AI Music is Not Music – Adam Neely

Lol. Using an AI is not "musical" but whacking buttons on a digital workstation is. Does this dude really think that Mozart wouldn't call his workstation not very musical? This is PEAK starting from the conclusion and retroactively inventing specious argumentation. Get over it, AI can do our jobs. It's ok.

On the point of copying Adam's music, intent matters. If I were to to copy it with the intent of paying tribute to Adam, as gesture of love and appreciate of his music or as creative or social commentary on the art form then that has merit. If I copy it with the intent of undercutting and replacing Adam and his band, driven purely by commercial motives with no care of love or appreciation of the artform, than that doesn't have merit, that if theft and that is why copyright exists. Now image I'm not a doing this as a human scale but at an inhuman scale where I can now generate Adams music far faster than he can even create it himself. That is unquestionably imoral.

If an amateur musician composed a song in the style of Adam Neely, he might take it as a compliment. If a musician working the same scene as Adam Neely did that, he might view it as a threat. In the latter case, Adam Neely could accept the threat and advance his musical style in ways that are difficult to reproduce. Could be apocryphal, but I think that's how bebop was made.

Some important concerns, like disruption to the market and job security. But most of Adam's points come from a significant misunderstanding of AI and human capability. Most of his answers sound like "I think AI is bad, so how do I justify that", instead of engaging with the topics genuinely. It just sounds like a knee jerk reaction.

While I do agree with most of the conclusions like how we should deal with AI and the negative parts of it, I completely disagree the way Adam defends them. Adam's answers almost never stand up to the smallest scrutiny and he refuses to give ground even faced with it. I feel this discussion didn't really add anything to the conversation beyond being fan service.

I think a really cool use of Generative AI in music would be a Sample Creator. I don’t know if this exists already, but the idea of creating any sample, whether it is a vocal ad lib or just a bell sound or sound FX is so interesting, especially if AI gets so good that you can be very intricate with the prompt to generate exactly what you want so then you can add it to your own track.

As Adam said in the video, the reason why AI music feels lazy is because it doesn’t take any skill to create and as a musician myself I have tried using Suno just to see what it is about and become so frustrated because the sound that I was imagining I would get when typing the prompt was nowhere near similar to the end result the AI spit out, and you just have to keep pressing a button to generate new stuff until you get something “good”. The slot machine process as Adam says it. I genuinely don’t see a future where completely AI generated music becomes the new norm, it’s just too random.

By the end of the video Adam mentions Rick Beato’s argument of autotune and quantising as a “preparation of the industry for AI music” and I actually couldn’t agree more. He mentions Angine de Poitrine as an example of the opposite and tbh I can think of more examples too of un-autotuned and un-quantised music such as Geese, black midi or BCNR. I think it is already happening in our generation and I personally see it happening even more in the future.

To get to a point where you can say 'my favourite music is the music I make' boycotts the whole bit where you spend years hearing, soaking in and getting excited about music. People that make music love and use other people's as a reference point! You cannot create anything in isolation, even to write a prompt in AI you need some idea of what you want the music to sound like. Every brilliant artist that says "I make the music I'd like to hear in the world" also has a ton of influences outside of themselves that allow them to do that. I would have never have picked up a guitar if I hadn't seen old footage of Hendrix at Woodstock as a kid and thought it the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Brian Wilson needed to hear the Beatles to create Pet Sounds, and they all needed Elvis to start making music at all, who also needed Gospel music to do everything he did. Every unique artist is an encyclopaedic tapestry of influences that inspire them to do 'their thing', seemingly in isolation, but not really. They would likely tell you all about those inspirations quite openly and excitedly…. because they love music!!!

Art is communication, if there is no longer any human involved, you are not connecting with anyone, it is not art anymore. We are heading in to a solopsistic world, very sad.

I have been in the "industry" for over 35 years. 25 years ago nobody would touch a digital mixer, now nobody will touch an analog one.
In 1906 John Philip Sousa said that that the invention of the gramophone (or phonograph) would stop people from playing live music.
Copyright law is broken.

34:02 what may well happen, and in my opinion more likely to happen, is that a lot of stuff won’t in fact be heard because of the deluge of AI slop. But there is no right given to artists, either skilled or lumpen that their stuff is heard. If people want the slop they’ll have it. Neither is there a right given to session hacks that they have gainful employment.

But what Neely almost said is that creativity is often generated by responses to limitation, intellectual, physical, technological. AI strikes me as being cognitively different.

In the final analysis though, I wouldn’t use it, I think, because it diminishes me. I would have done nothing and got nothing back from the process.

“<music tool> is not that hard to learn” clearly he has never seen Ludwig try to make music.

Fucking Huel? Disgusting 🤮. Wow, what a way to destroy your credibility. FFS. So stupid.

As an underground band that rejects ai and does everything diy, thank you for this!

Music beings people together. Kids currently learning to play instruments are instinctively reaching out for connection and something tangible, a sense of personal achievement. It's deep within us to seek the real.

My partner is a pro musician and he ran an old song he wrote through AI and the results were impressive. He got quite despondent and said that's it I'm obsolete the music industry is dead this is what it is now. And I said no – you wrote that song and you can perform it on stage. An AI can't.

My 2 worlds colliding

LLMs do make music, but it's just fairly generic sounding. It makes for really good background noise where you just want something to fill the silence, but it's nothing compared to the music made by an actually talented composer. By their very nature, LLMs can only try to mimic depth and emotion and do not have ears, so they cannot judge or gauge it. Still, it ends up being better than I'd have expected, quite a bit better but still quite lacking next to real music made by a person.

ULTIMATE CROSSOVER!

Two of my favourite YouTubers from entirely different worlds come together. Brilliant.

8:43 Good point….if you would replace your favorite football team with AI controlled robots, playing perfect football, winning every game….how many people would go to the games? Or closer possibility wise, replace the drivers in Nascar, Indy, IMSA and F1 with Tesla driving AI control. But you are perfectly fine with music AI? So you don't care for the people who could literally loose their life for your entertainment being safe, but you equally do not care for musicians loosing their livelyhood as well? Morally bankrupt, you must be.

17:14 Also good point. When imitating another persons music it is not creating a carbon copy of the style, it is always a new take on it. That turns into a genre. A group of bands or persons, creating music that is identifiably theirs. Like trip hop, grunge, hair metal, punk, neo soul, old school hip hop, trap, UK garage, kraut rock, new wave, ska, reggae, you get it. Suno can copy a genre, but inheritly never create one. Because it is derivative by nature.

Reggeaton is an interesting genre since most of it is claimed to be based on a single drum beat/groove. The creators of this beat are now sewing the whole genre. Interesting to see how that plays out in the courts.

28:51 This is dependent on the way you are wired. Prince for instance is the sole musician on most of his songs, sometimes using collaborations. Others create also alone. For instance DJ Shadow made Endtroducing on a MPC 60 Mk2. Jean Michelle Jarre created mostly alone, as did Klaus Schulze. Electronic music makes that possible as does sampling and hard disk recording. 31:31 But on the other hand you see an army of producers involved in Kendrick Lamars latest Grammy winning song. Producers from all over the world who probably never met IRL before the Grammies ceremony. But rapping is a skill in itself. So is sampling. Some rappers are also producers, but there is complete industry behind most rappers that create the beats they rap over. And at that point…..AI becomes pointless. J Dilla will never be met and always be mist.

30:33 Craft can be two things, intellectual craft and physical craft. You have to seperate these. For instance Beethoven didnt't play trumpet but could write for the instrument. Brilliantly. 42:10 In his later works, being deaf, he composed totaly in his mind. If you use a DAW these days you do the same. Suno takes all the intellectual satisfaction from the process, people think they created something when they uploaded a piece of music to Suno and typed "likewise" on their keyboard. But they didn't.

58:16 You know the story behind Damien Hurst's Butterfly works, do you. It was using AI before AI was invented. Basically he reduced himself to being a curator.

1:00:42 I feel your pain. We as electronic musicians are used to hearing 16 or 32 track 24 or even 32 bit recordings at 192.000 samples per second. And then the cruel mixdown to 2 16 bit 44100 stereo tracks happens. And even with good mastering…human or AI, it never gets to the level of the multitrack. And I know I only have two ears, but the dynamics are lost in translation.

1:12:27 The recent explosion of concert ticket prices is not helping to socialize music. A lot of music venues had to close shop in the UK for instance. The BBC made a documentary about the problem.

1:18:57 Or even the context of the artist. For instance Polly Jean Harvey. I own 6 CDs of her. Played them regularly. Until I saw her on TV promoting fox hunting after that they were never played again. She owned chickens as a kid. I like foxes.

1:25:02 So when you gatekeep AI to the people who don't need it anyway it is okay. No sir on this we profoundly disagree. That is Timba washing his hands in innocence. Or better nonsense. What I do however would agree on is using it as a tool. There are a lot of tools these days that can help create music. And in this AI can be used. For instance tools like Scaler 3, to explore scales and chord progressions. It doesn't create a whole song but it can gently steer you away from your standard patterns and even act as a subtle teacher. Like a music theory book can, but way more readable. Tools like RipX to analyse the structure of a song. You still have to put in the work but you have another tool to work with. Or the grooves in Ableton to mimic the tools like an MPC 3000 swing and sound, since most people can't get their hands on a real one.

Alex, generative AI is NOT a tool. A hammer obviously is a tool. Mine is 124 years old. It still works only when I use it. Generative AI is an end product. The prompt and the endresult are not related 1:1. As the same prompt can generate a different outcome with another random number guiding the process. That is how AI works. You create a prompt, the AI throws in a different random number and creates a different iteration of your input every time. If you fixate the random number you get the same result every time. You can do that in some open source AI image generation software. And you have no idea Alex that there is a whole market for musicians composing jingles, title musics, and music for games, that now can easily be replaced by royalty free AI generated slop.

Rick Beato finally made a video about Angine de Poitrine (which is a cardiac condition in case your French is lacking).

If AI conceived and realized a video of the perfect football, basketball, soccer game – would any spectator care? I would argue the answer is no — simply because it wasn't real. It didn't actually happen. The entire point is that it happened and that's what made it amazing and worth the spectator's time.

I feel like there is something similar with music. On some level, the human contribution needs to be extremely significant for the consumer to be emotionally invested.

It gets more interesting when the consumer can no longer tell the difference between AI generated and natural performances. Going back to sports – what if that perfect game generated by AI were indistinguishable from a real game?