AI is here to stay! Although I hate it in the sense that it will write music for us? But it’s already been here for some time. Think about chord tracks, audio, midi, arpeggiators, randomizers, etc
The thing is…Everyone seriously involved in music wants to ‘create’! They don’t want ‘something’ to create it for them! It’s only people that are not musicians or not talented at all that are looking for stuff like this?
For a novice musician it may be very cool to set a few parameters and press a few buttons and end up with a complete song? But he/she will soon find out there’s a lot more to music than just generating chords and a melody?
Music needs character and storytelling for it to be remotely interesting to the listener. AI (still?) doesn’t have that. It can create chords and melody based on mathematical models. But it can’t create music based on human emotion. You can put in all the right parameters and press all the right buttons on your Tensorflow app, and it still can’t tell from what emotion your trying to write this piece of music. So it will always be IA writing the music based on models, not you!
And let’s for a minute suppose you can get the perfect chords and melody out of this Tensorflow application?
Is it also going to arrange, orchestrate mix and produce this perfect song for you? Is it also going to pick the synth sounds, samples you had in mind? The fades between sounds that makes it special? Guess not!
Whenever ‘stuff’ like this comes up in music production I always compare it to photography as opposed to drawing/painting.Our camera’s today can capture any scenery and can capture every person or face in the greatest of detail with just a push of a button. Why is it then that some people still spend hours, days or even weeks to capture that same scenery, person or face in a drawing or a painting?
It’s because artists feel the urge to create! To create something unique!
Tensorflow can maybe create generic chords and melody for the masses?
It will never replace the creative mind. The creative mind that has lived the situation that it wants to portrait in music.
“And after the music has been created the next process starts……
I think about what parts should be played by whom? And what drums/percussion should be used? Who should I invite to sing the part? Maybe I could shift this melody here to the clarinet so the singer could switch to the second voice? I might put in a string arrangement on the chorus? Ahh! Here, on those two notes I really need the piano to do solid block chords….I have a patch on the Prophet5 somewhere that’s just perfect for this part, let me….! Mmmm…This snare is just not…it! Let’s try the Yamaha for this? I really think this melody sucks here and the chords are wrong? I’ll rearrange this….”
That’s a common example of the difference between a computer program like Tensorflow dictating you chords and melody and a real live human being involved in making music….