Artificial intelligence and music: noteworthy?

 

I was struck by an article in RealClear Books & Culture, titled "A.I. Panic Hits Music City".  Here's an excerpt.

Suno is the AI music app sweeping the music world and raising serious questions about the future of the industry. By typing a few prompts into a text box, you—or rather, the algorithm—can generate professional-sounding songs. If you upload your own melodies or lyrics, it can create new versions of your original content. As one song after another plays in the pitch meeting, more of these AI-produced tracks appear, most carrying that same disorienting quality: songs that sound better than they actually are, polished to a high gloss by machine production.

As Barack Obama once said, you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig. Likewise, you can have Michelangelo paint a mural on the ceiling of your uncle Ned's double-wide trailer, but that doesn't make it the Sistine Chapel. Whatever one thinks of the songs, one thing is certain: AI is alarmingly good at producing music at a quality level that, until now, required highly-paid professionals who had spent their lives honing their craft.

Songwriting, Nashville style, is a craft, and a slow-burning one at that. You spend years learning how to write a great bridge, how to make a hook land, how to fit your whole life into three minutes and fifteen seconds. I had heard friends in the business grumbling about what AI was doing to all of that. But I knew I had to find out firsthand. So I went home and fed my song into the machine.

Confronting AI for the first time as a musician can be harrowing. I'd recently watched a video posted by a local touring guitarist—the kind of sideman Nashville produces in abundance—who described receiving an AI guitar track from a client as a reference. The problem: the AI-performed track was so good, he wasn't sure he could match it. He felt there might be only five human beings in the world who could play it so well. This is coming from a professional in a city that represents perhaps the greatest concentration of musical talent in the world.

So it was with some dread that I picked a pop-country tune I'd written recently and uploaded it to Suno, instructing it to “Make a dark, soulful indie country cover of this song with a driving beat.” The platform can generate a complete song from scratch. Meaning, a person with zero talent and almost zero effort can make songs. People are currently creating more than 7 million songs per day on that platform alone, enough volume to surpass the entire Spotify catalog every two weeks. But the technology can also be used more subtly, to create faithful covers of work you've already recorded. It's like having your own band of professional musicians in a box, ready to take direction. That's what I chose to do: I uploaded my rough demo, along with my lyrics, asked it to make a faithful cover, and clicked "generate."

The results were all over the place. One early experiment produced something that sounded like a hit single. The AI singer was so soulful that I would have pulled over to Google him had I heard the track on the radio. But the same version had a hideous, wildly inappropriate drum sound that started firing in verse two, as if Christopher Walken had possessed the algorithm and started demanding more snare. Other versions produced strange discordant moments or went emotionally flat. Working effectively with AI in music isn't a single push of a button. It's an iterative process of trial and error. But after making many versions, I found two keepers.

. . .

There was only one problem: the AI singer had possibly sung my song better than I ever could. In a town full of great singers, I'm considered at least a good one. But the AI voice had everything—incredible control, emotional nuance, and a back-country drawl I'll never have as a Florida native ... Still, the AI offered something genuinely useful: production ideas I wouldn't have thought of myself. A minor chord in the bridge that improved the arrangement. Taking the final chorus up an octave for power and exuberance. A cool twist on the background vocals in the outro. Killer mandolin parts injecting energy into the choruses. These are the kinds of ideas I might have paid a top producer to provide. I was getting them for the price of a $15 subscription.

There's more at the link.

I haven't looked into AI in music in any depth, so this article came as a surprise to me.  Intrigued, I looked for AI country music on YouTube, and found innumerable examples.  Try this one for size.  The source blurb for the collection from which it's drawn notes:  "Made with AI. Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated."

It's a good song, IMHO, and I enjoyed it . . . but I'm left feeling empty, because behind that powerful singing and memorable tune, behind those excellently-played instrumentals . . . there's nobody.  The inspiration it offers is artificial.

Would I feel different if I hadn't known it was AI music?  I don't know, but I think I would.  A song composed and performed by a human being connects heart-to-heart, I guess.  Synthetic songs can imitate that, and if they're as good as the one above, they can fool people, but . . . it just feels wrong.

What say you, friends?

Peter