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11/03/07 #1 Chart Hit - Top Of The Algorithms
I was at the London hit Queen musical “We Will Rock You” last night. Aside from being a very enjoyable show - it opened up a new question for me.
When will a purely computer generated song make #1 in the charts?
So AI/Computers don’t have emotions, and judging the quality of music tends to be by the emotion evoked. But what if a computer was programmed with the rules of what works & doesn’t musically, then could compare these factors across millions of combinations of compositions and then was to analyse my MP3 collection (based on my most listened/highly-rated tracks etc…) and be able to synthesis some beat patterns & melodies of something that I really liked. Could it get to #1 in the charts? Surely it could.
The day the music died.
Tags: General, Ideas, Observations
5 Comments
Why does music die just because a machine can do it too? If you are an artist whose only goal is to get high in the charts then I think your music is dead already.
As far as computer generated music goes, I’m not familiar with research results, but I know Brian Eno has been experimenting for a while. He’s working on the generative soundtrack to Spore right now (http://www.spore.com/) with Will Wright. Here’s their presentation from the Long Now seminar: http://media.longnow.org/seminars/salt-0200606-wright-and-eno/salt-0200606-wright-and-eno.mp3
Spore looks great.
“The Day The Music Died” is what they call it in the musical. It’s an interesting concept though - if we can create limitless nice music on processors - what will happen.
Dude, we have limitless nice music now! What would be the difference?
Anyway, your enjoyment of music is not purely based on the overt properties of a song. As you said, you form an emotional connection with a piece of music and that makes it more than the sum of it’s parts. If I had the choice to keep listening to new “nice” tracks or to get to know certain tracks intimately, I would always go for the latter. Wouldn’t everybody?
13/03/07 152626 Blog Verification
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24/03/08 BoboL
If the so-called “nice music” does not come from human beings, the human being becomes superfluous to the creation and production of music. Music is now, already a highly industrialized process. If the human “artist” can be eliminated from the equation, do you think for one second the music publishing and marketing industry would hire “expensive” “unpredictable” and as far as making money is concerned “useless” human beings. Human “Art” would die-back due to pressure from the market place.
