> How long until we could assemble an orchestra of computers that can interpret sheet music with feeling well enough to impress a human audience?
I think AIs making music will come long before AAA games and movies, both of which encompass music as an art and then throw in like another 5 artistic pursuits on top.
I think AIs will be making music inside 10-20 years or less. Honestly I think it could happen in like 1-2 years if a company with lots of AI resources chose to focus on it.
Note that the parent comment wrote interpret music not make it.
I am a musician and there were already impressive algorithmic compositions in the 70s using Markov chains, and today we use machine learning to create something that resembles the works of J.S. Bach.
But how is that creativity? Creativity means coming up with new and interesting things (and fair enough many musicians make quite uncreative decisions all the time).
These statistcal improvisators can come up with some interesting combinations but they are completely unaware of them and don’t repeat it ever again.
IMO we didn’t even solve composition, because it also requires a good feel for how humans react to a piece and how a given piece or instrument fits culturally and what emotions it envokes for what reasons.
Interpretation is yet another thing, it means interacting with an audience in one way or another.
To think we managed to solve composition by scrambling together some melodies from an input of thousand melodies and thinking we are done with the hardest part is hubris at it’s best.
> To think we managed to solve composition by scrambling together some melodies from an input of thousand melodies and thinking we are done with the hardest part is hubris at it’s best.
To me, that's missing the point. The output of systems like BachBot and DeepBach is musically interesting precisely because of how weird and serendipitous the results of that "scrambling together" are. IOW, it's not just scrambling, but scrambling that manages to learn and preserve at least the short-term structures that we associate with "music". (That's a big improvement over simple Markov models.) It's nowhere near what humans would make, same as a picture of an actual dog is not similar to what the DeepDream network outputs as "dog-like" - but it's already interesting in its own right.
Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts.
To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of emotions the author intended to communicate.
That's creativity. As for purposeful manipulation of human emotions, this is harder and would require an AI with a theory of (human) mind, or some equivalent of that. Doesn't sound insurmountable though.
> Creativity and purposeful manipulation of human emotions are orthogonal concerns, even if often bundled together under the term "creativity" in context of arts.
No, absolutely not, I disagree. If we know that a piece of music is generated by software algorithms, it instantly loses any real meaning.
> To disentangle them I propose a simple test: take these 'impressive algorithmic compositions that resemble the works of J.S. Bach' and play them to people, telling them they were composed by a gifted human. Then ask what they think of their creativity, and of emotions the author intended to communicate.
The problem here is you are lying to people in order to achieve an effect. Deception has been known to cause a significant backlash amongst music fans [1]
There are enough music fans out there that will honestly want to know whether the music was created by a human or a computer program. If it ever becomes common place that procedurally generated music is misrepresented as the works of a human or group of humans, then there is a large segment of the population that will turn their noses up, and only listen to live music, where it is apparent that the music is performed by humans.
The rest of the audience, meh, if they want to hear meaning in music composed by machines, that's their prerogative I suppose. Most people I know who actually play instruments or sing are appalled by the idea, or at best, slightly bemused.
I will assert, those who have never stepped away from their computer keyboard long enough to have taken a deep breath, stood in front of a microphone, plucked an electric guitar at high volume or smashed drum skins with sticks in front of a live audience of 100 to 1000 cheering people may just be incapable of understanding this. The feeling in the air can be electric.
Humans connecting with other humans through the creation and reception of music will never be correctly emulated or simulated through silicon, no matter how good the facsimile.
> No, absolutely not, I disagree. If we know that a piece of music is generated by software algorithms, it instantly loses any real meaning.
Which is kind of my point, so I feel we're at least partially in agreement.
The point I'm making is this: creativity in software is either easy to achieve, or near impossible, depending on what you really mean by the term "creativity".
If you have a piece of performance in front of you, and your judgement of whether or not it's "creative" changes when you learn whether the author was a human or a machine, then that "creativity" is impossible for machines by definition - and, frankly, it's also not worth talking about, because it does not depend on the author, but whether or not you consider the author human.
If, however, your opinion wouldn't change upon learning whether the author was human, that kind of creativity is trivial to achieve for machines - it involves relaxing the constraints of whatever algorithm is used to create the performance, and injecting some randomness into it.
Interpretation - better than adequate, not necessarily world class - is a solved problem.
The heuristics for dynamics and tempo changes aren't particularly complicated. You can do a lot with fairly simple phrase recognition. You don't even need a full harmonic, melodic, and structural analysis.
Composition is a much harder problem - especially at the Bach level. And the state of the art is nowhere close to being able to produce satisfactory Bach-level compositions. (In spite of what David Cope says about his work.)
I think AIs making music will come long before AAA games and movies, both of which encompass music as an art and then throw in like another 5 artistic pursuits on top.
I think AIs will be making music inside 10-20 years or less. Honestly I think it could happen in like 1-2 years if a company with lots of AI resources chose to focus on it.