The Death of Artists?

[uncloned]

Actually I think not - judging from my daughter's taste a lot of this is going to be resoundingly rejected. #1 flag is - critics like it.

IMHO these people have to stop re-creating and start creating with these tools.

"Ever wonder how Jimi Hendrix would cover Lady Gaga? Whether you do or not [I'm guessing not], you may be about to find out. Writing for Wired, Eliot Van Buskirk describes North Carolina's Zenph Sound Innovations, which takes existing recordings of musicians (deceased, for now) and models their 'musical personalities' to create new recordings, apparently to critical acclaim. The company has raised $10.7 million in funding to pursue their business plan, and hopes to branch out into, among other things, software that would let musicians jam with virtual versions of famous musicians. This work unites music with the very similar trend going on in the movies — Tron 2.0, for example, will clone the young Jeff Bridges. If this goes on, will the major labels and studios actually need musicians and actors? In the future, it could be harder to make money playing guitar with all of the competition from dead or retired artists."


Here is a link to the article with all of the links

http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/10/03/03/175209/How-Artificial-Intelligence-Is-Changing-Music

[Sam_Zen]

This is a logical result of the technical developments so far, and the refined state it is in.
Look at the realtime personages in Avatar. The same with sound.

But I don't see the link between using existing material and 'Innovation'.. That word is too big.

In the 80s there was a change in copyright. People were allowed to use the chords of max. 8 bars of an existing song,
before they had to do something different.
This resulted in a hausse of "quote music". This was successful for a year, then it vanished.

[Saga Musix]

This is a logical result of the technical developments so far, and the refined state it is in.

Isn't it more like the progress of science? You first need science to find out the "characterstics" of a (dead) artist. Then you can go over to reproducing them, and it doesn't matter if a computer does it or a real person.

[Louigi Verona]

I fail to see why delivering a combination yet unheard should be considered progress.

The thing that in my opinion the copyright is missing is that it tries to eliminate any usage of previously created material. No longer can you take a musical work and base a new one on it. Now you should go around and ask permissions. The whole fact that you even have to ask for a permission is damaging.

In the end the arts are now in such a dreadful state not because someone is using existing material or not using it, but because arts are now heavily controlled. Stop controlling it, stop digging into every track, trying to see who used what, stop making composers chase each other to ask for permission of something they should be free to do - and arts will flourish.

[Sam_Zen]

I agree about the permission issue. But at least one should have the decency to mention the maker of the source material.
For the rest : I don't care at all using sounds being at my disposal via a CD, LP, radio, tv or iNet, whether 'legal' or not.
As it is now, the music from the past is defined as 'illegal' itself, instead of some tricky way of using it.
This, I agree too, causes an obstacle for musical innovation.

[Louigi Verona]

I agree about the decency. In our society being an author gives you so much benefits, that attribution seems to be a must.

[PPH]

Things that can be done by computers should be done by computers so that humans are free to tackle problems that can't be resolved by computers.

[uncloned]

are you then going to purchase and listen to music "created" by computers ?

[PPH]

are you then going to purchase and listen to music "created" by computers ?

If its good enough, sure. But the day a computer can make music as good as a human can, there won't be much difference between a computer and a human, will there? I mean: from that day on, computers will sort of be "alive", right? That's not what I'm talking about, though.

My point is this: there are certain tasks that, for now, only humans can do. These tasks require some sort of creativity computers don't have. A computer can't write a novel or compose a symphony. But some tasks can be performed by a computer. It is a good thing to let a computer address those tasks, so that creative labor, human labor, is freed in order to address those complex problems a computer can't solve.

Example: when calculators didn't exist, complex arithmetic operations were performed by hand. Why would you still do them by hand nowadays.

[uncloned]

But your position implies that there is no human communication in the arts.

My position is that the manipulation of the media requires communication in order to be considered art.

Recombining music phrases into new piece is akin to recording whale song on tape - cutting, randomizing and reassembling the tape and still expecting to communicate with whales.

I don't think it will happen.

True cyber creativity would be something other than recombination. And it would be something other than an imitation of human art. IMHO of course.

[PPH]

But your position implies that there is no human communication in the arts.

My position is that the manipulation of the media requires communication in order to be considered art.

Recombining music phrases into new piece is akin to recording whale song on tape - cutting, randomizing and reassembling the tape and still expecting to communicate with whales.

I don't think it will happen.

True cyber creativity would be something other than recombination. And it would be something other than an imitation of human art. IMHO of course.

If a computer had the same ability of a human, there would be as much communication as if a human had made the music. But this is a different subject from the original one, I think.

My point really was this: computers are tools that help human beings. For the time being, there are two kinds of problems: those which a computer is better at solving, and those which humans are better at solving.

As technology improves, computers advance and some things which only humans could solve are now better solved by computers. What I say is this: those problems should be left to computers to solve. Insisting on humans solving them would be a waste. In general, those problems don't require creativity. Creativity is, for now, a human feature only. The "communication" you mention is still in the human realm. But things that can be automated can be left to computers, so humans have more time to address what is really important they address.

[uncloned]

I ask...

is art just a "problem" to be solved?

or is art something more than that?

With all due respect I read your words and I find the thought - the reality your words paint, as incredibly cold as it reduces what I see as your perception of humans as something less than vital or alive. Humans as only wet-ware processors.

That an "artificial"  being (really non-biological sentient being) would have something to say I do not question. But it would not be from the perspective of a human. Neither would full communication with Dolphins.

[Louigi Verona]

I found that a lot of people interpret art differently. However, I do find the increasing view on everything as cold and materialistic. I think a lot of it is connected to the way religion is portrayed in the mind of the majority.

If you look at modern movies which touch upon religion in the mainstream, you would see stories about people to whom faith is something of a perversion of what faith should be and of how it was understood in the past. Today faith is basically a zombified state of human mind when a person tries to persuade oneself to believe in something that is truly impossible in our world, and he does not believe in it but he tries to persuade himself that he does. And people try to live in that illusion and they call it faith - no wonder thinking people reject that kind of "religion".

Religion is looked upon as a wrong path of the human history, something to be ashamed of, something that was a result of a primitive race. As much as I love Star Trek, all the passages about religion always make me think how superficial modern materialistic philosophy has become.

And so a typical stereotype about religion is that about dogma, hypocrisy and self-delusion. Which has nothing in common with a real religious world-view, full of life and profoundness and wisdom, to say the least.

Because in minds of people "progressive views" repeat again and again that there is nothing in the world besides what we see and touch, a lot of people start to reject a notion of spirit, art as a spiritual act, love as a spiritual act and life as a path of a human soul. To them spirit is a only and not more than a set of chemical reactions in the brain, art is a mere recombination of something seen before and nothing more, love is only a set of biological instincts combined with those chemical reactions and nothing more, and life is only an existence of a biological organism and nothing more.
A religious person sees something more in all of the above. It is something that can only be an experience, it cannot be logically proved or theorized.

[PPH]

I ask...

is art just a "problem" to be solved?

or is art something more than that?

With all due respect I read your words and I find the thought - the reality your words paint, as incredibly cold as it reduces what I see as your perception of humans as something less than vital or alive. Humans as only wet-ware processors.

That an "artificial"  being (really non-biological sentient being) would have something to say I do not question. But it would not be from the perspective of a human. Neither would full communication with Dolphins.

No. It's precisely the opposite. Humans are so unique that I don't want them wasting their creativity in activities so trivial that they can be solved by machines.

Would you have humans calculating logarithms by hand? No.

Of course art is not just a "problem" to be solved. I never said that. On the other hand, suppose that, instead of having to use Modplug Tracker to make a piece of music, write the notes,  choose volume and panning envelopes, gather samples, etc, etc, you could just imagine the piece of music and send it to a computer and have it produce the sound automatically from what you imagined. Wouldn't that be an improvement?

Don't you use the "interpolate" feature in volume columns? Isn't that so you don't have to waste time entering the volume row by row?

I think you have misunderstood me.

A different subject is the question of whether an artificial being could become, in a sense, as sentient as a human, provided that its intelligence is at least equal to that of a human being. Dolphins is not a good example, because they are not as intelligent as humans, or at least, their mind is not like that of humans.

[PPH]

Perfect example: Pixar. Pixar is composed of some of the best creative minds in the world. They spend their creative energy in defining what is to be shown, but computers do the hard work of generating the images. People say: "this image should look like that, with a light here and another there", and model the characters and objects, but a computer then makes the calculations necessary to generate the image. If such calculations were to be performed by people, making these movies wouldn't even be possible.