And the Band Played OnAnd the Band Played On

It's been interesting watching from the outside the existential crisis many developers have been having with the rise of agentic ai. It's also been interesting watching all of the speculation among computer-savvy folks about what's going to get gobbled up by bots (usually including art and music). Compare with this interview by a couple of musicians turned YouTubers that kind of laugh the whole thing off. I've definitely found AI music prompts to be about accurate as they describe (or less). The TLDR is, AI is good if you want to have the most generic sounding tracks or something totally silly, but this has no chance of ever replacing music that humans listen to, pay for, or create. Remember, Sousa thought that recorded sound was the death knell for music as a commercial product. I've read posts on this platform that conflate recorded sound and commercial music as the same thing! No matter what's going on in the rest of the world, the band plays on.

Meanwhile, I've really been enjoying PayPerQ as of late and today I noticed that they now have what's considered one of the top music models. So I figured that I'd give it another try.

I remembered that I recorded part of my solo from a random casino gig a few weeks back. These type of gigs are par and parcel for musicians on an off night basically everywhere in America. You get together with a bunch of people that you've never rehearsed with (and often never met, as in this case) and play a bunch of covers. Everybody walk home with around $400 depending on your role in the band and, as a result, gets to do basically whatever they want on the gig. So it's low pay, low stakes, and can be a lot of fun when you're there with people with the right attitude. It's an old model, but in a lot of ways resembles AI. It definitely lowers the pay for everybody in town, but there's also generally low expectations of what's produced. With bad musicians, that's a drag, but when this formula is combined with good musicians, that means adventure!

The song is Use Me by Bill Withers. I started recording because the lead singer was actively teaching the song to the bass player and drummer (who we had never played with) through the talkback mic (the mic that is fed to our monitors, but not the speakers the audience hears) and I thought it might be fun to document for you all. Unfortunately, you can't really hear it from my cell phone and I kind of abandoned and forgot about it.

...until I thought about pitting it against the clankers!

However, you can kind of hear this 30sec snippet of my solo that I cut up. It's pretty wacky. Normally I would never play this outside harmonically on a tune like this unless the band was playing a really artistic festival. But this was neither an artistic festival or a good paying gig, so I kind of had permission to do whatever I wanted. Here's one pretty fun and quirky passage while we're still simmering in low gear:

https://m.stacker.news/135200

Fast forward to today, and I figured, let's see if this new "good" music model that PPQ now has can produce anything comparable to what many might consider a throw-away musical setting. It seemed like pretty low hanging fruit as a benchmark to me because the rhythm section is relatively static, what I'm doing isn't super dynamic while having some fun "outside" playing, and it's a concise snippet (instead of something longer and more artistically developed). Here's the results.

Attempt 1Attempt 1

Prompt:

I'd like to hear a trombone solo over a funk tune with some adventurous, "outside" melodic content.

Result:

https://m.stacker.news/135196

Clearly, it's not even a trombone solo, and everything the horn section plays is generally bluesy type material. So I tried to correct for the next iteration.

Attempt 2Attempt 2

Prompt:

I'd like to hear a trombone solo over a funk tune with some adventurous, "outside" melodic content. I want to hear the trombone solo. It should sound expressive, not like it's playing a strict part with other horns. It should pass through some foreign keys to create some uncanny dissonance before resolving back to the key of the rhythm section. Think of a jazz soloist in a funk context.

Result:

https://m.stacker.news/135197

I was impressed it actually got the general timbre of a trombone! I still didn't think we were anywhere close to the prompt, and it was interesting that it just gave up on drums...for a funk tune.

Attempt 3Attempt 3

Prompt:

I'd like to hear a trombone solo over a funk tune with some adventurous, "outside" melodic content. I want to hear the trombone solo. It should sound expressive, not like it's playing a strict part with other horns. It should pass through some foreign keys (think the Coltrane matrix or something similar) to create some uncanny dissonance before resolving back to the key of the rhythm section. Think of a jazz soloist in a funk context.

Result:

https://m.stacker.news/135198

What was particularly interesting about this last one to me was the clear valve-trombone sound. It's a really unique sound, and one I didn't think these models would know about. At the end, after that fast run, it gets kind of chromatic, but definitely nothing like the Coltrane matrix or any sophisticated outside harmonic devices. But I thought it actually kind of sounded like a real valve trombone, ala Bob Brookmeyer. Definitely not appropriate for a funk tune, but at this point it had totally given up on the rest of the band! So I gave it a more generic prompt.

Generic trombone prompt with no stylistic instruction:Generic trombone prompt with no stylistic instruction:

Prompt:

I would like to hear a very expressive and adventurous trombone solo. It can be any style, but should be harmonically sophisticated and extremely passionate.

Result:

https://m.stacker.news/135199

It's definitely not harmonically sophisticated, but it's kind of pretty. It reminded me of a few years back when I stayed at an airbnb in rural Kansas and the bathroom was an old silo that had been converted. I did what any self-respecting horn player would do, recorded myself noodling around aimlessly with no goal but to hear how different echos interact with one another. Here are those recordings:

https://m.stacker.news/135201

https://m.stacker.news/135202

So all in all, I still put AI music in the parlor trick category, while it has improved in emulation of instrument timbres a little. Anyone else have any better luck?