Previous generations might have said the same thing about Ableton itself, vs playing a physical instrument. In that regard, AI might become just another power tool for creative expression.

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vunderba 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve always said that the more divergent the input is from the resulting output, then the less personal expression you have. For me, in order of moving away from meaningful control in generative models, it goes: “text → code,” “text → picture,” and, at the very bottom, “text → music.”

For me personally, music composition begins and ends with the motif - the melody itself. It’s the part I enjoy the most, and it’s also the part I have the most individual control over since I can sing.

Everybody makes music differently, but if you lack the ability to play an instrument and you also can’t whistle or sing, it’s hard for me to imagine how you’d have any meaningful control over the melody.

How would a non‑musician express an actual melody that they came up with (beyond simple things like instrumentation and general “feelings”) in text? RED RED RED BLUE. (Sorry couldn't resist a Mission Hill reference here.)

With all that out of the way, there's still lots of room for using AI in music. I’ve used it to take some of my existing songs, mostly pianistic in nature, and swap out instrumentation and arrangements just to play around with different soundscapes. It's like BIAB on steroids.

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tkiolp4 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agree to some extent. At some point though we jump the thin line between creative expression and… magic?

Like if at some point I can just say “Generate a song similar to Smooth Criminal, different enough to not trigger copyright claims” and it just works, and everyone loves it… well is that creative thinking?

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Archer6621 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think you can quantify the amount of creative expression you engage in by looking at all the decision points in the creative process where you are directly involved in making the decision. For an LLM prompt, that is going to be fairly limited by definition. I suppose the quality can be measured then by how novel and effective the output/approach of each decision is then, how much impact is made.

The amount of creative expression does not necessarily correlate with impact. Something can be created with nearly zero creative expression, that ends up making a significant impact. In that case you are more of a director than an artist I suppose, in that you direct the high-level process and only make decisions there. You can call it creative thinking in the same way a good businessman makes smart high-level decisions and then delegates what is downstream to others, with decisions being optimized for impact.

I think you can be creative "within a frame" in that sense, e.g. creative in the way you wield an LLM for instance, which is on a different scale compared to being creative on the piano roll with how you organize and brainstorm your melodies. It's just a different skill set at a different granularity altogether. But the one thing that I think holds, is that higher level methods have less creative expression by definition, because you are delegating more decisions to other faculties; you are seeing less of the "creator" in the work.

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PotatoPrime 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think there is something to it. First, it would still need to be different enough from Smooth Criminal to avoid listeners just going back to the original. Then, if anyone could just type a simple prompt like that and get a hit, wouldn't we be flooded with 'sounds like' singles, which would turn the audience off of those, and now, you're not making hits...

I think there will always be more to it then just a simple prompt, but having the vision to make a song that sounds pleasing, and unique enough is certainly creative to me.

Of course, there's also a huge demand for generic, inoffensive music (think theme/intro songs, waiting room and elevator music). If we could make that more enjoyable to listen to, would anyone care if that's not creative thinking?

You could make (and many do) the same arguments over covers of songs, even when the covers end up eclipsing the original. Where was the creative thinking in that?

	▲	rexpop 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> it would still need to be different enough from Smooth Criminal to avoid listeners just going back to the original Or just cheaper to license so that Spotify/Pandora promote it in your algorithmic feed. It's audio skimpflation!

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cardanome 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> AI might become just another power tool for creative expression

It is NOT a digital tool to create art. Yes, people used to be snobbish about digital art. Some still are. This doesn't say anything about generative AI because that isn't a tool.

The closest equivalent is hiring someone on fiverr to create music for you and claiming you created the music because you wrote the "prompt".

There is nothing creative about using generative AI. Is is a form of management. The difference is that instead of extracting labor directly your are extracting dead labor from the million of artists whose work was stolen to train the AI.

	▲	PotatoPrime 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't disagree if its building the whole song, but given that this is tooling within the DAW, if an artist went in and said 'give me 5 alternative reverb sounds on this track', is that not using AI as a tool? Yes, the AI is creating the sound profile, but is that any different then using presets, or samples? I used to play around for days just making sounds on my synth. The process of creating them was often just turning random knobs and dials. If the AI is turning those for me, thats not a tool?