Note: Use your headphones for this post! On August 21 st , one week ago, the world’s first album composed and produced by an AI was unveiled. In collaboration with the human singer/songwriter Taryn Southern, the album I AM AI was released, featuring the single “Break Free”: (Please visit the site to view this video) Taryn worked with Amper, an artificially intelligent music composer, producer, and performer. From what I can tell, Taryn provided the vocal track and the lyrics; Amper did the rest: the melody, chord structure, instrumentation, mixing, and overall ambiance of the work. Amper was designed specifically to work in collaboration with human musicians; specifically, Amper requires an input of mood, length, and genre, and almost immediately returns some samples. From there, the human can refine the sample, elaborate, or refine instrumentation. For example, with just a few inputs, Amper returns the following 30-second sample . Amper's name for this opus? Ambient Uplifting Cinematic . Descriptive AND concise! (For seven more examples, including “World Percussion”, “Happy Pop”, and “Playful Indie Piano”, see the Amper Soundcloud page.) Drew Silverstein, one of the founders of the company, has raised $4M in funding, pitching Amper as a fast, affordable, and royalty-free way to create the music for more “functional” projects (like commercials or short online videos), where most companies would currently use pre-written stock music. The result, I daresay, lives up to the pitch: cheap, boring, and lifeless music that uses sound to create atmosphere; it does not create actual music that anyone would want to go to a concert hall to hear. My Bias See, here’s the thing. I have definite opinions about music. I majored in music in college (lo, these mumblemumble years ago), focusing on vocal music and music history, and was an active musician for over ten years after that. I hosted a classical music radio show on our local NPR-affiliated radio station for a dozen years. In my radio hosting capacity, I have interviewed composers, performers, members of ensembles, and soloists. My CD library is extensive (yes, I know CDs are antiques, but still), and my online playlists are even more so. I’m active in the arts community in Santa Cruz and have been since I moved here in 1995. I’m telling you this to show that I know from music. My prejudice is not just because I’m a Luddite. The Complete History of Western Music in about 250 Words Bear with me. This is a lot of stuff compressed into one section. There is a pendulum that swings between formal and expressive styles, which has swung for the last 600 years of Western music history. When the trend of an era reaches its pinnacle, the pendulum begins to swing the other way, usually with a specific composer making the pivot point (easiest example to show is how Beethoven practically single-handedly changed the pendulum trajectory from the “Classical” era into the “Romantic” era). Even the kinds of names of the works from different eras are drastically different in those two musical eras—compare Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major (well into the Classical) with Romance sans Paroles by Gabriel Fauré (a mainstay of the Romantic); compare Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C major with Claude Debussy's (1862 - 1918) Clair de lune . In these examples, the Classical pieces are "form over function"—so utterly stuck on the formal structure of the piece that to name it, you only cite the form (a sonata, or a dance or a symphony, for example) and the key. In the Romantic era, in contrast, musical works were inspired by the decidedly informal “romance” or “moonlight”, and the structure of many works was entirely up to the composer, depending on what they wanted to achieve with their composition. The Reality of Western Music No matter the era, however, every composer has had to come face-to-face with one of two realities: The first is that at least within the confines of the Western musical notation, there are only about 60 notes to work with (there are 88 keys on a modern piano, and in piano music, it’s rare to use the very top and very bottom of the keyboard.) If you’re composing for a singer, an above-average singer has a range of about 3 octaves, or about 24 notes on the keyboard. Add any formal “rules”, like being in a certain key (which implies which chords can be used and in what order) or structure of the composition, and mathematically, you decrease the possibilities of melodies, harmonies, and tonalities that are possible. (A sample that I find dull? Try Clementi's (1752 –1832) Sonatina Op.36 No.1 in C Major . I think every piano student has had to learn this little sonata.) The second reality: If you stray too far from what is “listenable”—if the work you create is only understood by deconstructing it—no one will like to hear it. No matter how heartfelt and creative, it will quickly fade into obscurity. (This led to what my spouse calls “Bleep bloop blop” music. A sample? Try Anton Weburn’s Variations, Op. 27 [1936]. Not exactly my cuppa.) So when any musical trend comes up against some kind of restriction, whether it be formal or impressionistic, the pendulum changes its trajectory. The formal composers reject the rules and limits and come to focus on different aspects of music, using other tools in their musical toolbox: different uses of tonality, different instrumentation, different sounds, different interpretations, different inspiration. The composers on the other side of the spectrum may come to yearn for the structure of form, from which they can hang their expression. They may create new structures, new forms, new rules, and new ways to codify their compositions so listeners can understand it. In my opinion, the most moving and effective pieces in the so-classical repertoire take both trends into account equally; a classic example (see what I did there) is Beethoven’s 6 th symphony, “ Pastoral ”. Here, Beethoven straddles the formal structure favored by the Classicists, while being inspired by nature, a trend that was rapidly taken up by the Romanticists. “How happy I am to be able to walk among the shrubs, the trees, the woods, the grass and the rocks! For the woods, the trees and the rocks give man the resonance he needs.” —Beethoven, summer of 1808, upon finishing his 6th Symphony Now, for a musical trend—or any artistic trend—to accurately reflect the era in which it appears, it must take the actual humans into consideration. We as humans are the sum of all our influences: political, social, economic, artistic, religious, cultural, academic, technological...—and all of these influences involve other people. Take out that influence, and you just have background noise. Which brings us back to our friend Amper. More than the Sum of its Parts What is a melody, anyway? If there are a finite number of notes, further restricted by the “rules” of tonality, it stands to reason that there are a finite number of melodies. Any melodies that haven’t already been written can be picked up by AI, right? After all, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” consists of 48 beats (16 of which are repeated exactly), and six separate pitches: So, for the first line: (16 beats) × (6 pitches) = 96 possibilities any note landing on any beat. But since there are two kinds of notes—one that lasts one beat, and one that lasts two beats—multiply 96 × 2 , which equals 192 options for the first line. Is that right? Did I do the math correctly? Aren’t there more than 200 tunes? Didn’t my grandfather whistle more than 200 songs? Now, when you add the “rules” of western tonality (implied chord progressions, and so forth), the options decrease significantly. To explain them would go into way too much music theory to make my original point, so just trust me on this. If you only use two kinds of notes, six pitches, and 16 beats, there’s really only so much you can do with it. No wonder “ Twinkle Twinkle ” (or “ Baa, Baa, Black Sheep ” or the alphabet song—even Mozart composed 12 variations !) has shown up everywhere. Try Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World ! Same tune. If your adoration of Louis Armstrong is now tarnished by this revelation, don’t worry; he’s just as much a genius as ever. “Plagiarism is nothing new. We don’t always know what we’re stealing. I wrote a hit record for the Ripchords called Hey Little Cobra, and it went on to become the most important hot-rod song ever. But a UCLA musicologist later showed me I had taken the tune from a song called Mama’s Little Baby Loves Short’nin’ Bread. It was public domain, so we were okay.” —Carol Connors, Oscar-nominated songwriter (For more information about the ubiquity of this tune and my source for the above quote, check out this article published by The Telegraph in 2011 . Fantastic bit of research there.) This phenomenon appears everywhere. Don’t even get me started on how many times Pachelbel’s Canon appears throughout classical and pop music alike. Once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. So the developers of Amper have taken all of those variables—the entirety of western music theory—and plugged it into their system. I suspect they have added lots of machine learning in there, too, analyzing existing pieces of music and identifying discrete patterns that are repeated throughout. They have added specific instrumentation, and called it complete: voilà, we don’t have to pay composers anymore! Not quite dead yet! (I think I'll go for a walk...) My point—and I do have one—is this: Just because we can plug in all the variables into a big computer, doesn’t mean that a computer can compose everything we could possibly want to hear, so John Williams (composer of most of the music in George Lucas films, like Star Wars and Indiana Jones , for example) better find another job. Music composition is not dead. It’s not even dying. It’s just changing to accommodate the changing paradigms of our world. Yes, of course it can be effective to use Amper to write commercial jingles or music to play in the background during suspenseful movie scenes, but it doesn’t have the heart and soul of composed music. It does what it set out to do: touch something in our human psyches that we "mere mortals" can't readily identify, to create atmosphere. It does not, however, create music . Not yet, from what I have heard, anyway. For this art form to really fly, I think someone will have to do what Beethoven did: take the best of both worlds and make something entirely new. And I haven’t heard it yet. But I'll keep listening. —Meera Musical links in one handy list Break Free Amper Soundcloud Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major Fauré’s Romance sans Paroles Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 1 in C major Debussy’s Clair de lune Clementi’s Sonatina Op.36 No.1 in C Major Weburn’s Variations, Op. 27 Beethoven’s 6 th symphony, “ Pastoral ” Mozart’s 12 Variations in C Major 'Ah vous dirai-je, Maman' K.265 (Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star) Louis Armstrong’s What A Wonderful World Pachelbel’s Canon (an explanation how you hear it everywhere) More examples of re-used themes: Mendelssohn’s Lieder Ohne Worte (excerpt) and Danny Elfman’s Batman theme from the 1989 film Gregorian chant: Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”) and this collection of examples of quotations of the Dies Irae in famous films , usually in the trombones; it’s amazing and appears everywhere, to the point that I wonder if it’s written into our collective DNA Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata, 2 nd Movement , and Billy Joel’s This Night . My head just about exploded when I first heard it… I think Billy Joel pretty blatantly stole it, though!![]()
↧