Standing out as a musician in the era of AI generated music

The Backlash and Repetitiveness in Modern Music

While AI generated music has been getting a lot of (deserved) backlash from composers & listeners alike, it is also a testament to the repetitiveness of musical compositions, which sometimes lack harmonic, rhythmic & emotional complexity. This trend has been observed in the recent decade.

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The Rise of Accessible Music Creation

The growing accessibility of music creation has enabled many aspiring musicians to express themselves through their own songs by recording themselves in their own homes and sharing it with the world, sometimes even going viral on popular platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and other notable platforms. We encourage everyone to share their own creations because art is what reminds us of our humanity in this fast-paced and almost robotic world.

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Oversimplification: A Double-Edged Sword

At the same time, this trend has led to the oversimplification of music, harmony, rhythms, leading to less complex compositions, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

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The Ethics and Limitations of Generative AI and ai generated music

Generative AI companies have been training their models illegally on the works of many musicians who have decided to share their music to the world. And AI is best at recognizing patterns and imitating existing composers and compositions. At the end of the day, it is not really creating anything "new" so to speak.

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Where AI Falls Short: Emotional Complexity

And this is exactly where AI music is lacking. Since it has been trained on simple, generic songs without much complexity to begin with, it can only regurgitate simple, generic songs with or without lyrics. Although recent developments have allowed these systems to generate more complex songs, with polyrhythms, complex harmonic structures, even jazz compositions, at the end of the day complexity for the sake of complexity becomes redundant and merely a show-off. These systems are lacking in terms of emotional complexity and when prompted to create complex songs, that complexity is not successful at communicating it to humans. Conveying human emotion is what makes human-created music special. AI systems can generate as many generic or complex "songs" as they wish, but without being able to convey emotions to humans, it is more of a mass-producing industrial machine than a real artist.

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The Human Advantage: Emotional Expression

In order to successfully stand out as individual artists, we need to create rich, complex songs that can successfully convey human emotions to other humans.

Create not just for the sake of complexity and showing off, but with the goal of artistic expression. Make people feel what you´re feeling through complex, rich harmonies and outside the (black) box thinking. Ha, get it? :)

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The Drive for Creation and the Role of Technology

As humans, we naturally have a drive towards creation. Music technology has come far, enabling you to synthesize any sound (even a chainsaw) and creating music out of it.

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Navigating Music Theory: Overwhelm and Inspiration

Many musicians can get overwhelmed, inspired or even pessimistic depending on their journey through music theory. Music theory enables you to understand structures and recognize patterns in any musical composition. When looking at the big picture, you can recognize that there are a few harmonic structures (such as I-IV-V) that are extremely common in music, as it is the most important one and easy to understand.

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Common Progressions and Time Signatures

I-IV-V is most common in country songs; ii-V-I is extremely prevalent in jazz songs, and so on. Many genres have a few or their own chord progression.

There is also another prevalent chord progression, called “The Axis of Awesome”, getting its name from The Axis of Awesome band in their “4 songs” video

Almost all of the songs today are made in 4/4 time. Modern music technology software does make changing 4/4 time readily available and it might lead music producers to think that’s all there is to time signatures, or maybe not even know about time signatures at all.

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Experimenting with Time Signatures and Modulation

Instead, create your songs in not so common time signatures and see how much 3/4, 6/8 or even 12/8 time. Maybe even change them up in your songs. You have infinite possibilites of time signatures at your disposal.

You also dont have to stick to one key in your compositions. A lot of composers also change their keys mid-songs, a practice known as “modulation”.

Other “modulation” practices can also be changing not the key of a song, but the mode. You can go from Ionian mode to Phrygian mode, or even better, use the modes to modulate between keys. You can go from C major to C minor.

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Conclusion: Make Your Music Unique

At the end of the day, strive to make your music unique within a saturated and repetitive AI music landscape. You have infinite possibilites at your disposal, make use of them. Those tools can significantly up your game and make your music stand out.

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Thank you for listening to my rant about AI.