 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2025-06-28 05:52
Do you think Instrumental music will ever be replaced by digital creations (AI)?
I ask this, not out of fear - but having been keenly interested in how quickly Kodak (film in general) went out and was replaced by digital.
Will the other arts be saved from a similar fate?
If so - are there good reasons why?
The best "yes - instrumental music will be replaced" arguments that I can think of:
Just like film, music would be able to be created at the click of a button and sound "as good" as the real instruments (in this hypothetical). No real skill would be necessary to produce volumes of work - thus creating cheap alternatives - no longer would studios/venues need to pay many performers/creators. (I see this as a somewhat parallel to what is currently being given a cautious eye in Hollywood pertaining to acting and directing, etc.) I feel this view is somewhat validated by the fact there are so many people now making a living as "photographers" who truly have very little skill in the art of photography - but tap and click their terrible creations into works of digital artwork. Thus, delivering on the digital promise: make the difficult easy/within reach, and do it cheaply.
The best "no - instrumental music will never be replaced" arguments I can come up with:
There are simply too many musicians and musicians-in-training to allow this to happen - perhaps, unlike photography - where only the highly skilled felt the full impact of the change...with music there are too many folks who would feel the full impact, and the resistance would be too large to overcome. Neither the artist nor the listener would broadly accept the end product. And - thirdly (and possibly the strongest argument), folks can already buy "canned" music if they prefer...for a fairly cheap price as an end user...but I'm not sure about the producer on a film, or the record company producing the music. (That does bring in the topic of ASCAP and BMG etc. - but I'm curious how those will be impacted by AI created music.)
Would movie music/soundtracks be treated any differently than other forms of instrumental music? Would you expect this to fall sooner/later?
It's a strange new world headed our way, and I am interested in your thoughts. Again - this isn't meant to be a herald of doom or anything like that - just curious about what you all expect in the next 20 years or so.
It's only been about 25 years since the general public began embracing digital cameras - so I think the 20 year time frame is a good one to discuss as AI begins to ramp up.
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2025-06-28 08:56
As much as I enjoy a good argument, I don't think this is even a thing.
here is why
AI generated music (for example taking the entire opus of a particular artist and then at the push of a button generating a "new work" by that artist) can NEVER be original or inspired.
Also I have been fortunate to enough to be out of my element and around "popular music" concerts over the last four years and have heard/seen the reaction to presentations by truly gifted artists. The crux of it is this, audiences recognize truly rare and beautiful examples of human expression, and conversely get a little bored with the bland and common. If anyone (everyone?) could sing, or write music at such a high level, there would be no one around to pay hundreds of dollars a ticket to watch someone else do it.
Will there be more AI music and less great art in the future.......sure. Will it kill the profoundly beautiful........not by a long shot.
................Paul Aviles
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Author: donald
Date: 2025-06-28 13:47
When I was 9 years old I went to a wedding and heard a synthesizer play with what i thought was a "perfect" clarinet sound. I went up to my sister (at that time a professional musician) and said to her "I'm sad, how will real musicians survive, their jobs will all be taken by keyboard players using the synthesizer to sound amazing on every instrument". My sister assured me that this would not be the case, and to some extent she was correct. It's true there are fewer jobs today than in 1979, but that has not come about because synthesizers sound "perfect" compared to real instruments.
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Author: kdk
Date: 2025-06-28 16:48
Paul Aviles wrote:
> Will there be more AI music and less great art in the
> future.......sure.
AI-generated music already surrounds us. And the mechanics will only become easier and cheaper. But I don't think there will be less "great" art in the future - there has historically been little enough of it even without AI. There has been uninspired and unenduring art throughout the existence of mankind. "Great" art has always been a relative rarity and always will be.
Karl
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-28 17:08
AI would come to generate original music and art that would be indistinguishable from "great" to the majority of the audience. There's no reason to suppose that, given sufficient electricity and other resources, it wouldn't come to generate great-seeming examples that even expert humans would be unable to identify as non-human.
This would tend to reduce the market for human musicians. I write in hypothetical terms because bigger problems, involving AI and other things, seem likely to come to obviate the question.
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2025-06-28 22:39
I would hasten to clarify that what I mean is that within the context of "what is happening right now," AI could never do a 180 turn like an artist wanting to try new things, OR purposely buck the trend.
The Beatles are are great example of a quickly evolving artists. AI is nothing more than a better computer.........garbage in, garbage out
..............Paul Aviles
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Author: Fuzzy
Date: 2025-06-28 22:55
Donald:
Thanks for the reply.
What you say is obviously true. But...
There are far fewer real pianos out there then there had been...and far fewer top tier piano restoration techs out there than there had been. (One of my best friends is a piano restoration guy and he paints a pretty bleak picture of (at least regionally) piano restoration whenever he chooses to retire.)
I never thought I'd see pianists opt for electric over real, but it is happening. Frankly, once you open for electric, there's not so much of a jump to where AI could be put to work.
I'm not fearful that musicians will dissapear right away. AI is currently mostly scattered (at least what average consumers see of it), but as AI is created more and more for specific tasks (like, if/when someone decides to write an AI specifically for audio/sound mimicry), it will eventually rival our best - just as the voice replications are getting much better. It might be a ways off, but I believe it is a probability. Folks laughed at the first digital cameras, too, after all.
Last time I visited our small town's junk yard, I pulled up to drop off my load right beside two beautiful upright pianos which had been dumped unceremoniously on their sides into the rubbish pile. (People can't even give non-grand pianos away anymore - in my region.)
I'm not fearful or "doom and glooming" - I'm just pondering what changes might be coming down the pipe in the broader view, and how our industry/art will address them.
Fuzzy
;^)>>>
[edit: Meant to say "upright pianos" but had typed "grand pianos" - fixed that]
Post Edited (2025-06-28 22:57)
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Author: kdk
Date: 2025-06-28 23:37
Fuzzy wrote:
> I never thought I'd see pianists opt for electric over real,
> but it is happening. Frankly, once you open for electric,
> there's not so much of a jump to where AI could be put to
> work.
>
I think that opening happened when electric amplification first became available. When I go to hear musical theater, I don't actually get to hear the singers or pit performers, I hear an electronic reproduction created by the mics and amps the theater uses to avoid the problems of poor acoustics. When I go to a concert at Philadelphia's Mann Center, I likewise hear an electronic representation, although the musicians are right there in front of me on the stage.
In the 1970s and 1980s synthesizers became a "thing" - generating entire movie sound tracks and other popular and even "legit" music forms. These may have been created by "artists" in the best sense, but they were in many cases created by technicians who were looking for effects rather than "art."
Assuming the eventual goal of AI creators is not just to recreate and imitate historical styles, but to create art that is fresh and "original," we will still have proportionally few real successes among many attempts that are derivative and uninspired, as we have from human composers of the 17th century through the present. The risk will be that the economics of being a human creator or performer among AI robots will make human music creation and performance an unviable way to earn a living. But, of course, being a musician in the 17th century didn't pay all that well, either.
Karl
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-06-29 02:09
Quote:
But I don't think there will be less "great" art in the future - there has historically been little enough of it even without AI. There has been uninspired and unenduring art throughout the existence of mankind. "Great" art has always been a relative rarity and always will be.
But to some degree, what's "great" is up to us. I had professors who said when they were in their PhD programs, Schubert wasn't considered a suitable dissertation topic because he wasn't one of the great composers. Some Mozart operas, moreover, entered the standard repertoire only somewhat recently: Cosi fan tutte, for instance, in the middle of the 20th century in the U.S. So some music and musicians slide in and out of greatness regardless of the technical merits.
It's not hard to imagine, then, orchestras, opera companies, chamber ensembles (i.e. musicians focused on art music) refusing to play AI-generated music regardless of how technically sophisticated it becomes: after all, it's kind of up to us.
Similar to how keyboards have replaced the full-sized musical pit orchestra, however, I see AI-generated music quickly taking over work from musicians who focus on "functional" music. Music for commercials, YouTube videos, television shows, and even movies can easily be done for cheap with AI. In most cases, this music is just meant to be present in the background. Why pay a commercial composer and musicians to write and record some musical wallpaper when AI can do it for next to nothing? Even with blockbuster film music, cough cough Hans Zimmer, composers use cadres of ghost writers to do a lot of the work. I imagine much of this stuff could be accomplished by AI at some point.
So I don't see it as doom and gloom for all musicians but perhaps as a reshuffling of the deck.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-29 17:26
Remember when lip-synching first appeared and triggered offense? It's common now. Here's another increasingly common application: autotune. Many pop singers are routinely autotuned now; it's part of "post-processing" even in live performances. It's getting harder to detect, and I've read that it's being done with some classical recordings too, and not just with singers. Is what comes out "real" any more?
About "garbage in, garbage out", true, but the garbage in is everything humans have ever been recorded doing. A lot of that is garbage, but what comes out is going to sound just like it.
There's some work on YT that's created with AI tools that I find pretty close to moving. Also close to eye-rolling, but.
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-29 17:35
Example. The creator's comment reads,
"So I had this idea of a dramatic love scene aria, sat down and worked on a single “popera” idea for lyrics and then worked on some melodic lines for it, then went into my fun-as-hell #AI music tool box to flesh it out… and about 70 generations and some post mixing and mastering work later, here is this movie fan’s one and only “Brokeback Aria.”"
No live performers. "Fun as hell."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGPSedW9a-U
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Author: Philip Caron
Date: 2025-06-30 15:01
Ref the band, The Velvet Sundown. Hundreds of thousands of apparently human listeners on Spotify, bio and pics, but nobody has any verification that they actually exist. The supposition is they're entirely AI generated.
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Author: brycon
Date: 2025-06-30 21:40
Quote:
Ref the band, The Velvet Sundown. Hundreds of thousands of apparently human listeners on Spotify, bio and pics, but nobody has any verification that they actually exist. The supposition is they're entirely AI generated.
I remember reading something about AI music being rampant on Spotify. Moreover, if I'm remembering correctly, a great deal of it (ambient music mostly) is made by Spotify. I suppose when someone falls asleep to an ambient playlist and it keeps going throughout the night, Spotify wants to recoup that money rather than pay it out to a human ambient composer.
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