
Yacht fed their old music to the machine and got a killer new album - pimienta
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping-is-a-new-landmark-for-ai-music-an-album-that-doesnt-suck/
======
yowlingcat
This is both very cool and goes along the lines of the way I imagined deep
learning would advance the state of the art in songwriting. YACHT's got a
special place in my heart for "Psychic City" which sounds like a lost child of
Talking Heads, not to mention all the other great music they've made.

Secondly, it's interesting how they used the tech to stretch their existing
material: they basically notated their existing corpus of work (82 songs) into
MIDI, chopped it by part into loops, fed that into the MusicVae deep learning
model, got out thousands of loops, and reintegrated the output material into a
full album. This is probably the way things can and should go.

Exciting times! I want to have a go with this tech with my own music.

~~~
amelius
How about a system where music is generated by a computer and a person listens
to it while a functional MRI scanner provides feedback to the algorithm?

~~~
yowlingcat
I remember thinking about such a system a long time ago. In a theoretical
sense, that seems really cool, but I'm not sure if the hardware is quite there
yet. From what I can recall, practical brain-computer interfaces are still in
their infancy, and not reliable enough to use even for simple binary
interfaces. Otherwise, that would basically make a closed circuit for the
palette generation part of this -- just let the deep learning net come up with
material and approve/deny it in realtime until you've got the material you
need.

~~~
moomin
Also, from an artistic standpoint, initial response isn’t everything.

~~~
yowlingcat
That's true, but for me, it certainly is an important data point or signal.
Part of how I've gotten a lot faster and productive is having the right
judgment about when to tweak and when throw something or some part of a
composition, arrangement or sound design away and just redo it from scratch
when I don't think it's going in the right direction.

------
sharkweek
I love when things related to my non-tech fandom of some random _entity_ show
up on HN.

YACHT is fantastic and explores a lot of fascinating ideas both lyrically and
musically (try “I thought the future would be cooler” for a catchy dance tune
with a depressingly great dystopian theme, never has our impending doom
sounded so good. For the less cynical, try “Shanghai-LA”).

------
dejawu
My understanding is that even humans don't fully know why neural nets are
doing exactly what they're doing. If we were indeed able to just press a
button and have an AI give us a finished track (which is not what YACHT did
here), who should take credit for the track? I certainly don't think the human
who trained the net deserves all the credit, right? That feels like if an
artist's otherwise absent father gave them Kid Pix in their childhood and then
tried to take credit for their creative output thirty years later.

~~~
andreyk
This has been an open question for a while, and is in the process of being
figures out. Some fun examples:

\- "Generative art and UK copyright law - good news",
[http://mcld.co.uk/blog/2011/generative-art-and-uk-
copyright-...](http://mcld.co.uk/blog/2011/generative-art-and-uk-copyright-
law-good-news.html)

\- "Template License and Collaboration Agreements for AI Art"
[https://clinic.cyber.harvard.edu/2019/02/04/template-
license...](https://clinic.cyber.harvard.edu/2019/02/04/template-license-and-
collaboration-agreements-for-ai-art/)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
There's a more complicated problem. Generative art explores a space of
possible outputs, and in some cases some of those outputs will be exactly like
existing work.

If a melody generator produces a tune that's exactly like $famous_tune, is
that plagiarism? What if it produces $famous_tune among thousands of other
tunes? Does it make a difference if $famous_tune was in the training set, but
there isn't any evidence of over-fitting?

What if you argue that the generative space includes $famous_tune, and
therefore in some sense all output is influenced by it, making all output a
related or derivative work - even if the space is astronomically huge?

And so on. I suspect this is going to keep lawyers very busy.

