How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Music 261
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by
Soulskill
from the i-think-i-saw-this-episode-of-TNG-already dept.
from the i-think-i-saw-this-episode-of-TNG-already dept.
mbone writes "Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga? Whether you do or not [I'm guessing not], you may be about to find out. Writing for Wired, Eliot Van Buskirk describes North Carolina's Zenph Sound Innovations, which takes existing recordings of musicians (deceased, for now) and models their 'musical personalities' to create new recordings, apparently to critical acclaim (PDF). The company has raised $10.7 million in funding to pursue their business plan, and hopes to branch out into, among other things, software that would let musicians jam with virtual versions of famous musicians. This work unites music with the very similar trend going on in the movies — Tron 2.0, for example, will clone the young Jeff Bridges. If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors? In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists."
Re:How to alienate fans (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite, Guy. "Old" Flynn will be present in the real world, but when entering the computer world what you see will be "young" Flynn.
Not really new (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How to alienate fans (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, but lightcycles could travel in curved lines and were shown doing so in the original movie. Just not on the game grid ;)
Re:It's a shame, but I'm ok with it (Score:5, Informative)
It'll totally be worth it if it gets rid of the Nickleback derivatives.
Since all Nickleback songs sound the same, does Nickleback count as a Nickleback derivative that will also have to be gotten rid of? That would be something all music fans can hope for.
Oh, and as a Canadian, I'd like to apologize to the rest of the world for Nickleback. We're not happy about them either. Sorry.
zenph does not play new pieces (Score:5, Informative)
All they do is digital signal processing, not artificial intelligence.
Re:It's a shame, but I'm ok with it (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It's a shame, but I'm ok with it (Score:4, Informative)
That would be my thought as well.
Fogerty v. Zaentz [wikipedia.org]
Re:It's a shame, but I'm ok with it (Score:2, Informative)
Now, now this isn't the first troublesome thing to come out of Canada, let's not forget Bryan Adams
Re:When 10's of thousands of screaming fans... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, except some artists who "perform" onstage are lip-syncing and faking it to previously-recorded tracks, to ensure that their performances are flawless. I expect there are plenty of others who actually do it and just haven't been caught at it. Yet.
In some cases, as for example the opening to the Beijing Olympics, the performer on stage wasn't even the same person who actually recorded the original song.
It neither started nor stopped with Milli Vanilli (sp?).
So thousands of screaming fans are piling into major venues to watch someone play at stroking at a guitar and moving their lips in silence in front of a dead mic while a computer shreds in their style today.
So what's the difference? The fact that a human has sung the song once in a studio? The fact that the person who originally sung it is playing the role of marionette to their own recordings (or in some cases not even that)? You might as well put a robot out there to make sure all the dance moves are perfect, too.
Re:roll over, beethoven, (Score:4, Informative)
What halting problem? Never assume your reader knows everything you do.
The halting problem [wikipedia.org]: it is not possible to wite a program, let's call it P, which takes another program as its input and then tell if that program will stop or go into an infinite loop.
To understand that this is impossible, imagine you would write a shell script which calls P and passes its own argument to P. Next the shell script would enter an infinite loop if P says its input will end. If P says its input would generate an infinite loop, the shell script would end. Now run the shell script and let it pass its own source code and the source code of P itself (for all practical purposes, P and the script form together a single program) as input into P. Now you get a paradox: if the shell script ends, it goes into an infinite loop and if it goes into an infinite loop its has to end...
I second the advise on reading Hofstadter's GEB.