by Veedrac | 2025-09-27 23:31:52+00:00
I've been avoiding trying to class what counts as 'interesting' because it feels like the wrong point to make, for a medium so entwined with personal preferences that are so often at odds with each other. To single out my tastes feels like it would be saying 'paleontology is the true interesting subject, unlike architecture'. The tracks you listed here aren't really my thing, but I can see why AI audio doesn't help with it. That's fine.

I will also repeat that I'm well aware that the best stuff is definitely all human. It's not my genre either, but traditional composers like Bach certainly made extremely interesting, clever, even deeply-studiable pieces and AI 'in the style of' those composers surely won't capture much of that. There's a lot of stuff AI can't do wholesale; one particularly strong example is if you're Jacob Collier, AI is not going to make the complex harmonizations and song structures there.

AI is pretty bad at these textural or instrument exploration things like from Collier above or Mike Dawes or Yosi Horikawa or Yoko Kanno or Keiichi Okabe. There's a bunch of music I listen to because it's generically a genre or mood I like and it's well produced, which I won't list here, and AI audio can often do stuff like that at baseline but not especially well. There's also nostalgia; I'm also certain a huge part of the reason I like the Celeste soundtrack so much is in part that I liked the game so much.

But then there's a whole category of music I listen to where the texture is supplemental to the part that defines it, like most of Acapella Science or Bug Hunter or Tom Lehrer. Eg. Prisencolinensinainciusol isn't interesting to me because it's musically complex; the part I care about is that it's a listenable execution of an idea, not precisely how it was executed on. I don't keep coming back to I Will Derive by some random schoolkids recorded on a potato 17 years ago annually because it's sung well or they were particularly clever with how they took another song and changed the words; I come back to it because it's fun and reflects for me onto a part of my past that I remember fondly, and these things make me happy.

All these words and I've still only addressed half the comment. Ok, let's consider the idea that it's not enough for AI audio to facilitate the creation of interesting musical pieces, and it instead has to create whole interesting musical styles. I take issue with this in a bunch of places. I don't reject artists who I judge not likely able to create a new Bossa Nova. I judge artists based on whether the output they produce is something I want. I do the same for AI.

I also think the question about whether AI could 'create' a new style is somewhat misplaced. A style is a cultural centroid, not just a piece of audio. AI can definitely create new musical textures or motifs, but it's always being pulled towards the form of what it's being asked to produce. As long as we're talking about systems that work like today's systems, the question still needs to involve the people that are selecting for the outputs they want. Could that connected system create something as distinct and audibly novel as a new genre? Yeah, probably, given time and a chance for things to settle. That's a different question from whether it'll do so to an inspecific prompt thrown at it.