Unorthodox wrote:
When AI can produce the beauty of, say, ISIS' Wavering Radiant, I'll be concerned/fascinated.
Looks like somebody misspelled 'Panopticon' or 'Oceanic'.
I'm just busting balls but this sort of AI idea behind music isn't working right now in this small experiment but it's already been cracked in plenty of better funded ways. This sounds like it's just putting the snare to vocalization right now and calling that a death metal delivery. Where are the riffs? I get that it's a learning machine but how creative can it get without other input? How many bands have taken on a new perspective and totally blown you out of the water with their ideas? Now look at how pop music is created, the code has been cracked for years and still it gains a huge audience. This song still gets me going:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpMfP6qUSBo It's simple, basic, and it now is part of the greatest hits of your local retail store but it gained a good audience just two years ago.
This program is a long way off but aesthetically it's going to seem already there to someone who doesn't know death metal anyway.
There's an algorithm to every style of music, that's why each style is segmented into its own style to begin with. The question has been far long asked and answered. "All this machinery making modern music can still be open-hearted, not so coldly-charted, it's really just a question of your honesty" and funny enough the compressed sound in this endless stream sounds similar to the distant riff opening Rush's "The Spirit of Radio".
I'm not worried, Skynet isn't here to blow out our ears, music has been manufactured for generations to grab listeners and that's why we like to listen to honesty in the music made in many areas of these archives. There's always going to be an algorithm but look at how much a flash in the pan deathcore was. We all have our generation to enjoy, gaps we don't get, and it doesn't mean that we'll immediately turn into robots when they can possibly do better than what we like now. At the end of the day if you don't like music made with machines then you should break your computer and all your albums. Things are constantly evolving, it's just when you become the bigot that's the question, that's the cut off for your point of reference, and that's the end of where you want to embrace the world. It was the same in the '60s, it's the same now when I hear old women at work tittering about how the CNA's don't speak enough English in front of them, and it's the same for me when I get annoyed at boom boom cars going by my house. I like my own boom boom, I don't hate everyone else's boom boom, but I have no problem with a robot trying to boom his way into what we could call consciousness because Asimov knew well enough that that's a better future for humanity than to fear that future. Embrace the robot, don't make it a slave, and maybe humanity will survive so long that we won't have to worry about dying all together on this little rock on the edge of nowhere on the arm of a galaxy that doesn't care about us.
People should be better than worrying about music trends changing too much for their music, especially metalheads. There is a record, too vast and gorgeous a record of the shit we like to be so worried. So what if metal is left behind. Wasn't it left behind after glam died and grunge blew up? Fuck the worriers, they're too short-sighted to understand that you can be yourself and not a cultural movement. It's great to be part of one if you want to but this shit, it's not likely to be a cultural movement again. Now it's a lot of people picking up pieces, it's a lot of musicians struggling to stay relevant over twenty years after they were edgy and it's a lot of kids trying to embrace the new to keep it modern. Metal has split a lot, it works in many ways but it'll never be the '70s, '80s, even the '00s again. Why bitch about it when you can just listen to a song that still has millions of views on YouTube over forty years after its release? Metal has dealt with worse and still metalheads prevail, will always prevail, and will always end up indignant and defiant when it comes to their version of something they hold close. There is no death happening here, only new forms of life flourishing and that is better than being cast into nothingness.