As a (terrible) amateur musician, I'm expecting/hoping that AI will end up pushing people to make more weird music. Barriers were already pretty low to making mediocre mainstream-sounding music (at least for some genres), and AI pretty much eliminates them altogether. So a trite choice like an axis chord progression will become unbearably boring, and hopefully lead to people seeking and composing anything that's not the same thing that now anyone can do with a few clicks.
(Also small world - I recently had been playing with the tulip, bwhitman's cool project, as a synth!)
I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the reason these interpolations have become so common is because some bean-counter at the label or production studio has some data showing that a song people find “familiar” in some way moves more records than an original one. after all, a hook is easier to reuse than invent!
and here’s a pretentious Adorno quote to back me up from a different angle, from “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening:”
“The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it.”
I think I would be more concerned if people found AI-generated music more appealing than albums created by great artists. AI can generate lots of songs that are soul-less, but there are lots of soul-less songs created by people that nobody listens to.
Side tangent: I have been recently enjoying Kendrick Lamar's new GNX album, and I think I would have a crisis if I learned that this was all AI-generated rather than Kendrick's art lol. If there is an album that is purely AI-generated that I actually really enjoy, that's when I know we are doomed as artists.
Probably mentioned and/or familiar, but see also Axis of Awesome https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I?si=Bg0RU4ep9tcJ9kAf .
Mashups are yet another genre of borrowing; Bill McClintock is taking them to a new level, e.g. https://youtu.be/bM10A86drpI?si=DKZeYI1qM_zgSQ1Q or https://youtu.be/s97E0y023Jw?si=Zi_OPj9PFKfH2S_7
I’ll just leave these here
https://youtu.be/V4WGsMplGxU?si=1OuJTY3bCtO2mrn3
https://youtu.be/JdxkVQy7QLM?si=bOwrkfrZEnGiUc1D
As a (terrible) amateur musician, I'm expecting/hoping that AI will end up pushing people to make more weird music. Barriers were already pretty low to making mediocre mainstream-sounding music (at least for some genres), and AI pretty much eliminates them altogether. So a trite choice like an axis chord progression will become unbearably boring, and hopefully lead to people seeking and composing anything that's not the same thing that now anyone can do with a few clicks.
(Also small world - I recently had been playing with the tulip, bwhitman's cool project, as a synth!)
I have a sneaking suspicion that part of the reason these interpolations have become so common is because some bean-counter at the label or production studio has some data showing that a song people find “familiar” in some way moves more records than an original one. after all, a hook is easier to reuse than invent!
and here’s a pretentious Adorno quote to back me up from a different angle, from “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening:”
“The familiarity of the piece is a surrogate for the quality ascribed to it. To like it is almost the same thing as to recognize it.”
I think I would be more concerned if people found AI-generated music more appealing than albums created by great artists. AI can generate lots of songs that are soul-less, but there are lots of soul-less songs created by people that nobody listens to.
Side tangent: I have been recently enjoying Kendrick Lamar's new GNX album, and I think I would have a crisis if I learned that this was all AI-generated rather than Kendrick's art lol. If there is an album that is purely AI-generated that I actually really enjoy, that's when I know we are doomed as artists.
I'm more worried by how the abundance of soulless songs that lots of people listen to...