TimR

It's called the "amateurs disease", to make something more exciting, just play it quicker. The alternative is to actually work out why it sounds dull. Some bands have sped up recordings but I suspect that's under controlled conditions while listening to it. I also played Livin' on a Prayer in a band with a drummer who would speed up. I used to spend most of the gig trying to hold him back. One gig I'd had enough and just went with him. By the end of the song the singer couldn't get the words in and was giving the drummer daggers, and the people on the dance floor were begining to give up one by one.

I blame the "keeping up with the drummer" mindset. Even I have fallen into that trap in my post. The drummer should be playing at the appropriate volume. Too many non-musical drummers playing at one volume. But that's another thread.

Electronics is a lot cheaper and easier to mass produce than it was 'in the old days' Manufacturers will do market research and watch sales figures and know what sells. My first Amp in 1987 was 100w. It was just about loud enough to keep up with a drummer in a pub. But everything got louder as it got cheaper. That's not good for anyone imo. Everything is getting lighter now. It'll get to the point where everything becomes 1000W as it'll cost the same and be the same size as a 100W amp.

It won't be free for long.

AI slop. The backlash has started. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wx2dz2v44o

Tube is easy to mistype as tibe as U and I are next to each other. Tibe autocorrects to time.

No. The rest of us needed someone clever to spot it as well. 🤣

Conversely, I've just had an hour long meeting with a couple of people I don't know very well on a personal level. We discussed something very important to all of us and required every ounce of my emotional intelligence to learn and pick up on their micro body language and inferred language. I'm ready to go back to bed. I certainly couldn't do that regularly for very long. When machines have learned to do that, we are in trouble. Until machines learn to do that, they are not going to be much of a problem to us.

I would say the first three hours of my weekday, every day, is exactly the same and can be done on autopilot. I suggest most people are the same.

A lot of what we think of as human intelligence is just accessing a database. Very little of what we do requires actual intelligence*. *Luckily, or most people wouldn't survive longer than a day

I can't imagine anyone employing people to sit a desk all day, looking at the music you like and then working out what other music you would like. For a start, no human would have that massive encyclopedic knowledge of songs and genres, including album tracks etc. Certain jobs/processes are only possible and have been created because of AI. I suspect this will be the better use. Self driving cars, where one accident can be analysed and then the scenario be exported to all the other self driving cars so they don't make the same mistake, unlike human drivers who all seem to make the same mistakes over and over again and never learn from either themselves or others.

A lot of kids are being taught programming by assembling pre built units, that do things, together. We should remember that a lot of programming we do, if we are using a language is also assembling things that other people have already written for us. No one writes in binary or assembler. Very few of us have built our own amplifiers, leads, guitars. We all rely on the donkey work being already done for us. It just depends on what level of individual human input you're comfortable with. Seems most of us draw the line at the actual performance. There's some very interesting music created from received telescopic data by NASA's Sonification project. I think all AI produce should be labelled as such.

Wood isn't magnetic though?

Before the days the internet really got going I received an email reveiw from a 'producer' who had been at one of our gigs. I'm sure he was trying to be helpful. I read it several times before replying - "Thanks for your email." In hindsight I think that was 4 words too many.

"And this next one is one that my computer wrote earlier"...

Not really. There's no actual skill in assembling something the same over and over again. Practically anyone who has ever worked on a production line can do it. They have children doing it in some countries. I used to put bottles on a conveyor belt in a bottling plant. No skill, just a bad back. Robots do it now, thank god. This is why AI will only replace certain mundane tasks.

That's basically replacing a key requirement of what it means to be a musician. Although it will be interesting if it can do that in real time with other musicians and then improvise.

Quite. It's only free while we do their Beta testing for them.

It's the new world order. We all become one assimilated culture all speaking the same language, living by the same rules, using the same currency, eating the same food. I think there's a book about it.

Quite. The CGI should enhance the storyline, not be the whole film. AI in music should be there to do the same. Improve, not replace.

Friends often come along. My son is keen (he plays drums) but he's now living and working abroad. My wife has been to one gig since we got married (nearly 30 years ago).

Interesting fact. Everyone's ear canals are different lengths and shapes (that should not come as a surprise) which means everyone hears things differently to everyone else. If you swapped your ears for someone else's, your brain would really struggle to understand what it was hearing. The same is true for eyes. What one person's eyes present to the brain as red is different to what someone else's do. Which is OK, because we calibrate our ears so that an F# is an F# no matter who you are. It does mean that one resonant frequency for one person would be different for someone else.

YouTube creators create A and B versions of titles and thumbnails to see which gets most attention. Maybe AI will do similar, or maybe it will the be humans' job to listen to tracks for quality control. Ultimately AI has no sensors or hormones to measure whether what they produce is working. Comedians and live musicians get instant feedback from audiences. Whether or not they listen to the feedback or not depends - there are plenty of artists who have spent years looking for audiences who 'get' them. 🤣

As humans we get bored very quickly and thrive on new and exciting things. While AI just copies stuff that is already there, it'll get boring really quickly. Part of the attraction of any 'latest hit', is the anticipation of the next release and how will it be better than the last one. Scrolling through Facebook is losing attraction very quickly as it seems like huge AI farms, scraping posts and reposting as original content, have taken over. The cheaper the tech becomes, the harder it will become to find quality original content, we are already seeing this with every angst ridden teenager with access to garageband releasing an Album. It's a spiral to attract the Lowest Common Denominator, TV went down that route and YouTube is slowly following.

My BandMix profile is still live. There's no reminder emails sent to you asking if your profile is up to date. I don't think people actively update adverts when they've found someone.