I agree, if we are speaking about composition alone for example comparing two pieces played on the same piano. But what I think is interesting about the contrast is how pop music has evolved into a science of performance, and while I think a computer synthesizer and algorithm can render a convincing performance of Bach, the same can't be said of pop music. I know that we don't have the real Back here to perform, but that's kind of the point of what I am getting at, which is the idea of what these musics actually are in cultural math, if that makes any sense. I say it's easier to replicate the idoms of classical piece than of pop, because pop has complexity in performance, which actually means recordance, if that word exists.
I say you're wrong - and I'm saying that as someone who has worked on both.
Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are so complex there are no living human composers who can produce convincing imitations - never mind machines.
There are a few people who can do clever improvisations in-the-style-of, but that music completely lacks the big structures, broad relationships, and metaphorical depth of the real thing.
In comparison, electronic pop styles are much more formulaic, and the forms and changes are much more predictable.
I think we're less than ten years away from completely generative pop, vocals, sound design, and all. Good computer generated classical music is going to take quite a while longer.
Fair enough! I agree with your statements on the classic composers, however modern composition in it's highest art forms has moved with the rest of art towards abstraction, accident, pure invention, and contemplation of pure noise. You might say the sound of reality is so complex that no living human composer can produce a convincing imitation either! (in the role of devil's advocate at the crossroads)
You might also say that all composers are doing clever improvisations in the style of the sound or reality :}
I agree that pop is simpler and more formulaic, but I'd argue that the practice can result in complexity that belies it's seeming simplicity. While simple, pop music is volatile, so a popular form one year might look entirely different than a popular form the next. It isn't driven by the same stylistic conformity as music in the classical periods was.
Pop music, when it well done, speaks in many layers, across cultural realities. I know that Bach for example, did the same, but I'd also argue, given the fact that composers are speaking on many levels, that many of those cultural realities are lost to the modern listener, some of whom are appreciating classical music in the mode you describe: an art of big structures, broad relationships, and metaphorical depth about ideas and things that they have no cultural basis to understand (and I think this idea goes a way towards explaining the increasing fragmentation and deconstruction of classical order in the high art of modern musical composition).
Therefore machinery might have an easier time reproducing classical music than popular music in spite of it's simpler melodic formulas.
Pop has actually ossified over the last ten years or so. Dubstep is more than fifteen years old now, and the Paul Van Dyk album I've just listened to sounds a lot like the last Paul Van Dyk album a few years ago.
Ahahah! Thanks for the clips and good points! And in spite of how formulaic pop music is at the composition level, I still think it would be harder to AI a convincing pop song than a classical piece, because so much of pop's information is encoded in performance, which ironically is thanks to the ability to record instead of notate. You are right that it would be much harder to fool an advanced listener. To me the videos you shared say something about this whole AI problem and the future of the music market, which is that interactivity and engagement with creation in musical forms and performances will replace the traditional performer/audience role format. I think the problem of artificiality, which we might as well call the ease by which music can be entirely reproduced by algorithm won't work in the traditional mode of performer/audience. Instead all the power to cast musical forms that are effective at entering and altering the psyche of the individual listener will be sublimated and abstracted just beyond their conscious intention, so that they can become a player in the musical work. This is what happens now too, and it is why the AI performer won't work unless as a hoax in our current format - the participation and identification with the singer are fundamental to the music experience. Those country singers are singing about manly things: mostly getting girls into bed. You may be able to program a compute algorithm to crank out shallow man tunes like that, however it will have to also be tuned in to the culture of the times, because I can hear a lot of change in those country tunes than country tunes of ten years ago. There are layers and layers. But primordially, there is identification with cultural realities, and these might well be generated by machinery, and already are, however they will fundamentally align with the desires of the human creator, unless someone creates an artificial consciousness to compete with our human one. So bar that, musical AI will enhance and entice us towards a deeper and better human experience, which the machine knows not!
No human composer will ever produce convincing imitations because the only test that will be accepted as "convincing" is the judgment of an expert. Experts are familiar with the complete works of those famous composers, so they will immediately know the imitation is an imitation. Their knowledge makes them incapable of unbiased judgment. A blind test is impossible. Even tricking the expert into thinking a new genuine work has been discovered won't help, because they will know that is much less likely than an imitation being written.
I've listened to a lot of music by those composers, but not all of it, and I'm confident a skilled imitator could fool me.
That's a different problem. Fooling an amateur isn't so hard - as this thread shows.
Fooling a musicologist is much harder. David Cope thinks he's done it already. I'm not entirely convinced, but the output of EMI does a reasonable impersonation of pastiche, which is about as good as it gets for now.
I think we're less than ten years away from completely generative pop, vocals, sound design, and all.
I highly doubt this, because of the vocals. Generating coherent appealing lyrics and synthesizing voice to sound natural isn't going to happen in 10 years time. Would be really cool if I was wrong, though.
I think the problem you're pointing to is not that pop music is somehow more difficult or more performance based - a lot of pop music is basically electronic music and has relatively little performance element. What you're noticing is that music (and not just pop music), and in fact, all art, is anti-inductive [1].
What I mean by that is that our expectations of music are constantly changing and evolving, and the minute something is created that captures our imagination, creating something similar becomes "not that interesting". It would probably be fairly easy to create an engine that produces pop music from the 80s or 90s or even 2000s, but the closer you get to today, the more the music is either a copy/rearrangement of an existing pop song, or it's not recognised as pop music.
The very nature of music is constantly reinventing itself, everyone always looking for that "new sound". These neural networks, as they are at the moment, can, it seems, pick up an existing "sound" and learn to reproduce it, but creating "new sound" is another matter, at the moment at least.
yep exactly what I am pointing to. I meant performance based in that its complexity comes from how it interacts with culture language, other music, ideas, etc: cultural production. True also of classical composition, but as you say, it's already been done, and so the pattern can be reproduced. I was also adding the idea that the mathematical and notational rule-logic of a lot of classical music lends itself to machine based reproduction in ways that modern pop pastiche does not, and that's counter intuitive as some comments noted, because the actual product itself is entirely machine mediated.
