Two Technologists Create Black Metal Album Using An AI (theoutline.com) 57
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Outline: Coditany of Timeness" is a convincing lo-fi black metal album, complete with atmospheric interludes, tremolo guitar, frantic blast beats and screeching vocals. But the record, which you can listen to on Bandcamp, wasn't created by musicians. Instead, it was generated by two musical technologists using a deep learning software that ingests a musical album, processes it, and spits out an imitation of its style. To create Coditany, the software broke "Diotima," a 2011 album by a New York black metal band called Krallice, into small segments of audio. Then they fed each segment through a neural network -- a type of artificial intelligence modeled loosely on a biological brain -- and asked it to guess what the waveform of the next individual sample of audio would be. If the guess was right, the network would strengthen the paths of the neural network that led to the correct answer, similar to the way electrical connections between neurons in our brain strengthen as we learn new skills.
Lw Zepeln (Score:2)
Led Zeppelin said that "The Song Remains the Same". And these largely do.
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Had the same thought.
Listened to the source material (https://krallice.bandcamp.com/).
Yeah; it's supposed to sound that crap.
There you go, finally found another music genre I hate; polka, operetta and black metal.
Is it better than the original? (Score:2)
This brings me back (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't listen to much black metal, but these results seem a bit better, or perhaps just far less silly.
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Thanks for the links. Never would have stumbled across those links otherwise. Good demos.
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Actually, what it reminds me of is Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, but with a drummer thrown in, and somehow less interesting.
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Black metal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, but did the person writing this story up actually listen to the thing? Not only are the songs totally indistinguishable, but they also suck. They are noise. The drums sound awful. The mix is harsh. The music, if you can call it that, is lame and boring. Granted, I don't have any familiarity with the Krallice album they used to train the AI - perhaps all those descriptors apply - but this hardly seems like any kind of real achievement. You could just slice up an existing black metal album into g
Incredible! (Score:1)
They've created a random white noise generator that utilizes AI to harmonize the random white noise. We have brought order to chaos, my friend.
Re: Incredible! (Score:1)
Yup. It's the audio equivalent of that Google AI seeing dog faces in everything. It's sort of interesting because it somewhat mimics human cognition, but the result is very primitive.
great production! (Score:2)
Seems reasonably similar (Score:1)
It sounded really terrible, but so did the original album it was based on.
Death Metal, Dubstep, sure. (Score:2)
That stuff sounds like normal music being put through an industrial shredder anyway. But can your computer sing the blues?
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Oh, my disk drive left me
Optical I lack,
when it comes to networks, well
I ain't got jack!
I got the Retina blues...
but I get good reviews.
Don't do it! (Score:2)
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I don't really think it's replacing humans in this case.
Not There Yet (Score:3)
This indicates to me that they're not really there yet. If you really want to compose something interesting, train the AI in a wide range of music first, then have it focus on a particular artist to mimic, with a goal being to produce songs that sound like they were produced by the same artist. Of course, to be really good, you would need to also handle lyrics, not just the music.
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Comment removed (Score:3)
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I've done "random notes" [bandcamp.com] -- specifically, I set out to mimic the style of the Crazy Bus theme. But the only reason it holds together and isn't just an annoying series of blips is because of the bass line and the drums, neither of which are random. The thing about random is that it will never improve on its own.
Sounds like a bad garage band. (Score:2)
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Trve kvlt (Score:3)
They must have used the same AI to come up with names for the songs.
These songs are not composed. (Score:2)
Sample track for 7 USD (Score:3)
Reflection (Score:3)
I've been involved with generative music since the 1980s. You could say it's a serious hobby of mine.
Making a generative black metal album like the one in the article is trivial, and could easily have been done a decade ago.
If you want to hear the state of the art in generative music, I'd recommend checking out the most recent album and the earlier four iOS apps from Brian Eno. His latest, Reflection was some of the best music in any genre released on record in 2017. It's light years ahead of this junk, which is an insult to the many talented black metal musicians.
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I'm sure the first transistor was an ugly pile of jury-rigged wires and metallic blobs, and an insult to any self-respecting vacuum tube, but that's not the criteria by which we publish.
Such a good post, and then you had to signal your snob credentials.
What might be an insult to black metal musicianship is the author(s) deliberately choosing black metal (over another musical genre) all the better to conceal (to the weak minds of the uninitiated) t
Has this been going on for years? (Score:1)
I have a feeling that pop music has been written exclusively by algorithms since the early 2000s. Sounds that way, anyway.
Welco\m/e (Score:1)
I for one welcome our \m/achine overlords
Remix... (Score:2)
That's a pretty complicated and convoluted way to do a remix of an album.
Additionally, if a genre of music becomes so predictable that computers can synthesise it (or even dice, in the case of the German game Musikalisches Würfelspiel), then it's pretty much dead and it's time to move on to newer genres.
I don't like it, BUT (Score:2)
I don't like it, but then again I don't really like the band this AI learned from.
Feed it music I like and see what it comes up with - it seemed to stay true enough to the original music
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That's because it remixed the original album. It "came up" with pretty much nothing
Doesn't sound like black metal (Score:2)
BLACK METAL (Score:2)
\m/ Venom performing Black Metal live [youtube.com] \m/
How much more black can it be? (Score:2)
None. None more black.
To be fair (Score:1)
...it's honestly no worse than 90% of "real" black metal.