I really liked that. Yes, it is two guys rapping over a sample, but it tells a story that the vocaloid backing is from a song about a woman who breaks and “fixes” someone’s belongings to show her...
I really liked that. Yes, it is two guys rapping over a sample, but it tells a story that the vocaloid backing is from a song about a woman who breaks and “fixes” someone’s belongings to show her appreciation (Breaking Things to Pieces by Kikou), along with the subtext of the generative voice on a track about how generative media will be the end of art.
I can't bring myself to do anything but dislike it, for the latter part alone: Vocaloid music is one of my things. It's been around for over twenty years, and has resulted in an explosion of...
I can't bring myself to do anything but dislike it, for the latter part alone: Vocaloid music is one of my things. It's been around for over twenty years, and has resulted in an explosion of amazing indie music...real art made by people who just want to make something, not commercial products. There are, quite literally, hundreds of thousands of songs made with Hatsune Miku alone, released traditionally through music distributors or labels, and an untold number of originals and covers that only exist on YouTube or NicoNico.
Vocaloid is also not generative, as people use the term. It's synthesis, like any other non-vocal synthesizer. It's an instrument that uses vocal samples instead of a simple oscillator, requiring that you define MIDI notes with associated phonemes and adjust a set of parameter curves to change various properties of the resulting sound. (And you'd better know how to mix the output, or you'll have a result that sounds as bad as any "dry" human vocal recording.) It takes a considerable amount of skill, and hours of time, to create a vocal track with a vocal synth (Vocaloid, SynthV, etc).
Vocaloid has helped democratize music making, representing the last piece of the puzzle of things that you can now do from a DAW: we have an endless supply of software instruments that are cheaper than even a Korg or Yamaha keyboard from a couple decades ago, mixing tools the Beatles could only dream of, and now you can create vocals if you can't sing...all on a computer.
Hatsune Miku, at least, also represents a delightful middle finger to celebrity culture, which I'm all about. Vocaloid producers often combine the quasi-anonymity favored by dance musicians like Daft Punk, choosing pseudonyms and being known for their work without being widely known personally, with attributing the vocals to a fictional character. It's both creating a shared thing that's bigger than any of them, and kind of making a statement about the public's obsession with celebrity over the art itself.
So, the context of this track comes off as ridiculous if they want that message: picking something that's not generative AI, and represents an explosion of democratized indie art, and sampling it. I'm not one to get onto people for sampling (it's a core aspect of dance music and the copyright encumbrance limits some cool and creative things), but some people might suggest it's lazy or stealing...so the hypocrisy kind of writes itself. If this isn't meant to be some heavily layered irony that will be lost on most people, it just seems ignorant.
This reading is complicated by the choice of the sample they used. According to many comments on the video, the specific sample comes from "Breaking Things into Pieces," by the artist Kikuo. The...
So, the context of this track comes off as ridiculous if they want that message: picking something that's not generative AI, and represents an explosion of democratized indie art, and sampling it.
This reading is complicated by the choice of the sample they used. According to many comments on the video, the specific sample comes from "Breaking Things into Pieces," by the artist Kikuo. The song is sung from the perspective of a girl who goes around breaking things so she can fix them as an act of love. Endlessly fixing things just to break them again seems seems symbolically apropos, don't you think?
Which reminds me of something. The first novel Kurt Vonnegut wrote is called Player Piano. For many years it's been considered one of his weaker showings; it's pretty clearly a first novel attempt by a writer practiced in making short stories for periodicals, as was the state of the industry at the time. It's a bit long-winded, which is unusual for a Vonnegut production, and not terribly concise. As I said, for many years the book has been looked at as an imperfect first outing for an artist who would eventually hone his skills and develop in interesting ways, and not for its prophetic qualities.
As it turns out, Player Piano is somewhat prophetic, in the original sense of the word. It takes place in a dystopia ravaged by capitalist exploitation of automation. No one can land a job without a doctorate degree, even to be a grade school janitor, because automation has eliminated any job considered "low-skill." Ominously, that bar is rising, as the primary incentive for any worker is to devise a way to automate their job. A patent for a machine that makes your own career obsolete is a license to print money, and the only avenue to upward financial mobility. The early stages of this process are now complete. With pretty much every blue-collar job fully automated, the drive to automate is deep into the process of eliminating even white-collar "thinking" jobs.
As a consequence, millions are unemployed. The government's solution is make-work programs patterned off of New Deal programs like the WPA. The biggest of these–or perhaps just the most central to the plot, as it's the only one I remember many years after I last read the book–is to maintain the roads. Since there's such a surfeit of labor, each pothole is attended to by dozens of laborers–laborers who only have employment, and thus pay and meaning, if there's something to fix. So each night, people go out to dig potholes in the streets, just so there's work to be had down the road, so to speak. Human endeavor is reduced to endlessly breaking things just to fix them.
I'm not trying to claim that the artists read Vonnegut's Player Piano and felt inspired to make this track using samples from a thematically relevant Vocaloid song, but the themes of fear of being supplanted and the ever-increasing human irrelevance in the face of inhuman exploitation of automation are certainly shared. Any work addressing the pitfalls of unrestrained automation is likely to deal with those aspects.
That they chose to use Vocaloid samples, a technology that is generally considered a net positive use of automation (and it is that, automation, even if it doesn't generate the subject matter), could be ironic, but could as easily be a nod to the fact that automation actually is capable of improving the human condition. It just depends on how it's used, and who benefits from that use. They could be suggesting that the best way forward isn't an outright rejection of automation in the spirit of Ned Ludd, but a synthesis of human creativity with automated tools directed toward human ends, for the benefit of humans, not just corporate entities and their high priests.
At any rate, the song is interesting to contemplate at least. Better for that than the majority of purely AI-generated art I've encountered.
The reading that I got (and several of the youtube comments) is that its artists and Vocaloid against generative AI. Vocaloid is definitely on "our" side, due to being more of a medium for...
The reading that I got (and several of the youtube comments) is that its artists and Vocaloid against generative AI. Vocaloid is definitely on "our" side, due to being more of a medium for expression rather than the soulless content generation of AI.
If it's not for you, it's not for you, but from what I know about the Vocaloid genre of music, a key theme that can come up is how much of the human element is in the machine, artificial persons...
If it's not for you, it's not for you, but from what I know about the Vocaloid genre of music, a key theme that can come up is how much of the human element is in the machine, artificial persons losing themselves to their automated nature, or if the repeating tasks themselves can conjure an identity that no longer wants to comply with their directives. It's not that out of pocket to have Miku play heel to humanity, even against her own will as a reanimated automaton, regurgitating lyrics and mindlessly compelled to break and fix what's in front of her to prove her worth. That's my read anyway.
That definitely is a common theme. There are definitely some well known songs that deal with topics like that...I tend to like "meta" ones that characterize Miku as trying to help someone write...
That definitely is a common theme. There are definitely some well known songs that deal with topics like that...I tend to like "meta" ones that characterize Miku as trying to help someone write music. Some offhand ones I can think of that deal with that topic:
It could also be I'm overly sensitive to outside takes after some of the obnoxiousness (especially by journalists) during this year's US Miku Expo tour. (And the general, for want of a better description, default-to-Luddism tone surrounding technology lately, which is stressful given it's my profession...) I don't usually like to be too critical of others' music these days, after I started dabbling and figured out how much goes into it...
So it's not so much that I'm passionately disgusted by the track or anything. It just definitely provokes a lot of thoughts, and I wish I knew more about the intent. My gut opposes anything that isn't pro-Vocaloid though lol.
The act of sampling implies respect to the original artist, and in their Album Commentary podcast, they shout out Miku by name. I know there can be a big difference between fan of a work, and part...
The act of sampling implies respect to the original artist, and in their Album Commentary podcast, they shout out Miku by name. I know there can be a big difference between fan of a work, and part of a fandom, but they seem to know what they're getting into, and they have enough of a social media preference that you could probably ask them what's up if you really wanted to.
I heard this a couple months ago and loved it — but was way too worried that it’d be a smidge much for folks here. Glad that someone else thought otherwise :D
I heard this a couple months ago and loved it — but was way too worried that it’d be a smidge much for folks here. Glad that someone else thought otherwise :D
I'm curious why you thought the audience here could not handle this? The writing style here tends toward being carefully considered and emotionally reserved, but that's out of a desire for shelter...
Exemplary
I'm curious why you thought the audience here could not handle this? The writing style here tends toward being carefully considered and emotionally reserved, but that's out of a desire for shelter from the constant psychological warfare of the public internet not a desire to avoid provocative work.
I suppose it was less that I didn’t think people could handle it (ie. watch it without a negative emotional response), and moreso that it seemed fairly niche (in artistic style and genre) so I...
I suppose it was less that I didn’t think people could handle it (ie. watch it without a negative emotional response), and moreso that it seemed fairly niche (in artistic style and genre) so I didn’t think there were any groups here that would enjoy this piece. Perhaps as support for my inability to estimate the preferences of the forum, someone posted about Mili here the other day (definitely not the same genre and tone as this, incidentally) which I was also surprised by! I didn’t think said artist would have appeal to a general audience, which is (was?) generally how I think of Tildes.
I really liked that. Yes, it is two guys rapping over a sample, but it tells a story that the vocaloid backing is from a song about a woman who breaks and “fixes” someone’s belongings to show her appreciation (Breaking Things to Pieces by Kikou), along with the subtext of the generative voice on a track about how generative media will be the end of art.
I can't bring myself to do anything but dislike it, for the latter part alone: Vocaloid music is one of my things. It's been around for over twenty years, and has resulted in an explosion of amazing indie music...real art made by people who just want to make something, not commercial products. There are, quite literally, hundreds of thousands of songs made with Hatsune Miku alone, released traditionally through music distributors or labels, and an untold number of originals and covers that only exist on YouTube or NicoNico.
Vocaloid is also not generative, as people use the term. It's synthesis, like any other non-vocal synthesizer. It's an instrument that uses vocal samples instead of a simple oscillator, requiring that you define MIDI notes with associated phonemes and adjust a set of parameter curves to change various properties of the resulting sound. (And you'd better know how to mix the output, or you'll have a result that sounds as bad as any "dry" human vocal recording.) It takes a considerable amount of skill, and hours of time, to create a vocal track with a vocal synth (Vocaloid, SynthV, etc).
Vocaloid has helped democratize music making, representing the last piece of the puzzle of things that you can now do from a DAW: we have an endless supply of software instruments that are cheaper than even a Korg or Yamaha keyboard from a couple decades ago, mixing tools the Beatles could only dream of, and now you can create vocals if you can't sing...all on a computer.
Hatsune Miku, at least, also represents a delightful middle finger to celebrity culture, which I'm all about. Vocaloid producers often combine the quasi-anonymity favored by dance musicians like Daft Punk, choosing pseudonyms and being known for their work without being widely known personally, with attributing the vocals to a fictional character. It's both creating a shared thing that's bigger than any of them, and kind of making a statement about the public's obsession with celebrity over the art itself.
So, the context of this track comes off as ridiculous if they want that message: picking something that's not generative AI, and represents an explosion of democratized indie art, and sampling it. I'm not one to get onto people for sampling (it's a core aspect of dance music and the copyright encumbrance limits some cool and creative things), but some people might suggest it's lazy or stealing...so the hypocrisy kind of writes itself. If this isn't meant to be some heavily layered irony that will be lost on most people, it just seems ignorant.
This reading is complicated by the choice of the sample they used. According to many comments on the video, the specific sample comes from "Breaking Things into Pieces," by the artist Kikuo. The song is sung from the perspective of a girl who goes around breaking things so she can fix them as an act of love. Endlessly fixing things just to break them again seems seems symbolically apropos, don't you think?
Which reminds me of something. The first novel Kurt Vonnegut wrote is called Player Piano. For many years it's been considered one of his weaker showings; it's pretty clearly a first novel attempt by a writer practiced in making short stories for periodicals, as was the state of the industry at the time. It's a bit long-winded, which is unusual for a Vonnegut production, and not terribly concise. As I said, for many years the book has been looked at as an imperfect first outing for an artist who would eventually hone his skills and develop in interesting ways, and not for its prophetic qualities.
As it turns out, Player Piano is somewhat prophetic, in the original sense of the word. It takes place in a dystopia ravaged by capitalist exploitation of automation. No one can land a job without a doctorate degree, even to be a grade school janitor, because automation has eliminated any job considered "low-skill." Ominously, that bar is rising, as the primary incentive for any worker is to devise a way to automate their job. A patent for a machine that makes your own career obsolete is a license to print money, and the only avenue to upward financial mobility. The early stages of this process are now complete. With pretty much every blue-collar job fully automated, the drive to automate is deep into the process of eliminating even white-collar "thinking" jobs.
As a consequence, millions are unemployed. The government's solution is make-work programs patterned off of New Deal programs like the WPA. The biggest of these–or perhaps just the most central to the plot, as it's the only one I remember many years after I last read the book–is to maintain the roads. Since there's such a surfeit of labor, each pothole is attended to by dozens of laborers–laborers who only have employment, and thus pay and meaning, if there's something to fix. So each night, people go out to dig potholes in the streets, just so there's work to be had down the road, so to speak. Human endeavor is reduced to endlessly breaking things just to fix them.
I'm not trying to claim that the artists read Vonnegut's Player Piano and felt inspired to make this track using samples from a thematically relevant Vocaloid song, but the themes of fear of being supplanted and the ever-increasing human irrelevance in the face of inhuman exploitation of automation are certainly shared. Any work addressing the pitfalls of unrestrained automation is likely to deal with those aspects.
That they chose to use Vocaloid samples, a technology that is generally considered a net positive use of automation (and it is that, automation, even if it doesn't generate the subject matter), could be ironic, but could as easily be a nod to the fact that automation actually is capable of improving the human condition. It just depends on how it's used, and who benefits from that use. They could be suggesting that the best way forward isn't an outright rejection of automation in the spirit of Ned Ludd, but a synthesis of human creativity with automated tools directed toward human ends, for the benefit of humans, not just corporate entities and their high priests.
At any rate, the song is interesting to contemplate at least. Better for that than the majority of purely AI-generated art I've encountered.
The reading that I got (and several of the youtube comments) is that its artists and Vocaloid against generative AI. Vocaloid is definitely on "our" side, due to being more of a medium for expression rather than the soulless content generation of AI.
If it's not for you, it's not for you, but from what I know about the Vocaloid genre of music, a key theme that can come up is how much of the human element is in the machine, artificial persons losing themselves to their automated nature, or if the repeating tasks themselves can conjure an identity that no longer wants to comply with their directives. It's not that out of pocket to have Miku play heel to humanity, even against her own will as a reanimated automaton, regurgitating lyrics and mindlessly compelled to break and fix what's in front of her to prove her worth. That's my read anyway.
That definitely is a common theme. There are definitely some well known songs that deal with topics like that...I tend to like "meta" ones that characterize Miku as trying to help someone write music. Some offhand ones I can think of that deal with that topic:
It could also be I'm overly sensitive to outside takes after some of the obnoxiousness (especially by journalists) during this year's US Miku Expo tour. (And the general, for want of a better description, default-to-Luddism tone surrounding technology lately, which is stressful given it's my profession...) I don't usually like to be too critical of others' music these days, after I started dabbling and figured out how much goes into it...
So it's not so much that I'm passionately disgusted by the track or anything. It just definitely provokes a lot of thoughts, and I wish I knew more about the intent. My gut opposes anything that isn't pro-Vocaloid though lol.
The act of sampling implies respect to the original artist, and in their Album Commentary podcast, they shout out Miku by name. I know there can be a big difference between fan of a work, and part of a fandom, but they seem to know what they're getting into, and they have enough of a social media preference that you could probably ask them what's up if you really wanted to.
I heard this a couple months ago and loved it — but was way too worried that it’d be a smidge much for folks here. Glad that someone else thought otherwise :D
I'm curious why you thought the audience here could not handle this? The writing style here tends toward being carefully considered and emotionally reserved, but that's out of a desire for shelter from the constant psychological warfare of the public internet not a desire to avoid provocative work.
I suppose it was less that I didn’t think people could handle it (ie. watch it without a negative emotional response), and moreso that it seemed fairly niche (in artistic style and genre) so I didn’t think there were any groups here that would enjoy this piece. Perhaps as support for my inability to estimate the preferences of the forum, someone posted about Mili here the other day (definitely not the same genre and tone as this, incidentally) which I was also surprised by! I didn’t think said artist would have appeal to a general audience, which is (was?) generally how I think of Tildes.
Yeah - I listened to it when it released and wasn’t liking it initially, but it grew on me after a few closer listens.