awkwardbydesign
Officially Awesome
If you want to hear creative use of autotune, try listening to some Tuareg guitar artists.
A bit about AI and the future of music, and that devilish Auto-Tune
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awkwardbydesign
Officially Awesome
How on earth could you tell?
stephen bennett
Mr Enigma
We were told when we were young, the robots would do all the boring jobs such as cleaning, doing the washing up et cetera, leaving us, humans to be creative.
Turns out that robots are really bad at the boring jobs, but pretty good at the creative ones.
(Disclaimer: There is, currently, no such thing as artificial intelligence, though I appreciate we have lost the battle about this. The large language models that people using now are basically predictive algorithms based on machine, learning and statistics— Emily Bender calls them 'stochastic parrots'. As they are trained on the data from the Internet, new models will be using the crap produced by the earlier versions of themselves, so eventually they'll become absolutely useless.
I can see that the use of curated data being fed into models for stuff like searching for patterns in x-rays or large data sets, but the kind of so-called artificial intelligence we have now will die a death. Of course that won't stop it being used to produce lots and lots and lots of stuff that will appear to be crap or appear to be good depending on what it is. There is software available now that helps you write books very quickly. I think Amazon are restricting the number of publications written by large language models to several a day.)
Stephen
stephen bennett
Mr Enigma
Autotune has become a generic term for pitch correction (like Moog or Hoover) but it has other uses beyond the obvious 'Cher effect' (although there is some debate, whether that was actually an early version of AT or something very different), but the effect is the same). Say you play a guitar solo and fluff a note. No need to do it again—just correct that note. I use Melodyne and the most amazing thing it can do is to 'look' into polyphonic music, pick out the notes and process them separately.
It used to be impossible to 'unmix' a song. Now, depending on the song, you can remove the vocals from a backing track, for example.
I think one of the scariest uses for so-called artificial intelligence is deep fake technology. We can't be too far away from when we'll have new albums by David Bowie, Frank Zappa and Michael Jackson.
Stephen
It used to be impossible to 'unmix' a song. Now, depending on the song, you can remove the vocals from a backing track, for example.
I think one of the scariest uses for so-called artificial intelligence is deep fake technology. We can't be too far away from when we'll have new albums by David Bowie, Frank Zappa and Michael Jackson.
Stephen
Martyn Miles
pfm Member
It’s probably because I’m old, and prefer the music from my era, that I can’t abide modern
‘Pop’ music.
Especially female singers.
Singers, such as Dusty Springfield, articulated their words properly.
Some modern female singers ( and I use the word advisedly ) appear to almost gabble.
‘Pop’ music.
Especially female singers.
Singers, such as Dusty Springfield, articulated their words properly.
Some modern female singers ( and I use the word advisedly ) appear to almost gabble.
Seeker_UK
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
Although AT was used in the track "Believe" the main effect was achieved through a Digitech Talker after finding a Korg VC10 vocoder was a bit too cheesy.
Recording Cher's 'Believe'
It was the best-selling single of last year, and signalled a radical change of musical direction for Cher — complete with bizarre vocal processing. Yet, surprisingly, it was produced in a small studio in West London. Sue Sillitoe relates the astonishing tale of 'Believe'.
Digitech Talker
Paul White discovers that it's good to talk, especially when you have some help from Digitech.
Yessir, the old ones are the best. (Grrah…)
You was my stitch but it not what it seam
I got that wetty, I’m keepin’ it clean
I swear I be stuck in my ways…
The not very good ‘Ghostwriter’ song that went viral on TikTok last year (‘Heart On My Sleeve’, with Drake and the Weeknd AI), even received a Grammy nomination; though it was then hastily reworked as the vocals weren’t ‘legally obtained’.
Martyn Miles
pfm Member
Was that weird video actually music ?
If that’s what young people listen to today I do wonder for their sanity...
Martyn, I suggest you buy shares in Ice Spice while they’re still undervalued, as it’s not just the Bronx that knows her now…
(I didn’t know Madonna was so tall.)
Martyn Miles
pfm Member
I would rather put my money into somebody with talent, thank you.
paulfromcamden
Baffled
Computers are pretty good at lots of boring jobs - who wants to go back to air traffic control systems run by people with slide rules and post-notes?
And machine learning has loads of amazing potential. I've been reading about Transkribus which is amazing tech for anyone who has struggled to read illegible c18th manuscripts.
But as you say, the one this it doesn't do is creativity.
Seeker_UK
Feelin' nearly faded as my jeans
stephen bennett
Mr Enigma
I agree that computers can do, and allow us to do, very boring tasks. I am a spreadsheet fan and wrote my own before VisiCalc conquered the earth. And I agree that ML has potential to do amazing (and dangerous) things. Pattern recognition is a wonderful and terrible thing.
I was talking about robots though and, by extension, so-called 'AI'.
Where is the washing up robot? The hoovering robots are depressingly stupid machines. Where's my personal jet pack and food pill?
AI is a marketing term. No-one will get funding to make a film called 'Applied Statistics'. The press releases by tech billionaires (and Rishi Sunak) about AI destroying the human race are facile and are designed to hide the much scarier areas using this technology that will deny you a mortgage or benefits or brand you a criminal without recourse to human intervention. Or make crap music.
Stephen
stephen bennett
Mr Enigma
Although AT was used in the track "Believe" the main effect was achieved through a Digitech Talker after finding a Korg VC10 vocoder was a bit too cheesy.
Recording Cher's 'Believe'
It was the best-selling single of last year, and signalled a radical change of musical direction for Cher — complete with bizarre vocal processing. Yet, surprisingly, it was produced in a small studio in West London. Sue Sillitoe relates the astonishing tale of 'Believe'.www.soundonsound.com
Digitech Talker
Paul White discovers that it's good to talk, especially when you have some help from Digitech.
Indeed. Mythology has it that it was all an early hardware version of AT. I've see that denied and confirmed in various interviews!
Ah for the old days when you needed to use gas to change your voice.
'In 'Willow Farm' Gabriel sings 'Mum to mud to mad to dad', his voice apparently changing from female to male and back again. Although this sounds as if it might have been done by tape manipulation, 'Peter came up with an idea that he wanted to do the vocal through helium,' he says. 'And so we had to get helium into the studio.'
Stephen
paulfromcamden
Baffled
I think they're called dishwashers ;-)
You're right though. Technology was supposed to free us up from the daily grind so we could all laze around creating incredible art. Instead computers are writing the books at Amazon and humans are dashing round delivering stuff for minimum wage.
I wonder how much that's a failure of technology though or a consequence of a ruling class that doesn't want to see the masses unoccupied...