9/22/2024

Why am I so attracted to AI for generating material? I had been involved in generative music in the ‘90s creating music from seed structures, and I’m still interested in that, but sometimes I find myself wasting too much time going to websites, logging in, thinking of text prompts to generate music–when I can generate music from an idea or simply pick up a guitar or a bass and I’ll have an idea within seconds. Like this morning: There was a Bill Clinton quote in my diary on 9/22/2010: “They always like you better when you’re gone.” I heard a 12/8 minor blues in it. For the past 4 or 5 months I have been generating music from words and phrases that are in my diary and I jot them down in my Songday notebook. I wouldn’t necessarily want to generate music algorithmically as a first choice. It would be interesting to have my own large language model that would generate music based on the inputs that I give it, such as a rhythm or melody and see what happens. A lot of creativity is “Let’s try this and see what happens”. It will at least give you the materials to work with. But in my experience, songs can take a long time to develop and reveal themselves, sometimes years later. It’s a matter of placing one thing against another and seeing what happens, but you don’t get that with AI. There’s nothing to be compared. It can be perfect right out of the gate. As to intentions, generating music with AI has to be immediately shared, so I suspect the main intention is to get attention on social media. All the new tools that are being developed at YouTube, for example, are for generating content to share on social media for getting as much attention as possible. Apparently, it is for the “enhancement” of creativity, but why does it need “enhancements”?

[2026: AI-generation using existing tracks is actually very useful because it's not confabulating your music--it's picking up your rhythms and your chord changes. For me, to hear a jazz head I wrote decades ago played by an ensemble is the same feeling I had when I first got Finale and could hear what it sounded like, even with crummy General MIDI sounds. To some Suno users their recent model is crummy. But look what functionality it gives you. Sounds shouldn't be everything. I have a guitar that has strings 15 years old on it. I don't care about how it sounds as much as I think a tool can be framed as decorative art--in which it can...]