I know so many musicians that would absolutely love the tool, but it’s just not accessible, and Onsets and Frames is actually one of the most accessible right now.
The research has progressed far enough to release the tools for developers, but there isn’t that same level of progress in packaging and delivering the service to anyone that cares - and the vast majority of musicians won’t because of all the boilerplate.Ī great example of this disconnect is Onsets and Frames, which I wrote about last year. Obviously somewhere along the line from research to user there’s a gap, and I’d argue it’s more than a gap. It’s pretty clear why this isn’t effective for any musician. Lovely. I can’t even tell if that’s Twinkle Twinkle anymore - if Sam actually changed the name from all_star to twinkle_twinkle, I doubt I would have been able to tell the difference. Sam can forget about training his own AI musician - Deep Learning is notoriously resource-greedy, so he would need at least a CUDA-enabled GPU Instead of working with sheet music, scores, piano roll or the ubiquitous MuseScore, Sam now has to do all of his composing and idea generation like this: Sam is all done combing through Stack Overflow and gets rid of all the ImportErrors, surely now he can get into music creation? Sam also needs to go through the harrowing installation and setup of Python and its dependencies (as well as an IDE) and the complex web of installations for the Magenta module to work. In order to use anything beyond the very basic tools, the user (let’s call him Sam) is required to know Python, already cutting off any non-programmers.
The shortage exists in musicians who have the technical skill necessary to use these tools - the barrier to entry is too high. How can there possibly be a shortage of musicians? There are so many creative tools that would be amazing for any composer, but musicians just aren’t! Despite some imperfections, these tools provide huge amounts of creative material but there’s simply no one to use it. So what’s the problem? Why aren’t these being used? AI is rapidly taking over so many fields, and there’s huge progress in music too! There are so many awesome developments (check out the app Transformer) and progress is moving at a breakneck pace. Music seems to be one of the fields that, at a surface level at least, AI just can’t seem to penetrate.