> (will politely side-step the pitfall of debating whether music was better 40 years ago!)

I don't think you'll have many takers here suggesting that things were magically better 40 years ago. (We know about survivorship bias and that there was less of the design space search so much more novelty/amazing).

I do think we've gotten a few more axes of exploration but also have in the mainline of music has gotten much more homogenous in some ways as well, which is kinda sad.

Sophisticated tools are a bit of a trap. People tend to create in ways that their tools make easier. Tastes evolve around what's being created. And tools evolve to match those tastes, which in turn really optimizes everything to a specific local maximum. And tools cause loss of skills and dependency upon the tooling.

> I don't think you'll have many takers here suggesting that things were magically better 40 years ago.

Ha, fair point. I must not realize how old I am, because I was attempting to reference the music of the 1960s and 70s, not 1982, which I agree is not many people's idea of the golden year for music ("Come On Eileen" notwithstanding).

> Sophisticated tools are a bit of a trap. People tend to create in ways that their tools make easier.

No doubt. Ableton, logic, and protools have drastically altered the norms of what modern music is "supposed" to sound like (ie tuned vocals, quantized drums etc). I do wonder what the next generation of music tech will bring.

As someone whose high school years spanned 1982–6, I have a bit of a soft spot for that era.¹ I think, also, that in the early days at least, a lot of marginal bands who had videos ended up getting a bit more fame thanks to those videos than they would have pre-MTV.

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1. I have a theory that most people tend to favor the pop music of their high school years. No idea if it’s true or not.

> I have a theory that most people tend to favor the pop music of their high school years. No idea if it’s true or not.

I would rank that theory with evolution, relativity, and the germ theory of disease as being as close to true as any theory is ever likely to get.

Oh I think your high school pop music theory is spot on. I grew up in the emo era, can actively laugh at the music/fashion now... and still love it more than anything :)

Completely non-ironically - 1981/1982 was an incredibly fertile period for music in the UK at least.

I believe the real AI music revolution is still ahead of us. Most existing tools don't really use modern deep neural nets and the ones that have just been released and do are quite good (e.g. Synthesizer V). The project I released yesterday uses all research advances (such as diffusion models) and more (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoCzMRqh5SkFwkumE578Y...) and I think it's a large leap forward over what the existing melody generation software can do.

I think that pretty soon we'll see many hit songs that have a large contribution from AI models. It's possible that the variety can increase as well and new styles can appear, as the "good" generated songs are fed back as training data.

I don't think creative types will be satisfied with reaching a local maximum. They always try to find ways to stretch what's possible by looking for completely different ways to use said tools. Just the different genres of music points to this fact.

How I see AI fitting in is being used as an effort multiplier. Imagine if a single person was able to produce an entire anime / cartoon tv series rather than the current situation of hundreds of people being involved. The single human could act as a creativity director ensuring consistent story and style while the AI does the heavy lifting of pumping out hundreds of thousands of frames.

Currently we have youtubers putting out crude AI voice generated videos with basic visuals, and its still funny and entertaining because the story is good. But imagine if anyone with a good idea could start producing studio quality works to accompany their meme video.

A good example are Joel Haver's videos on youtube. He explains his process here: https://youtu.be/tq_KOmXyVDo . He produces animations by rotoscoping live footage, with only a few keyframes being done by hand and the rest by AI, using something similar to style transfer.

Before recorded music, if one wanted to listen to music one had to pay skilled artisans for every song. Now music is more or less free and available in unlimited quantities. The same will probably happen for art, and maybe even animation thanks to DALL-E.