Grimes/Claire Boucher thread

there’s many factors to consider besides “it sounds good”, most chart hits are personality-driven. I don’t think if THXF-2543 released some crap like “Toosie Slide” it would receive the amount of attention than if someone like Drake released it.

I have to partially disagree in that Drake may or may not have much personality, but “Tootsie Slide” is a good song. And I don’t think AI can replace (good) songwriting – much as some ppl (including on here) may snark that “a computer could have written this.”

I actually like Drake but he has several songs that sound like autopilot and imho Tootsie Slide is one of them.

Anyways... sorry for sniping on Tootsie Slide... it's not that bad of a song, I just think it's one of those songs that wouldn't have half the impact it had if it weren't for the Drake trademark.

It might not seem like it based on my last comments, but I hate gatekeeping "rockist" attitudes. I actually agree with Grimes on this one and I understand exactly what she's going for in here. A.I. will be a very helpful tool to develop musical ideas and it will one day reach the ability to create 'perfect' songs from scratch, but humans are very much not fans of perfect things.

Grimes is pretty much otm, but I don't see an AI serving as a singular cultural figure like Bowie. To me, it seems way more likely it'll get used by the future Spotifys to create new, interesting music for you steered by your likes/dislikes

I mean you can still get a charismatic human to be the face of the operation and AI to do the songwriting.

Yes definitely. But it just seems a much easier task for an AI to create music an individual will like based on their tastes vs. correctly guessing what the next big thing will be. The latter involves knowledge outside what a strictly music-making AI would know, like music trends or even societal trends

Plus, when the technology is there, it'll be in the hands of too many people to really stick out the way Bowie did. That's why I thought the Bowie comparison was not quite right

the tech grimes is imagining where AI can make music on its own as well as humans can is a long way away still and she even says that in the article ("in a century" etc.)

it wouldn't surprise me if sometime this decade there are good machine learning-powered compositional tools etc. that can be used effectively to provide accompaniment to human-created works or suggest musical ideas etc. but the end result from that is still going to be about human curation and using whatever AI tools there are as a creative partner and i think that would be quite exciting and interesting. rather than being a replacement for humans i'd expect initially you'd get a different sort of creativity that can lead to novel and interesting results if applied well, if current text-generation tech is any guide to how things will develop. obviously there are people already trying to do this at the moment but it's still very experimental, limited & inaccessible etc. since the tech just isn't there yet.

even the best text-generation tools at the moment like gpt-3 still rely a lot on human curation of both input and output. probably the best application that uses gpt-3 at the moment is AI dungeon which is really really incredible and one of the funniest and most entertaining games i've ever played, but the experience you get from it is very much a collaboration between the human players and the AI feeding off each other. to really get the best out of it you have to be willing to reject the AI's responses when they don't work for you and ask it to try again and even at its best it doesn't really feel like the AI's responses are 'human' - instead it has its own bizarre creativity that is distinctly inhuman and all the better for it.

ufo otm

Yeah, I feel like I'm echoing a lot of the responses already in this thread, but it feels like there's a step missing here. "When will AIs make art / music / whatever?" -> how do we know they aren't already?

Humans are so bad at understanding or even recognising other forms of life / intelligence / play / (potentially art would go here) that are already existing on our planet. How would we know what kind of "art" an intelligence so unlike our own would even look or sound like?

The question of "when will AIs make music that is recognisable and enjoyable to humans?" is quite a different one. I find it kind of uncomfortable when people speak in ways of, "well, we have to train it to create scenarios that appeal more to humans" - the autist in me wants to protest "why can't we train ourselves to better understand what is interesting / entertaining / artistic to other intelligent entities?" That dominator impulse, that "our" values are the correct ones, and we should train others to fulfill our wants - that always flags up caution when I see it.

(I always prefer the suggestions that sound more collaborative, more Kraftwerkian - "we play the machines, and the machines play us" etc.)

AIs: "yeah, we just make music for ourselves and if any humans like it that's a bonus"

Haha, yeah, that's really funny!

But thinking "well, what kind of music would AIs listen to" - you know, that reminds me of the processes of listening to other kinds of music that are intensely *alien* to me, i.e. I am quite LOLold now, and often when I listen to music that the teenagers around me love, I am totally lost, and the music sounds incomprehensible to me. (Or indeed, listening to music from entirely other cultures or subcultures, where I don't really understand the rules of how the music is made, or what it's about or who it's for!) The best way to access or get into that kind of music is to ask the teenagers - well, what do *you* like about this stuff? And they'll respond that it turns out the point is something that I hadn't even considered.

Do you want AI music to be just a kind of generative Spotify Hipster Boyfriend that gives you more of what you already like? Or do you want to treat AI music more like a Russian teenager who listens to music you find utterly incomprehensible, and try to learn to comprehend what the AI gets out of it?

Also, AIs wouldn't need to listen to music linearly in time the way we do. They could presumably, say, take in a whole MP3 at once as a data file.

toosie slide is a terrible song and drake on autopilot at his worst

this is dumb. even if possible, that level of production would be overwhelming and human listeners wouldn't get anything out of it. if shakespeare wrote 10,000 plays just as good as hamlet no one would bother trying to wrap their head around his oeuvre. same if bowie made 10,000 Lows

by this logic, shouldn’t we try to minimize the number of great works of art and music, in order to free us up from the bother of trying to wrap our heads around too many of them?

― flopson, Wednesday, October 28, 2020 2:20 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

one must wrestle with the Super Deluxe Sign O' The Times and answer this for oneself

Or do you want to treat AI music more like a Russian teenager who listens to music you find utterly incomprehensible, and try to learn to comprehend what the AI gets out of it?

I already have Autechre to scratch that itch for me

ai doesn't exist and will never exist and this shit is stupid beyond all measure.

fuck grimes and her opinions, she married one of the most contemptible men alive ffs

One could argue that the situation that Grimes is describing already exists-- I remember the early 00s when there were arguments like "are DJs musicians?" (not turntablists, but song selectors). I don't, on a base level, see much difference between present-day algorithmically-devised playlists and "an AI-manufactured Bowie" aside from where we are on the development curve

ai doesn't exist and will never exist and this shit is stupid beyond all measure.

― Give me a Chad Smith-type feel (map), Thursday, October 29, 2020 3:15 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

“strong AI” or whatever exists but for writing something close to what she’s talking about already exists

*strong AI or whatever may never exist

the OpenAI soundcloud dump is my most listened to album this year, the GANs are already capable of making mistakes that humans are incapable of making themselves. even the most generic jukedeck / aiva / amper stuff trying to make traditionally pleasing / consonant / ignorable background music for commercial music occasionally throws a 'nice' chord change that obeys all the rules, and yet is so totally alien & wrong that at times I have to, y'know, yell

/commercial use

ya ive dipped into those a bit. on some level ai is like a really insane vers of an arpeggiator. i wonder if there was a luddite rxn against like arpeggiators and sequencers when they first came out too

it’s funny how this thread is 50% people idly speculating about ai and music and 50% online rage-dads whose opinion on it is perfectly correlated with their opinion on elon musk, just because this is the grimes thread

🖼

quote was meant to be: "on some level ai is like a really insane vers of an arpeggiator"

i wonder if there was a luddite rxn against like arpeggiators

Well, God did intend us to pick all the notes for ourselves

I need to go listen to the songs you two are talking about, I haven't heard much recent AI-generated music. I thought Microsoft Songsmith produced some interesting "mistakes" along the lines Milton describes and that was ten years ago

some of y’all never been to a YONA show curated by Ash Koosha


The vast majority of Yona’s lyrics, chords, voice, and melodies are created by software, with Koosha mixing and producing the final song.

https://youtu.be/gT2D5_CTzb4

the open ai soundcloud is interesting thanks milton

I wish I could be tricked into listening to this stuff with some fake bio of a weirdo electronic artist, it's hard to listen without the baggage of knowing what it is

The way I’d break it down is that there are a number of artists and toolmakers who are in the generated music space now, who sit in a different space than musicians that are in the mainstream or fringes of the mainstream, who are busy creating/programming and writing about the theoretical space of how AI and generative music could become mainstream. There are artist spaces and festivals, the kind with panels and nerds talking in dark corners about *how* the music was made, that have been going on for some time. I think to a lot of the adventurous music-listening public, the creative process and technique is a very opaque thing and the end product has a limited audience because you have to have an idea of how and why the music is created.

As far as I know, Grimes sits on the other side of this. She’s a musician but a consumer of music-making technology, and she works outside the space you could, perhaps with a grimace, call the “academy.” She’s on the Coachella, holograms dancing on stage, side of it. I know a number of people (including Holly Herndon iirc) were engaging with her on twitter about some of the things she’s previously said and she might be synthesizing some of those thoughts when making comments about AI in music now, but it’s not her wheelhouse.

The thing about the creating-tools side of things is some bits seem rudimentary or even cobbled together until it’s formalized into a piece of software or something that befits a creative workflow and then it’s *everywhere*. The precursors to things like ProTools and Ableton were used by a handful of people for very meticulous projects, and now they’re everywhere. We’re getting close to presets and a lot more point-and-click for things like Max/MSP and integrating OpenAI-style noodling into creative workflows to the point where they’re something you just jump into, but not quite yet. And I think that’s when Grimes comes in.

I had an interesting conversation at a bar last year with a guy who set up the A/V rigs for large touring shows — he was doing a simple gig just doing work for a conference in town — and he was enthusiastically explaining some realtime effects a couple acts he’d worked for had used and how it was an amazing show. I was thinking back to a coordinated electronic music/laser show I’d seen closer to 2010 and once I tried finding video clips on my phone to show, I realized that it looked completely unimpressive now. Because the show I’d seen was doing something new that was pretty rudimentary — but not previously done — and now it was completely archaic. The tools for linking those things together in the way I had witnessed is now completely run of the mill.

lulz

Tbf her Canadian company applied, not her.

Despite her terrible persona and life choices, Miss Anthropocene is way better than it has any business being.

pomenitul at 8:39 24 Nov 20

Tbf her Canadian company applied, not her.

a distinction without a difference

Zen master Basho said to his disciple, “When you have a staff, I will give it to you. If you have no staff, I will take it away from you.”

what a dickens

the unfairness of an established artist with access to vast financial resources (and space flight) getting grants because she has a record company with enough staff to apply for them

isn’t this kinda sexist, tho? “access” to resources, hmm

I thought the revive was about i_o passing away today. Anyhoo:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CH_b5S2glBL/?igshid=1nfwpsvhh7sgu

Some Canadian record labels kinda operate as FACTOR grant application mills. They won't sign you if you don't qualify. They acquire your grant for you and stick their name on it for a mgmt fee. The rest is up to you.

I’m sure she’ll continue to find ways to disappoint me to the point of hating her and vowing to never listen to any of her music ever again, but I honestly don’t think she was even aware of said subsidy.

I agree that given the meritocratic pedigree of the Musk family that it is unconscionable that either party would be on the receiving end of government arts funding, such a borderline socialist act smacks dangerously of altruism

https://factorportalprod.blob.core.windows.net/portal/Documents/Annual_Reports/FACTOR_Annual_Report_2019-2020.pdf

Here's the full FACTOR report. Grimes's stipend accounts for .36% of the overall budget

Don't get me wrong

I don't think Grimes's admin bodies should be applying for Canadian arts grants

But these sort of institutions and their budgets are completely dwarfed by, say, "the amount of money the federal government uses to stimulate the, say, softwood lumber economy", and so I always get frustrated by people clay-pigeoning certain recipients of broader industry stimulations as a method to criticize the entire mechanism as a whole

If you wanna load up the guns, let's talk about Starmaker (and even then I think Starmaker is a good thing)

The writer of that article also identifies himself as being “firmly” in the camp of “those who think (government’s) job is to stick to the basics” – so I suspect there may be a bit of concern-trolling going on.

I mean Musk took 4.9 Billion in government subsidies. If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

The writer of that article also identifies himself as being “firmly” in the camp of “those who think (government’s) job is to stick to the basics” – so I suspect there may be a bit of concern-trolling going on.

National Post gonna National Post.

The writer of that article also identifies himself as being “firmly” in the camp of “those who think (government’s) job is to stick to the basics” – so I suspect there may be a bit of concern-trolling going on.

The National Post is very right-wing, approximately a Canadian equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, maybe? His 'concern' for up-and-coming artists is quite likely disingenuous. Some subsidies have been put forth to assist with the issues he refers to, which I note he doesn't praise here, e.g. https://www.cbc.ca/music/new-program-will-pay-canadian-musicians-for-live-stream-concerts-on-facebook-and-instagram-1.5569422

xp!

And the Liberal govt, of whom Gurney is not a fan, has roughly doubled funding for the Canada Council, which funds music by lesser-known, less commercially oriented artists: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/arts-federal-budget-canada-council-heritage-1.3501480

Is that fund going to be spent in Canada?

Acc to this (blog by Alan Cross, who seems credible), it seems like yes: https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/grimes-whos-married-to-one-of-the-richest-men-in-the-world-finds-herself-in-artist-funding-controversy-lets-sort-this-out/. It's a Montreal-based label and the money may not even go to Grimes's recordings - he questions whether she is even an owner of the label.

I did a little Googling of my own last night, and also couldn't find any indication of how Grimes may actually be connected to the label (I couldn't even find its corporation record, tbh).