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Robot uprising news: puny humans cannot save the music industry

By | Published on Friday 2 October 2015

Valerio Velardo

Hey guys, sorry to have to tell you this, but we’re going to have to wind up this CMU thing quite soon. Because there’s no point publishing news about and for the music industry if no such thing exists anymore.

And with the rise of intelligent computers, that’s what’s going to happen pretty soon. There’ll be no musicians, so no music business, so no music business news, so no CMU. According to research from the University Of Huddersfield anyway.

Well, the research was actually strangely quiet on the future of CMU. But the other claims have been made by the university’s Steven Jan and Valerio Velardo, who are co-editors of a new publication called the Journal Of Creative Music Systems, which is due to launch next year.

They say that the future of all things musical is one where computers automatically create a piece of music to suit the listener’s exact mood at that point in time. This, they reckon, will do away with popstars like Rihanna and Kanye West “and the huge economic infrastructure that supports and markets such people”.

“You wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money downloading your favourite tracks”, says Jan. “You just tell the computer that you want a piece of music to suit your mood, or something like a piece that you heard last week, and that you want it to be about three minutes long”.

“The field of computational creativity is vibrant at the moment”, he continues. “There is work being done to develop programs that can paint and that can write poetry and stories and generate humour. But computational creativity in music hasn’t been particularly well explored so far. Things that were thought impossible ten years ago are now becoming a reality”.

Inferior human-played music will still have a place though, he adds. “Human beings will always gain pleasure playing music and listening to it performed by humans”. But advances in computer-created – or anthropocentric – music will do away with the need for big stars. Because, of course, those people all become celebrities entirely on the strength of the quality of their music.

A press release also notes that “there is also the possibility that [the computers] could develop a musical language that humans are incapable of understanding or enjoying, but which could be appreciated by other machines”.

Which I think means that robots are going to be the hipsters of the future too.



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