The last tropical house one is better than the first one in that it gets the house 4/4 drums right whereas the first one sounds more like a rap track. It’s still got elevator music vibes though.

Thanks for sharing! In the 1st example ["computer nerds", "hackernews", "geeky", "computer tones"] seem to make the result sound more like an old-school RPG soundtrack rather than a song.

I dunno, I got Glitch Mob vibes from it. Not exactly Top 40, but still musical. Something like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHGxEVHZXlU&t=40s

> more like an old-school RPG soundtrack rather than a song

Well I'm just going to go ahead and pretend I didn't hear that.

Nice, but somehow it feels like I've heard these songs before. Could that be possible?

>"Nice, but somehow it feels like I've heard these songs before. Could that be possible?"

According to the paper[0] "We found that only a tiny fraction of examples was memorized exactly, while for 1% of the examples we could identify an approximate match." FWIW I'm pretty sure I heard a fragment of Kalinka (a folk tune in the public domain) in one of the samples I generated.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11325.pdf

Is there a way to get off the waitlist?

They all suck. Nowhere near Jukebox. Depressing that seemingly zero progress has been made since that.

? I don't think these suck. I enjoyed the first and last ones genuinely. Shared them with friends, head bobbed a bit to the beat.

They are just very bland and a little musically incoherent. They pass the basic sniff test of, "this sounds like music" but the more you listen the more they fall apart. It's a good muzak generator, but that's about it.

The most impressive was actually the classical one.

From a music producer standpoint if that's the quality for classical music, could definitely create some samples.

I agree, but it's also really weird that such is the case. It's almost like "classical music" is some kind of code word prompting it to maintain a little musical coherence. The others break down rapidly after you listen to them for 5 seconds or so, but the classical-based one holds up a lot better.

Huh, I actually thought that one was the worst? Felt like it was small unconnected snippets…

Uh - no. That was classic (not classical) formless AI noodling on an orchestral bed.

It has multiple structural layers of a sort, which is progress over a few years ago. But they're still a long way short of the huge but intricate structures in real classical music.

Yeah, I agree. It's not going to replace modern music theory today or tomorrow, but I'm excited to play with this sort of thing in dynamic video game content generation. I'm envisioning a user giving a bit of information about their mood and then getting auto-generated music while they use an app briefly. What I heard here seems good enough to impress some people with that use case.

I agree too, it’s passable filler

Don't ask where audio generation is now, ask where it was a year ago and then where it will be in a year from now. Or, say, in five years.

Remember all the people who said, in January and February of 2020, this "novel coronavirus" is not a big deal? Because it affected only a tiny amount of people? Because "much more people die from the flu"? The fallacy is that they ignored the speed at which it progressed.

A friend was a full time jazz musician for years (he’s not famous but played with many/most of the big names in jazz) and said it < https://google-research.github.io/seanet/musiclm/examples/> was really interesting to him, musically. Sort of like the ideal for a jazz band, because you’ve got all independent instruments but coming together from a single “mind”.

That's an interesting perspective.

It seems like it's trained on entire soundwaves. I'm curious if you'd get a better result by training it on transcribed MIDI and then taking the output MIDI and plugging it into VST's.

Seems like you would still get that "central brain" compositional approach without the garbled sound quality and unidentifiable instrument noises.

Nowhere near Jukebox?! This is one hundred percent an improvement over jukebox.

Why would you want to get off the waitlist if they suck?

I was joking

Feels a bit... noisy? Like a way overcompressed mp3.

It's basically overcompressed MP3 cliche soup.

The information density of music is much higher than that of text or still images. So something like this is still tech overreach.

That said, it'll be able to match modern overcompressed human cliche soup pretty easily. There's a lot of production out there which is really low hanging fruit for AI.

It's not unlike how the visual AI can do 'Greg Rutkowski', but has a hell of a time being an actual concept artist in a functional way. If the cliche soup is well defined, you're pretty much all set, particularly if it's not a genre that requires a lot of character.

> The information density of music is much higher than that of text or still images.

That depends on how you encode it. As a sound file (.wav, .mp3 or something like that) it's hard to compress but as for instance a midi file it can be very compact. Music is hard to make and hard to reverse but it is relatively compact in terms of source material if it can be expressed as midi.

This is very cool! I can totally see this being used in low-budget indie video games (much like Midjourney already being used in video games).

Really? This sounds like horrible muzak to me and there is TONS of awesome actually good royalty free music out there. Maybe it will get there in some time, but right now I would not use this.

This definitely feels like more of a tech demo for things to come. But I suspect it could get dramatically better in a matter of months or single-digit years.

I'm curious whether they put any guard rails around what kinds of sounds you can invoke. Can you get it to synthesize offensive speech that's legible? Does it do gun shots, fart noises, orgasm sounds, crying, or screams of pain?

sexy music with orgasmic moan - Oops, can't generate music for that

sexy sax - Oops, can't generate music for that

drill rap with gunshot - Oops, can't generate music for that

song with farts - worked but it contained no farts sadly, just some bad techo

sad song with crying - worked but contained no crying, just screechy violin folk music

Excellent, my gig as a sexy sax player is safe!

Jokes aside, it’s still very early days for this kind of generative AI. I see a real use case for virtual band mates that play along with whatever type of music you play when jamming at home, for example.

Maybe I'm a snob but they're all awful and I wouldn't listen to most of them once (I'd skip through) let alone twice.

OK they're not exactly captivating to listen to - but I don't think they're supposed to be. The use-case, I think, is more along the lines of generating adequate background music for a my-first-self-published-videogame project with next to zero effort.

I feel like that becomes sort of shovelware. There are some games with some truly amazing scores and the above stuff doesn't approach. Is it better than no music, or stock/open license music? I'm not sure. What happens if you've built the next hollow knight but rather than the amazing score from Christopher Larkin that elevates the game you get the garbled terrible music in the above post? It actually makes it worse.

I fear the path into "low/no effort" versions of music scores, art, etc is a dilution of great works that actually makes a worse product than if you went to the trouble of finding someone to do it properly. It leads to shovelware and I don't think we need more shovelware. We need more high quality high intention music and games and images, and personally I think thats going to come from gifted individuals who put in the effort to learn it, not a neural network that can't experience what you want the music to make you feel.

If I logged into a video game and I got the music in the above post it would detract from the game. You'd be better off finding open license or cheap music that a human has made. its way better, and would reflect better on your game and design process.

If someone has the vision and taste to create the next x, they likely have the appreciation of what decent music sounds like and the work that goes into that.

Nah, the person I replied to said it themselves

> The use-case, I think, is more along the lines of generating adequate background music for a my-first-self-published-videogame project with next to zero effort

next to zero effort is the goal. shovelware.

n+1. #indiedev is full of extremely passionate people who want it exactly their way down to the pixel and every note of music. To write off the entire non-AAA space as only wanting to write shovelware even as a first game is laughable.

Having worked on a few games doing music, the devs were super passionate about a quality product, frequently over-engineering, and when then-available bog-standard audio middleware didn't do the procedural mixing we wanted, wrote a custom system just to get it spot-on.

I also know a few major AAA legends who went indie who won't publish shite.

Equally, if the original commenter is happy with x being good enough then that's valid. Maybe the game isn't for you?

Keep in mind my initial reply was directly replying to the "What happens if you've built the next hollow knight" in your post. The implication is if you're at such a level you can do that, you very likely aren't going to settle for your music letting you down, which is arguably the other 50% of what a modern game is against the visuals.

>To write off the entire non-AAA space as only wanting to write shovelware even as a first game is laughable.

Clearly I'm not - as I mention hollow knight.

>Equally, if the original commenter is happy with x being good enough then that's valid. Maybe the game isn't for you?

Clearly it isn't for me, as I'd have to listen to the above sort of garbage music and would hate the time spent, regardless of the game itself.

> The implication of my first reply is if you're at such a level you can do that

There are lots of people who have great ideas and even iterations on a game that isn't there yet, but who fail in graphics, audio, and overall design because they underestimate how important those are to user experience.

I would never say "I'm so glad I have access to copilot, now I can make a game with next to zero effort" but the guy I replied to thinks he can get a score worthy of being in a game from a machine learning model.

The easy part overrides everything and we get (or are going to get) huge collections of shovelware from people who see how easy it is to produce.

That's awesome! I immediately wanna build a quasi automated generative dj set and try to get some gigs around once I get access!

They sound “glitchy”

Catching “will smith eating spaghetti” vibes.

Last one is much better than I expected this thing could do!

I think you are not supposed to give it instructions, just descriptions like in your last prompt.

Is it able to synthesize individual elements of a track? (kick, snare, hats, bass note in C4, etc). This might be killer for pairing with a sampler. Back in the early days of hip-hop, memory & disk limits encouraged artists to load samples that were pitched up 2x then slow back down on the device. This gave the samples a grainy quality which helped the aesthetics. With a human level of polish, I'm pretty sure the combo would be amazing.

The last one made me think of Monkey Island.

The last one took me back to Venezuela in the late 90s. Pretty cool!

Can it follow instructions with time codes in order to generate music that is synchronized with another performance?

Thanks for sharing. To me it's another instance of generative AI being a technical marvel, but in absolute terms producing total crap. I'm sure it'll get better, of course, but I'm happy to completely ignore it for now.