which is “unconscious” to the musician, and quantify it for an AI, and then let the AI do it - keeping in mind that just because a single person might not be able to conceive of how that’s done, doesn’t mean that it can’t be.

There is absolutely no reason to assume that any human process can not be accurately modeled. To me, the awareness of how we arrive at things of which the world’s consensus is “that’s genius” is a marvelous process (in the traditional sense involving something to marvel at), even if it’s quantified down to the last detail - in the same way that the sonorities in La Mer became no less beautiful when I was able to say what chords were used. And the appreciation of beauty in nature - a sunset, a flower, another human - is a result of innumerable filters and rules that a mind has in place, and will differ from mind to mind; and if these things can be quantified, then it’s equally and logically possible that an AI could be made with these same filters and rules, so that it could “perceive” in the same way.

In an increasingly complex world, we must remain vigilant against any inclination to stop thinking too early.

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New here, so I thought I might start by replying to this post because yes, it doesn’t actually scares but worries me to see human values and feelings vanishing from today’s ’e-world’ where nothing is real and barely most people anymore.

My thought is at the start producers and publishers would hunt for talents to make money with, and that once these producers well settled then it’s been up to artists to ‘beg’ for getting produced or published, and today quite anybody or whatever can be made a star or a success overnight thanks to the media. It took to corrupt the public’s taste and lower the standard too so that to be able to turn cr!p into gold, more generally to get things easier to sell and allow a crowd of untalented but well connected ‘artists’ to make their way.

So many composers and song writers used skilled methods of plagiarism to fulfill undeserved careers, so maybe AI will not be anything quite new, but making music doesn’t stop to combining figures and harmonies together to make something that ‘sounds well’. If there’s no soul or spirit in there then it’s just ‘disposable’ music or home appliance… : )

If computers ever ‘came to life’ then we’d have to get rid of them right away, and the only title of the AI song linked in the OP tells you why…

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In short 5 to 10 years the answer is NO! I have been involved in the design and build of computers since 1968. AI needs access to a vast amount of data and lightning speeds to compute results. AI tools yes there are many now in the sense they look at chord progressions, random generators etc such as Scaler, Melody Sauce, Captain series Chord/Beat etc. All useful to composers. I would like and may see an AI Logic Pro X to make a rather complex tool less complex. Software and AI has been based on making programming more like configuring to the point where graphical tools have come a long way as have picture search tools. However, how fast we progress is still based on Moore’s law and AI is mixed in with that and for sure to take over as you put it there needs to be a huge breakthrough in computing and how we make computers first. Quantum computing could be that but is becoming a bit like Nuclear Fusion next 30 years after 30 years have past!

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Well yes it’s scaring actually. Sorry but I don’t edit a post that got ‘replied to’, and what I read from people on this thread makes me fear that yes, it seems the market no longer needs men for it EITHER and that it may include all arts, even cinema where holograms or CGI will end-up replacing today’s ‘actors’.

Maybe the current ‘crisis’ with its shutdowns and stalling of all human activities is a means to get us accustomed with what’s awaiting us. Most movies always served to spread hidden propaganda anyway so why keeping pretending to put ‘art’ in them ? Same about songs and their lyrics, painting, writing, even sports if you look closer. That’s what I’m fearing, maybe the ‘dream’ is over and that’s it, maybe we’ve ‘got to the point’ and after having got lured for decades we’re now being set on ‘survival mode’ for ever.

Maybe I’m going too far but music is a reflection of the surrounding world and society of your days, and as an ‘artist’ you wouldn’t want to make an ugly work… This is human.