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Friday Fun Thread for March 22, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Looks like AI Music is having its ChatGPT moment: https://app.suno.ai/

Lyrics, long (2-minute) songs, different languages, quite high quality. If you're too lazy to write your own lyrics ChatGPT will do it for you, which gives it the whiff of terminal genericness. My personal favourites:

Bean Soup: https://app.suno.ai/song/524dd0c0-c4e3-4c94-9968-aaa7c93c6fbc

LOOK MOM I AM A MUSICIAN!!!: https://app.suno.ai/song/aada88a3-9d7f-422a-843d-2a544379d059

You could take this and just slap it in a game I reckon - not the greatest video game OST of all time but perfectly decent: https://app.suno.ai/song/4c95e7de-8d99-4db0-af7d-922c274569bd

Per their terms of use, you fully own anything you make if you made it while you have their 10 dollar subscription. I think a lot of people lose work over this.

The question of whether and where composers lose their jobs is more about status than cost or automation. As with, say, pilots and running an air route, their labor cost is a relatively minimal part of the product. Already, developers often spend much more on music than they have to, eg. hiring symphony orchestras to record their soundtrack on Abbey Road when the gap between that recording and a well-produced synthetic track with modern tech will be extremely minimal and won’t matter to pretty much any players.

It reminds me of the discussion we were having last week where it turns out that most businesses aren’t actually run in the interests of shareholders, something as true for a local mom-and-pop store as it is for Google and Citigroup. Shareholder influence often rarely even asserts itself, these are places that exist primarily to support their own internal hierarchy, their employees who actually operate the machine.

Already, developers often spend much more on music than they have to, eg. hiring symphony orchestras to record their soundtrack on Abbey Road

Who does this?

Nintendo does full orchestra stuff, and I’d agree there’s some luxury-good signaling involved. Still, I don’t think they’re renting out famous studios and getting star musicians involved? I’d expect it to have a pretty streamlined production process, one driven by the composer’s preferred workflow.

I think it’s a lot more common for AA/AAA projects to use the small-team approach with experienced composers. The only ones who go even cheaper are smaller, indie productions, culminating in the “developer winging it” school of soundtrack design. And not everyone can be Daisuke Amaya.