Welcome to Why Make Music..., a podcast where we dive into the world of creations.
hosted By ThinkTimm,,, we're broadcasting from Planet Erath.
so without further ado let embark on our journey our own journey to think, to talk, and to explore.
Why Make Music...
Welcome to YMAC Music.
I'm your host, ThinkTimm.
Today on Why Make Music...
Dot, dot, dot, the podcast. We will be discussing AI.
Artificial intelligence. Artificial life.
What are some of the pros and cons when it comes to music production?
For those who are tuning in for the first time, let me introduce myself.
I am ThinkTimm. That's T-H-I-N-K-T-I-M-M.
And I will be your host and curator for all things music here on Why Make Music...
Dot, dot, dot.
Let me begin by once again explaining my background.
I am a hobbyist musician turned independent producer slash artist.
I want to say that there is more of an emphasis on the producer side.
In the background of all the podcasts, which by chance this is episode 25,
is music that will be likely played. Hopefully this music will catch your attention for it is all written, composed, produced by me.
ThinkTimm, all of my music is available on all streaming platforms such as Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeart Music, etc.
So without further ado, I will get into our episode this week,
which I have been dabbling and experimenting to try to come up with the best description of the functionalities when it comes to home production.
I say home production because for that's where I produce my music.
I am not affiliated with anything major. I am a self-producing entity of music.
So I thank you for tuning in and I thank you for your support.
This is the time where I have to remind you to like and follow and subscribe and leave a comment or a question in the section below.
So across the board people, what is your opinion on AI?
I know that it is a mixed bag when it comes to speaking of AI, especially when it comes to creative people for AI.
If used irresponsibly could possibly take revenue from creators.
I say that because in the everyday more visual aspects of artificial intelligence,
one could prompt, ChatGPT or open AI or journey or any other to recreate an image or draw an image in whatever style you decide to choose.
And it will perhaps give you a one of a kind image.
It will do it as many times as you request it and it could be entertaining because the more detailed your prompt is, the greater the likelihood is that you will receive an image to your liking.
In the professional world, AI is used to summarize, gather information, disseminate information quickly,
get you answers that you are needed to explain educational lessons.
It is a great tool.
I am not a person that looks at AI from a negative point of view because I believe that basically any technology that is introduced to the masses
by the time that the average person gets their hands on it to utilize it via their computer, PC, desktop, smartphone, tablet or what have you.
It is technically mainstream at that point.
One of us are computer programmers, software writers, code writers to sit back and say that we are on the cutting edge of AI.
We know what our curiosities lead us to look up and what videos we can procure for ourselves and we can look at.
But none of us are, or at least no one I know immediately is the one who is responsible for any AI to come about.
Now there are people that I know in conversation and in life they have their issues depending on their point of view of what they think AI is
and the harmful elements that it has towards us humans.
Being though you hear the run of the mill likelihood of the stories that pertain to
AI is going to get smart enough to realize that we the humans are the problem and it's going to eradicate us realizing that we are not necessarily part of the solution.
That we are more so part of the problem.
Once again with that terministic and matrix like situation way above my pay grade since I am a independent producer, musician and podcast host of this lovely podcast.
Why Make Music... dot dot dot? If it happens what can I do about it?
Well so, true story, about a month ago I saw a YouTube video and it was talking about finding a way to generate passive income with the use of AI.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all about the hustle. I'm all about educating myself on finding ways, techniques of utilizing any type of technology to ease me through my creative process.
I am not necessarily a fan of AI when it comes to being creative.
My personal view is that I find the creative process rather therapeutic, rather part of the journey of creating either the visual art or the music that you hear.
So the hands on creation to me is equally important if not more so important than the final product that you the consumer, the listening audience, the person who
likes something but does not necessarily create something.
So the passive way was utilizing ChatGPT, asking it to give you a list of names for children's songs.
Tell them what type of song you were trying to write and it would generate a list of 20 or so titles.
So say for example if you wanted happy preschool age, multicultural involvement, educational videos about trips to the zoo, or you wanted a song about
animals singing the alphabet or you wanted anything, the more descriptive you were and entering your information, the more creative titles, the AI generated.
That was step one. So me being the curious soul that I am, I did it and I wrote prompts in reference to perhaps, could you write a song about space kids?
Because me being a Star Wars fan and I figured I would keep it in an alien non-human like world.
So therefore I requested that and with that prompt I got a list of about 20 or so titles of songs and it was cool.
Don't get me wrong and I also included activities, whether it was playing in a schoolyard on a far distant planet,
whether it was possibly being friends with an alien, you know all of the basic things that people tend to look at or search for
when it comes to kids songs involving outer space stuff. So it was kind of cool and kind of fun.
So what I did from there was I picked a song and the song was titled was called "Intergalactic Ice Cream"
I went to a suggested website, I think it was called SUNO.AI, perhaps I'm going to...
Let's see, Sun U, S-O-S-U-N-O-A-I. It was a music generation site that allows you to make high quality music in various styles and genres.
So what I did, I followed the instructions of the YouTube video and the next thing I did was type in,
could you write lyrics for this song called "Intergalactic Ice Cream" and sure enough it printed out lyrics.
Now mind you, this story I'm telling you is longer than the time it took for the AI to do the steps.
So step one, generate a bunch of titles. Step two, pick a title. Step three, ask AI to write a song.
Step four, go to the Suno, S-U-N-O-A-I website and basically plug in your audio.
Yeah, so it's that easy and I say it's that easy because literally it was that easy.
So from there, what I did was I plugged the lyrics in and literally seconds it generated a song.
Now I am going to minimize my background music for a hot second like this.
But before I do that, I want to make sure I pull up the track and have it ready for a quick look
because I don't want to waste anybody's time and I am going to pull it up on the other screen
so we can have a look, see, at this craziness. So here we go.
I have the other screen up and in this box here is the preview of the song that took literally two minutes to make.
Now what I'm going to do is I am going to drag it in to my field right here and fill it in
because I am really uncertain as the proper connection of whatever because I'm doing this like I'm ad lib as I go along.
So I'm going to pull it and I'm going to put that right here.
All right. So I do have it loaded. I am going to lower the volume so it's not obscenely loud.
And we are going to take a listen. Now my question is, OK, obviously I'm still recording.
Things are going well and I am going to move it a little closer so we can have it coming in as soon as possible.
So I'm going to put it right here and I'm going to minimize this next track here to bring it up.
So in a hot second, we're going to get it going and we should have it playing. And am I recording still? I am.
And here we go. It should be coming in right now.
All right. So enough of that.
So seriously, within less than two minutes, it created this Disney-esque song that background vocals the whole bit.
And technically, if you did not bat your eyes about it or if you were sitting home with your kids and that came on the television streaming channels, so forth, you wouldn't think twice about it.
Now, as a music creator that's not drawing a paycheck from making music and the time that I spend making music,
two minutes to make a full fledged song that probably posted on YouTube under a children's station with a catchy hashtag and some flashy SEOs.
Those are the search engines application to help you find something when you're looking.
Interesting hustle.
Yeah, I just moved it down the line. Didn't get rid of it. Anywho, but the thing is,
how do you get mad at technology that does that when you as the consumer, you don't necessarily know where it's being utilized?
We have all seen animated movie. We've all listened to commercials and we don't know for sure who are the creators of these songs that we hear.
The reason I say that is not only was this instructional video, keeping you to how to create a ton of songs like that.
Think about it. It's been out 20 titles in less than a couple of seconds. It literally took seconds minutes for it to generate this song.
It generated two songs that gave me an option to pick and it would have generated more if I just click the button.
So if I did not necessarily have a moral compass in the course of a day, I could probably generate easily a hundred children song.
The next step of the hustle was to go to a video site and then cut and paste the lyrics, a couple lyrics at a time to generate images to accompany the lyrics.
And then put it all together and the complete scenario was a two minute video that played like anything else that you would probably ignore completely because it seemed completely normal and made by whomever.
So all I'm saying is that artificial intelligence is a useful technology.
And you think about it for those who play video games, if you play any sports games like a Y2K, the commentators are calling the games as you're playing it.
That's AI. They're telling you the scores from the sporting event the night before. It's giving you real life stats and real life history and real life antidotes in conjunction with a video game.
Applications used on your phone, information gathered, assimilated, put it out there for people to consume, writing codes, helping you with your assignments, your works, whether you are a health care professional to a student, to a curious person.
Whenever I have questions about programming or getting something done quickly, I literally tell my ChatGPT on my phone to tell me like I'm to explain it to me like I'm a novice and it gives me step by step instructions.
Legal questions, publishing questions, conflict of interest questions.
It is a resource that is necessarily there to aid you and help you. But I do see the problem side of it.
I could technically do what a creative does in a fraction of the time.
And I looked up the legal copyright rights of it and the person who created the prompt and created the product holds the rights to basically put that song out and collect the revenue and the way AI works is that
it generates a one of a kind
piece of material, whether it be art or music that technically there is only one of them.
I'm sure I did hear stories that there was a music AI program that actually put a DJ tag over the music because that was the music that it was learning from and it dropped several times.
So,
what are your thoughts on AI and the creative field?
Why make music episode 25 Artificial Intelligence Artificial Life?
Do you think in your life, it is something that is a necessity to utilize? Do you think it's good? I guess it depends on what you do in your daily everyday life.
I find it to be helpful.
I'm not afraid of the future and will AI take over? Don't get me wrong.
I've fallen down plenty of rabbit holes, looking at AI robots and AI weapon guided systems and the things that it can do and possibly make
your mind spin because I can't say whether it's totally good or totally bad. It's not my place.
All I know is that it's crazy. There is another app that I'm playing around with. It's a program from ACE Studio.
And what you can do is import your vocals from your song. And once you import the vocals over to the program,
it will transfer the audio wave into MIDI signals and then it allows you to utilize a AI generated voice.
And it has countless amount of vocals and styles and you can adjust it and you can change it and so forth and so on.
You have to try it and give it a shot and see. I don't know. I am not going to criticize anything that is being done and put out there
because the thing is I don't know who is utilizing this technology, who's not utilizing this technology as a movie goer,
as a fan of film. I know AI can be used to cut the production time of doing special effects.
I know that in customer service, more likely you are interacting with a AI generated customer service representative.
So I as a creative, I say learn, learn about it because I guess the same way that more traditional musicians,
like I guess when I was a younger guy and I was playing actual instruments and recording on to tape and lo and behold,
digital workstations appear, keyboards that had hundreds and hundreds of sound, all the rolling keyboards and Yamahas
and synthesizers that came and I'm sure older musicians looked at that and thought, oh, that's not the way to go.
You saw the fall of I guess the traditional recording studio when people started using computers and laptops and virtual tracks
that could be countless and you can't run from technology, I guess long story short, so I will keep educating myself
and I would encourage you no matter what you do in your life to do the same. Don't say something is bad or good
if you don't necessarily know how it really affects you in your life. Now, shit, if times got really crazy
or I really had a lot of extra time on my hands and I thought that there was a market for cheesy songs and whatever,
maybe I would sit back and spend a month and get my slave on and try to generate as many children's songs
because I know when my kids were little we'd listen to a ton of songs about numbers, ABCs as part of the learning experience.
I never questioned who wrote these songs or if these were legitimate songs, but all I know that me personally ThinkTimm T-H-I-N-K-T-I-M-M
as I tried to generate a organic following, it would hurt my feelings, it would hurt me to my soul
if I were to create a YouTube channel or a social media channel and generate AI content and if I sold or out marketed my own original content
it's something to think about because I see artwork that has been generated by AI and the sites I go, I scroll to the very first image
and I look at that very first date on that image and that date might not be more than 6 months ago, 7 months ago
and then I look at the followers and they have 250,000 followers based upon AI generated artwork
speaking of artwork, this is my shirt, this is one of my think-tim boombox guides available on Tee-Public and Threadless.com
you know for humans, life's a hustle, I don't know, maybe I should try, what'd I say, I'm trying to crack the code
maybe I need that hack, maybe I need to get my meal on like I'm in the Matrix, maybe I need to really just think like, maybe perhaps
it shouldn't matter what you do as long as you do well and succeed, I don't know, sometimes I think there's a moral code that you should live by
and you should stick to your guns, now, incorporating things, listen, I don't know, it's just a wild wild west out there and
far be it, I don't wanna be left behind, I'm already old and I'm already gray and I might be having a midlife crisis, I don't know
I was thinking about that the other day, am I having a midlife crisis, that's crazy to think about, well anyway, ThinkTimm, this was episode 25
Why Make Music,, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, live your life