If A.I. took the place of musicians, would you listen to it?


A few questions which I'm curious about. If you have a take on this, please share!

Here's the question:

A.I. is increasingly playing a role in music creation. Not just assisting composers, but generating music.

If you found an A.I. generated song to be enjoyable, interesting, etc. would you have any objection to supporting it by listening and paying for the service which provides it?

If more and more music was like this, and there were fewer and fewer jobs for musicians, would that bother you? -- I'm thinking here about the aesthetics of the issue, not the economics or justice of it. 

I'm trying to understand if people just want to have a certain set of sensations from music and they don't care if there are human beings creating it -- or if it's important for you to know that what you're experiencing from music (or art) is coming from human beings.

Thank you for thinking about this.

128x128hilde45

I can see that people here are talking about very different levels of AI advancement. Who knows, in time those robots might be able to replicate emotions, or even generate them to become a fully developed artificial life form. Would you accept this kind of humanoid-like being ? Tough, isn't it ? Any fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation ? Fantasy might become reality, but not tomorrow.

The idea that music can really only be created by humans is very limiting.  Some of the most musical sounds I've ever heard were not created by humans.  A few examples:

water falls

a thunder storm, especially with lightning

bird songs

rain falling on the roof

tides crashing against the shoreline

various wind noises

coyotes howling

crackling fire

The natural world provides a myriad of sounds that are quite musical.  The may or may not be compositions, but they are organized enough to be readily recognized and they do incite an emotional response. 

The may or may not be compositions, but they are organized enough to be readily recognized and they do incite an emotional response. 

This is a really intriguing comment. If they may be a composition, who is the composer?

I admire and get beauty out of nature, too, but I don't attribute intention to those patterns, colors, sounds. A sunset, to me, is not saying anything even though it's beautiful. But some hear the "language" or "meaning" of nature (or God/gods) so I would want to remain open minded, here.

hilde45, you should drop the whole intention angle. It’s misleading. The throbbing of a big twin motor is definitely music to the mechanic’s ears and only a few are immune to the heavy metal thunder -- intent notwithstanding.

Btw, very nice thread you started!

Recently discovered Boris Blank's "Resonance" album and was enchanted with it on a resolving stereo system late at night. It requires a decent system for best effect. It's a bit kitschy, but the luscious quality of the sounds is very charming and will make your system sound very accomplished.

Blank apparently works with a huge library of "samples," and given that technique AI could probably generate similar music in the here and now and probably already is doing so not withstanding that many listeners would be referring to this music as "artificial" from the get-go.

My files were downloaded from Quobuz, so it's available from them in .wav for streaming.

I say, "Let it do its thing." Let's see what happens.