Tuesday, February 18, 2020
Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Musicians?
Consequence of Sound: Two months before she dropped the news that she’s expecting her first child with Elon Musk, Grimes (aka Claire Boucher, who now legally goes by c, the symbol for the speed of light), lit up music Twitter. The one-time neuroscience major let loose with a provocative forecast on theoretical physicist Sean Carroll’s Mindscape podcast when she shared, “I think live music is going to be obsolete soon,” predicting we might be seeing the last generation of human artists and also inspiring dozens of variations on the same joke suggesting Grimes’ own imminent obsolescence.
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7 comments:
This is wild! I think I often forget about the possibilities of advancement that come with technology, and so reading about this topic was mind-boggling. Whether or not the music written by these AI’s will be “better” or more “successful” is another question entirely - but just the possibility that the music industry could be dominated by artificial intelligence is quite a lot for my pea sized brain to wrap itself around. One part of this article stuck out to me especially. The writer said that artificial intelligence could make very successful music but it wouldn’t have the relatable quality that so many music consumers listen for. People turn to music for help relating to others going through certain events or feeling certain emotions. I don’t know that artificial intelligence will ever be able to replicate those life experiences and emotions. There has been a lot of crossover between music and technology recently in a very intense sense, so it will be interesting to see if or when Grimes’ tweet manifests itself.
The title of this article is a bit deceptive, because it is more about how artificial intelligence can contribute to music creation rather than replace it. Personally I would be incredibly upset to see the decline of live music performance, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Concerts hardly seem to at a loss for audience members nowadays. But reading more into this allowed me to understand more of the music technology side that addresses the actual creation of the tracks. I do however question the integrity of some of this technology in a traditionally organic, creative process. Why do musicians need special algorithms to help them compose? Is this becoming more than just a tool, and now a shortcut to creating the next big, money-making hit? I do admit that some of the AI tools are helpful, such as the ones that Spotify utilizes to find new music you might like. But knowing that they can now use that data to create custom music to appeal to customers is a bit more chilling.
Anytime I read an article about technology and advancement, I am shook by what all the the industry has to offer because the retrospectives that they propose are so wildly alien to my imagination that I am always super surprised after reading these articles.
I do agree with Sidney that the title of the article is a little deceptive because the article talks so much about how technology can collaborate with natural music rather than how that might replace the present music creation methods, which would honestly be very sad.
Natural music has a quality to it that is so relatable that people like to listen to them all the time and I do not know how much of an effect would AI music make to the listening audiences because at the end of the day it is created using machines and no human voice is there to provide the relatability content that songs have had for so long.
I think this is so interesting. I read a lot of things about technology because really I don’t know that much about technology and computers and they are such a big part of this world. This article I really liked because it is about how technology can contribute to the making and composition of music which I do know a little about. I’d like to think there is something about live performance of music by people that could not be recreated by technology, but honestly, I have no idea, technology is so advanced and really it seems like the possibilities are endless so who knows, I feel like I could probably listen to an AI created song and human-created song, and I wouldn’t know the difference. I think it is really cool how they are integrating the AI with the music industry, I would like to learn more about it.
While I understand Grimes’ comment about Artificial General Intelligence enhancing the creative process and being able to make different forms of music that are on par with human creation, I think in no way will live music ever become obsolete. I think of live music (and concerts) in a lot of ways as something similar to the theatre in the sense that there is a sort of vibrancy that comes along with seeing it in real time and getting to experience something created and performed by real people. The idea of AI being a generator for music is very interesting, because I think it speaks to how fast our world is advancing in terms of technology, though I feel that the value of human to human interaction is too strong for it to become the overarching form of music. I am excited to see how music will continue to grow and evolve with the partnership of technology.
While machines can easily make more popular, more pleasing, and technically better music than us, I do not believe they will take over. The only way I imagine they could take over the music industry is if they also had humans who presented themselves as the faces of this music. I believe otherwise people will always resist music made by machines. The history of a piece, the person behind it, and the way that music transforms with the life of the artist it is what most often gets people invested in music. Without any of that, I do not see how machines could take over the industry. I believe we would have to be tricked into it. As this article says, artificial intelligence is contributing more to the creation of music, and I completely agree that that will continue to expand, but I believe music will always need to have a real person in front of it in order to sell. We are too focused on authenticity and sincerity to allow robots to take over knowingly.
This article touches upon the interesting and more broad topic of how technology influences the arts. I do think that this is a misleading title since, as others have pointed out, it focuses more on the generation of music as opposed to replacing musicians themselves (although that is not out of the question for sure). I think we need to stop focusing on how it may replace what we know today and shift that conversation to how it can help us. We should really take a step back and think about how the music we know today owes a lot to technology and the advancements and impacts it has made on the music industry. Without basic analog electronics, we wouldn't have mixers and PAs; without computers, we wouldn't have such an incredible library of beautiful music at our fingertips; without DAWs, we wouldn't have so many electronic music genres that have allowed many artists to express themselves. Sure, it can be scary to think about how something we love change, but I think we need to remember that people will crave art and humanity in music. We should focus on how this technology will help artists reach people, not if they will replace them.
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