( For context, here's the tune I posted a couple of days ago using the plugin I'm referring to: https://mastodon.social/@terjefjelde/116114786332030102 )

10/end

A lot of things will change for professional musicians and composers. Revenue sources will dry up. And automatically generated slop stock music will soar. But I don't worry for a second that the new tech will ever replace creative people. Because people will never stop loving singing, playing, composing, arranging and engineering music.

And we will always find ever new and creative ways to use, manipulate and profit from new technology – even ones as scary as this one. 9/

I think this kind of "AI" – whatever it is – is in the same place today that the gramophone, microphones, loops & samples, autotune, once were – there's a lot of resistance, prejudice, and misunderstandings. But it's as undeniably a central part of music's future as these other contraptions are to its past.

And terrible dreck and lack of talent will remain the same – Suno sucks bad, and people who for the life of them can't write or produce a decent tune, will still make it sound awful. 8/

And if so, will you also think of Adele's sad, sampled, soft pianos from 2011 as "cheating"? When is an instrument an instrument? And when isn't it?

Is it okay for a mastering engineer to use a similar, locally stored, "morally defensible" AI tool to get the mix to 80% of its potential, and concentrate on the last 20% – or is it cheating? 7/

Synthesizer V goes beyond this, and manipulates sound in ways that (I can't explain!). I'm convinced that in a very short time, traditional sampling will be old hat; violins, saxophones and neys will all be "generated with AI" – technologically – whilst still being played and manipulated by the musicians like today.

But will producers ever tell you – the listener? And do you – the listener – think of this as "cheating," or "not real"? 6/

And you still have to do all the hard work – you have to write the lyrics, the melody, and perform and manipulate the performance with keyboards, controllers, and an advanced set of parameters. Just like you do with an orchestral sample library.

It's not exactly a sample library, though. Until now, the entire expression range of a sampled violin has, more or less, been limited to the physical recordings of the instrument. 5/

For one, the vocal models are based on the voices of singers they hired for the purpose – there's no wholesale scraping of the entire Spotify catalog. I don't understand the technicalities, but the way the vocal samples are manipulated is apparently AI.

From a musician's perspective, it's basically like any old virtual instrument: The plugin and all its dependencies are stored locally on your hard-drive, and you don't drain your local power supplier every time you produce a vocal. 4/

And yet, there's this nagging feeling whenever I use it that I owe people an "explanation." I don't agree that this should be the case for reasons mentioned below, but... there it is.

The company defines the technology as AI, but there are some important distinctions that set it apart from the way most people probably think about AI. 3/

I assume most professional musicians, composers, and engineers will be wary to reveal that they're using AI in their productions these days. There's a lot of stigma attached to it – and people will be quick to judge.

I started thinking about this after I bought a virtual voice plugin that can produce uncannily real vocal performances (Dreamtonics Synthesizer V). I'm using it for my own tunes, and I do all the work like I usually do. 2/