Literally building an instrument so I can have fun playing it… and making it has been pretty fun too.
every time these lizards say shit like this I get more vindicated in saying people who believe “ai” “art” is legitimately art are not human.
“making moosic with eenstrooments is such a terrible experience am I right fellow hoomans?”
no you fucking bot. people who do it are delighted by it and most of those who don’t do it wish they could.
and most of those who don’t do it wish they could.
ok, out of the people who , let’s say, own an instrument, how many do you think fall into this category?
All this generative AI for “creative works” basically makes it so that if you lack the skill to do something, you can feed it something among the lines of what you want, and it will do the hard work that takes years of effort to achieve for you.
In the right contexts, it allows for personal curation of art the user can imagine but lacks the technical ability to create.
Of course, corps and assholes looking to make a quick buck are also abusing this to make money at the expense of genuine people who are expressing something and have honed a craft. Guess what, that shit’s happening anyway, Taylor Swift is charging 5k for tickets to watch her lip sync to music she didn’t write and isn’t singing at the concert. It’s already fucking over, and has been for ages. It’s even worse, there are bands out there that have bothered to hone their craft and are out there touring their asses off, but because they “found their niche” are basically phoning it in and making the same fucking album every two to five years. Great work. Think about the last few meshuggah or mastodon albums. Violent sleep of reason, koloss and immutable are variations on the same fucking ideas. at least the band grew and tried to find themselves, and perfected themselves in the era between nothing and obzen. Mastodon stopped giving a shit since Crack the Skye.
EDIT : If I want to hear hardcore mixed with lounge , and I don’t want to learn to scream, play the sax , drums, guitar, bass etc, and I have a machine that can interpret that for me, why shouldn’t it enrich my day? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ-K647LViU
EDIT2 : You wanna tell me that there’s more value than the latest Boardroom generated pop album with no AI compared to Pho Que which was made by someone who understands what goes on under the hood with the way the AI would generate the music to fulfil their personal tastes in music and curiosity?
EDIT3 : You know what, I’ll even multiple down. I spent the morning checking out bands from a gig poster in town, unheard regional bands, and you know what, they were all generic and mid. 6/10. I was hoping to go to the gig, have a good time, discover great local talent, but I don’t want to, since it’s not worth it to bother going out to do that while I have other responsibilities or ways of having fun.
I’m still listening to Pho Que (ai generated by the guys at dadabots, through suno, the company in the OP) and I’m enjoying myself more than when I was listening to their generic efforts at black metal. There’s more dynamics, more surprises and it’s better overall.
This man needs to be sentenced to 10 years solitary confinement in a room with 100 electronically controlled vuvuzelas serenading him at all hours of the day and night.
I think one week of that will render you insane
Corporate will suck your soul and drink your blood when you’re young. They will take or steal everything they can from you to accumulate money, just to make sure you would not have any other options than work for them until you die or get old and become useless. After that if you’re lucky to climb the ladder they will push you off the building for certain death and replace with younger generation. Is that really the future we want ?
CEO should have consulted an AI for backlash on that sentiment.
That’s disingenuous and fucking dumb.
Granted, I personally no longer enjoy playing music, but I did it for about 22 years. It got old for me because I realized it was a hobby that was costing me money, and health.
I no longer desire to spend Friday and Saturday nights at bars, lugging gear around in order to play songs for a few drunk people. Like… when you break it down, it’s incredibly depressing.
Nothing kills the joy of a hobby faster than trying to make a living out of it.
It’s one of the symptoms of the SYSTEM when a kid shows talent and/or strong interest in a thing, it could be most anything, the adults that this child looks to for guidance push them to make this interest and/or talent into a career. And as soon as that suggestion takes root in that child’s head then it just time before the hobby/talent is abandoned with regret and sadness.
This may not be universal but it’s not rare either - as you know first hand.
Hope one day you can, if you want, get back to what drew you towards playing music in the first place and I hope you find joy in it for nothing more than that.
What you’re saying makes a lot of sense and seems to add up.
Also, thank you for the kind words.
Know that us drunk people love you and people like you for it. Can imagine it gets old for a lot of folks though.
Glad you filled in what the health risk was on the second paragraph because I immediately thought “What risk could you have playing music? Are you drumming with your head?”
Gradual hearing loss is ironically a huge risk/side effect of playing live music. You can get specialty earbuds now that reduce db while not loosing too much frequency range, but it is still noticeable.
Tech bros’ lack of empathy means he literally can’t imagine anyone liking something he doesn’t.
Finally the actual reason he said this.
Suno was what radicalized my stance on AI, and I refuse to use any of it.
As a solo hobbyist game dev who struggles with art, I had a pretty reserved approach for AI for stuff like art, animation or most notably voice acting, which makes the game a lot better but is really hard to do if you’re not a native speaker or don’t have a budget. My plan was to start with AI filling in places I couldn’t do, but then pledge that 100% of the first sales will go towards paying an actual artist/VA and replace the assets as soon as possible. That felt like a fair compromise.
And then I tried Suno. You see, as a programmer, my line of work isn’t really threatened by AI. Quite the contrary - it hinders the learning process of so many new programmer who will end up missing core skills, that it kind of increases my job security.
And since stuff like VA is something I don’t really understand, I mostly considered it as an asset that AI can temporally provide.
After trying Suno, which makes something I am passionate about - I’ve tried and failed for the past few years to learn instruments, and starting a band and making music is one of my so far unattainable dreams, it was so, so devastating. To see something you’ve actively struggled with, dreamed about, and made an effort for to overcome the challenges, unsuccessfuly so far, be overtaken by a literal three word prompt, making a better song I probably ever will - it’s so heartbreaking, demoralizing and awful. Which is something I haven’t realized when thinking about art I was not invested into, but now, thanks to Sunk, I see how it must feel for every artist, and I refuse to support any of it. It gave me determination and motivation to make the effort towards meeting people who do VA or assets I need, and collaborating, even if it postpones everything by a long time.
Fuck AI, and fuck this guy. The product may be useful and is pretty mindblowing, but it comes at a cost of making a lot of artists demotivated and miserable. Also, saying that “music is hard, people don’t want to” just adds salt to the wound, insult to the injury, and is really fucked up thing to say, after the product you’ve made affected and demoralized artists at large so much. Seriously, fuck that guy.
AI is also not very good at replacing artist or anyone if your standards aren’t in the Mariana trench. Best use of it is somewhat realistic clip art generation, otherwise it only generates a shitton of soulless stuff.
A version of generative AI with more human involvement would be closer to what I call “art”, but that is not what makes investors soyface over the tech, whose idea of art is “coming up with an idea”.
Its also terrible for originality. Itcan create a basic template, but that is all it will be. If you want to make music for your game, and you have a specific kind of theme and instrument in mind, you’d be hard-pressed getting that right with generative AI.
My coworker is using one of these sites and is uploading to YouTube. He says there’s a lot of curating he’s doing and listens to 14 hours of AI music a day to find the actual usable songs.
The songs he’s shared are okay, I wouldn’t have gathered they’re AI besides that they’re generic.
The thing I wonder is if people would accept this music knowing that it was generated.
I would not.
An old friend of mine was doing the same thing with Suno. He gave up after a while because he lost interest, because there’s not really anything to enjoy in the process.
more like it’s one of the few things people still can enjoy.
For now…
I totally suck at the piano/keyboard but I still enjoy it so much
Gross
Music, even the boring practice, is one of the few remaining joys in my life
FALSE.
I used to keep a piano keyboard next to my computer for loading downtime, and it was the least depressed days of my life.
Why not do it again then? Even a small keyboard might do.
I gave it to a relative that wanted to learn piano and I was too busy with work to sit at the comp/piano station, then never got around to getting another. I have a second hand seaboard now but I haven’t looked into setting it up or if it even works under linux
seaboard
This? That is… holy shit, really cool! I didn’t think there was anything beyond velocity and polyphony in terms of expanding the capabilities of what a keyboard controller could do. I kinda want one myself, now.
Also, LOL at the the other thing they sell that looks like a Theremin but actually uses computer vision to turn your hand gestures into MIDI commands. I don’t know what drugs that company’s product designers are on, but it’s the good shit.
or if it even works under linux
the midi definitely works, the firmware updates was the mystery. worst case I have a shitbook laptop in the closet with windows for doing such updates
edit: I remember what i thought might not work. the original board and the minis of the same time period can connect over bluetooth but it sounded like it worked fine on mac os but windows was nearly unusable, and no linux users even knew about the thing. No idea if the seaboard 2 or the current minis have that fucntionality.
How long do you think it would take to set up?
realistically probably a month or two. I’ve been in renovation limbo and parts of the house are incomplete, and I still need to redo some of the parts that are done.
just setting it up though, maybe like 30min of research on the clock at work when nobody is looking and maybe about the same for the actual setup.
I can’t believe I’ve never heard of the seaboard before. Just looked it up and have straight up cartoon heart eyes about it. What a cool instrument! I’m used to playing on a regular keyboard and then spending hours editing the expression in my DAW (for things like synth, strings, brass, wind, etc). The concept of playing it that way to begin with is kinda blowing my mind.
I demoed it before I took it home. Its super cool. Its the original 25 key model which I suspect will end up making me want the bigger one fairly quickly. Hopefully I’ll have time for it soon.
I hope so too! It can be so challenging to find time for what makes us happy in this day and age, but gosh is it important.
I don’t have a Seaboard, but FWIW it shows up as a valid controller in the menu for Bitwig Studio under Linux, so it might not be hard to set up at all. Bitwig also has great MPE support, and if my Linnstrument is anything to go off of, you’ll have a ton of run with MPE on the Seaboard. :)
If it’s a midi keyboard, it should be pretty easy to get working. No problem if you got a DAW definitely, but I’m sure there are enough programs that can play piano sounds at midi input.
And midi is mostly just USB nowadays, so connecting should be easy enough.
If it’s not a midi keyboard, it should have its own speakers, otherwise what’s even the purpose?
I swear I wish I wasn’t so stupid.
I have Roland electric drums and I couldn’t figure that shit out to save my life. I finally plugged them into my old Mac and Logic Pro just did it for me.
Electric drums are not a piano though. Getting drum pads (or pads in general) to work correctly can be a bit weird.
I seem to recall that it was convention for all drum pads to always be on midi channel 11, so even if your device normally outputs in channel one, it does that. Maybe try to set it to that? But it’s a long time ago that I’ve worked with that so don’t quote me.
A Yamaha Reface is a lovely thing for just that.
