AROIOS

It sends bots to capture and force humans to grade its output... That's actually not too far from what actually happens. There are huge teams of humans grading and labeling training data and A.I. outputs both here in the US and in outsourcing destinations like India. Remember the online Captcha challenges ? That's us labeling data for A.I. training (and feeding Skynet 😃)

It's mostly marketing. Even the term "Machine Learning" itself is largely just CS guys re-branding good ole "Statistical Learning".

Pseudo-Science

LangLang epitomizes the fetish in Classical circles that worship "fast/hard" for the sake of "fast/hard". Throw him a Jazz Swing piece and wait for a cringy disaster. 1/128th notes at 240 BPM are "impossibly demanding". But what's the point? That a human can catch up with a MIDI sequencer?

Count me as another big fan of Tchaikovsky. 🤝

Yup, and you can't have an informed conversation about A.I. with folks who don't even understand Gradient Descent and believe "if/then statements" are all there is to it.

How do we know human brain isn't just that, except scaled by 100000X? 😃 Even some of my friends in High Performance Computing throw around comments about the "divine human ingenuity" with wild abandon. I just find it amusing how little difference there is between their blind faith in the human mind, and the religious fervor of rednecks they look down upon. 😆

This is showing potential. Give it a few years and the stock music industry will be f***ed like ProfD and CHarrell mentioned.

Yup, "originality" only describes 0.01% of what happens in music or any artistic pursuit. The rest 99.99%, are just regurgitation and imitation.

I suspect artistic "creativity/innovation" is little more than 'hallucinations" displayed by the LLMs and Multi-Modal Models right now. Maybe they are just "tasteful" random mutation that happened to tickle us "the right way" and dwarf in comparison to "creativity/innovation" in STEM, the kind that brought us Calculus and Relativity.

Until A.I. passes a Turing's test for the particular musical task it's asked to fulfill. In other words, as soon as A.I.-generated content become indistinguishable from that from a human counterpart, at similar cost, Mr./Ms. human becomes "useless" for that task.

Yup, PG Music already attempted it 25 years ago with their "Soloist" and "Melodist" features in Band-In-A-Box. 95% of what it generated were insipid and sometimes outright jarring results. But for a songwriter, the 5% usable ideas more than make up for the fluff. As I've said before, improvisation is mostly just a form of mental masturbation, enjoyed only by the performer and a few spectators. To most casual observers, it bears little difference from the output of a computer arpeggiator with a bit of pre-programmed randomness. Human intelligence is vastly more powerful than those simple neural-logical algorithms that churn out "Jazz Improvisation". But we artists are a notoriously self-important bunch, so thumbs-down from the non-techies among us is hardly surprising. 😃

But "Classical" is such a giant umbrella. When my friends make similar comments about how much they love "Classical music", I find it as descriptive as "loving Pop music". If we break music down by 1) Melody; 2) Harmony; 3) Timbre; 4) Rhythm; 5) Articulation, the only thing Classical music have in common is 3). Case in point, I love the works of Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Liszt and can enjoy some Bach on a good day, but the Schumann Sonata above just bores the shit out of me. 😃

Just came across an excellent instrumental cover of Diane Schuur's "By Design". It was originally arranged by Dave Grusin and is now beautifully adapted by Vadim Shinnik. I absolutely love his playing,. and what an endorsement for Viscount!

The first 15 seconds are surprisingly bouncy for TB-303. I can't even get a JX-8P to sound that funky.

Speaking of GM, Passport produced a bunch of excellent GM midi files back in the day. Some of them got shipped with early versions of Windows and even garnered fans decades after those OSes were released. Early GM support and sonic performance were all over the place, but it paved the way for Roland's GS and Yamaha's XG formats to come. Roland hired a Japanese keyboard wiz duo "IDECS" in the early 90's to produce a series of excellent MIDI files for their SC-55 GS synth. It became a line of commercial MIDI packs they sell. Yamaha soon followed suit and commissioned several American and British musicians to produce a vast library of original demo tunes for their XG synths. Like Roland, they also sold lots of XG MIDI packs. To this day, these GS and XG MIDI files remain the best sounding MIDI productions I've heard.

I recognize that room.

Excellent Brazilian Jazz and Bluesy Funk/Gospel! Don is a much under-appreciated master player. Here's a collaboration between him and Casiopea's Minoru Mukaiya from 10 years ago, this type of stuff is right up my alley:

Judging by the term "General MIDI", I highly suspect you're one of them T-1000s who just got wormholed here from 1990.

Yup, for now, I'd choose living within a self-sustaining "Intentional Community" over being a farm animal in those "15-minute cities", hooked on UBI and VR/Metaverse goodies. But I'm not delusional about how weak our species' will power is. The gaming industry has already been bigger than movie and music combined for a few years. And humans are only gonna get increasingly addicted as virtual experiences improve. Maybe all it takes for me to give in, is a VR trip to VR Caribbean with a VR girlfriend, on my VR yacht. 😆

This reminds me of another prediction I made back in 2015: Universal Basic Income (UBI). It's inevitable that we as a species will become economically "useless", facing challenges from A.I. and robots. Oppressive regimes like North Korea can simply "solve the problem" by starving their "excess" population to death. Luckily, we own guns here, and the AI/Robot corporations and their government cronies will have to throw us a bone reluctantly. Eventually, we'll exist as code and merge with A.I. Let's just keep our fingers crossed SKYNET doesn't wipe us out before then. 😃

He learned that from Eddie:

Exactly, I've watched some of his music theory videos and found them to be utterly useless. Just regurgitation of dry text you can easily find online, with little empathy or thought put into them. And there were poor souls in the comment sections saying those were way better explanations than what they received in school. Really makes you wonder just how terrible their teachers were, or how bad their YT search skills are.

A great album, always loved the string arrangement Ettore Stratta did on "I Love You Porgy".

I like what he did at the end of the intro: CHD Pro -064.mp3