This is why we never should have invented the phonograph. People who want to listen to music can just buy a record, making it literally impossible for them to perform an activity humans ENJOY doing. Without it everyone would surely be making all their own music, and nothing valuable would be lost
The ability to record has led the greatest expansion I musical artistry in human history.
Ty it don’t think peasants were listening t to Bach, do you? Only the extraordinarily wealthy could afford to have music as anything like an every day thing.
And with more affordable and easier-to-learn tools, the creation of music will be similarly made much more accessible?
DAWs and virtual instruments running on regular laptop was one step, generative AI models will be another?
You're debating two different things, two different experiences
Creation is a human activity, charged with emotions, efforts, which are their own rewards, as much as the end-product, which is invested of this human (sometimes collective and not instant) effort and intention and creative loopbacks. Let's call that some kind of history (because the process did happen).
Generation short-circuits that entirely, as it happens at non-human speeds, and non-human scales. It's something _else_ entirely. You do get an end-product. It may be fun and useful for some; it sometimes is. However, you don't get the process, the collaboration and the inner transformation it comes with.
Adding: with two different end-products, the issue is then how they are perceived, received, appreciated and valued by those not "in the know" of how they were made. And that is both an artistic, aesthetic and economic problem. Generating soulless shit that isn't invested with a human sentiment miseducates people and destroys taste.
I agree with your overall description of creation. But I do not agree that generative models are something else entirely. They are tools, and while their affordances do influence what people do with it, in the end the responsibility is on the creator. You can make "soulless shit" or "thoughtful commentary" or anything else you put your mind to, by using these tools in combination with all the existing ones.
Models that are oriented around one-shot, text-only direction are pretty limiting in creative flow. This will hopefully continue to improve.
To make what I consider a halfway decent song with these current easiest-to-use services (like Suno and Udiio) takes a few hours in my experience.
To get there one has to work with the text, the song structure, find a decent style, and then do corrections on sections where the models goes off track.
To make something that is closer to "good", I would go and re-record all the lead vocals myself, and then mix this in a DAW.
The tools and knowledge for making music are already unbelievably accessible. Anyone with an internet connection and a decent computer can read about music theory, learn to use a DAW, and get some basic virtual instruments. The same goes for producing art, which doesn't even require anything digital.
This does not augment the music making process in any way, it simply replaces it with what might as well be a gacha game. There's no low-level experimentation, no knowledge acquisition, no growth, and you can't even truly say you made whatever comes out.
It's not a tool for music creators, it's a tool for people who want slop that's "good enough".
Sure, with several hundred hours to spare one can make some songs in a DAW. Now one can make something as good/bad in maybe 1/10x the time. Or, given the same time investment, one can possibly make something better!
The goal of AI automating labor should be to give us more leisure time to pursue hobbies, not to fill our limited leisure time with low quality substitutes for those hobbies.
Making an activity in which the primary limiting factors for most people are the time, knowledge, and effort required (as opposed to expensive tools) into an effortless slot machine pull is enfeebling to human creativity and agency. Who will spend the hours of making bad music to get to the point where they become good if they can just rely on something else to generate music that's "good enough"?
There's something to be said about all this which is related to AI generated images that I rarely see brought up: people with specific skills play roles within groups, so AI making their hobby that they dedicated so much time to more easily accessible makes them lose social value, which might make them quit altogether.
The common response that "people should make art because they love it, not for attention" is a prescriptive statement that supposes there are more or less "pure" forms of performing an activity and also ignores that art is a form of communication.
"low quality substitute" and "effortless" are value judgements on your behalf. Many made similar judgements about DAWs and VSTs. And that is your right. But not everyone sees it in the same way - for some generative models are opening up a new world of possibilities.
I agree that the slot machine pull of current models is tedious and boring. I look forward to models/systems which better facilitate more creative control, directed exploration and iterative refinement.
Yes, there are a TON of free tools and endless instruction on using them. If you move your budget up to making one-time payments for things that cost less than one month using a subscription service, you get an astonishing breadth of new options. Beyond that, so many of the more expensive music making tools are one-time payments rather than subscription services. Buy Ableton once? You own it. You can get the latest version at a discount, but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using the version you bought, in perpetuity.
Lots of common people did listen to Bach, because he wrote many works for church organ. Church attendance was almost universal, and even small churches had (small) pipe organs.
His work was not commonly performed in his lifetime, and I think you're rather proving my own point? Yes, they could perhaps occasionally listen to Bach, if the organist at their church was aware of him (most would not have been, not until hundreds of years later), had the music, were willing to perform it, and you happened to be in attendance when they did. That's a lot of chained ands.
There are like 6 core activities that bind humans together: shared creation of food, myth and music; co habitation, protection, child rearing.
We've done these things ourselves for hundreds of thousands of years. As we are increasingly convinced to buy them for convenience we loose the very things that make us know our connectedness.
So ya, there are real problems caused by the convenience of technology
People will still enjoy making music. Musicians will make music quite regardless of whether anyone is listening or whether there’s recordings or AI available.
