If you drop by here occasionally, you might have read the article I posted a little while back with some thoughts on the use of music technology tools – including AI – that can help in the workflow of writing, recording, mixing and mastering of music. You might also have see some of the online discussion surrounding the AI band The Velvet Sundown and their song ‘Dust On The Wind’ that has caught people’s attention and managed to gain a lot of streaming plays….
The original track – I’m trying to use my words carefully here; original as in the initial release 🙂 can be viewed here on YouTube and, if you have not yet heard it, then do give it a listen. It’s a fairly standard Americana track but, in isolation, it’s a perfectly acceptable (if somewhat generic?) piece of music. I suspect if it popped up in your own Americana Spotify playlist and you were just listening casually, your ear might not even notice it amongst whatever else Spotify’s algorithms offered up…. The instrumentation is conventional enough and, played on your phone or tablet speakers, sounds convincing enough. The vocals are actually kind of cool, with a distinctly Ray LaMontagne vibe; the have a character, even if it is a rather consistent one through the whole piece….
Of course, as the internet soon started to suggest, and as the band’s Spotify bio now also confirms, the track is, essentially, AI generated. Your guess is as good as mine as to how much human creativity is contained within this track but, given just how good some of the currently crop of AI music generation platforms are, it’s not beyond the bounds of belief that the human interventions consisted only of various text prompts…..
However, after we have collectively smacked our heads against a wall in frustration (and the wind has stopped blowing so the dust is no longer on it but somewhat settled), the track is kind of interesting on a number of levels. And, one of those levels has been brilliantly illustrated by a follow-up video from the YouTube channel Sons Of Legion. As well as containing a very interesting discussion of the original track, the main purpose of their video was to provide a cover version of the song performed and recorded by themselves within their own studio…. You can watch that video here….
At the end of the video, you get back-to-back play-throughs of the original AI version and the recreated ‘human performed’ version. The latter is undoubtedly the better version and the Sons Of Legion team have done a stellar job in the performance, recording and mixing of this cover…. and, thankfully, the ‘human’ shines through. This kind of experiment – which must have required some considerable time and effort to put together – provides a welcome demonstration that, for this genre at least, human performances are more than capable of bringing something that, at present at least, generative AI can not match.
That’s reassuring…. but the video also raises a further talking point. In it’s human-delivered form, Sons Of legion have made Dust On The Wind a rather a good listen. OK, maybe not the very best Americana-style track you have ever heard but also very far from the worst. Putting aside the human performance capabilities of generative AI for a minute, it does throw a separate light on the capabilities of generative AI to cough up a song that, when well performed, it actually a decent listen….
There are plenty of additional rabbit holes to disappear down here but I’ll leave you with one to start the ball rolling…. Is this kind of AI generative music platform now rather good at generating potentially useable song ideas, demoing them for you, and then leaving it up to you to transform them by recording them with the required amount of ‘human’ to make them worth listening to?
Answers on a postcard…. but, for better or worse, I suspect we will soon find ourselves with plenty of examples to form a more comprehensive judgement around….
