Posted on 03/23/2024 7:00:01 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
I heard a new song last weekend called “Soul Of The Machine.” It’s a simple, old-timey number in E minor with a standard blues chord progression (musicians in the know would call it a 1-4-5 progression). In it, a voice sings about being a trapped soul with a heart that once beat 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, it’s the creation of Suno, an AI tool from a startup of the same name focused on music generation. Rolling Stone said this song’s prompt was “solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” And you know what? I doubt I’d glance askance at it if I heard it in a mix of human-recorded Delta blues tunes. The track is technically impressive, fairly convincing, and not all that good.
I spent 10 years or so as a semiprofessional or professional musician, onstage at least four nights a week. For some of that time, I played in a genre called Western Swing. Bob Wills is the most famous example of the style, but some very smart people have argued that more of his credit should go to Milton Brown, who drew more directly from early blues and swing acts like The Hokum Boys (which featured Big Bill Broonzy) or Bessie Smith. I preferred to play more like Milton Brown.
SNIP
(Excerpt) Read more at theverge.com ...
A few more tweaks and they’ll have that.
only goes to prove that a machine can have the blues but still no soul.
Who gets the copyright and royalties?
Machine (robot)
or
Human who made the inquiry?
Vernon Reid (head guy of Living Color) has been messing around with AI for a while, using his own catalog to train it. He was kind of disturbed by how quickly he could make it write a song that looked just like one of his, just a few corrections and passes and boom. It also taught him he’s really fond of some words, to the point of him now trying to not use them in his songs.
It can be a valid tool. It can be stupid. The choice is the users.
“Wrote a song about it, like to hear it, here it go….”
The weird thing is that Vernon Reids soloing is already kind of like AI. Not very traditional, it’s spastic, and kind of random, and pretty much avant-garde.
“ It can be a valid tool. It can be stupid. The choice is the users.”
Dear Suno,
Construct a blues song in the style of Blind Mellon Chitlin’.
They took the credit for your second symphony
rewritten by machine on new technology
and now i understand the problems you can see
— The Buggles 1980
Hopefully this junk will go the way of programmed drums. I don’t hear much of it anymore thank God. It’s not completely gone, but I think it’s used less. I don’t believe therw will ever be anything like real human voices, real instruments, real musicians. Music is a human thing, not a machine generated one.
Surprisingly catchy.
What did you dream?
It’s alright, we told you what to dream.
chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator....
The tune had been haunting London for weeks past. It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator. But the woman sang so tunefully as to turn the dreadful rubbish into an almost pleasant sound.
Old, great musician to me almost 50 years ago when I was a beginner.
“There’s no such thing as bad music...just bad musicians.”
Yes, but can it write a country song about; Mama, trains, prison and get’n drunk?
Well, a friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song
And he told me it was the perfect country & western song
I wrote him back a letter and I told him it was
Not the perfect country & western song because he hadn’t said anything at all about mama,
Or trains,
Or trucks,
Or prison,
Or getting’ drunk
Well he sat down and wrote another verse to the song
And he sent it to me,
And after reading it,
I realized that my friend had written the perfect
Country & western song
And I felt obliged to include it on this album
The last verse goes like this here:
Well, I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick her up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned old train
The day AI can replace Stevie Ray Vaughn, or Hendrix, or Duane Allman, Johnny Winter, BB King, and so many more will be the end of real music. I can only hope for it to be an utter failure.
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