Exactly. I don’t want AI to make me a song. I want it to switch up my baseline or chords or recommend a fill instrument.

Logic Pro comes the closest to this with the addition of virtual drummers. You can assign it to follow certain rhythmic timings by connecting it to a main instrument track, and by labeling sections of your song (bridge, chorus, etc) you can regenerate until you find something you're happy with.

It's a far cry from having a real drummer, but it works in a pinch.

I think the big limiting factor is having it learn what the infinite number of parameters in different synths, etc actually make it sound like, and then being able to make the model be able to produce music by using and configuring them instead of just spaffing out crap music.

If it could do that it'd give the tweakability it needs, but I think it would basically involve training a model for each instrument.

I think you might like https://soundry.ai they are working on a feature that is just like 1.

Spark amp is now advertising with some interesting AI options. https://au.positivegrid.com/products/spark-2 As far as I understand it can attempt to generate backing drums (and music?) for jamming, which sounds great for practicing.

> A big limitation of AI sloop is it tries to not offend anyone.

That tends to be very true of major commercially-hosted and proprietary systems, and true (but somewhat less and less consistently so) of open foundation models from corporations and big labs, but community models (including community fine tunes of big-vendor open models) much less so. This is very visible in LLMs, image models, and video models right now.

Rap (and even music more generally) models don't have as much attention right now, but I suspect if/as they get more attention and community use the same dynamic is likely to emerge.

> Art that can’t even try to offend is barely art.

I do not believe that offense is a necessary or sufficient component of art. If I raise my middle finger at someone, that is not art, but rather offense. If I view Botticelli's Primavera, I'm looking at art, and I detect no intent to offend, nor do I take offense.

There is certainly room for offense within art: the iambic poetry of Archilochus and Hipponax manages to blend aesthetic beauty with ardent invective. But I do not think that art needs or is defined by offense. Offense is accidental to art as a concept.

> Art that can’t even try to offend is barely art.

Good art is secondary to avoiding some journalist writing a hit piece about how they used your company’s AI generator to depict Hitler saying the gamer word.

Instrumental music doesn’t count as art? Come on.

Here is a cool demonstration to do voice-to-instrument or instrument-to-another instrument (The inconvenient thing is that for a new kind of output sound you have to train a model for around 1 hour for good quality, but after that you can use it with different inputs quickly):

https://youtu.be/lI1LCfTx2lI?t=525

There is also Kits.ai https://www.kits.ai/tools/ai-instruments

You sound like you are just talking about virtual instruments, which are getting better and better.

Something like this maybe, doing the virtual instruments (VST/VSTI) review for saxophone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909398

It sounds very similar to suno v3.5 (including the audio quality) Likely they trained on suno generations.

These music/art AI threads are always gross. Make things for the joy of creating. Prompting some AI model doesn’t make you a musician - it actively robs you of the thing that’s rewarding about actually creating something.

A tool existing doesn't ruin anything. Genuinely stop being so dramatic and learn to ignore things you don't like. Our society would be a lot better and calmer if people did that rather than start pointless crusades.

People said this about photography. It ruined painting, and it did in fact put a lot of portrait painters out of business because in that era the reason you hired them was not for art. It was for a photograph made with brushes.

This is a good read on photography and art. Note that the rhetoric sounds almost identical to today's AI rhetoric.

“If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon supplant or corrupt it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally." - Charles Baudelaire

https://medium.com/@aaronhertzmann/how-photography-became-an...

I don't think AI is a threat to actual art at all. If I want art, I explicitly do not want slop churned out of a model. I want something created by a human being to communicate something. That's the entire point.

Some around here will argue that there have been double blind tests showing that people sometimes can't tell the difference between AI output and human art. That is missing the point too. Knowing who the artist is is part of the artistic experience. If someone deepfake calls you with a model imitating your friend, is it the same as talking to your friend? The parasociality of art is part of it.

It may -- as photography did with portraiture -- be a threat to some of the ways that artists make a living, and I do understand the pushback from that. Back before photography a lot of painters made a living being cameras, and all that work dried up pretty fast. Today AI is replacing all the "filler" churned out by artists. The only silver lining I guess is that artists generally hate this work and it never paid well.

Another thing I expect to happen is: actual AI art. I don't think this has happened yet. There has not yet been an AI equivalent of the Pictoralists.

AI art is art if the AI is used by a human being as a tool to communicate what art communicates, to do what art does. Art, I guess, does many things. It entertains, informs in a way, but also communicates matters of the emotional and spiritual aspect of human existence -- of consciousness -- that can't be communicated well in other ways. If someone uses AI as a tool to do that, it's art.

A lot of what we see today coming out of AI models is I think correctly called "slop" because it is not that. There's no artistic intention or craft behind it.

BTW I'd argue that "slop" exists in the realm of music, literature, painting, and other arts made with traditional methods too. For centuries there's been low-effort smutty pulp fiction, crappy imitative pop music, and gimmicky low-effort painting. Those things are slop made with lower-tech tools. A pretentious gimmicky painting where someone threw some paint at a wall has less artistic merit than a photograph that someone composed with care to communicate something.

Edit: people said this about writing too!

https://www.anthologialitt.com/post/the-god-thoth-and-the-in...

I'm not bashing people for being skeptical of AI and worrying about its effects on the arts. There are, like I said, very valid points, especially about the ability of artists to make a living and the effect AI "slop" can have on the population. I just think we have been here before, many times.

- https://ace-step.github.io/

- https://huggingface.co/spaces/ACE-Step/ACE-Step

If the “Guns in butts” / “my wife is a jar of dirt” songs are any indication, I don’t know how “safe” it will be, at least as far as content goes.

I’m similarly hyped and iffy. If you could have a model that listens to a looping segment to contextualize it, and then play with other patterns on top but through a more expressive way (or even humming/singing and allowing the LLM of sorts to compose it together), that could be interesting. Would it be panned for being AI-assisted? I’d hope not, I think?

“I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record. I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables. I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.”

We just add AI in whatever forms it takes to the list I suppose.

They always fail with structure. The progressions often meander aimlessly and eventually go to weird places, at least IME.