Hey all,
Been slowly getting back into the habit of working on MusicBrainz stuff today, and decided to put some focus into adding relations between songs I like, and the songs they sampled. So far it’s been rather run-of-the mill stuff, something sampling Justin Timberlake, another sampling Limp Bizkit, some stuff I was working on few days ago sampling Skrillex, Tech N9ne, Avicii, list goes on.
However, I decided to see where the vocals came from for one of my all-time favourite tracks, that being cynical by N_dog. Song is fantastic, love the energy the track has, instrumentals are great, love the switchups, list goes on.
Decided to search the lyrics and came across the lyrics through Shazam, which matched them to a track called Fuzzy Love by Diluli. If the album art didn’t already make it clear this was AI-generated, looking around further brings up a YouTube channel of the artist where the banner reads “Applied AI Architect”.
I feel conflicted here with what I think about this song now. The first thing that comes to mind is disappointment that the vocals sampled were taken from a track that was AI-generated knowingly or unknowingly. The vocals aren’t from a real person, which feels it should ruin the immersion, and knowing that they’re almost certainly generated from a dataset without the consent of however many artists is honestly gross.
On the other hand, I weirdly almost appreciate the track more than I did before? The song itself is without a doubt made by a person, it just so happens the sample they used was from an AI-generated song. A lot of work went into it, and the fact that they took stuff that was devoid of creativity and gave it creative life honestly feels a bit uplifting, even despite the fact that the vocals would be much preferred to be from an actual person.
What are your guy’s thoughts on this? Is sampling AI music giving acceptance to AI music as a whole thus bringing the music industry down, or does it come off as rejecting the idea of literally lifeless music by infusing it with genuine human creativity?
My dude, you have no idea how much of contemporary popular music of any genres that use lots of drum machines and synths and samplers are built with ready made loops. Even top hits from demon producers contain sounds from sample libraries and midi libraries and tools to create them. Electronic dance music, hip hop, pop songs… All of them.
It is inevitable that eventually these samples and loops will be generated by AI. There have been plenty of tools for generating compositions of drums, chords, leads, bass lines and so on for a very long time. Before AI there were tools to do it algorithmically and mathematically. Before computers composers did it by hand by lifting bits and pieces from others, repeating patterns with variations, flipping sequences, imposing arbitrary rules on themselves while composing and so on. In the 1950s there was a sort of culmination with the modernistic movement of Serialism that attempted to liberate composition from all musical parameters into pure algorithmic pieces. Check out Messiaen and Boulez. It sounds pretty much what you’d imagine pure algorithmic music to sound like but it was a milestone for that time and era.
The thing is that while use of technology can be abused by the greedy and the lazy and the untalented to make unoriginal slop, there will also always always always be creative people that use whatever they get their hands on to make stuff that is unique remarkable in ways that the technology itself could never achieve by itself.