Undistraction wrote: ↑07 Jun 2019
FWIW I love and make generative music, but there is something that irks me about these kind of features. Making music should be hard. It should involve blood and sweat and soul. To me this is just a hairs breadth from somewhere that involves none of those things. It will be really interesting seeing where DAWs end up in the next 10 years. As AI get's more integrated and algorhythms become more and more sophisticated. People clearly love the idea of making music with as little effort as possible, so the market will move further in that direction. How many people use presets Vs crafting their own sounds? How many people will use AI-generated melodies rather than writing their own?
"Making music should be hard." - again sorry, but I disagree! If something is fun, intuitive, and easy it can still have soul, because creativity can flourish when technical barriers are removed. And like I said you're kind of discounting people that can't play keyboard because...it's not their instrument. Or perhaps they're not physically able. Not everyone that relies on assistive devices is lazy. Of course, sometimes ideas can come out of struggle - as a progressive tech metal guy, I can attest to that. But god knows it isn't always fun or inspiring to sit there working hard shit out. Some days I just caaaaaannot be bothered.
"How many people use presets Vs crafting their own sounds?" - Me?
Don't get me wrong, I can make my own sounds and I often do when I have the luxury of time. But if I'm working to a brief with a tight deadline, you bet I'm gonna go straight for the presets. That's what they're there for. Ultimately what we all wanna do is write music, right? Create a vibe, a mood or emotion. Yeah you could do *everything* from scratch and flex about it but...does it have any bearing on the emotional impact of the music? Personally, I couldn't care less. Who decides how much has to be hand created in order to be valid? Is it lazy to use a synth when you could build your own in Reaktor? The only exception would be genres where the distinguishing feature is the sound design (like drone music). Using presets in those instances is a bit...lazy. But also self defeating because literally anyone else could make the same thing so, why bother?
It's an interesting conversation, and no doubt one that's gonna come up more in the years to come. I just feel people are worrying unduly. The most advanced AI out there is streets beyond anything we could expect to find in Reason and it's still very awkward and in no way a substitute for a human touch. If algorithms are guided by a human hand, well I think that blurs the lines. I'd still argue that you'd have to know what you're doing with it to produce intelligible/listenable results. It's creative assistance, not substitution. IMO anyway. To sidetrack a bit, look at game development. At various points in the pipeline people are using procedural algorithms to generate environments, using game engines with pre-made modules for game logic and audio, recyling pre-made assets. No-one would argue that they should do all this from scratch every time in order for it to be valid as a creative or artistic work (and some games really are art). But again in those cases, there's always a human hand guiding the final output. There has to be a vision, or the essence of an idea. Otherwise it's just a jumble. Same is true of players, or any generative musical devices.
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