I'm pretty proud of having created some good-sounding AI music. https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame...

I tried to make it in as many styles as possible. "Crossing The Channel" is a favorite, because the tempo is so unique. I think the GPT made a mistake early on, and then completed the most likely "not-mistake," which caused the piece to have some pretty unique timing.

Maybe someday I'll dig up the model off my old laptop. I thought everyone would be making nice-sounding AI music, but I guess nobody can match a Gwern-trained model. He's the Hattori Hanzo of ML.

I assume you are talking about a less obscure app like Live, Bitwig, or FL Studio, but in case not: I vaguely remember a 90s Windows application (possibly shareware) that had a 3D pre-rendered UI with keys shown on screen that looked like a payphone's keypad. You could assign beatmatched loops and hits to any key and toggle or trigger them in a synchronized manner (either with the mouse of the physical keyboard). I had loads of fun as a kid recreating Music Instructor's archetypal/self-aware cliché dance song "Hymn" with it.

Do you or anyone else know which software I'm talking about?

I wasn't actually talking about any specific app. I'm not a musician, and while I've touched Live/FLStudio, most of my experience is just with toy ones on the web. I've seen dozens over the years with various level of complexity, but the one I remember the most vividly was a flash one called Tone Matrix, here's a non-flash remake:

https://www.maxlaumeister.com/tonematrix/

Honestly just clicking random squares, adding and removing as you go can great unlimited good sounding patterns.

Audiotool itself (the site that hosts Tone Matrix, linked from Max's page) was also very impressive at the time.

I looked around a bit on the googles and it helped me remember a French person's name who had lots of similar Flash experiments on their site; apparently that was where TM originally started: http://lab.andre-michelle.com/

The fact that browsers never managed to come together to build and integrate a proper emulation layer is truly a shame. I know there's quite a few projects out there, but we really need something built-in the browser.

I doubt it was Future Beat 3D, but that's the only one I can think of right now that sounds like what you're describing.

Thank you for answering that, sincerely. You've knocked somebody's white whale out today, which is one of the most selfless things you can do. In doing so, you've probably freed up minutes or even hours of their thought for years to come.

Wow, either that was it, or one of its precursors by a different company, Beat 2000 (I found a review on Future Beat 3D that mentions it): https://archive.org/details/beat-2000

I've been looking for it for quite a long time now, thanks!

I'm not sure it's the same software but your comment made me remember Dance eJay ( https://youtu.be/b1PpXcC8Ik0 ). It was distributed in Sweden in the 90s by a radio channel called NRJ, and I guess it was made like that in a few other countries in the EU. It was so much fun and those samples still bring back a lot of memories.

Even before that, there was a similar piece of software called Magix Music Maker, with a separate Techno edition. Good times.

The one I liked the most from the era was Arturia's Storm 3, with its interface modeled after a studio rack: https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/arturia-storm-v3

Generative music is absolutely nothing new either.

I have listened to so much generative music the last 25 years and there was one piano piece that was really good and something that felt like a unique style. Not good enough though that I even remember the name of the piece.

Generative music is really no different than what you get when a human starts noodling around with music making software. It is almost literally the same process.

The way to get good results from AI is letting it randomly generate stuff, then have a human pan for gold

You can say that with randomly generated content, or simple heuristics+random based content, it's not specific from AI

I agree that the "AI as assistant" model is AI's sweet spot now and likely for the next few decades.

This model is already common now in systems like Tesla's badly-named "Full-Self Driving" Autopilot, which Tesla itself notes "is a hands-on driver assistance system that is intended to be used only with a fully attentive driver".

Similarly, "AI as creator" mostly leads to uninteresting outcomes. In contrast, "AI as creative assistant" will lead to actually-fascinating advances in the creative arts in the near future. AI will help creators think differently, and in turn, creators will weave good and/or interesting output into coherent, higher-quality pieces.

No, that‘s the way to get your paper published. Actually good AI systems produce convincing results without curation.

You can probably teach it to start producing higher gold/crap ratios with enough human planners training it?