Can AI Write Creative Music?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We're here because your heightened awareness deserves heightened entertainment. The Last Show with David Cooper.
AI can now write music with you. You type in a few words and boom, an AI-assisted breakup ballad plays. But can it feel that breakup? You know what I mean. Can AI-assisted music be deeply creative right now? More creative than a person writing that song alone? Researchers say algorithms are getting better at music, yet humans writing music alone still beat them out creatively. So if that's the case, what exactly makes a song still sound human? I am here with someone who has researched just this.
How can AI assist in writing music?
He's an information systems researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. His name is Jose Oros. Jose, welcome to the show. Hi, David. Excited to be here. Let's talk about your study, AI.
writing music with people it sounds less creative to the average ear what exactly did you find what exactly did you research so um in our study as you as you mentioned uh we're very interested in understanding how this new tools that can create very sophisticated human art like um
Can AI-generated music convey human emotions?
do they actually are able to be leveraged by musicians in a way that expand their ideas, expand their horizon of creation? So what we do in this study is we pretty much give access to a group of participants that have musical training and have piano experience. We ask them to come in and create music with the aid of AI. And we're very curious to see then, OK, what's going to happen? Is the music going to look different from what a human alone would do? Is the music going to be more creative? Is it going to have different elements? So that's what we're studying.
So what did you end up finding?
What does research say about AI's creativity in music?
Was the AI-assisted music more enjoyable, less enjoyable, more creative, less creative?
So before I answer that question, I want to just think about, OK, if we think about how these type of systems help or not, in a way, when we think about these generative AI systems, It's basically, you know, when you have this, it's an idea machine, right? You can just query it. You can create things, you know, very quickly with a lot of speed. So in a way, you can think that you're going to have access to these tools and you're going to find that they, you know, give you a lot of ideas that you can leverage and that should increase your creativity, right?
Yeah, you would think an algorithm with access to the entire history of music would help you make something deeply creative, right?
Precisely. But there's also this other concept of fixation, right? And it's studied on the literature and the psychology literature for a long time. But what this tells you is that, basically, these algorithms, such as the ChatGPT, or specifically the one we're looking at is a text-to-music algorithm. these algorithms tend to produce something that's very probable or high probable patterns. So if you think about how these algorithms produce these patterns, the thing that they're going to produce is going to be highly probable. In the literature, you see that when people listen to these kind of exemplars, then you're going to see that there's a fixation effect. What does this mean? Well, if you're looking at an example, then your search on alternatives, specifically in this case for music, is going to be around that exemplar.
So it's hard to get away from that. And if the exampler itself is something that comes from a high probability, something that's very common, something very average, then it is likely that what you end up producing is going to be very around that average.
MARK MANDELMANN, And for me, a lot of the hype around AI is increased productivity. But music isn't like a spreadsheet that you're trying to fill out efficiently. Music is something you're trying to do that's deeply creative. Is that the reason like AI is really good at kind of doing these productive, efficient, common flows and it doesn't sort of think outside the box, so to speak?
Yeah, yeah.
How do musicians perceive AI-assisted music creation?
It's a very likely reason that we are seeing these kind of patterns. And as you say, you know, there's a lot of research around AI right now.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–0:39
2
How can AI assist in writing music?
0:39–1:11
3
Can AI-generated music convey human emotions?
1:11–1:51
4
What does research say about AI's creativity in music?
1:51–4:11
5
How do musicians perceive AI-assisted music creation?
4:11–9:28
6
What were the findings on the creativity of AI-assisted music?
9:28–9:34
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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