Fireside Chat: Music and AI, Part 5: Hungry Eyes on Charing Cross: AI Composition in Action

In this five-part series on music and AI, filmed at the 2024 Marketing AI Conference, or May Con in Cleveland, I sit down with composer Ruby King to discuss AI, music, and the future of creativity. This is part five, the fifth and final part of the song Hungry Eyes on Sharon Cross, AI composition in action. That is not at all on chamber bar. Let's see what it doesn't. See if it changes to LT.

Not stiffer base, no. That is a fail. Yes. If I submitted that, I would be noop. Alright, let's see what variation two of that particular one who managed to nail it or not.

Nope. Immediately. I mean, it's epic, but it's epic, but that's not a chamber bar. This is a hungry cat in London. That's a bit OTT, don't you think?

I mean ignoring the instructions Soprano went and two. That's acceptable. Nice. Simmons how many dogs. Women are there too.

Let me tell us that it's hard to tell. Okay, it's got a separate line of harmony held with no words. That was interesting. Audio clipping. I think it was.

So it has mangled the Lazarus. It is no longer following the lyrics. It did follow word painting of that bit. I'm not sure what it's singing now. I've not.

Oh, oh, there's more. So it has gone back and repeat is now repeating ten or one and two. Which you shouldn't. No, it wants to. It wants to.

Who are we to kill girls, obviously? Let's see what the second variation is any better. Okay. Nope. That's a hard pass.

So out of four variations, it m you it didn't even get the genre right for three of them. That's a tricky thing. Also, it completely ignored when it was told brass and soprano. Baby, bass and soprano and like it it had its own ideas. Yes.

So obviously it still has a bit of a ways to go, but that's the process for building that. And with a tool like Suno, yeah, you have to do a bunch of candidates so that it eventually gets one of them right. But to your point earlier, it's you would not have you would not have paid a musician to make that song. People frequently do. Really?

They do. Yeah, so there's a lady who came to our university not too long ago. I first saw her because I went to a Royal Albert Paul performance um in London, and that was sort of music for Royal Occasions, because it was around time of big royal occasions, and we thought hey, it'd be great to hear that kind of thing in a big hall. Like um, yeah, it was a lot of very famous music, and um like Zadok the Priest, which is quite an important famous one. So we went and one of her pieces, one of the pieces there was commissioned, especially for the occasion, it had never been heard before, and it was the first time we heard it.

And I got to meet the um composer afterwards very briefly. I think she signed something and I ran away all giddy. Then she came to the university afterwards, and she recognized me. Yay. But she had been, I believe she'd been commissioned to write a piece for a chamber choir that was at a church.

Because there are still, when you go to churches, especially in England, I cannot speak of America. I have been here like five minutes, I don't have a clue what's going on. But in England, there are old style churches that still have chamber choirs that still dress in the like red and white with the little fritty stuff. Um they're cool, don't diss it. Um, and they still sing, um, and there's still sometimes gender requirements for like not always, but sometimes there are still I think yeah.

Um, but they need music, and it's fine singing the old stuff, but sometimes you want to commission a new piece for a special occasion, like maybe it's the birthday of like 500th birthday of something, and you want to have a special thing. So they they can be commissioned, they are commissioned, but it depends what it's for and how much money there is, whether they even hire you to sing it, let alone if you told this to write that for you. Can it give you the score, the sheet music to give to your musicians? Because at the moment I think the answer is no to that. The answer is this tool cannot.

You can use other tools to decompile it. Okay, um, I'm not sure how effective that would be, bearing in mind some of those notes were just kind of, I know this is meant to be loud with a lot of notes, and there's some notes in here, don't listen to all of them. Yeah. No, I bet um it's unlikely someone would write a commit would would commission a song about a hungry cat just for fun. There has been stranger things.

Fair enough. Okay. Um yeah, that's the process for how you would use generative AI. You would today it it's not something you can do all in one tool that's going to be highly effective. It's going to be something you have to do across multiple tools.

That will change over time, as well as the audio models themselves will get better over time. So I guess that leaves us at the end of this to say, what do you think about the future of music, given what we worked on and what you know of the industry and what you know of the way AI is going. I think it's going to change. And I know that a lot of people are concerned and hoping for the best. It's a tricky situation because a lot of it does come down to laws, and people in other countries, a long way away from most of the people I know in industry, and what they decide.

And it also depends a very large amount on the morals and ethics and beliefs and preferences of the people who have the money to usually commission that music. The music industry has already changed so much because of streaming. I mean, back in the day, like a very, very, very long time ago, you would live in a residence of someone who would pay you to write the music, and then a patron. Yeah, exactly. Like, it's not like that anymore.

Like back in my day, not quite. But that was the way it was, and now that's nearly unthinkable. I can't think off the top of my head of anyone who's in that particularly great situation. But streaming has changed it, and streaming pays so little that it's a real problem and it can't continue forever. But where that line, where it changes, is it going to change in favor of musicians and giving us a fair cut of what our work is worth?

Or is it going to change we didn't need you anyway? AI will now be what we have, and we will invest all our money in improving AI rather than in paying you enough money to incentivize you to write good music. Because we're not like musicians, composers have to do a lot of work to get our music, their music heard, and that will no longer be anything but a hobby if the money from Spotify and stuff is sent over to preference of AI and trying to get that to be the best that it can be, so that more people go, okay, that was the old times, this is the new times, you have to be up and with it with the new times. Goodbye, humans, hello machines. It all does depend on so many different things.

I think it's impossible to say right now what is going to happen. Anyone who is predicting the future is predicting the future, which is a bad don't dream that doesn't work. I would agree with the caveat that some yeah, you know, this is as a psychology person, some human behaviors are very predictable. Yes, greed and stupidity are highly predictable. People generally want better, faster and cheaper.

That's highly predictable. People want to be entertained and engaged and to some degree educated. Um with that backdrop, given how the industry of music functions, it is highly probable that at least in the short term, there will be music industries will see music companies say that we can save a lot of money by not paying humans and generate music that people will find acceptable enough. Which is why it also depends on laws and rules. Like I'm not sure what happened with something that there was such a lawsuit when open it was OpenAI said we can't do what we do without without this content.

Are they being told they can't? Well, those court cases are going to take years to work out. So uh it is unclear. Okay, well, that could help musicians in the future. It could, and if that cloud is over the heads of tech companies, then investing every single penny into making it as great as possible might be slowed down.

Because if it isn't, if it if there's a possibility that all that money is wasted, then greed dictates that money being wasted is bad. Right. So for those independent companies, that's true. Uh what is probable is that it will hyper concentrate uh into the tech companies that have the legal standing, Google and Meta. Um, as the companies like, hey, you you're using Instagram and Facebook and and YouTube.

You gave us licenses, so here's our models that are now the best in class models because we have the legal standing to say you told us we can make derivative work, so you're stuck. Yes. Um yeah, well, we're with greed, the music industry has got so much greed in it. Already, it's infested. It's really a difficult thing to get into, especially for minorities or anyone but the usual, which I don't have to explain.

So, like it's hard enough as it is, and then you add in all these other things, and it's like things are only gonna get worse. And I would like to say until they get better. But I'm not sure you can predict that either. No, we cannot. Nah.

No. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate your time for this uh this series. Um, we're gonna publish this as a series because no one's gonna sit through 90 minutes of this.

Um, and thank you very much. All right, we're done. That concludes our series. I hope you found it helpful and useful and would love your feedback about your thoughts on AI, music, uh, the ethics of using AI, and so on and so forth. You leave a comment below, uh, leave uh send an email, drop a DM, whatever.

You can find Ruby on LinkedIn. Just look for Ruby King uh composer. Thanks for tuning in. See you on the next one. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button.

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