A.I. and Prog???

Maybe AI will help our artists out with writing block??  

I haven't played around with any recent AI music generators and have little interest in them at the moment, but from what I've seen they seem suitable for television/internet commercials, soundtracks, and such. Much cheaper than paying for real music. They've probably already been used in pop music in the last 10-15 years, if not for ideas, then to generate parts of a song. 

Good composers will use it as just another tool in their toolkit. Not-so-good composers will probably use it without making any changes and pass it off as their own. C'est la vie.

Music is created in the ear of the listener.

We may have emotions when listening that have not been put into the music by the composers, and we may feel something also when listening to AI generated music.

When I was at school we had a very innovative computer class, and as a project I coded a "solo generator" that would just play random notes on a scale with random length but some side conditions respecting the rhythm and some musical "rules" that made it slightly less terrible. It didn't shake the world of music to the core to be honest, but that was in 1985 or so. With today's possibilities it should be possible to do a far better job.

 

A long time ago, I read something about using random noise to generate musical data. It said that a pink noise distribution is the optimum for creating interesting music. White noise creates music that is too erratic, and brown noise creates music that is too dull.

 

Jimmy Page once said that he would tune his guitars to different odd tunings just to generate new musical ideas.  I've done that also.  It is very powerful.  AI is similar.

As a teacher, I haven't dealt with a tool like ChatGPT yet.  Instead of hoping my students would NOT use that platform, I would assign them to complete a paper using ChatGPT, then hand-write the answer, analyze the facts and improve it with their thinking skills.  I'll do that someday. 

Musical tools like Mellotron were once feared and reviled by traditional orchestra musicians, who saw the device as a threat.  Bah.  If anything, classical music is more popular and accepted now.