Remix.run Logo
BizarroLand 3 days ago

When digital recording became a thing, there was a huge backlash against it from the artists and studios who had invested obscene amounts of money into full analog recording studios, saying that it made the process too easy and would fill the world with amateur slop.

Records were released with labels proudly saying that the albums were recorded fully analog.

When Autotune became a thing, there were artists complaining that it was inauthentic and cheating, allowing talentless hacks to sound like they have more natural talent than actually talented human beings, and released albums proudly saying that they used no autotune.

Even now, the hint that a natural sounding singer is using autotune is a common insult among recording musicians, even though almost everyone does.

Whether you agree with the original analog non-autotuned musicians or not, (which, honestly, I think they were correct to a certain degree, but that's its own discussion), AI music generation is almost certainly here to stay.

That being said, digital recording made making music possible for people who would have never had the opportunity otherwise, and had generated a lot of good stuff that would have otherwise never have existed.

Autotune has enabled people to express themselves the way they want to express themselves even though they didn't otherwise have the talent or skill to do so.

AI "might" make it so that people who can imagine a song they could never spend the time and energy needed to create such a song to create the songs they hear in their heads they way they imagine them.

AI "might" give people the ability to express themselves in ways they never could before.

It doesn't yet do that, it only remixes what it's heard before. But combine that with people then tweaking/reprocessing that output, doing other things to it, making AI mashed potato music into crisp potato chip music, it can be a good thing.

Doesn't mean the au-naturale artists are obsolete or wrong, I would rather listen to 1 mediocre human musician than a SOTA AI music box, but if the music box is used as part of the total, I'm ok with that.