*I'm more than willing to listen to generative music – got megatons of ambient Eno – and I wonder why this sounds like this. What am I hearing, exactly? It sounds pretty bad, but like a Mondrian screensaver, it has its moments.
*But is there just ONE way to sound bad with TensorFlow – like, a characteristic badness – or are there TENS OF THOUSANDS of wildly different potential ways to be bad?
*Lately I've been comparing AlphaZero the chess player to LeelaZero the chess player. They've never played one another, as far as I know. They seem to be using the same techniques – LeelaZero is inspired by research papers about Alphazero – but I get the impression that AlphaZero could easily defeat LeelaZero. Alpha just seems to do attacking moves that are more daring and elegant, while Leela seems to be a bit of a wood-pusher, even though they're both far better than human players. But can I trust that impression? Do I understand what I'm seeing there? I'm not sure I could tell them apart if you showed me an unlabelled game and asked me to guess which machine had played it.
*Suppose that TensorFlow Music Transformer started doing knock-off Chopin riffs that were better-sounding than Chopin. Would human ears even be able to distinguish that? If Chopin showed up among us right now he wouldn't compose any Chopin. With a volatile girlfriend like George Sand taking up his time, he's probably have to do blockbuster movie soundtracks.
*The works of Chopin have emotional content while a deep-learner pastiche of Chopin has no emotion to convey. So I hear a kind of odd deadness in these pastiches, a puppet-like quality, but what am I hearing there, exactly? So hard to describe. The many sadnesses of the generative-art critic... all his artists are zombies by their nature.
“Failure” Samples
"We collected some examples generated by Music Transformer that had clear flaws, but had so much character and dramatic arc that we thought we’d include them for fun. Some “failure” modes include too much repetition, sparse sections, and jarring jumps." (((Those are probably the most interesting – got a glitch core thing going on.)))
