
Can AI Write Pop Songs? - prostoalex
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/06/29/in-stargoons-car/?utm_source=Boomtrain&utm_medium=manual&utm_campaign=Paris+Review+Daily+Weekly+20170702&utm_term=Paris+Review+Daily+Weekly+20170702&utm_content=Paris+Review+Daily+Weekly+20170702&bt_ee=/CeGRlN2Sp6DBPdo3s8etN+MDYo58q2xiIGOK/XyFsw/zoUO6mCtR0VHRKtiAsbT&bt_ts=1499001081597
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cthor
Having listened to the song linked in the OP I was blown away, but then:

> I ought to note that a human being is involved in all this: the French
> composer Benoit Carré, who took the raw data generated by the CSL and
> matched it to audio from existing recordings [..] Benoit then arranged,
> produced, and mixed the tracks that resulted from this collaboration. Carré
> has also written the words.

I feel like there's a big difference between "AI creating music" and "AI as an
assisstive tool for creating music".

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yesiamyourdad
But in the early 90's I sat in on a seminar by a music prof at my university,
he was working on AI generated music. His vision was that it would be an
assistive device; basically labor saving for composers.

At the time his students were doing automated compositions and I was blown
away by the quality at the time. Definitely his students were already at the
stage of partially composed music - basically just a songwriter who needed a
good arranger / producer.

Given some of the work I've read on RNN's, I think this is really close to
being fully automated. 5 years, maybe, and stuff like this will be fully
automated.

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maroonblazer
I think this is the future of AI in music, not just pop.

It's trivially easy to write a mediocre song. All it takes to turn a mediocre
song into an above-average one is a clever turn of musical phrase; be it
melody, harmony or rhythm or all three (typically it's all three). As a
songwriter you're constantly generating options for you to choose from. "What
chord goes well after this one but doesn't sound too predictable? What
direction can I take this melodic idea in? My chorus is boring; is there
something I could do rhythmically that would make it more interesting?" You're
constrained by your own imagination, which itself is constrained by what kind
of mood you're in, what you've eaten or drunk, energy levels, etc.

How nice would it be to have a super-charged co-writer that could spit out 20
alternatives that you would never have thought of. They don't even need to be
perfect alternatives; simply enough to jog your head into a different frame
where you can proceed to refine and build from.

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chjohasbrouck
That's interesting, but in that scenario, how important is the composer
really?

Couldn't we just connect the variable output of the AI to some kind of
Mechanical Turk-style focus group, feed those results as inputs back into the
AI, and repeat that process millions of times? Might that produce a better
song than an individual composer?

I've seen interviews with some modern artists, and they'll often take
inspiration from decades-old hits (which are essentially de-risked melodies)
and apply them to a modern template. I'm assuming the bigger labels already
focus-group the output and make revisions. This seems like something that
could eventually be automated.

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maroonblazer
I'm looking at this from the standpoint of someone who likes to write music.
If I'm the composer then I'm important. :-)

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chjohasbrouck
Haha, fair enough. :)

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Animats
From the article: “Franchise a rock band.”

Some years ago I was backstage at a major rock event the day before the
performance. One of the management types was explaining to me that they had
two sets of everything, and three crews. One crew was at the current venue,
one was at the previous venue, tearing things down, and one was at the next
venue, setting up. I asked "so why not have two sets of performers and double
your revenue? 'Cats' has two road companies. Barnum and Bailey circuses have
two road companies. There are bands that replaced all their members over time
and kept the name. It's all about the branding." A more senior manager,
overhearing this, looked very thoughtful.

It's been done in Japan. AKB48 has three teams. They're organized like a
sports league, with farm teams and regular turnover.

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yesiamyourdad
I'm not all that familiar with them, but isn't Gorillaz an entirely fake band?
I mean, they don't have real human members, it's all virtual musicians.

In a sense, all the boy bands are basically the same thing. One runs its
course, another springs up with the exact same formula. It'd be much more
efficient without having to deal with human performers.

I think this franchise music thing is going to happen.

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adventured
Given the relatively short, finite length of the average pop song; given the
well known, restricted inputs; given that there is a general formula for
successful pop songs; not only can AI write pop songs, it can (and will) write
every possible pop song. At this point it's merely a question of a short
amount of time, sub ten years perhaps, twenty tops.

The creation part will ultimately end up being the trivial aspect. Figuring
out which of the billion songs AI create are any good will be the more
difficult, time consuming filtering / discovery aspect (that will process
partially at human-speed).

AI will create vast amounts of content/goods in the relatively near future (of
all types, from VR worlds to pop songs to physical things automatically made
by printing). A large industry will spring up around filtering that, deciding
what's good, to then serve it up to people for popular mass consumption.

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CJefferson
> ... sub ten years perhaps, twenty tops

I hope you are being sarcastic :) Even though pop songs aren't that
imaginative, exponential growth means causes problems. We can't count all ways
of ordering 52 cards using all the computers in the world in the history of
the universe, and I bet one could come up with an algorithm for creating pop
songs, one per ordering of a deck of cards.

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GuiA
We can count all the ways of ordering 52 cards.

It's 52!, or
80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.

Enumerating them is where it starts to get tricky.

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CJefferson
Yes, you are right, I meant enumerate :)

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luckyt
I recently worked on a project that attempted to find harmonizing chord
progressions for pop songs, given a melody. Since pop music has such
predictable structure, I think AI generation is well within possibility.

[https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/ai-project-
harm...](https://luckytoilet.wordpress.com/2017/04/25/ai-project-harmonizing-
pop-melodies-using-hidden-markov-models/)

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lucidguppy
Can evolution produce pop songs?

Just take a few pop songs written by professionals then do some descent with
modification - and dump them all onto youtube. Cull the losers - rinse and
repeat.

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dqv
If Vocaloid sounded a little more realistic, humans could be completely
removed from the process.

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pharrington
I look forward to the glorious future with infinite Hatsune Miku concerts
featuring neural network produced music and AI written lyrics.

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Animats
Right.

We may also get machine learning systems which take in recordings of existing
singers and generate the data needed for a singing synthesizer. Automatic
cover bands, at last. It will be worth it just to really annoy the music
industry.

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H4CK3RM4N
Maybe this is where Apple's AI efforts have been directed all along. Who needs
a good assistant when you can piss of music execs even more?

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amelius
This reminds me of Microsoft Research's Songsmith, [1] (also known as MySong).

[1] [http://songsmith.ms/](http://songsmith.ms/)

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tnecniv
Has anyone fed the Real Book into a Markov Model (or I guess RNN these days)
and seen what gets spit out?

All the music examples I've seen have been people feeding tracks
because...people tend to have lots of MP3s lying around. I'm curious as to
what you get when you work directly with the notation which conveys a lot more
structure than a waveform.

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uyoakaoma
Just wondering. Why does the link have utm_source=boomtrain when its coming
from HN

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jchw
My guess: the link was probably copied from an email marketing campaign or
newsletter with that UTM already attached.

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skdotdan
Pop evolutes. With machine learning we can create, say, every single
combination of reggaeton, but every decade new styles appear. AI leveraging
real creation requires AGI.

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jeeez
It's amusing that people down vote comments for which no formula exists...

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dangayle
The second this happens, will people tune out and revolt against it, making it
no longer "pop"? What will be the post-AI pop music?

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user5994461
>>> Can AI Write Pop Songs?

Doesn't matter. There is no value in the songs, they are easy to write and
many are written in a day with the premise of becoming the next pop song.

Pop is about distribution and marketing. Control it and your songs will be the
next thing played everywhere.

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dwringer
A lot of pop songs go through the hands of several different producers, each
of whom might work on a specific element for a desired effect. In many cases
these producers are selected for specific sounds deemed to be chartworthy. I
would be very surprised if some of them are NOT using AI trained on extensive
databases with the latest most popular and most lucrative music.

