AI Revolution in Music & Sam's Alarm Clock Idea

[00:00:07] Welcome my fellow tech enthusiasts to another edition of Tech Watch radio brought to you by network providers ink.com NPI Tech Guys calm the site for the show and more welcome to the broadcast where we keep an eye on tech

[00:00:33] So you don't have to I'm Sam Bushman Jay Harrison's with me. Welcome, sir. Hey Sam. How's it going? I'm just over here hanging out Playing my beats bro. Yeah, are you hooked up with some beat headphones and

[00:00:46] Jammin no, I just got the my open speakers, but I got the rhythm and I'm trying to compete with AI I don't think you have a chance. You don't have a chance

[00:00:56] Come on now. I'm more creative than AI aren't I I don't know it's it's amazing the stuff that they're coming out with now I'm calling it the revolution. I know it seems like we talk about AI every second

[00:01:08] It's the hot about that but it is the hot topic It's the what do they call that the killer app? It is what they say It's the buzz man in in IT and in everything everything is AI right now

[00:01:20] This is gonna be the decade of AI the to the 2020s is gonna be Where it busted out and change the world like the printing press or the the steam engine or any

[00:01:32] Revolution like that that we've seen the information age with the internet AI is gonna be the same thing I think Yeah, it is 2020 but 2020 usually is they say hindsight's 2020 now four sites 2020 is really the reality check on this one that are buckled at the revolution

[00:01:48] AI joins music creation. Now. This is something to behold Jay So we got this whole series kind of on this. We've got a producer that lends credence We've got some songs generated by AI and more

[00:02:01] Let's start Jay with the clip where this guy kind of explains and walks us through what he's been doing with AI as a Producer yeah, this is interesting. So I grabbed a couple of these just a couple little examples mostly from tiktok

[00:02:11] But this guy is a creator he does this 24-7. You know, he's he does music production So he's an expert in the field like we do tech watch radio. Yeah, look like we do tech

[00:02:20] He does music right and yeah, well, so let's listen to his take on it Will AI soon be generating 90% of the recorded music we hear I don't know but check this out This is crazy. So this one's called Suno dot AI

[00:02:35] Basically, you just type in some text and it generates a song for you. Let's try it out a reggae song about a Soviet submarine captain who likes cheese Create Wow, and it's gonna generate two versions for me

[00:02:55] Takes a second. It's incredible. Yeah, look at that. It's even generated album art The ocean captain says a Soviet submarine on a mission to prevail Yeah, man Secretly conceals When the ways are crashing He retrieves to his quarters Which is the pledge Sam

[00:03:46] Alright, now he's the board where he continues here. Yeah, it's almost over hold on All right, you want to get to the chorus there? Okay, all right first of all It's how it should be right? That's uh, it's impressive It's fun. No doubt. It's funny

[00:04:15] It has that weird artificial sheen to it sonically right it doesn't sound quite real But honestly How long until they fix that right we are months away if not weeks away if not days away

[00:04:32] From AI to being able to generate something that we cannot differentiate from something that's been made by humans I mean, I don't want to be a doomsayer here But I worry that like library music production music stock music is about to evaporate as a career path

[00:04:48] Because especially if you get rid of the lyrics if you just need some underscore for your commercial or your reality TV show Why would you pay for it if you can just generate it with the click of a button?

[00:04:58] And of course, this is ethically problematic and there's been much said about it already better than I can say it But while we're talking about AI let's talk about something positive. Okay, so this is fader and

[00:05:07] What fader does is you upload any audio file and it stems it out for you using AI into stems that you can then Individually play when I do base covers on here. This is what I'm using

[00:05:17] I'm stripping out the base part and I'm playing it in with the rest of the stems And something I like to use fader for is to analyze Pockets the pocket being when you've got like a bunch of instrumentalists playing a groove

[00:05:29] You've got the beat you've got like the bar line, right? And then you have a decision when you're playing to play either a little bit ahead of the beat right on the beat

[00:05:38] Or a little bit behind the beat and if different instrumentalists choose different spots to play this creates a tension Around the beat something that kind of pulls you and it kind of makes your body move when you feel that tension

[00:05:49] That's the pocket right so if we look at this track from Wolfpack here Here I have in yellow the drums and here I have in this kind of bluish

[00:05:57] Purpleish color that's the base, but I want you to just kind of observe here where the bass is falling in relation to the drums If we zoom in and we look at these transients, aha, you see how the bass players playing

[00:06:14] Sometimes right on and sometimes a little bit late. Is there a pattern? And what I can see is that the Transients sometimes line up and sometimes they don't and I don't know if that's you know

[00:06:29] 4d chess on the part of the players in Wolfpack or if it's just natural variation human chaos and human imperfection Human imperfection is what I'm interested in right now most of all because all of our music is about to be generated by AI

[00:06:45] So if Wolfpack one of the funkiest bands playing in 2024 has all this natural Inconsistency to it and chaos and imperfection then so can you and I think that's his point is that that's gonna be the Right now maybe the only way to differentiate that AI music from

[00:07:03] Stuff that people are doing because it's not perfect computer synchronization in intact but I think that it would be very easy for People in AI to just mix in a little bit of that variability and it will be indistinguishable

[00:07:16] Well, they'll get there no question and the question becomes that in variability how well can a computer? You know intentionally Add imperfections as humans naturally do Part of that's personality driven J part of that. Yeah

[00:07:33] The way you want something to sound you make a groove then you're you're a bass player So you intentionally play a little late sometimes to differentiate this verse from the last verse etc And so on anyway, it's very very nuanced indeed

[00:07:46] But I'm telling you this and this is only what you can really get for free or inexpensive on AI when you start Spending real money with some of the real internal AI tools. I bet they've already got all this solved You're you're we're playing on the edges

[00:07:59] The free AI if you start to generate instruments like you know how they clone voices they clone instruments and then you start to get Some of the better algorithms or better systems that you pay money for and stuff

[00:08:08] I bet y'all this is already obliterated the question becomes, you know when you have AI and then you have auto-tune Hey man, even guys like me might be able to be a musician J

[00:08:18] Well, and not only that but Cameron and I were talking about this before the show This is be a great if you're a band and you just need ideas and you just want to get some now question fresh stuff to

[00:08:29] Let it play a bunch of stuff and then you can just say hey Yeah, you could take some of that pieces and run with all the baseline and run with it

[00:08:36] Yeah, and make it completely modify it so it's yours and the other thing is sometimes the poetry. Is it perfect sometimes the It's you know, it's kind of a stretch like you heard that in that submarine song Some of the rhymes are a bit of a stretch

[00:08:48] Like you could come up with better stuff and you could improve it and iterate it a few times And you have something written and then tweak it and you're off to the races

[00:08:56] All right, let's let's play a couple of other selections because the selections to this are interesting J Yeah, so I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna play this a country song

[00:09:03] And this is about somebody said just generate one about the waffle house and make it in a country genre So well, let's hear that next See Pretty impressive And So it sounds impressive you can tell again that the voices sound digitally created

[00:10:06] They don't sound like you know the soft warm feel of a human You can tell that the beat is so solid that it's leading the whole thing usually Yeah, let the guitar lead a little bit and the beat is slightly behind

[00:10:17] The guitar in other words, it's not so Drum driven. It's more melody driven. That's the way music, you know generally by humans is created So you can see some differences there but think about that though That's what the press of a button

[00:10:30] It's coming up with a song about waffle house and it's talking about waitresses and this and that just imagine a band doing that And then saying okay I'm gonna rewrite the lyrics slightly and I'm gonna then put that human feel in now you've got an AI created human

[00:10:46] Generated version of a song you will be able to produce albums like Like I don't know how to say like I could just turn them out not instantly because you still have to play them

[00:10:57] Yeah, you want to have that human feel but I'm just saying rather than me going to the studio and just You know planning for weeks and playing and playing I can have this generate get a couple of things tweak my lyrics get this and that make a few

[00:11:08] melodic changes and a few Riff changes on the top of something or whatever else and before you know it I've got a song that's not a eyes anymore. It's mine, but it was AI generated human collaborated No words to use here for a second

[00:11:24] But and now and I could crank out tune after tune after tune very quickly if I got good at that Jay. Oh, absolutely And what's interesting about this algorithm too is it generally creates this is on suno AI

[00:11:34] Um about a mute about a minute or so which is typically about two verses in a chorus And you could just press a button and say okay generate more and it will do another two verses

[00:11:44] Of the same song if you want or you could totally mix it up and do a different one. It's It's amazing and it's really impressive. Here's a couple of other clips to kind of round out this discussion a little bit

[00:11:55] Yeah, so we'll do one. This is one about a lady shopping in target. We can all relate to this probably right? It does She gotta hit that store spending all savings can take it anymore

[00:12:19] She's addicted to that target. It's her retail therapy when she's walking down those aisles buying Everything she sees always says she's here for one thing always gets a thousand more Oh, she's spending all her money. There's just something about that store

[00:12:39] The way has to get a coffee and she's you can tell us just too drum driven Usually you would adjust that mix the use of it's better The voice on this thing the lyrics are a little bit, you know juvenile in a sense

[00:12:52] But it's the topics they're putting in too if you had somebody who knew how to put in the right topics and refine Their query of what it wanted to build it would get smarter and smarter

[00:13:02] And I find myself in chat gpd doing that j i'll throw something out and then it gives me that kind of what I want And then I'll go. Yeah, let me read my question. Let me add this. Let me add that and do that

[00:13:11] This is really virtually one take song creation stuff. What have you did 20 takes? Yeah, and just reiterate it and refine it. I mean you could get Almost anything you wanted It's it's just shocking. All right any other quick clips. Yeah, I got one more

[00:13:26] This is probably my favorite at least it's my kid's favorite. Um as far as the beat it's it's most modern probably Taylor Swift version or rihanna. No, I thought I thought they're all good

[00:13:34] I mean these so I probably listened to 20. I only picked out three samples for this show Um, but I thought they were all pretty good

[00:13:41] But uh, this one is about um somebody who you know as long as clock's going off and he doesn't want to go to work And um, and it's kind of a modern version of the clock idea that I had for you

[00:13:50] I'll tell you about that too at the end of this. Okay. Here we go I got a picture This one has a pretty good bridge in it too, which is pretty interesting

[00:14:37] All right, we need to have it play create a technology song jay that could become our tech song our tech team kind of a thing We could write a theme song for tech watch radio and just uh, yeah man

[00:15:01] We keep an eye on tech so you don't have to it would say stuff like that. Yeah It's a network providers incorporated brought to you by kind of thing, you know, we could do it all

[00:15:09] um anyway, interestingly enough to me, um, you can tell the ai is not human I get that I mean in all these different clips you kind of get that flavor But I agree with the musician how long or the producer how long will it be until that's gone?

[00:15:24] Yeah, but also imagine telling you it's it's weeks and months. It's not years and yeah decades or anything jay Definitely, but you know what the one of the interesting points that he brought up also was uh production of stock music and things like that

[00:15:36] Um that last song that we played I could easily see that playing in a store or you know anything else And there would be services down. I foresee in the very near future Where if you want music for your store if you want uh music

[00:15:48] You don't want to be able to have to pay royalty rights as cap bmi csac all that kind of stuff You could just get a service very low monthly rate and just stream no question

[00:15:57] Uh all new music music on the fly music music that sounds familiar to people But they've never heard it before. I mean can you imagine it's pretty cool? Yeah, and you can even start to do songs like that that would have the melodies very similar

[00:16:09] But not even necessarily have words for that matter to be background music anyway And you do underscores and if it sounded enough like and that's the other limitation of ai now Think about this every one we had generated was kind of modern sounding

[00:16:22] There was nothing that kind of made it sound like the Beatles or there's nothing to stop you from doing that Jazz stuff. No, I know but I'm just saying by default. That's what ai is going to deliver because ai lives in kind of the real time Right

[00:16:33] Ai doesn't live in historical relevance unless you apply that to it Yeah, if you say make it a 70s do up make it sound like the Beatles then it will it'll it'll be exactly like that It's a phenomenal, but here's the point. It can't go forward

[00:16:46] Yeah, you're right nose and backwards. That's what I'm getting at unless forward is more ai music Maybe we stop creatively Changing music and all we have is recycled ai Imagine well Well new and improved ai or whatever you want to call it

[00:17:02] And then does ai become the engine that becomes the creativity or do we want the creativity based on societal norms and expectations? The reason ai is generating music like this because there's been people who have created music like this

[00:17:12] And it's trying to in modern time make you a modern tune because you didn't say not to Right a fault that would just make a modern tune what it sees out there And it can only be trained on what's already happened what people have done in the past

[00:17:23] And if I say hey, I want a future tune It might try something but now it's going into the future without any societal norms or without any um The society determines what's in what's out what we like and what we don't stuff

[00:17:37] So if it if it charts the future and it can so-called ai think and project the future It's not going to do it with guidance from society like the future generates now in real time, right? Exactly

[00:17:49] All right. Anyway, I told you I had an alarm clock idea. This is kind of funny Okay, you know how people have crazy alarm clocks j I don't know if you've heard of them, but some people can't wake up and so they have alarm clocks like

[00:17:58] Oh an alarm clock might um shake your bed or something like that Yeah, I've seen some that'll run off the dresser and run all over and you gotta catch it

[00:18:06] Yeah, some of it so my son has one where you put this thing under your mattress and it literally shakes your bed And when he got married his wife freaked on it and he had to get rid of it because it would just scare the crap out of

[00:18:14] Every time she woke up anyway And so they've got all these alarm clocks that do things my daughter had an alarm clock on her phone And what you had to do is when you woke up you had to do a math problem

[00:18:23] And then if you solve the math problem correctly their alarm would go off Otherwise it would just keep going and you couldn't stop it. Oh my gosh. That's annoying She's like that's the only the only way I can wake up is that I gotta focus on this thing

[00:18:33] So I had this idea for alarm clock if we're gonna do AI and we're gonna do all this futuristic stuff And what have you had an alarm clock that sat on your dresser and it filled up with water like a humidifier

[00:18:42] And whenever the morning came it would go off and then it would let you press snooze one time And if you press snooze one time, it'll be cool. It'll be nice to you But then the second time you can't press snooze

[00:18:53] And if you you've got five, you know five seconds or whatever timeframe you set to turn it off If you don't turn it off it just sprays water on you right in your bed just sprays water on you Oh my gosh

[00:19:03] And then if we want to make it more advanced, you know, they've got these um Diffusers all you gotta do is add a diffuser to this alarm clock And then it would just put out a scent and you can make the scent really good nice scent

[00:19:12] Or wake you up or you could have a scent that'll be a gross scent where you're like, oh my gosh My room smells like pee now That or whatever I would never do that you'd call the alarm clock. You'd call the alarm clock. Don't pee on me Yeah

[00:19:25] I don't know you might you might do a kickstart campaign and raise a bunch of money for this dude And you might you know, I know it's an extreme example people would buy them for gag jokes and all this kind of stuff and

[00:19:35] Anyway, all I'm telling is that interesting idea though and and that's AI You know, you could make it do all kind of things All you gotta do is just have a baby, you know and

[00:19:43] Have a baby sleeping in your bed and you don't have half of that right there sam, you know So you probably had that before Anyway, that's my alarm clock we could just call it don't pee on me

[00:19:54] You know the thing would just spray you and get your bed wet and so my daughter's like It wouldn't affect me. I just pull my blanket up over my head and and I'm like, yeah But then you know like all wet bed and stuff, you don't want that

[00:20:04] I'll just let it dry out. You mentioned the mess you got to clean up. I mean I think you'd be better off just get up. Wouldn't you Jay? Yeah, you would definitely, you know, it was in series The point isn't it?

[00:20:13] Because listen if you press the alarm one or press news once or get up, it's fine Right, it's if you just continue to persist. It's gonna absolutely make you pay the consequences You gotta disarm that dude getting up early Be on it. Yes, you do

[00:20:26] Yeah and solve a math problem You know, you know one of the coolest alarm clocks the one that I mentioned about spraying water and doing all those things was just my Brainchild. Yeah the one that really has you does math. That's a real one. My daughter has it

[00:20:39] Now I understand I've seen this one that shaker and like I said I've seen the ones that have wheels on and they run off and like a random direction Yeah, like it like a um those vacuums that just go places. Yeah like that

[00:20:50] Yeah, it's kind of looks like those um hoverboards with the two wheels on either side And it just takes off. It's smaller net of course and It just scurries all around and you gotta go correct until you got to and of course

[00:21:00] You gotta chase it around yelling and screaming an alarm at the same time But one of that seriously one of the best alarm clocks I've seen and I've never really used this But I think it's a great idea

[00:21:09] Is especially if you have to get up at weird hours or wait early in the morning Like my sudden law. He's got to go to work at 4 a.m. Or whatever

[00:21:15] Are these sunrise alarms and they're they're bright full spectrum lights that slowly come up over about a half hour Before you wake up and they're supposed to kind of get your you know circadian rhythms or whatever

[00:21:28] Yeah, make your body think hey, it's morning time. Yeah, and you wake up more naturally with this Slow rising light in your room that gets you up and in your Yeah, like when the sun comes up

[00:21:40] That's what happens the sun comes through your window and after a while you're like, um sun's up It's getting warmer and you can also turn up the temperature. Yeah Do that too, but that would be good. I don't hate these in here Yeah That's what I mean

[00:21:55] It's amazing to me what levels people will go to though think about alarm clocks you have to chase around Math math problems that you have to solve to get it to turn off and then my don't pee on me example

[00:22:06] It just hey that alarm clock would just spray you with water man. Your bed's gonna get all wet You're just absolutely gonna get up and it's amazing how many different ways people have found to say, okay

[00:22:16] We're gonna wake up another another good one that you can do and you can do this with Tech you probably already have is if you have a smart watch you can set it to Silent and you know, let's say your your spouse is there with you

[00:22:28] You don't want to wake them because you've got to get up early I do this sometimes and I'll have my watch just go off silently And you wouldn't think that it's enough to wake you up

[00:22:37] But and it doesn't necessarily right away. It might even take a minute or two But you will wake up from it just vibrating and jingling and whatever But non-audibly just just from the the haptic feedback kind of thing on it

[00:22:50] Can wake you up pretty quietly without disturbing somebody else. So that's kind of cool Yeah, there's a lot of ways You know to to you got all the five senses you can engage right? Yeah, absolutely more senses

[00:23:02] I haven't heard any of scent clocks before though. So that's an original idea. I think sam Yeah, the scent clock plus the one that sprays water. Have you ever heard one of them? No, I haven't dude spray water

[00:23:11] And you know, you're gonna get up but the scent clock though You could make it smell good though You can just make it smell like flowers in the morning time or whatever like you stepped outside and smelling flowers The lights go up and now it's you know

[00:23:21] The heat goes up it gets hotter and you do all these different things I could just beg dude It is absolutely morning in every sense you've got it's morning now What it needs to smell like though is like pancakes or something or coffee

[00:23:30] And that that'll get a lot of people out of bed. I think Well, you could do that or just make it smell like flower whatever they like Make it smell something foul where it's like I have got to get out of here breakfast burritos

[00:23:42] Anyway, there you have it. It's just kind of a weird idea This alarm clock, but you know, you could have an AI alarm clock tied with AI music Jay and it could just play music for you play a new song every morning to wake you up

[00:23:56] Yeah, I think that'd be cool. I think there's a market for that potentially You know, well, I could play songs about waking up You know, Katy Perry does a song awake or something like that. Yeah, I'm not familiar with it

[00:24:06] And you could do a song always a different wake-up song Yeah, it could all in all of them could be about waking up like it's a beautiful morning or whatever some derivative there of

[00:24:17] Oh, I'm Tony is an idea for alarm clock. Here's what's fascinating about this inventions are You know, we thought all the inventions were done in the 1980s or the 1890s But now we're finding out invention is live and well including AI starting to invent things

[00:24:31] The future looks bright ladies and gentlemen, we keep an eye on tech So you don't have to npi tech guys dot com spread the word share the love and make it a great tech day Will ya hey, thanks