Are we killing the art of music?
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- čas přidán 27. 08. 2024
- Let’s get philosophical. What is “art”, and are we killing the artistic spirit within the medium of music? I’m hoping to really get a conversation going, and explore how we define art, and challenge ourselves to do better in our creative aspirations.
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Music Intro/Outro Credit
"End 2 End" by SoundPaint
Video Production
Kewlacious Video Productions
www.kewlacious.com
Hardware I use in this video:
Microphone:
AUDIX CX112B Large Diaphragm Microphone
www.cymbalfusi...
Tags: #Music #musiceducation #whatisart #musicpodcast #musicschool #arewekillingmusic #iscreativitydying #musicacademy #musiccreativity #musicinspiration #musicfoodforthought
Rick Rubin (the opener) is not a musical performance artist. He’s a producer, and an amazing one that really helps artists reveal themselves. Those edits are misleading. He is very good at what he does, even though he doesn’t play an instrument
Yeah. Being dishonest is a bad way to "start a conversation".
Rick Rubin might not have been the best choice but I think you’re missing the point. I know a lot of people that make music but don’t think of themselves as musicians. That has worked in the past but I don’t think it will work in the future. I think you are going to have to be a great musician or you will be replaced by AI. The people that are going to support music made by humans are going to want to see the music made. Whether it is live performance or recorded performance.
@@MisterNilesbeing dishonest made you comment. 😉
It is a good idea to play an instrument as a producer as well
The studio is an instrument.
I've been a musician since I was about 15. The tracks I've made that mean the most to me are usually (but not exclusively) the kind that just hit me like lightning in that R.E.M way.
Now, so often, I am asked by friends, usually non musicians if I have an intent on putting my music on tiktok, on branding myself, on trying to make a "career" out of music and it's always very difficult to explain that no, to do so, for me anyway, always felt like it would fundamentally change my relationship to music. Music for me is the most raw expression of the "soul" for lack of a better term. It's like my humanity distilled into a form that I can show other people because communicating the craziness of all our own unique human experiences is impossible with just language. Music allows me to some extent and to a limited audience, communicate the most without ever having to be explicit about what I mean. Because most of the time, even I don't know what the hell I mean.
Just found this channel btw, love your stuff already. 😊
I think there is maybe a middle-ground where you try to treat TikTok or CZcams less like "platforms" and more like real spaces, just go on them and talk about your work and perform without trend chasing, and do exactly what you would do at an open mic etc. but do it online instead
Makes you kind of realize why live acoustic acts are ever more popular
well, they're also cheap to put on.
small venues with a small PA usually don't need to fork out £200+ a night for an audio engineer if they're only putting one mic and one guitar through the PA.
I am a young musician who has just recently started to make music about a year ago. I believe that, to an extent, music is becoming more dull and mindless as time goes on. The music scene went from people who felt pride, passion, and a unique aspect in their music, to people who don't put as much effort or individuality into their art(especially lyrically). I don't imagine that the genre of music I strive to create will become popular since it has already died out, but I'm always pushing myself to create music that is melodic, emotional, and lyrically strong that has meaning and evokes some sort of connection between the listener and the music.
This was a great video btw and I will plan on taking a break from listening to music for a couple of days for hope of a spark of creativity in my music.
I'm a musical artist also trying to create a kind of emotionally meaningful and deep melodic music (that has been considered outmoded by many and fewer still know of). I'm hopeful that if I can get my projects off the ground they will be successful on their own merit, but out of curiosity, what's your music?
@@qriofficial1769 The music that I make is mostly metal, but I'm not super focused on the technical side, but rather the heavy and melodic side. I'm trying to work myself to become a better vocalist since its not my strong suit. I'm a bassist/vocalist for my band and I'm mostly responsible for the ballads and melodic solos(on bass) in my bands first album which we plan to release later this year.
@@qriofficial1769 Same here. I'm striving for extremely emotional music that hits the listener like watching "Titanic" does for some viewers. My aim is to - quite literally - make people cry. Some examples of songs that have this effect are "The Long and Winding Road" by Beatles, "The Way Life's Meant to be" by ELO, "Midnight Blue", also by ELO, some old songs by Randy Newman and some by Kent "Lobo" LaVoie.
This kind of music is, as already stated above, not popular these days, but to me it's the very essence of music. Classical composer Alma Deutscher once said, that she insists on bringing the good melody back into classical music, because, as she says "there's enough ugliness in the world already, so I want to counter it with beauty" (or something like that) - look at the world today, and it should be pretty obvious why music that nourishes our compassion, kindness, caring and love is not a bad thing.
Oh and... yes: it IS possible to create such music with aid from AI tools, many people don't think it is... or they believe the exact opposite: that AI will automatically create such music from a simple prompt. Reality is, that AI is like having a co-composer, but without your guidance, that co-composer would tend to create avantgarde montages or loose snippets of melodies. You need to be at the wheel, steering, guiding, correcting, retrying, but if willing to do that, then yes, emotional music can be created - I just finished (still needs some inpainting, though) a song yesterday, called "Sorrow's Angel (My Unforgettable Torment)" and it's EXTREMELY emotional.
It is interesting how we assume professional musicians in the past were more pure about serving “the art”. I am not so convinced
A lot of real, music loving musicians do what they do for free or very little recognition anyway. So why is AI going to upset that? Just keep doing what you love & don't obsess over what everyone on the commercial scene is doing. If AI ruins music it will be the masses that suffer & they will suffer because, as usual, they didn't put any thought into what they were listening to.
Technology used by humans as a means of expression is always cool. It’s why I love so many recent guitar pedals, because they allow for guitars to achieve sounds that weren’t possible 30 years ago.
Generative AI is a cancer upon the music world, as the vast bulk of tracks uploaded now is from these AI companies. We have met a point where music is so saturated by the rise in AI, it’s creating more difficulty for artists to be noticed due to an over saturation
That's not true at all. Generative music ai's - that don't sound ridiculous - have only been a thing for a couple months now. There hasn't been enough time to saturate anything. Like what are you even talking about..
@@SineEyed There has been a good amount of speculation to when AI music started being a thing, but the rise of fake artists on Spotify is speculated to have become AI at some point, and this was around mid to late 2010s. Boomy AI has reached almost 20M tracks by now, which the majority are on streaming platforms.
In a short timeframe, generative AI has been able to go from being nearly nonexistent, to one that has millions of tracks generated, that are not guaranteed to stay off streaming platforms even if AI like Mubert have strict policies against it. That generative AI tool, has generated 100 million different tracks in total, which, to sum up, is about as large as the entire library of human generated works. There aren't good safeguards that exist against this influx of works that exceed the amount of human works, or else, we wouldn't be having nearly as big of a problem.
With just only a little bit of timeframe, imagine the damage AI can have over the course of a decade, and you'll start to see the valid concern that I'm having for this new dystopia-tech
@@Ryan_Wiseman _"the vast bulk of tracks uploaded now is from these AI companies"_
Prove it.
_"We have met a point where music is so saturated by the rise in AI..."_
Where is this alleged saturation taking place? Show me.
_"it’s creating more difficulty for artists to be noticed due to an over saturation"_
Prove it..
Exactly
@ryan...wise... IMO its very good when saturation leads to fewer and fewer artists noticed so that humans, having their motivations purged, discover how to make Music great again by allowing Music to advance artists.
Music is going to do what music is going to do. Technology, tastes, perception won't stop that.
The most important part of keeping the art of music alive is to teach people to be musicians. Even if they never go on to become a professional they will be a lifelong music lover. There will be enough people that reject AI music to keep the art alive. People that passively listen to music have never been patrons of music as an art.
I purged myself from listening to "commercial, pop, easy listening, latest, fashionable, mainstream" music decades ago and intend to do the same with all kinds of AI generated "entertainment".
Also the most detrimental aspects of the current music state could be easily avoided if more people adhered to the concept of "Don't make stupid people famous!"
Two key ingredients why music doesn't make it today and why it was so ingratiating especially in the 1960s: a strong melody and a terrific arrangement.
Technology should only be used to improve the sonic fidelity...imo
Well said...the saddest part for me in all this is that none of my students in the last 20 years will know what it's like to find an open field...put up a fence made of palet's...hire a few big guys from your gym, rent a generator and flatbed trailer and throw a Major Jam...{and make a couple grand just charging $5 bucks a head!}..heck...even the MAIN part {which is learning how to write great music} has ALSO been demonetized to ZERO...What next?
Only love will remain.
I've been practicing music every day since about 1977. I play acoustic music, guitar, banjo, mandolin, ukulele.
I'm not worried as a musician, because I have a plan. I'm keeping it to myself because the world has always told me I wasn't good enough at anything, my whole life. I never believed in keeping secrets but, it has made me a bitter man thinking that way. 😇😁
It takes few seconds for me to be annoyed by the homogenic "music". My brain recognices autotune and then i'm off to turn it off thou usually it's in public spaces i hear that stuff and can't get away from it. Glad we have headphones
Food for thought indeed. Some music has zero nutritional value.
Empty calories?
@mace... Great name for a band!
Technology is a prosthetic of human consciousness. It is an invention that describes, and could betray, the inventor.
If you went to a cookout, and they offered only steaks made in a lab from soy, eventually someone would say "hey who wants a real steak?" And there would be at least a few people who would put down the fake steak to grab the real thing.
i make music with zero computers. the more "wrong notes", the better. if I play and my guitar is out of tune, I work with it. as long as I make it sound good.
Yeah it's a tricky one. I resonate with the idea that we're somehow killing art, or unable to be authentic with the creation of music, but it's quite an illusive feeling to really pin down in coherent thoughts. I think that the audience has a much greater influence on what music is allowed to be made, and in some sense is the "killer" of the artist. As a creator of music, you are meant to serve the audience in the same way other people work for the benefit of other people. By doing that, you're bringing them joy, entertainment, escape, or whatever it is that they need. As an artist though, that feels like it is missing what is important to me about making the music in the first place. I am trying to communicate to people about something. I want them to hear it, and reflect on it. To feel some part of what I feel, and understand what I understand. The audience doesn't want that. They want it to be easily digestible and not challenging at all. They want to scrub most of the weirdness or uniqueness from the mix of sounds.
I think this hungry ghost reveals itself in our aggregate listening preferences even though many people would say that they at least theoretically value the artist and an authentic attempt at creation. I find it in myself too. I am less patient with music these days, and I don't have all that much curiosity about most of where artists are coming from. I would like for it to be easier to financially reward artists who I find valuable in order to upregulate a better, purer from of art and allow it to thrive, but I don't find the effort to actually do that within all the other things taking up my bandwidth. I guess I've pragmatically accepted that serving the audience and letting go of my own perspective within my art is part of the creative constraints that I try to work within, but the process sometimes feels very dead to me, and I don't know how to relate to it.
I also find that when I try to honestly investigate where any of the drive is coming from, it's pretty much just my ego trying to feel important. Having caught my mind's motives it feels a bit gross to defend loftier interpretations and aspirations about what I am doing as an "artist".
It is likely that Spotify et al will push AI music in their free stream to save them money. This will make AI music popular. If they need a human face to connect with the audience they can hire some influencers for this.
It’s up to us and our willingness to pay to support real artists. Please do.
Just like VeVo CZcams and CZcams music
The sad part is that none of this matters. The market will buy what the marketing tells them to buy. If audiences demanded authenticity, the labels would produce authentic music, but they don't. The audience simply won't care if AI made it.
Then we’ll make people give a fuck
@fuzzf... All the empires, kingdoms and controllers want your secret! So, OUT WITH IT, already!
I've always just sat down with an instrument and started fiddling with it and, if something comes out of that, then maybe it becomes a complete piece of music eventually.
I have also found that I had started stumbling across really small channels, like hardly any subscribers at all, and often younger people. They will be playing an actual instrument and sometimes, they're doing some song which is decades older than they are. Then there are some of them where their music is completely unique and fresh.
Pop music is always going to be made to sell and make a lot of money in the short period of time that its popular. Note that some people will even label stuff like that as "Oh, it's so 2021!"
I haven't given up on genuine, lasting music though. I'm seeing plenty of people who got really good at an instrument (possibly driven by their time during lockdown) and only seem to be gaining more listeners who are probably sick of the samey nonsense they're used to hearing.
Wow, I rattled on longer than I expected. Sorry about that!
I'm not sure what this was about. Okay so reading the title of the video: musicians are saturating a market that is free. It has all changed.
We just do it as a hobby, and I buy the ads to push the videos to the masses, all out of my own pocket; I am hoping to go viral. That's all any of us can hope for at this point, and I hear it only lasts 15 minutes anyway.
I started guitar when I was 12. At 24 I ceased listening to recorded music. At 62 I resumed listening to recorded music to learn pieces to play with others. I don't enjoy listening to 99% of recorded music because the Music I was hearing when I wasn't listening to recorded music came from Music herself, without intervention of the syndicate. Now I don't have time to follow stuff because there are too many themes and parts going in my head to keep up with: life is not long enough! Music is where its at, this other stuff is rubbish 😃
I stopped listening to music regularly for 3 years apart from the occasional live band so that I could compose & record an original album uninfluenced by genre or technique of which I'm currently in the recording phase & beginning to listen to music again & enjoy it albeit mostly older songs. From 2000 onward we have been stuck in a cultural loop as a result of corporatism, post-modernism & endless simulacrum... ie representations of representations or representation. I know of many musicians who are returning to traditional roots or rather breathing contemporary experience into traditional forms, not in a pastiche way but creating new from the ashes of the old & human, with all its flaws as part of its expression.
You're speaking my language here. Natural musician born in the 70's, I sense a dumb down that picked up great speed by the time Grunge happened which I still don't like. I feel a great revival of real musicianship the more space is invaded by robots. I'm an astrologer as well as musician and I've looked at Neptune through sign changes and you can see how the music changes every time that happens. 2012 was when things got really robotic, Neptune in Pisces way too much dreamy stuff in the humans while the monster built while Neptune was in Aquarius took us all for a nightmare ride. Now Neptune is stationed to retrograde at the very last degree of tropical Pisces, but the scene begins to shift next year with first entry into Aries, then a dip back into the mutable ocean of dreams and delusions before Neptune is established for over a decade in a fire sign for the first time since Neptune entered Capricorn from Sagittarius, just about the minute Live Aid happened. After 84 especially you can hear the producer sheen start to obscure the artist as the Capricorn businessmen took more control. Then 1996, Bill Clinton legalized monopolies again so by the time Pro Tools happened the death of music as it had been was sealed.
That said there's scads of music teachers and organizations like Drumeo training a vast army of real musicians with skills in the instruments of the ancients, from before the computers got fast enough to take over the tape machines. Human joy in making the music live is something the robot cannot take, or if it does we're done as a species.
Well YT not helping found good music at all. YT doesn't even have proper music search. I mean i want to see all home production techno releases by this week (this is called YOU-Tube, not Corporate-Tube, right?) and there's no help at all. Distribution of music today is a failure and how can we find new music when all YT wants us to enjoys trends and removing home production musicians to shadowban? Music is dying coz of that.
You can’t put technology back in Pandora’s box and you can’t dictate what people will do with it. For good or bad music is evolving, technology is part of that evolution. Evolution is naively to be considered to be an “improvement”, but instead evolution just means an adaptation to the environment
I think there is also much to consider about what musical environment you are talking about. For example, commercial music is going to have very different environmental pressures than music people make purely for fun. This may be a controversial hot take, but I don’t see “art” (or pure-art) having much to do with commercial music at all, so I would expect it to become more soulless, derivative and coldly synthesized. Commercial music is about making profit from music, and the most efficient and marketable music will win regardless of the tools used to make it.
To juxtapose commercial music, you can look at the music I make. I don’t intend anyone to listen to it for the most part. It is out there, but I don’t try to market or advertise it. It is made purely for me and the friends I use to help me make it. This music will die with me and I have no problems with that, it is about enriching my life and my friends’ lives. In many ways this is far more “artful” than any music attempting to be sold because the intentions are pure/personal
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying any one form is better, I merely say this to get a point across: to show how motivation behind making music helps dictate the methods used to make the music
Autotune is the biggest thing for me these days that is driving me absolutely insane. Every one of the bands I like from the 90s uses it now and I can’t take it!!!!! Where’s the authenticity and work ethic to do a song until its rig HR without cheating so much.
Ever since pitch correction became a thing, it's been present in literally every single musical production that isn't a live stage show. It's also gotten to the point, these days, that a boatload of live performances are now pitch-corrected on the spot...
But that's still not a real problem. Even though I don't 100% agree with the complete sterilization of vocal performances, one HAS to remember that you have to be able to put in good source material, in order to get anything good out of something like pitch correction; you can always correct a bad note or two but you cannot correct proper dynamics, timbre, or actual delivery. Autotune, Melodyne, VariAudio... blah, blah, blah. None of them are a magic bullet that makes a crappy performance into a good one. It's a production tool, and nothing more--if it's used properly, you'll either never know that it's there, or the artist will sound like T-Pain as an artistic choice.
I really wish people would stop complaining about pitch correction. It's not all people crack it up to be.
@@georgemeller4074true if you wanna hear what autotune sounds like when someone just isn’t hitting the notes at all there’s a verse in Pro-Test by skinny puppy where he like doesn’t hit the notes and it sounds wack
@@SinRuin Or just watch the Phantom of the Opera movie with Gerard Butler. There was only ONE classically trained vocalist on that entire cast, and there are a very large number of artifacted, potch-corrected notes and phrases that stick out like a sore thumb.
That explains why people are so impressed by my band's live harmonies
@@angelainamarie9656 got any CZcams videos or songs uploaded anywhere? I want to hear real people really singing!
I like the analogy regarding the robot and building muscle.... but I think technology is also about "abstractions" to achieve larger goals. The idea of having the robot lift is not inherently bad if the objective was to carry heavier loads than a person could carry. I don't think AI is inherently bad, it is no different from any piece of innovation since forever. What's bad is how the music industry, and just industries in general, is looking at AI; they are seeing it as a means to add headroom to their bottom line. Nearly every week, you'll see stories of lay-offs from publicly traded companies because they need to show "profit", even if nobody's buying.
Procedural generation of music (and art in general) have been around for decades. Machine Learning AI is just another method to achieve the same thing. The issue is how the training data is sourced and it's viral popularity (and users being unaware and lackadaisical about "copyright").
I don't think that AI is a threat to creativity, I see it as just another tool for inspiration and songwriting. Sure, there is a big discussion to be made about the dark arts of using generated songs as is and passing it as a "genuine creative output". People should be invested in the policing and regulation of such works. A big part of that is Ethics and Morality. The industry and these companies need to be invested in it.
I remember several years ago when Adobe showed off their voice synthesis tech. Right after they showed it to the public, they realized that it is much more dangerous than deepfakes. So they never released it. I'm not saying Adobe is a bastion of morality, but they showed restraint. Now, they are also relatively transparent about the training data they used for their AI image generation tech. That is what we need across the board. Us end users should hold them accountable and educate ourselves on the EULA of these services.
Always remember that Machine Learning AI is a "Garbage In, Garbage Out" technology; it is heavily reliant on the authentic works of human creation for its training data. Using AI generated output to train AI is a death sentence for the tech. That's why in EULAs you'll see things like making sure that the end user only use non-AI generated data in their input prompts. So the fight is also in the ethical training of these AI models, not just the exploitation of the output.
I'll post here what I posted in another video about music and AI:
The thing that seems to always be lost in the weeds of any AI discussion is Intellectual Property and Licensing. I think that is the main limiting factor in all these. You have AI services that, upon generating songs, the company owns all of them and they are only granting the end user a license to use the output (non-commercial/commercial). Ethical training is also a big part, if not THE BIGGEST part. The industry is pushing and innovating so much that all these moral and ethical discussions are somehow left in the backburner. The same companies pushing AI are also the same ones dissolving their own AI Ethics and Risk teams.
Either IP law changes, or these companies ethically source their training data (and be transparent about them - just because music or samples can be licensed or is already in the public domain does not mean that the original IP owner would allow AI training use, knowing its adverse effects to their livelihood). One has to eventually give, otherwise, all these is just one giant gray-area market.
Trying to keep it alive.
The future of Music is as healthy now as it ever was -perhaps even more so?
The future of making millions and millions and millions of dollars and becoming incredibly famous and culturally as important as the Beatles is more distant than it ever was before but then it was so distant anyway should we really care?
Any time I used AI for making music I ended up with a piece of BS which technically sounded like music, but lacked human touch and emotions. Yes some of the tracks were much better than the others, but still it could pass for mundane commercial background at best. If someday AI replaces the worse part of the array of stock music, I won't be against that. But if you still worry about that I have an answer: to stand against Artificial Intelligence we just should become more humane. To begin with start using more live instruments, stop recording songs into a grid and compress the hell out of it. AI can't simulate those imperfections that we are, pieces of meat with nerves and feelings and emotions, generate as easy as we breathe.
Hooo boy ... where to start XD
So I've been making my own music for at least twenty years at this point. I was born during a time when music and technology were starting to become what it is now. For instance, the complete Synclavier package - keyboard, synth engine, computer and memory - would cost three-quarters of a million. Whereas now, a decent smartphone can achieve much more than what that Synclavier package could do. And honestly, I see those things as tools: means to an end. Thus, what is important is what end you want to achieve.
I think that "authentic" music means that you and you alone can come up with that music, even if you happen to use tools that "generate" a particular result. An example of this is software that allows you to generate chord sequences and even melodic lines. Admittedly, I can point to an instance where I used those tools in my own work. However, it was purposefully chosen with a very specific intent. Furthermore, it was a small part of a larger whole, therefore that particular element didn't make it any less authentic.
I know that it's popular to be concerned about AI and how it is used in creative endeavours. Honestly, I'm not concerned by this because creating is a human trait (and to go further, I believe that it's a trait endowed onto us by God as a reflection of His own capabilities). AI cannot create in the same way that humans can. Yes, it can generate a result that can be appealing. But I wonder how long that appeal will last. In a way, I see this as a challenge for those who do create about making art to do better and not be complacent in its creation. I don't think it requires going "Martha Stewart" and having to go to extremes with making everything yourself, right down to the very instruments used. But it means making choices or trying things that can go outside of "expected conventions". For ane example: remembering one of the clips you used where a guy gave "stats" about what a "typical commercial song" is, I react to that "report" with "Says who?" or "You can't tell me what to do".
There's more to say for sure, but I at least want to get a conversation going =]
AI Music is just a consequence of mass production and homogenization. All genres of western pop music today seems to have been mixed and mastered by the same people, at the same studio and with the same tools and this was already happening before AI. Why 60s and 70s music sounds so "magically" attractive to some, specially on vinyl? Basically because of diversity in production and preservation of the dynamic range, among other things. There were more technological limitations, but less rules and standards about how it shoulde be done - I'm not saying they weren't there, though. I'm also not saying there aren't good productions nowadays or believing that "they don't make good music anymore!" as lots of creative scenes flourish every now and then, the problem is with the current industry standards, those pursuing them - be they big or small/indie artists - and how we're consuming usic in the 21st century. I hope this whole AI mess helps us overcome recent creative berriers in art.
AI is a scam and AI generated music is just Mass plagiarism
@@angelainamarie9656 I think it's too simplistic to it that way. AI is indeed all of the data being mined from us for decades now regurgitaded back at us, though
🤔Well, i don't feel like i would need to "fast" from music, at anytime. I don't think that any "formulaic or filler" music is really reaching my ears (unless i agree to it, which is pretty rare - just to stay in touch with the reality of what the top forty is). I don't listen to any "pre-digested" music, I don't listen to the radio, i don't have a TV, i don't use Spotify, or any streaming service. And yet, i listen to music pretty much 24 hours a day. All from my very slowly ever-growing music collection (around 5000 CDs, nowadays). With bands from France, Japan, Brazil, UK, US, even Poland, China, and a few African countries too, etc. … All this from mostly small labels that i have been following for decades now… I listen to bands and artists from the 60s up to now (with a propensity for synth/sample/fusion of any kind)… I love taking time to discover new & old (and if possibly strange, brilliant, challenging, touching, surprising…) music… And i make kinda strange music too… at least that's what i would say 😄😅
Ai music currently is going to hit music producers. They have been living of formulaic in studio algorithms and grift. Live band players and Dj’s performing live sets are going to retain that authenticity the paying public need and want. Live music performances can never be replaced by an ai.
as more of a visual artist, AI may make sense as a cutting tool, but not for creating a final product. Technology can make new sounds but can make making sounds a little bit more lazy. Why ask a computer to make a decision, when you can control the choice for the product.
ya AI's been a part of pretty much every creative industry for decades. It's super handy. The whole idea of "push button to make art" thing is just techbro marketing. It will probably replace some of the more undesirable jobs throughout creative industries but I'm under no illusion of the "the robots will replace us" fearmongering.
I'm not sure what you are saying?
Music is an industry. "The Music Industry." Beato calls someone like Taylor Swift a content creator that's mastered the algorithm. The music industry isn't for musicians any longer. Hasn't been in a long time. Thems the facts. Musicians will keep making music no matter what, because they are driven to it, they just can't plan on living off it. Isn't the fault of musicians, the public wants content. The public wants 'entertainers' if they want humans at all, at least so far as "popular" goes.
Hm. OK...in a few years, it will have been six decades since I first stepped on a stage to perform a piece of music at the age of 5. In Nashville, where I grew up in and around the industry there until leaving for grad studies in composition.
So I've kinda been around the block on this some...geez, I quit counting years ago, so...
First of all, any music teacher who's going to engage in some sort of performative nonsense that "[insert technology here] will kill music" isn't worth listening to in the first damn place. You don't want to impart a preconceived notion like that to students of ANY age. Instead, these are best looked at as opportunities.
One of THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS I've learned over the years is to never, EVER dismiss technology of any sort simply because "low-effort/low-skill" people can make it cough up A result. Those aren't the people who you or I or ANYONE with a love for music should be listening to in the first place. These aren't even necessarily musicians, but click addicts. Did people click on you? Then U WIN!!!
Of course, if you're "winning" with something that sounds like utter junk... eventually, when the novelty wears off, people WILL figure this out. But this is what keeps the industry running: the hype machines feed on new talent and tech one week, and kerplunk it in the toilet the next. That makes less sense until you remember that the Industry isn't about art, but a very fitting term from the Nashville of many years ago: "Product".
The definition of THAT "Product" is pretty much this: an action involving music equipment for the sole purpose of making money. Under those dicta, there's been an understanding for decades that you can do "art"...or make "product". Choice is yours, so choose wisely...
Which, eventually, I did...leaving Nashville in 1989. I sometimes tell people that I love music too much to do what THEY do to it. Not wholly correct, but that's a big part of that decision.
So, every few years, the music industry runs across something they simply DO NOT get. Circa 1970, the AFofM considered synthesizers to be the ultimate music wreckers and imposed some intensely weird limitations on their use. Later, it was "secret processing technology" (ie: Aphex) that "made people" listen to even total garbage because...SEEKRETT TEKK!!! Then MIDI sequencing. Sampling. The DAW. Autotune. And now...AI. But after every single "tech panic", far more creative people always came along and did something paradigm-changing with the "ebul badd tekch" that disproved the BS and actually raised that creativity bar.
If people think they're going to "destroy music", think again, as those same people are going to wind up in MUSIC'S crosshairs instead. F'rinstance... anyone remember Frank Farian? No? OK...how about Milli Vanilli? Ahhh...the crystal ball brings us an image of a video set in Connecticut...hmmmm...
Milli Vanilli, as you recall, was the pretty damn fraudulent concoction of that Mr. Farian. And when they blew up, his assumption was that, fine, we'll just put Fab and Morvan out on stage to twist and frug. Who cares if it's them singing or not? And then...the Grammy.
The microscope came off the shelf at that point. But they opted to keep faking it. Then MTV did this "set" with Milli Vanilli innnnnn... Connecticut. Live. On air.
DAT tapes suck, basically. Y'know how old VHS tapes could get stuck and then you're watching a few frames of video that keep spasmodically twitching on screen? Well, DAT is simply that tech applied to PCM audio...with more crap in the machine to cause trouble. And that evening in CT, that's precisely what happened. Suddenly...the DAT transport died, but NOT the rotating helical-scan head and NOT the decode and output stages. So Fab and Morvan were twitching around to a loop of "Girl you know it's Girl you know it's Girl you know it's Girl you know it's...". Careers done. Especially Frank Farian's, for thinking he could slather a couple of models in digitally-canned lipsync tracks.
At THAT time, DAT was being demonized about as badly as AI is now. There was even legislation proposed to make DAT machines ILLEGAL because, supposedly and according to people who'd never even SEEN a DAT machine, precise copies would be made from CDs and music PIRACY would RUUULE THE WOOOOOORRRRRRLLLLD [insert villainous stock disaster footage here]!!!
And then...Girl you know it's...and the results were "DAT and DAT!! What is DAT?!" DAT manufacturers proceeded to crawl under their furniture to escape the embarrassment. Congress found some other things to ruin. And everyone then understood clearly that DAT was yet another music tech paper tiger. Music wasn't destroyed. Garbage kept spewing out of the TV and radio. It was as if NOTHING had happened.
Give the clock some espresso, and we're off to now once more...
AI is NOT this creativity-destroying bugaboo from some lab. Fact is, AI allows some VERY creative things to come into being; check out the "version" on YT of Johnny Cash "singing" "Barbie Girl" if you doubt this.
But joke projects aside, all AI does is to introduce new tools and methods into OUR bag of tricks. If one can't use them, then fine... don't use them! Furthermore, if you don't play clarinet, don't try to play clarinet on your stuff (unless, of course, the aim is to sound precisely like that; see also "Abdul Ben Camel's" bass clarinet work on Fred Lane's "Hittite Hot-Shot"). Same idea. AI is capable of so much more, though. What if Anton Webern wrote tunes for The Ventures, for example? AI allows you (with enough prodding) to see versions of what that might come out like. Then you can better hit that sound YOURSELF. Or, what happens if you apply Xenakis's stochastic techniques to a club banger for the build to the BIG drop? What about that nonexistent duet between Merle Haggard and Albert Ayler? It's doable. It would NEVER happen in the real world (Ayler is kinda dead, y'know) but you can gin up the parameters to get AI to cough up any sort of musical hairball you like. And then USE that.
So... it's a tool. Like a hammer. You can use it to build things. Or you can use it to smash things. But whatever you do with that hammer, don't front like that hairball is the final result. We can see your cat coughed it up 5 minutes ago and it's still really...uh...disgusting. But with some polyurethane, glitter, a little glass dome and proper lighting... OK, yes, it's still obviously a hairball, but according to Marcel Duchamp, it's also art via those additional aspects.
Art isn't necessarily about the thing in the frame. It's ALSO the frame, the card on the wall next to it, the room, the building, the car you drive away in, the burger you'll have later...because the ACTUAL ART is what the artist causes you to carry around in your head after viewing all of those things. It's a thing that "colors experience". And if you manage to pull that off, even just once, THEN you can say you're a composer, painter, sculptor, whatever. But if you can't, don't blame the tools. They gave their best as that's really all tools CAN do. The problem lies with the person wielding them...and if you live in existential terror of ANY tool, then whatever that tool is for is probably something you shouldn't be screwing around with in the first place.
AI is going to make music production very easy for the next generation of kids. Spotify is already inundated with marginal, unoriginal music...it hasn't seen anything yet.
I dont want to get sucked into the dumb discussion of generational quality. I just will say that you don't have to use a tool the way the person who invented it asks you to. And you don't have to use a tool just beCAUse someone invented it.
DAWs and MPCs can be a space just as creative as any historic one, it is just that aesthetics and process and social scenius still matter big much. Technofeudalism has trained the business and the trade craft to service, that really doesn't have much to do with what I do in my house and my town.
The music industry is dying or dead? Great news, seriously, it has always been toxic crap. Maybe people can start listening to music as music? Or muuuuch better yet... playing it together in purely community spaces.
Ecocide and culturecide and the various monstrosities of our age are very much enabled by our individualism and our consumerism and our filtering of everything through the terms of money and status. It is so GD boring and over and useless to anyone but people with too much money and not enough ethics.
It is not about Artificial Intelligence, did you listen today to top 50 world Spotify songs?, the answer is there.
your definition of "art" seems to be rooted in what I would call "craft." for me, art is the meaningful expression that an audience member takes from something, the meaning, no matter how those sounds were created and assembled.... the craft is the technique of putting it together, which is what you seem to care about. The guy at the beginning is incorrect. All musicians have some means of producing sound (playing techniques) and arranging it (some sort of theory), which is the technique, whether it is traditional or widely accepted or not... Moreover, these notions of "authenticity" that you cling to suggest elitism. It seems that you consider yourself a qualified arbiter of what is "real" and what is not, and anything else is somehow "bad." ... It seems to me that if you want to be an artist, one should contemplate more and judge less. The way I judge music is not so much as by how it is produced, but more what it says to me. For instance, Lyrnyrd Skynyrd's musicians can easily be understood as pretty talented and technically savvy, and also pretty "authentic" (i.e., they play what they live), but in my mind they are awful because they seem to be a musical confederate flag, which is not a good message in my mind. However, the Descendants have a song called "Der Wienerschnitzel" that most people would find awful, yet it accurately portrays the assholery of fast food customers and the plight of the workers who must put up with them for a living, which seems to be the right message. Yet, I don't imagine those who care about the craftsmanship of making music would appreciate the song. I don't care if a person makes sounds with a couple of rocks or a voice with autotune if it says something that seems to me to be worth saying. And, in my opinion, that is where the art is...the meaning(s) that can be drawn from the object beheld (or sounds listened to). Art is artificial, and artifice. It is never real or "authentic" unless judged so by some one policing the boundaries, such as yourself. My advice is to quit being a music cop, and starting to try to understand rather than judge. That is, have some empathy instead of propping yourself up as some sort of authority.
Autotune killed recorded vocals 20 years ago...
"Are we killing music?"
no.
"AI bad"
AI tools have been a useful part of developing and using music tools for decades. Generative music sounds like bad napster mp3's and will never be more than a gimmick. It has as much value as you give it.
"Industry bad"
Yes. this is the #1 problem in every art form. Good art exists in spite of capitalism, not because of it.
"Modern music bad"
No. This is the worst take you could possibly have as an artist. turn off your radio and seek out musicians that speak to you. There is more and better music being created now than there's every been. If you disagree you don't actually care about music to engage with it and you just want the aesthetic of being a "music guy". At the very least stop whining and let the rest of us enjoy music.
I don't think you all are killing the art of music. I just think the last 2 generations lack any kind of substance.
"Technology is probably the largest jump in advancement."
Did you mean the biggest change in music industry in the production technologies?
Cerebral hygiene is big dumb. We've already seen what's happened with AI. It has already occurred with sampling in dance music. How many times has the amen break been sampled? We get new tools and we make new things. It also allows people who would be otherwise less able to create, to make music.
I've worked in food for like 7 years. Do not give a shit if what in front of me is authentic. My goal is to get something that's good and/or good for me. People are just telling stories. What even is authenticity?
Is anything truly authentic or original? A child a banging on a pan is an authentic thought or expression. We're all just consuming stories that are crafted. People are gonna consume what they like and what reinforces their existing world view.
Anti-conformism isn't inherently good. Purging yourself of mainstream music feels aesthetically puritanical. Just try new things. I haven't listened to top 40 for like 18 years and I'm not more special because of it. Honestly, it's pretty isolating not being able to relate to other people's musical experiences.
It's a music industry, not a music charity or a music justice project. The outcomes will probably fit into the realm of what capitalism always does. Extract from the marginalized and mass produce.
popular music has been dead for awhile now - AI is the zombie replacement
Music will not die but great music is already dead. To be a good writer you've got to be a good reader. Its the same with music. The best musicians take the best music and make something new with it.
Ai assimilates everything. The good, the bad the indifferent. Its the equivalent of sausage meat. Mixing prime meat with crap thats on the factory floor to produce grey gunge.
Before ever a note was wrote, Music gathered her chosen to serve in the festival of life as greatness goes before her as she goes on and we don't.
how about this exercise? Can you make a video and counter all your points? like for example why is what you propose to be synthetic and "real" doesn't matter in todays "attention" economy? Are you implying that people don't value hyper reality? food for thought
....what sort of music do you write or play.....Mozart's music was a written artform not aural......I started writing in 1968 and I think in 2 years time the AI will out write the human.....sorry, but that's the way it goes......and it's not just music.......management in all areas of business will evaporate soon too........I don't think people can see what's coming.....
Conqering patriarchy wants to erase music and musicians, probably mostly targeting women. I will explain later.
Yes yes yes yes. Please stop! You're hurting old people. Don't you understand!!!!
Some of technology helps people with no musical talent to create music and then try to pass themselves off as skilled.
Some of technology helps people with no musical talent to create music and then try to pass themselves off as skilled.
yeah, rihanna would happily make a million dollars for nothing. what’s her method as an artist, birthday cake?
YES (didn't watch the video)