I’m assuming everyone here listens to music somewhat regularly, but I’m curious about how much you care about it. And i specifically want to know about your enjoyment regardless if it’s considered a timeless masterpiece or just a meme song. (feel free to share you favorite artists while respecting other’s tastes)
Do you care about having decent enough devices to enjoy it or do you just buy the cheapest pair of earbuds to silence the world around you?
Do you have favorite albums or do you just hit play on a random playlist and zone out?
Do you ever listen to music just to enjoy it and nothing else?
Do you talk with passion about your favorite songs/albums/artists?
Do you spend time searching for music?
TL;DR is music art or content to you?
It’s a difficult question to answer, “why do you like the things that you like?”
There is surprise that can be had at the generation phase. Sometimes I’ve got a particular detailed thing in mind that I’d like to hear about, I can end up writing pages of prompts, hand-tweaking the lyrics extensively, and regenerating bits until it’s just right. Other times I’ll throw out a very general vibe and just see what the AI comes up with. Some of my favourites are songs that definitely surprised me.
I’m actually not very familiar with the specific ways of describing the sound of different styles of songs - pop-rock, folk ballad, driving bass lines, all those sorts of descriptive terms are lost on me. So I usually let the AI come up with something for that based on a more general vibe, like I tell it a song should be “upbeat” and “informative” and it’ll come up with something. I get to hear a lot of variety that way.
Would you like me to link specific examples? Honestly I was expecting more of an “AI sucks and you suck” kind of response but I guess there’s enough responses to this post that I haven’t been noticed in among them all, so I could show you a playlist or a few specific tracks that show the kind of music that I enjoy that I don’t think I’d have ever been able to find in significant quantities from “traditional” music sources.
I admit that i am closer to the “AI bad” movement than not but curiosity wins anyway, i would be very happy to give it a try
Alright, here’s what’s probably my most diverse and “fun” playlist: Funny How Science Works. It’s a collection of songs about science and technology. Each song often starts out technical and educational and then veers off into insanity. For example Tectonic Truth, which is about plate tectonics, and Along the Lines of Blaschko, which is about Blaschko lines, a pattern of cell differentiation found in females but not in males as a result of X-chromosome inactivation (I think this is probably the only song in existence about Blaschko’s lines). Others are a bit less deranged, for example Million Player Co-Op is just about how awesome ants are. And speaking of ants, Little Pilot is about Dicrocoelium dendriticum, the liver lancet fluke, a parasitic flatworm that uses ants as an intermediate host.
Criterion Three is about how the IAU reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006 and in particular it’s about how much of a hypocrite S. Alan Stern was about it. This is perhaps one of the pettiest and most specific diss tracks I’m aware of. Speaking of diss tracks, The Pro-K is sung by a prokaryotic bacterium dissing eukaryotes for how unreasonably complicated our cellular structure is.
If you’re leaning anti-AI then you might enjoy my AI Apocalypse playlist, which is a bunch of songs along the general theme of AIs taking over the world. I’m not personally concerned about the stereotypical Skynet bombs-and-Terminators scenario, that’s Hollywood, but I do have some concern about the emergence of a Super-Persuader AI that’s better at convincing people to do stuff than humans are. So a number of the songs are along those lines.
Many of the songs in these playlists are ones where I wrote pages of detailed prompts and tinkered with the results, since they involve personal philosophies and technical scientific subjects that I wanted to make sure were right. Here’s an example of a song that was generated with just a simple prompt to see what would come out; Insert Romance Here, which I generated by simply telling the AI “generate the most absolutely generic possible romantic song.”
Here’s a playlist of songs that’s entirely about the RS-232 standard, a standard introduced in 1960 for serial transmission of data.
A lot of the songs in these lists have probably only been listened to by me, nobody else has ever heard them. It’s a little annoying that Producer.ai, the service I used to generate all of these, doesn’t support attaching an “author’s note” to each song; many of these only really make any sense with a little bit of context about what was in my head when I generated them. But hopefully most of the ones I’ve made public are self-explanatory to some degree.
Sorry for the late reply, it was a busy day. Anyway i heard some songs and i think i get the appeal of having songs that talk about specific topics that no regular musician would cover. The thing holding me back is that they don’t reach the level of detail and consistency that human artist can achieve, especially regarding instrumentals. Not for me but definetly worth a try
Thanks for giving it a fair shake, and not just defaulting to “AI bad!”, though. I figured it was unlikely that you’d like these specific songs, since the whole point is that they are specifically for me - often a result of an in-joke that exists solely inside my head (the reason I made so many songs about the RS-232 standard, for example, is based on a gag from an episode of the British TV show “Spitting Image” that I saw maybe 30 years ago at this point).
But that’s the point, in the end. These songs are “mine”, they don’t need to be anyone else’s. I just hope that a few of them at least elicited a chuckle, if only at the fact that they existed. :)