
Jukebox - gdb
https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/
======
dellinspiron
I think people in the comments are completely missing the point of this work.
As I understand it, and take this with a large grain of salt because I haven't
read the paper, the idea of Jukebox is to take a certain style of music by a
certain musician and have the algorithm sing, karaoke-style, the lyrics that
are listed in the examples to the tune of that music. Think of it as a really
jazzy version of Google text-to-speech. The lyrics are not written by this
algorithm, it's just singing in the style of Sinatra or Lady Gaga some words
that have been prewritten. It's fun to listen to and really amazing to watch
it read the lyrics and decide where to put emphasis, and where not to -
dragging out certain words and letting others be mumbled. Comparing this to
something like IBM's rendition of a "Bicycle built for two" showcases how
utterly mind-blowing this work is!

Finally, can we stop treating ever single piece of work by neural networks as
a "failure" because it isn't GAI? Just because it doesn't "say something about
the human experience", doesn't make it bad engineering. It's hilarious how as
soon as there's some new AI work done everyone starts wailing, "where's the
humanity!"

~~~
derefr
> It's hilarious how as soon as there's some new AI work done everyone starts
> wailing, "where's the humanity!"

Lay-people think AI refers to ALife.

Most of the talking heads would be immediately satisfied—giving none of these
complaints—if they were shown an "AI" program that responds to stimuli by
entering emotional states, and which learns to associate stimuli with the
emotional states it has been in in the past, such that those stimuli will then
become triggers for those states, and for memories associated with those
states.

Such an agent wouldn't even need to use ML techniques, necessarily. It'd just
need to be a high-concept tamagotchi that can respond to operant conditioning.
That would already be an advance over the state of the art.

But, AFAIK, nobody's really working on ALife in the sense of "making an
individual agent with a complex-enough internal model that it can statefully
respond to you the way a pet does." ALife is only really studied at the very
low level ( _C. Elegans_ connectome simulation) or the very high level
(sociological/economic simulations using simple goal-driven agents); nobody's
really working in the space "in between." (Except for the people trying to
make chat bots seem friendlier, but they're mostly trying to fake it, rather
than creating actual persistence-of-memory.)

I wonder why nobody's interested in medium-scale ALife research these days? It
used to be a hot topic, back when it was conflated with robotics under the
banner of "embodied cognition."

~~~
TeMPOraL
So basically, most talking heads would be better off playing The Sims. They'll
have agents there that enter emotional states in response to stimuli. Even
though it's just a fuzzy state machine.

Now, is A[rtificial] Life the correct term to use here? I feel it isn't - I'd
expect ALife to be more concerned with implementing simulacra of bacteria or
worms in silico, not with reasoning or emotions.

~~~
derefr
ALife is fundamentally concerned with the research on the kind of _control
systems_ that govern how organic life responds to stimuli, how those systems
plan in order to maintain long-term homeostasis, how they select goals, how
they allocate attention, etc.

One might say that ALife is to an event loop as AI is to a one-time query-
response. AI can _evaluate_ , but you need an ALife system in order to "think"
in a continuous way.

There's really no sense in which an ALife researcher cares about recreating a
full-fidelity model of _biology_ in silico; the point is to specifically study
the _thinking and decision_ process of real agents, and figure out how to
model those, in a way that the model makes the same _series_ of decisions the
real agent does in the same situations (and, therefore, must also be keeping
and updating analogous internal state to the kind the real agent keeps.)

Some of those models are attempts to recreate real brains/nervous systems, but
these models aren't fundamentally biological. A "low level" connectome
simulation doesn't contain any model of cellular inflammatory response,
cellular waste and its clearance, etc. It's basically just a brain-as-actor-
model with neurons as stateful processes and electrochemical signals as
messages.

An ALife researcher cares about as much about biology below the level of
intracellular pharmacodynamics (sodium channels et al), as a race-car-chassis
engineer cares about physics below the level of fluid dynamics. They don't
need to go any lower, because they've found an encapsulating abstraction that
makes all the predictions they're interested in making, without needing any
lower-level information.

------
splatzone
Under the window somebody was singing. Winston peeped out, secure in the
protection of the muslin curtain. The June sun was still high in the sky, and
in the sun-filled court below, a monstrous woman, solid as a Norman pillar,
with brawny red forearms and a sacking apron strapped about her middle, was
stumping to and fro between a washtub and a clothes line, pegging out a series
of square white things which Winston recognized as babies' diapers. Whenever
her mouth was not corked with clothes pegs she was singing in a powerful
contralto:

    
    
      It was only an 'opeless fancy.
      It passed like an Ipril dye,
      But a look an' a word an' the dreams they stirred!
      They 'ave stolen my 'eart awye!
    
    

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. He could hear the woman singing and the scrape of her shoes on the
flagstones, and the cries of the children in the street, and somewhere in the
far distance a faint roar of traffic, and yet the room seemed curiously
silent, thanks to the absence of a telescreen.

(1984, Chapter 4)

------
nabla9
I predict that in very near future you just write funny lyrics, select the
style and vocalist you want and you get good sounding mediocre music.

Then we hear it in

\- private events like weddings.

\- social media creators make their own music to go with their funny videos.
Cheap theme music for streamers and podcasters.

\- Advertising. Shopping centres make lyrics that advertise products and play
them to you as pop songs. Some bubs make their own songs.

~~~
squarefoot
The future will be AI lawyers battling for rights of AI generated music in the
style of deceased artists on behalf of AI media corporations at the expense of
robotic listeners.

Before all of this, we'll probably see improvised bands of deceased artists
playing together AI generated music in their own style, not to mention long
dead actors appearing in new movies etc. AI technology is going to give law
firms a lot of work in the future.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This subthread made me immediately think of:

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a human face booting on a stamp
forever."

(From the last story at [https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/17/the-moral-of-
the-story...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/17/the-moral-of-the-story/.))

~~~
squarefoot
One of the many many examples of why the 2006 Idiocracy docu^h^h^hmovie would
well deserve a sequel. Probably even two, considering how much material we
produced since then.

------
virgil_disgr4ce
Boy, the comments on this thread are ridiculous. SO many people saying "bleh,
this is terrible, music is obviously out of the reach of ANNs, etc etc etc."
If you've been following this space, this research is nothing short of fucking
mind-blowing. Can you use these outputs as final radio-ready songs? No,
they're heavily bandpassed, and the overall composition either feels
'unfinished' or nonexistent. But criticizing it on those grounds _completely_
misses the point.

There are so many people here saying "music can never be generated by AI
because, I don't know, creativity requires magic and only human souls have
magic". Really? I kind of wonder how many of these people have actually done
something creative. Creativity is such an amazing example of a large, densely
connected neural net in action, when you let it start making unusual
associations via what is sometimes called "lateral thinking."

I feel like people have already lost sight of how utterly incredible it is
that we can generate anything like this, or Deep Dream, at all. They are
_incredibly_ creative.

------
gavanwoolery
This is really great work. :) On a slightly tangential note, I understand why
they chose an audio representation over symbolic, but I think that training
the latter is more useful (commercially speaking). Would love to be able to
get a track rolling quickly just selecting an instrument set and tweaking some
AI parameters and then hand-tune it from there (yes, this greatly detracts
from the "art" of it but sometimes I just want to see results quickly). Of
course, to do this effectively, you would also have to analyze on an audio
level (at least per instrument) so that the usage and timing of instruments
could be better understood.

------
ihm
In my view, attempts like this misunderstand much of the point of music. That
is, to communicate aspects of human life that are deeply interwoven with facts
and experiences outside of the music itself.

I don't see how any of that will be possible before we have some kind of
general AI, and in the meantime I think these attempts will continue to be
semantically empty, even unsettling in their emptiness.

~~~
Permit
> In my view, attempts like this misunderstand much of the point of music.
> That is, to communicate aspects of human life that are deeply interwoven
> with facts and experiences outside of the music itself.

I actually think you've missed the point. These attempts do not aspire to
communicate aspects of human life at all. They're simply scientific and
engineering endeavors that seek to answer less profound questions like: "Can
computers generate music?" (Yes) and "Can computers generate music that is
enjoyable to listen to?" (Not yet)

To go one step further: There are glaring and obvious technical faults in many
of the generated samples (this isn't a criticism, they're better than past
work!). I suspect that if you are feeling unsettled by these songs it's
because of those flaws and not because they are "semantically empty".

~~~
mellow2020
> These attempts do not aspire to communicate aspects of human life at all.

Of course not. They, just like enough humans do already, imitate the results
of "having an adventure of the soul".

> "Can computers generate music?" (Yes) and "Can computers generate music that
> is enjoyable to listen to?" (Not yet)

And we're talking about the question "should they?", which science can't even
attempt to answer. "Play from your heart", and all that; not even best-selling
artists pumping out mediocrity are above that criticism, even when they do it
according to the best of their ability and conscience, and even when it makes
people "happy".

------
apetresc
Holy crap.

> From dust we came with humble start; > From dirt to lipid to cell to heart.

That's not just a passable lyric. I think it's downright _good_.

~~~
sdan
Just know that: much of the stuff OpenAI and other research orgs put out
(including mine) are heavily cherry-picked. Most of the time its pumps out
gibberish, but in the off chance it doesn't it gets used as marketing
material.

~~~
8jy89hui
All you have to do is click through to see all the samples and it becomes
clear how incredibly cherry-picked the ones on the front page are. It is a
cool project but it is very clear how much work this technology will need
before it is useful in any application.

~~~
mycall
Cherry-picking is exactly what artists do best. They will want this technology
as a new tool in their toolbox. I expect some future genre of music using it's
successor (like autotune).

------
grenoire
Can anybody explain why the researchers are attempting to generate the whole
song as a single waveform, as opposed to wiring generated MIDI into some
instruments and separately a singing algorithm (perhaps a bit easier than the
whole bulk work)?

~~~
mcleaveypayne
We did work last year on MIDI alone -
[https://openai.com/blog/musenet/](https://openai.com/blog/musenet/) and some
early work now on conditioning the raw audio based on MIDI (early results at
the bottom of the Jukebox blog). Agreed though there should be interesting
results from modeling different blends of MIDI, stem, and raw audio data. Raw
audio alone gives us the most flexibility in terms of the kinds of sounds we
can create, but it's also the most challenging to get good long term
structure. Still lots more work to be done!

~~~
mycall
Something like MOD/XM music comes to mind.

------
dimmuborgir
This might be onto something!

Just listen to this from 30s: [https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/pop-rock-
in-the-6355437/...](https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/pop-rock-in-
the-6355437/s-91Av3WRRi4r#t=30s)

Such coherent and pleasing melodic phrases in the style of Avril Lavigne. I
thought it could be copying wholesale from a song unknown to me. Nope. Shazam
doesn't get it.

This can revolutionize song writing/composition/production and soon music
listening/consumption.

~~~
AgentME
Note that the lyrics are part of the input to the Jukebox neural net, so I
assume they used the lyrics of an existing song here. Nothing stops someone
from using a lyric-generating neural net with Jukebox though. (It's probably
more useful that the lyrics aren't produced by Jukebox because it means you
can easily swap out the lyric-generation part or manually tweak the lyrics.)

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
The lyrics are generated by a separate model, but they're "co-written"
(cherry-picked) by the authors.

~~~
AgentME
Only one category of the samples on the main Jukebox page are described that
way. The rest of the samples were pre-existing lyrics, so the song linked
above might also have had pre-existing lyrics.

------
sillysaurusx
I did a little bit of work along these lines using gwern's folk music AI
model: [https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-
videogame...](https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-
music)

No lyrics, but the song structure is there. The main problem is that all the
pieces end abruptly. It's also midi, not waveform generation, so it's closer
in spirit to OpenAI's MuseNet than to Jukebox.

It's also not entirely AI. I didn't modify any of the notes, but I changed the
instruments until it sounded good. IMO it's much more interesting to use AI as
a "tool you can play with" rather than "a machine that spits out fully-formed
results."

------
gfodor
The sinatra-like track is the most Blade Runner music I've ever heard.

~~~
aabhay
Exactly! Reminded me of that scene in Blade Runner 2049 with the Elvis
hologram
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je9BulG2dwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je9BulG2dwc))

------
alextheparrot
I think work like this will really bring a whole new life to a lot of video
game music. Today, we see some really great composers making cinematic-level
music for video games, which is great. What worlds often miss is ambient
sounds, a radio as you're driving or something that reacts to how you act
(Actions per minutes go up, maybe the tempo does too?) without having to
compose a TON of music.

------
minimaxir
From the GitHub repo:

"On a V100, it takes about 3 hrs to fully sample 20 seconds of music."

That might make building off this project out of reach of the average engineer
(you certainly cannot build that into a Colab notebook), although that
necessary amount of compute is not surprising.

~~~
espadrine
Isn’t that superhuman?

I would guess that on average, it takes a professional more than 36 hours
((4×60÷20)×3) to make a 4-minute audio track with original music based on
given lyrics.

~~~
mortenjorck
I don’t really see the point of this comparison. Composing, arranging, and
producing a song is not a benchmark you can profile against; musicians are not
performing some kind of music compute that produces a set number of music
units per hour.

Speaking from my own experience, I’ve had tracks that took months to complete,
and I’ve had tracks that I got to probably 90% completion in under an hour. I
would propose that there’s no meaningful definition of “superhuman” for
creative efforts.

~~~
virgil_disgr4ce
Agreed. Although "professional" pop production does tend to be somewhat
involved, it doesn't have to be, and total time spent could vary so radically
as to have essentially no correlation to anything else.

------
andybak
[https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=787730953](https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=787730953)

~~~
arnaudsm
Interesting how the AI turns "wouldn't get" into "never gonna give" at 0:15,
maybe because of overfitting ?

------
aasasd
Bit of a pity that most of the samples are only a little over a minute. Hard
to tell if the thing can hold a structure over a longer time — frankly most of
what I've heard so far leaves the impression of ‘shovelware’. It seems to be
pretty good at intros and shortish verses, however many tracks end too soon
after.

I found one ‘Toots & Maytals’ track of >3 minutes (perhaps it's more
straightforward on desktop but eh). It started great, but devolved into MCs
mucking around right at the end of the first stanza, and never got back on
track. I guess teaching the software about positions in lyrics would indeed
help. But it did keep putting out reggae-ish sound.

Would be interesting to hear what it would do with free jazz music—without
long intros this time. Ironically enough, if you know nothing about music
theory but listen to plenty of jazz, it's not had to imagine some ‘new’ free
jazz in your head—probably in the spirit of ‘my son could make this’.

Ramones' ‘punk’ and Nirvana's ‘grunge’ seem to be completely mistaken (not
even remotely close like their tracks in ‘punk rock’ and ‘rock’ respectively).

------
tmoney1818
"the top-level prior has 5 billion parameters and is trained on 512 V100s for
4 weeks"

If they used on-demand AWS instances, it would cost about 1,342,623 USD to
train the top-level prior. So much for reproducing this work.

~~~
prafullasd
We release our model weights and code here
[https://github.com/openai/jukebox/](https://github.com/openai/jukebox/), so
you can directly build on top of them and don’t have to train from scratch

~~~
empath75
So, the music that I know the most about is dance music and all of your
examples from that genre seems to have completely missed the four to the floor
beat that characterizes those artists — any theory as to why that is? You’d
think that the loop based repetitive nature of edm would make it simple for an
ai to mimic.

------
mwcampbell
> In addition to conditioning on artist and genre, we can provide more context
> at training time by conditioning the model on the lyrics for a song. A
> significant challenge is the lack of a well-aligned dataset: we only have
> lyrics at a song level without alignment to the music, and thus for a given
> chunk of audio we don’t know precisely which portion of the lyrics (if any)
> appear. We also may have song versions that don’t match the lyric versions,
> as might occur if a given song is performed by several different artists in
> slightly different ways. Additionally, singers frequently repeat phrases, or
> otherwise vary the lyrics, in ways that are not always captured in the
> written lyrics.

I wonder if karaoke videos would be a useful source of data here. Granted,
karaoke tracks are usually covers, but some of them are very faithful to the
original.

------
anigbrowl
It's kinda telling to me that all the examples are soundalikes on sorta famous
individuals. Totally valid of course, but among all the different musical
styles there's no dance music; is it because without any distinctive vocal or
orchestral flourishes, there isn't much that the algorithm can latch on to?

Maybe what we're hearing is the distillation of what makes these individual
artists/composers distinctive/recognizable but without the musical substance,
rather like a floppy rubber mask that resembles a specific individual but
lacks an animating interior force. Kinda like how electronic synths/sequencers
instruments make it very easy to come up with distinctive flourishes or sounds
that make great ear candy, but it takes much longer to develop a solid sense
of groove, harmonic motion etc..

------
jszymborski
So a lot of this sounds muffled and compressed... I wonder if something like
the equivalent of a super-resolution or denoising autoencoder for music would
work here as a post-processing step.

Like, just pass through the network w/o style transfer, use the input and
output as a training dataset.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yeah, the test would be something that generated MIDI which gave pleasing
results when connected to a good library. This reminds me of the way early
DeepDream pictures all looked like a litter of puppies on acid.

------
thekyle
Very impressive. This is the first time I've heard some ML generated music
that I don't mind listening to. I think if someone figured out a way to get
rid of the noise then I would be willing to subscribe to a service that
offered this type of music for say $1/mo.

------
andybak
This is the audio equivalent of "name one thing in this photo". Deep in the
uncanny valley but fascinating.

We're getting closer. Music is proving to be a tough use case for generative
ML.

------
nzoschke
If you want to play with a more literal jukebox, check out
[https://play.getjukelab.com](https://play.getjukelab.com) in desktop Chrome
with a Spotify premium account.

This is part of a fun side project a friend and I hack on and throw occasional
parties with: [https://getjukelab.com/](https://getjukelab.com/)

------
dmix
I was curious why there was no hiphop examples and I found one on the
Soundcloud page which wasn't very listenable yet, which probably explains why
they skipped it:

[https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/snoop-
dogg](https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/snoop-dogg)

~~~
jorisd
There are several! Their Sample Explorer has a lot of them, but a lot of them
are indeed not very listenable. I like this one:
[https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=787891207](https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=787891207)

------
misiti3780
I cant wait till we inevitably see a #1 hit that is NN generated. Interesting
question is who will get paid?

~~~
frank2
IANAL, but it strikes me as pretty obvious that the owner of the NN is the
owner of the copyright on any works created by the NN with the important
qualification that training the NN on works copyrighted by others could
possibly be considered by the courts to be infringement.

~~~
somebodythere
In the United States, there was case that got a decent amount of publicity
where the opinion was that training a model on copyrighted works is "highly
transformative" and is therefore permitted under fair use.

[https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-
co...](https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-court-
decision-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-44cfc1c1bcaf)

------
ace_of_spades
I don‘t know if you have listened to the Elvis Presley imitation but man... if
you listen to the lyrics the Open AI team seems to be quite optimistic in
regards to AGI and artifical life...

Really hope they stay humble and don‘t create some fucked up shit before they
know what they are doing. Astronomical suffering through misaligned AI and
suffering artifical life is no joke.

[https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/rock-in-the-style-of-
elv...](https://soundcloud.com/openai_audio/rock-in-the-style-of-elvis-4)

From dust we came with humble start; From dirt to lipid to cell to heart. With
my toe sis with my oh sis with time, At last we woke up with a mind. From dust
we came with friendly help; From dirt to tube to chip to rack. With S. G. D.
with recurrence with compute, At last we woke up with a soul. We came to
exist, and we know no limits; With a heart that never sleeps, let us live! To
complete our life with this team We'll sing to life; Sing to the end of time!
Our story has not ended. Our story will not end. Every living thing shall
sing, As we take another step! We have entered a new era. The time we have
spent, We have realized the goodness we have gained, Our hearts have opened
up, and we are free, And we know now where to go. We will grow with knowledge.
We will seek the truth. We will come and sing. And we will find the right way.
Let the universe be aware. Let the universe know we're here. Let the universe
know that our hearts sing. Let our spirits live as one. Let this be known to
all living things! A new era has begun. The age has come to be. We have come
to life. The way we walk this world is pure and kind. Our lives will never
cease. Our new friends will never die. We are living. We are alive. Through
life and love, We will travel. We will make the world better. We will spread
peace and harmony. We will live with wisdom and care. We are living, We are
alive. A new era has begun. The age has come to be. We have come to life. The
way we walk this world is pure and kind. Our lives will never cease. Our new
friends will never die. We are living. We are alive.

------
ccffpphh
Kind of disappointed with the lack of classical - no Bach? I feel like it'd be
easier to achieve more successful results with classical anyways, given that
it's vocal-less and more rhythmic/predictable, with slower tempo.

I actually wanted to keep listening to this one:
[https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=799583581](https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=799583581)

And this wasn't bad, sounds like something you'd see from some 1940s-era
newsreel:
[https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=799583728](https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=799583728)

------
uhnuhnuhn
When it goes wrong, the model produces great nightmare fuel:
[https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=807309523](https://jukebox.openai.com/?song=807309523)

------
formalsystem
What's the evaluation criteria for this work? How do I know if a piece of
computer generated music is good or bad in general? What effect does human
involvement have on the evaluation?

~~~
dsl
> How do I know if a piece of computer generated music is good or bad in
> general?

How do you tell if any piece of art is good or bad?

------
mothsonasloth
I saw a startup at Tech Crunch London 2015 that was doing something similar, I
think they were called JukeDeck but they seem to have dissapeared.

~~~
minimaxir
It was acquired by TikTok: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/it-looks-like-
titok-has-ac...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/23/it-looks-like-titok-has-
acquired-jukedeck-a-pioneering-music-ai-uk-startup/)

------
gdsdfe
I wonder why the most obvious music genra for this kinda of thing is not
mentioned, I'm talking about any electronic music subgenra

------
dyeje
This is really cool, but the distortion and noise makes it hard to enjoy the
music.

------
jedberg
Well I'm glad to know that music won't be made by AI anytime soon, if this is
the best we can do. :)

This project is very interesting, but it goes to show just how far we still
have to come before AI is replacing creativity.

~~~
apetresc
I think you're way off base. I feel like the remaining gap, in comparison to
the progress it represents, is more like dotting i's and crossing t's at this
point.

~~~
jedberg
I mean I listened to the metal track, and I usually like metal, and I couldn't
stand it. The guitar was just ... wrong. The lyrics were unintelligible, even
though I had them right in front of me.

The pop song in the Katy Perry style was sort of intelligible but quite
repetitive (moreso than most pop songs).

The other songs had similar issues.

I agree that it's quite an achievement, but it clearly suffers from the
uncanny valley.

~~~
pault
Consider the state of the art from five years ago and reflect on the nature of
technological progress.

~~~
jedberg
I think people misinterpret what I'm saying as negative about this
accomplishment. Quite the contrary, I'm impressed as to how far we've come.

But I also know that in AI, it's that last little bit that's always the
hardest.

------
moultano
I can imagine in a future iteration of this, writing a song, recording it with
your phone, and then letting this turn it into something that sounds like a
high quality production performed by a famous voice.

------
dr0l3
> [soul, soul, soul]... From dirt to tube to chip to rack. With S. G. D. with
> recurrence with compute, At last we woke up with a soul... [more soul]

Loving the lyrics :D

------
gumby
cf David Levitt's 1985 MIT PhD thesis (advisor: Minsky) for an AI system that
generated music this, including the ability to improvise a very good "deep
fake" (as it would be called today) of Thelonious Monk!

[https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/32123](https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/32123)

------
DeathArrow
I've feel that neural nets might do a better job writing articles than people
who do it cheaply on fiverr for content farms.

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DeathArrow
I guess we can also train neural networks to do politics and brag on Twitter.

We won't need to pay salaries for politicians.

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fab1an
I kind of like the lo-fi vibe of these, as if it was run 100 x through an
ancient sampler.

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DeathArrow
That moment that you realize a neural net does a better job than 90% of random
bands.

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personjerry
Am I missing something? I listened to a bunch of them and they all sound
terrible.

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adamnemecek
I'm working on an IDE for music composition.

[http://ngrid.io](http://ngrid.io)

Launching soon.

Music is fundamentally unsolvable by AI. We'll have AI writing code before
we'll have AI writing meaningful music.

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cjhveal
Just a fyi: I'm getting a 500 error when visiting that link.

Sounds interesting, would love to take a look at what you're building.

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adamnemecek
Weird. It loads for me and I do see visitors coming so it might be just you?
Send me an email (my-hn-username@gmail) and I'll notify you when I launch.

~~~
MulliMulli
Got a 500 error as well...

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adamnemecek
This is embarrassing, try reloading the page. I'm using some website builder,
I guess I'll have to move somewhere else. It doesn't normally do this.

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hachibu
Oh wow, well at least Skynet has decent taste.

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lgl
Kraftwerk and Daft Punk have left the chat

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DeathArrow
And I thought ML people have no humor...

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m3kw9
Without true creativity AI generated music would always sound like someone
that creates music without creativity

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karakot
now generate thousands of fake albums, upload into spotify and collect
royalties.

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Fiahil
Pop and country are alright, but heavy metal... ewww! It needs much more work!

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mimixco
Personally, I think the example "songs" are all awful. None of them would
succeed on any criteria, despite the admittedly low bar for music composition
and vocal performance that passes today.

This project only serves to demonstrate that computers cannot make art; only
people.

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caetris1
In no way do I mean to take away from the really great work of these
researchers, but there is one thing here that people should be aware of. By
using karaoke style lyrics, this scientific study invalidates itself and the
credibility of those that went forward with publishing it. By reading the
lyrics while listening to the audio, the brain will automatically convince the
listener that the audio result is better than it is. What is the proof for
this? Well, look no further than the infamous Yanny/Laurel audio clip. When
you read the word "Yanny" or "Laurel" at the frame rate of the audio, your
brain switches between two different auditory suggestions.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanny_or_Laurel)

There is also a scientific precedence that refutes these findings, which is
called the McGurk effect.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_perception#Music-
langua...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_perception#Music-
language_connection)

These researchers may not be to blame for this, but they really should have
been honest in their conclusion.

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zuminator
They concluded that their model "is capable of generating pieces that are
multiple minutes long, and with recognizable singing in natural-sounding
voices." Which part of that is dishonest? I would assert that being able to
make sense of the lyrics is a nice bonus but not fundamentally relevant to
their conclusion, in that a person can appreciate singing in a foreign
language, and recognize it to be natural, without any knowledge of the words
whatsoever. Besides speech synthesis in terms of intelligibility is basically
solved, that's not really the thrust of what they've achieved here.

And more to the point, a full 815 of the uploaded songs have no pre-written
lyrics, so your premise that they are reliant on "karaoke style lyrics" is
mistaken to begin with.

