computer composes a quasi-novel song in beatles' style

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http://www.flow-machines.com/ai-makes-pop-music/
a collaboration between Sony CSL Research Laboratory and startup Flow Machines, this new beatle-esque track "daddy's car" will be included on an album of AI-composed songs to be released in 2017. The computer "read" through a database of beatles musical charts and then "listened" to a selection of beatles' tunes, made an AI-cognitive aural stew of them, focusing on this quality or that, then printed out sheet music that French composer Benoît Carré arranged and produced into charts, and wrote the lyrics, and turned it over to studio musicians to flesh out. my main thing that I quibble with, is that there are existing programs out there that can also analyze lyrics and produce a novel song with a lyrical style similar to the original which it borrowed from. if they had done this in addition to borrowing the music, it would have been more realistic. also if the had hired liverpudlian high tenors to do the singing, the illusion would have been much more powerful. my initial response was that it sounded like a mélange of jeffe lynne and phil spector studded with discrete beatles bits. as it is, though, it elicted an emotional response in me, just the same. (sigh......... )
what are your thoughts, my fellow wrong planeteers?

Sounds more like Beach Boys to me …

that is amazing!! it really has had a lot of work put into the programming of the AI.
however, it does not convey any emotion or sentiment (which would be impossible for artificial intelligence to do), and it is not "catchy" which is a mysterious element to exceptional composition.
but it sounds very plausible that it was composed and played by humans.

i wrote a program that tried to compose and play music, but it never really worked very well, and the songs that it composed were full of things that would be too complicated for the human ear to interpret, so it sounded almost cacophonous.

this is the best song it ever wrote and played, but i have not cleaned out the aberrations and dischordant inclusions.
i have given up on it now but i may get back to it if ever i think of another layer of rules to write that makes it more precise.

http://www.soundclick.com/player/single ... 04783&q=hi

instead of entirely human singers, they should have chosen the voices they wanted, create a vocaloid library and have the computer do the singing. same for the instruments.

it's perfectly possible to have a computer do everything- and I'd be interested in listening to that, not for musical pleasure, but to see how far we are right now.

about thecatxhiness: well, yeah, but: only few tunes ever actually are catchy out of the millions composed every year... so... this one wasn't.. just a numbers game, in my opinion.

the question with computer generated art is: do you want to read it, listen to it and watch it? at some point we'll have realtime rendered vr movies, in which we get to decide who play smajor kusanagi, or rather, whose actor's face will get rendered for us, while we watch.
just... the "aura" will be missing

^^^ yeh, i'd like to see puter magic render a new movie with gary cooper and Randolph scott in it. and how could I forget Marilyn and james dean? and of course, make new beatles songs using their lyrical and musical style and in their voices.

^^^ well... memberberries are a talking grapes, thet begin evry sentence with " 'member...." followed by some sort of nostalgia. listening to them calms and soothes the characters amidst the current election (mr. garrison gets to be the trump-equivalent) and a subplot of cyber-trolling. they also say thingslike "member when there wasn't so many mexicans" and other backwardsstuff, showing how close backwards-thinking and nostalgia actually are.


anyway... the entertainment-industrial-complex doesn't let stuff go anymore, in the name of nostalgia. that's bugging me, culturally, because it means we're turning our culture into a museum in the name of capitalism, while I think we still need innovation (and overcome capitalism)...it's too early to stop and do nothing but rehash the past. but once it's all cg and VR, we can live in these virtual versions of whatever we want,- install the all-caucasian big-boob nude modelpack, -and that prospect scares the hell out of me.

^^^
art and storytelling are means to relate to reality, but they require an artist, someone who at some point said: this is what I want - the audience has to deal with it. Art appreciation is a sometimes difficult process, but we get better with training and knowledge, and thus can expand our ways to engage with reality.

If I can always get exactly what I want -or have things composed by an algorithm in the style of some artist I liked- I won't learn to engage with new things anymore.

like only reading the posts that facebook has algorithmically determined will make me happy.
or, to a lesser extent, only reading the newspaper whose views already aligns with mine (in that case, however, the actual news still don't line up with how I would want the world to be, hence the ameliorating "to a lesser extent")

in other words: my view of reality won't get challenged anymore.


obviously that's only an issue as long as we share some aspects of experiencing reality with other people. if everyone's in his own VR, being displayed in whatever bigboobmodelpack when appearing in someone else's experience, I guess we can all live in peace. we won't have anything to talk about anymore, though.
maybe that is at the very core of peace... silence.

^^^so then it may not be so bad after all.

Wow, this is so cool! I can't put a word to what's not quite... human... about it though. It's clever, sort of, but the refrain doesn't have enough of a melody so it's not catchy. There's one part of the song, the part about the diamond sky, that seemed to evoke emotion. Sometimes, the chords don't quite fit together, but I can't explain why, only say it's human intuition. If you listen to the second song, there are even more examples of what I'm saying. I think that music theorists, and perhaps some musicians, will learn a lot from how AI composes music.

it needs to merge with that shakespearing emulation program, to emulate how the beatles wrote songs. a good example of that was the story behind "fool on the hill" - it turns out that this song has an "etymology" that is quite complex, but is rooted in a weird paranormal incident when paul was walking his dog [named martha] atop primrose hill overlooking london, and as he watched the sunrise, he noticed martha went missing. paul looked around for her when he encountered a strange man wearing a belted raincoat- the two exchanged pleasantries about the sublime view of the city atop the hill, then paul turned away from the man for an instant, and when he looked back the man was gone, which was strange because the nearest trees were hundreds of feet away and the man could not have run that far that fast. then again, since paul was at that time a heavy user of mind-altering weed, it could just have been that his perceptions were up in smoke.

so that is one part of the fool on the hill, the original impetus for lennon/mccartney to write it down on paper. the other part of the fool has to do with george and his veneration of the maharishi, "head in a cloud, the man of a thousand voices talking perfectly loud" [IOW the hindu religion has been referred as being made up "of thousands of gods/voices"]- and when george tried to get paul and john to share his interest, he was met with indifference ["but nobody ever hears him, or the sound he appears to make, and he never seems to notice..."], IOW john and paul weren't listening. so i am gathering that the maharishi was indeed the other major part of the subject of "the fool on the hill."

sooooo.... if an lyrical emulation program is to work for the beatles, it has to learn to have just this type of sensibility, this way of seeing the world.

You said no one ever hears the sound George appears to make. What sound is that?

The Beatles stories are interesting. It'll be decades before AI can tell that type of original story.

Oh I get it now, thanks.