Auto-tune destroying Popular Music?

[Cecil6243]

Not pushing Rich Beato although I enjoy his videos, but why are you thoughts on this? Is this a threat to the the creativity of our popular music? Will AI replace musicians and song writers?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IV29YNTH3M

[Rudy4]

Originally Posted by Cecil6243

Not pushing Rich Beato although I enjoy his videos, but why are you thoughts on this? Is this a threat to the the creativity of our popular music? Will AI replace musicians and song writers?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IV29YNTH3M

Rick has some interesting videos. There's a current topic in the Recording section that discusses the Billy Eilish "track comping" portion of his overall concerns.

https://www.acousticguitarforum.com/...d.php?t=663142

All this boils down to what the general public will accept, and it's pretty obvious that the standards are low.

It's easy to find the opposing musical direction, particularly if you concentrate on live performance.

What Sarah Jarosz can pull off with two side musicians live I'll take over Billy Eilish's "performance" that's strung together from 87 recorded vocal tracks any day. No comping or autotune necessary.

[Gordon Currie]

That war has already been lost (autotuning), at least in the pop music world.
Autotune is here to stay.

AI will certainly replace not only musicians, but artists in general. As well as reducing/eliminating human employment in entire industries.

The time to exert any control or standards around AI was probably 4 decades ago. At this point, perceived economic advantages will completely overwhelm ethical considerations.

Money talks.

[Brent Hahn]

Rick Beato's entitled to like what he likes, and he's entitled to complain that he was "on the bubble" and The Label shafted him, and he's entitled to turn everything into a music theory lesson, and wish that we were still in that tiny historical blip where one song could make you rich and famous. That last thing -- an awful lot of us wish that.

He gets major props from me for being able to turn that stew of talent and experience and bitterness into a Youtube channel that makes him a living.

[Andyrondack]

I bet the Clash and the Sex Pistols would have told you all where to stick your auto tune.

[Mandobart]

Autotune is not the threat - popular music (as played on commercial radio) is a threat to its own existence. The lack of originality, meaningful lyrics, musicianship, the consolidation of the mainstream studios, mainstream performance venues, ticket sellers and radio stations into a single entity AND the ever growing access to independent artists, venues and music outlets are (thankfully) killing popular music, which quit being creative a while ago.

The recently (last few years) emerging artists like Molly Tuttle, Sarah Jarosz, Sierra Farrel, Billy Strings etc. have a growing fan base and are packing festivals and indie venues, podcasts, internet radio, etc. The outlook for fresh original music has never been brighter. Some will mourn the dying pop music monoculture, but none in the musical circles that I frequent will.

[Glennwillow]

Originally Posted by Cecil6243

Not pushing Rich Beato although I enjoy his videos, but why are you thoughts on this? Is this a threat to the the creativity of our popular music? Will AI replace musicians and song writers?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IV29YNTH3M

I previously listened to that Rick Beato video about autotune (and AI) ruining music. What I noticed is that the examples he used for autotune were extreme, where the odd effects of autotune are part of that particular "music" culture. This isn't stuff I listen to, so I had trouble identifying with his complaints.

It's my understanding that many recording engineers believe that autotune programs -- and there are several -- are just tools, and like most tools, they have to be used carefully, judiciously. If used sparingly, I don't think most of us can tell when a little bit of pitch correction has been used. It's the extreme use of autotune that sounds so robotic.

And the more robotic something sounds, the easier it is for a computer using artificial intelligence programs, to clone a voice and make its own "music" while leaving the humans out altogether. I have trouble believing that's what most musicians want to see, computers just taking over music. Yuck...

I wouldn't be surprised to find that songwriters might use AI to start the process of writing songs and then modify these songs to make them their own. A lot of the AI generated songs are often very stilted, not very professional. But that could change rapidly.

The chess world has been affected by computers and AI to where machines are simply better at chess than people, even the best of us.

- Glenn

[Robin, Wales]

Interesting piece. However, Chat GPT only turned out lyrics, not a melody or arrangement - so a long way to go yet.

I thought that his comments of tracks being over produced was very valid. Hell, I think that plugging in an acoustic guitar at a gig is over production!!!

Now the big rant! Please, please please embed the YouTube videos you use in your posts - don't just post the link. I don't know if it is the same in the US, but over here in the UK we have to go through proving we are not a robot and then sit through ads before getting to see the video you have linked to. But if you embed it, like I have done here, we can play it straight away, with no ads or need to prove we are human!

[Chipotle]

Originally Posted by Glennwillow

I wouldn't be surprised to find that songwriters might use AI to start the process of writing songs and then modify these songs to make them their own.

Already been done! My friend and former bandmate (a software engineer and user of music tech for decades) recently did just this, using chatGPT for lyrics (then lightly edited), although he admitted the music generators just aren't up to snuff yet and mostly wrote the melody... although then he got a synthetic vocalist to sing it.



His description of the song:

"In a Denver Broncos text discussion, I asked A.I. engine chatGPT to do this:
'write song lyrics about Michael and Scott hating Elway'
The lyrics were spot on, so Michael challenged me to finish the song. I tried to get AI to gen the music too, but the best I could do was gen some backing tracks from sounddraw that I thought might work, and then I manually wrote the melodies and phrasing, and then taught those to some SynthV vocaloids to sing it."

Sure, not a smooth & polished song. But you can see the future taking shape.

[SongwriterFan]

As far as auto-tune goes, I've never cared for it when it's used so much as to become an "effect" . . . but I do think it has its place for correcting slightly out-of-tune vocals to make them better (rather than endlessly punching in and out to get it perfect).

Here's a few versions of a song of mine:

First, an acoustic version, that has NO auto-tune on my voice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u2SxSkTud0


Second, a fully-produced version, that has SOME auto-tune on my voice (note, I sang two different versions for this song, so the underlying vocal isn't exactly the same):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6uFJnMx8ao


Out of curiosity, I asked my producer to crank up the auto-tune as far as it would go, to try to create the "effect" that's on so many songs these days. I hated it . . . but after listening, I began to wonder: would I have a better chance of it being a hit if recorded like this? The answer is probably something I'd rather not know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJPVnMjJWSM

[Cecil6243]

Originally Posted by Robin, Wales

Interesting piece. However, Chat GPT only turned out lyrics, not a melody or arrangement - so a long way to go yet.

I thought that his comments of tracks being over produced was very valid. Hell, I think that plugging in an acoustic guitar at a gig is over production!!!

Now the big rant! Please, please please embed the YouTube videos you use in your posts - don't just post the link. I don't know if it is the same in the US, but over here in the UK we have to go through proving we are not a robot and then sit through ads before getting to see the video you have linked to. But if you embed it, like I have done here, we can play it straight away, with no ads or need to prove we are human!

[Horseflesh]

The AI era is going to be interesting and disruptive. I'm not yet sure if it will be a catastrophe or a speed bump.

I can't think of a great analogy that we have already been through. The closest thing I can think of is the cheapening of photography. It used to be that if you wanted to take photos, it took a real investment in hardware, and every shot had to count because of processing costs.

Then, digital cameras became affordable and began to exceed the capabilities of film and there was a lot of free instructional content online. At that point, jerks like me started doing stuff as a hobby that ate into professional work. Were we all great photogs? Nope. But I have also had photos in publications and done the headshots at my last 3 jobs and they were good enough.

Now, everyone has a pretty good point and shoot camera in their pocket. There's even more "good enough" content out there than ever.

What will happen when a computer can make an infinite amount of artistic content that is "good enough" for free? What happens when it can be "good enough" at even more white collar jobs?

I'm hopeful we can find a way to make it a useful tool and benefit from it, instead of only suffering from the fallout.

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Brent Hahn

Rick Beato's entitled to like what he likes, and he's entitled to complain that he was "on the bubble" and The Label shafted him, and he's entitled to turn everything into a music theory lesson, and wish that we were still in that tiny historical blip where one song could make you rich and famous. That last thing -- an awful lot of us wish that.

He gets major props from me for being able to turn that stew of talent and experience and bitterness into a Youtube channel that makes him a living.

My feelings exactly! Old boomers like him have to scratch a living any way they can; good luck to him. If old boomers like me detest him (for the lazy way he presents music theory, confusing countless innocents), we're just jealous...

[JonPR]

My comments FWIW.

He very pompously dismisses Ed Sheeran, for a start, admitting he is not "scholar of his lyric writing" (fair enough),but goes on to mention "the team of people that write songs for him" - which is an assumption based on his typical boomer prejudice and opinion of modern pop music. You (we) can hate Ed Sheeran's songs all we like, but he writes them all himself! (with very few exceptions).

The lyrics produced in Sheeran's style by ChatGPT are perfectly acceptable for a modern pop record. They are obviously unoriginal and full of shallow cliches, but so are countless other pop love songs written by humans. That's kind of the point, after all.

When people write songs with the aim of achieving a hit record, they follow tried and tested formulas; they know what a "hit pop song" sounds like. They will have learned dozens, maybe 100s, of existing pop songs and absorbed the formulas. Not only for lyrics, of course, but for chord sequences, rhythms, even melodic hooks. So it's hardly any surprise that AI - fed with all the same data (and more) - can do the job as well as makes no difference.

Beato is quite right that the general public don't care. The people who buy popular music want the cliches, they want the familiar sounds. It's not that those audiences are stupid, it's just that music is not a central part of their lives. It's for creating a good mood, or a dance groove. It doesn't need to have depth or artistic substance, and is usually better if it doesn't. They don't want music they have to think about! They want music to make them feel good.

Beato is like a chef in an old-fashioned (and expensive) restaurant complaining about people liking MacDonalds and takeways pizzas! OK, some people eat nothing but junk food, but why care? Other people eat junk food occasionally, cook for themselves other times, and once in a while might even go to Beato's restaurant! But the people who eat the junk food couldn't give a care how it's prepared - whether it's made by people or by machines - as long as it tastes good! In fact, if it tasted better when made by machines, then they'd prefer that! (So, some cooks would be out of a job, but who cares about them?)

But one really important Beato does make is towards the end. There is BIG MONEY in popular music (at least if you have hits). If AI produces the songs - not only composes them, but puts the recordings together - who gets paid? Who is coding the AI systems, and who is programming them for each song?

It's not a matter of creativity there - i.e., a songwriter being out of a job is one thing. But it takes very little skill or education to enter a few lines of text to ask an AI system to produce a song. How much will that person be paid, as a proportion of how much money the song makes? Where does the rest of that money go? The designers of the AI systems, the coders, obviously deserve a living, but - again - once the system is designed, it would more or less run itself. Recording engineers, even recording studios are more or less redundant too.

If there is still a creative person assessing the AI output - and maybe making choices of which songs it spews out should be published, perhaps even making small edits here and there - then that person is effectively the new equivalent of "songwriter", or at least "producer". I.e., in creative terms there's not a lot of difference if a human is in charge of the final output, making decisions based on musical intuition (even if that intuition is governed by commercial factors rather than "artistic" ones).

Beato is also right about the insidious process whereby automation has slowly crept in, becoming more and more acceptable and invisible. On the food analogy, it would be like junk food containing sugar and salt because it enhances the flavour, but then the quantities gradually increase while the nutitional content decreases. With food, of course, there are government concerns about people's health (not for their sake, but for the sake of the economy being damaged by loss of workers). There would be no such concern over the creeping domination of AI in music. Especially if the music proves successful enough to bring in more taxes!

Even so, why would we care? We don't have to listen to commercial pop if we don't want! Who cares if the garbage in the chart is made by humans or computers if its garbage either way?

The issue would be if "real" music gets elbowed out; if those of us who still like non-AI music find it harder and harder to get hold of it, because nobody thinks it worth making any more. Old boomers (like Beato and me) will be dead soon! Already, we are old enough for the commercial recording industry to consign us to irrelevance.

One thing that gives me optimism is live music. There is no sign today that people are getting tired of going to see music performed by humans in real time on stage, using real instruments. It may be that a lot of small venues are closing, for various economical reasons, but concerts and festivals are still plentiful. OK, a lot of the time it's people dancing to DJs operating computers. Other times, live bands might have a backing track as part of their sound. But live music - and live musicians! - still exert a powerful appeal, over and above the celebrity factor.

IOW, there is something about music which I believe is going to survive whatever automation does to recorded music. It's worth remembering that audio recording is only a little over 100 years old. Popular music on record only began around 1920. For millenia before that, all around the world, in every culture, music was a fundamental part of human society - and it was all live! The experience of hearing (and seeing) it live - and often joining in with it! - was crucial to it. It was cathartic, ofen transcendent. Religious ritual on the one hand, and pagan dancing on the other, could not do without music. It's in all our blood.

And of course, each of us can make our own music any way we like. Maybe we will entertain ourselves with our own AI generated party music (it will be cheap and easy enough). But maybe we will also continue to discover the unique pleasures to be gained by operating those old fashioned devices called "musical instruments". After all, there's nothing like being "hands-on" when creating music. I don't doubt that virtual reality will be able at some point to mimic that sensation (probably it's already possible), but - by definition - it's always one stage removed from physical reality. If there comes a time when virtual reality really is indistinguishable from the physical kind ... well, I'm pretty sure I'll be dead by then, or in a position not to care.

[cdkrugjr]

I don’t think auto tune (with subtle settings….extreme settings is an effect, no less than a ring mod), or click tracks when done subtly are “The Thing Wrong With Pop Music.”

I DO think the insane levels of brick well limiting used on everything is a much better candidate.

“Picture an old 78…now make it sound even worse . . . Livin la vida and all that”