The original recordings sound much better and more interesting to me. Way better. The AI generated versions sound slicker in some sense but... like the re-recorded versions of old hit songs from the 60s you hear at the grocery store sometimes. Technically the song is still there, but it blends in with the rest of the muzak.
I'm sorry to be so negative, it's great you're returning to the material after all these years, but the AI versions I've listened to all have the same smoothed-over quality that loses everything interesting and relatable to my ears in the original versions.
I get it. Recorded music is a lot of fun to play and listen to. This still was a fun project for us to work on together after 25-years and with both of us living on opposite ends of the country. Hopefully our next release will be an in-person recording!
I gotta brag on Chuck a bit more though. I do love the depth to his lyrics and the way he puts them to melodies. I think his stuff, at the core, is excellent. Can't wait to work on some new stuff!
I'm glad to hear people share this sentiment. I think the human quality will be part of what people will start to enjoy more about music now that AI has improved so much in terms of it's ability to produce highly polished songs.
This is my hope as well but I'm doubtful. I'd expect it's more likely that the generations growing up with this stuff will enjoy being able to annoy their elders with it and fully embrace the human-less aesthetic.
My girlfriend has been using an AI music generator and like, her music is the best generative music I've listened to. Her prompts are crazy, lots of actual like, music theory and specific requests.
That said, it still shares these qualities. It sounds like AI images look. Oversmoothed/overtuned.
Like as a creative myself, what AI has taught me more than anything is that a lot of what we call artistry happens in the friction between an artist and their tools, when they're pushing to the limit of what they know how to and what their tools are able to do, that's where the great shit is. And it's not even that AI is a bad tool necessarily, it just doesn't create any friction. It can be frustrating, for sure, when you just can't get it to do what you want, but it's not an interesting frustration like friction because you aren't the problem, nor your skill: the tool is the problem.
That probably sounds like I'm saying it's bad and again, no. I'm saying the friction between the artist and their tools is the interesting part, and because there's very little friction, meaningfully, between artists and AI tools, it just comes out... boring.
As a first reaction, I loved the idea, since I have had a handful of bands in my life and really loved how you revived (or aimed to revive) the old days with modern tools. I really liked the web design and nostalgia of the old photos combined with the possibilities of new technology.
Then I hit play.
AI sucked the soul out of your music. I am happy for you if you liked the results. But for me, each of the comparisons proved me right to loathe AI music.
Nice - I've done similar things with some of my music [1].
I have a classical piece I wrote over a decade ago for piano [2] (it’s the instrument I play), but it was always intended to be an orchestral work. Using AI allowed me to sonically experiment with a stringed score which was pretty cool.
It’s basically the equivalent of taking a piece you’ve written and running it through an arranger keyboard or Band-in-a-Box on steroids.
That's great. AI is a tricky beast. It can be used for good or evil. I had a lot of convictions while working on this project and my soul is resting easy with how we navigated things!
I think you nailed it here. The originality happened 25 years ago. That was fun! Then 25 years passed, life went on, and this project gave two old friends a reason to reconnect and see what the technology could do with our old songs. That was fun too!
it's pretty easy to make words that fast once you have the words written, fwiw. mostly breath control and there are things you think you could never do and you'll be doing it after a few times practicing. now writing the lyrics is a bit harder. twista is great
Interesting idea, and it sounds like you like the results, so kudos.
My musical taste tends toward less produced, rougher/lo-fi recordings, e.g. Guided By Voices. So, it follows that I prefer the original recordings.
There is one aspect that I find slightly dehumanizing -- the AI changed the singer's voice so drastically that I don't recognize the original singer anymore. The uniqueness of the voice has been smoothed out to be much more generic. For me, music (and art in general) is in part an expression of one's identity, so I'd consider this a negative outcome. I'm sure similar things could be said of the instrument performances as well.
But again, this is all just my two cents, and it's a matter of taste. Ultimately if you're happy with the results, that's what matters!
Completely agree. We tried feeding his voice in and using that as a voice model and it actually sounded even further away from his actual voice so we nixed it. We uploaded our original tracks as a reference, so there were some notes that left me feeling like "that sounds like Chuck", but for the most part, yeah, it's pretty far off.
I've read the "how revival works" section, but still have no idea "how the revival works".
("We've used ai" is all I got from both this intro on HN and the we pages I read, though possible I missed some section.)
Can you share?
I.e. Did you take original audio recordings and run it though some audio chain that optimizes the mix and volumes? Did you put the sheets and lyrics into ableton and recreate the music? Did you feed audio files into chatgpt and prompt "make it better"? Something else?
In the interest of transparency, understanding what happened here will significantly guide my own emotional response :). I appreciate the details of 5 core principles, but spending so much time on principles without actual detail on what got done makes me skeptical and even cynical, which may not be the intent. For example, I personally distinguish between a raw photo, edited photo, composite image, and AI regenerated image, and one of the things I'm trying to understand is the path / traceability from human to final audio file.
I think this is a super intriguing project! I’ve been experimenting with some similar work on my old unfinished songs from eons past. It’s been really fulfilling to take that old work and see the original vision spring to life through modern tools.
I think that is one of our biggest takeaways with this. The goal was never to make AI music just to get tons of streams. We were curious! And now we get to share these reimagined versions with friends and family and rekindle some great memories from back in the day.
Exactly. Even if just for Chuck and I, this was something both of us needed. It brought a lot of positivity to each of our lives for a lot of different reasons.
The web stuff is well done. Now, with this newly created momentum, you should re-record the songs now, without AI. Hell, you could probably afford an awesome studio and equipment too. You could easily blow the AI out of the water.
I'd love that. We hope to. We live on opposite sides of the country now. The AI stuff was a great, nostalgic kick-off for us. We don't plan on using AI like this as our only way of making music, but it was a great project to work on. We'd love to write some new stuff and play live again. Hopefully soon!
The revived (AI) versions have this...thin and hollow sound to it. It is difficult to explain, most AI-generated songs have this when they're modelling acoustic drums, stringed instruments, etc.
FWIW, I'm (now a hobby) musician and have done studio work. Even the latest and best models have this unmistakable sound.
Totally agree. I guess that's what comes with the AI/robot stuff. Hopefully we'll be able to create an in-person album again, but with a little higher production quality than our dorm room versions.
This is great! I disagree with some of the commenters here that the originals sound better.
The originals sound very much like demos, and from a producer's perspective are very low quality (no offense). They're definitely more raw, but objectively not as good - i.e harmonies aren't tight, the levels are not well balanced, etc.
It's funny that people hate that AI can improve this, because even without AI, modern music uses a ton of digital tools to mix and master - and true musicians don't care whether it's digital or not.
These commenters would be the same people who boo-ed bob dylan when he went electric.
Look at John Mayer - he uses AI to model amps, instead of lugging around giant heavy tube amps.
Question for you - what was the workflow exactly? I've been wanting to test out some AI tools to do similar things with my music.
I agree. I think there are a lot of haters here. The remaster sounds much more professional/complete. I guess I could see that some people may have preference for a sorta live show feel but I've always preferred the album versions. Maybe I had too many friends that made me listen to their bad demo albums when I was young and I'm traumatized ha.
Have you considered processing the original recordings using AI? I've witnessed some truly amazing results. I've had twenty year old Skype call recordings sound like we were sitting in a recording studio.
Yes, that's exactly what we did here. We fed the originals to AI, but we did give it wiggle room to make a cover version and not follow the original exactly. I think I will play around with running a few tracks through and telling it to follow as close as possible to the original and see how it sounds!
We're about the same age, I was even in a band at a small liberal arts college in the great lakes area in 2003. AI can't bring it back, and the stuff the music AI has created here sounds terrible to me.
Yeah, I thought maybe everyone was being negative but wow. It’s _sad_ to think of music moving towards this “revival” style. More a wake than a revival. The death of human music.
I'm sorry to be so negative, it's great you're returning to the material after all these years, but the AI versions I've listened to all have the same smoothed-over quality that loses everything interesting and relatable to my ears in the original versions.
I gotta brag on Chuck a bit more though. I do love the depth to his lyrics and the way he puts them to melodies. I think his stuff, at the core, is excellent. Can't wait to work on some new stuff!
That said, it still shares these qualities. It sounds like AI images look. Oversmoothed/overtuned.
Like as a creative myself, what AI has taught me more than anything is that a lot of what we call artistry happens in the friction between an artist and their tools, when they're pushing to the limit of what they know how to and what their tools are able to do, that's where the great shit is. And it's not even that AI is a bad tool necessarily, it just doesn't create any friction. It can be frustrating, for sure, when you just can't get it to do what you want, but it's not an interesting frustration like friction because you aren't the problem, nor your skill: the tool is the problem.
That probably sounds like I'm saying it's bad and again, no. I'm saying the friction between the artist and their tools is the interesting part, and because there's very little friction, meaningfully, between artists and AI tools, it just comes out... boring.
I have a classical piece I wrote over a decade ago for piano [2] (it’s the instrument I play), but it was always intended to be an orchestral work. Using AI allowed me to sonically experiment with a stringed score which was pretty cool.
It’s basically the equivalent of taking a piece you’ve written and running it through an arranger keyboard or Band-in-a-Box on steroids.
[1] - https://mordenstar.com/blog/dutyfree-shop
[2] - https://mordenstar.com/blog/screwdriver-sonata
I want to be able to rap like Twista. If I use AI to change my voice and speed it up, it’s kinda fake.
Where’s the originality in that. I’ll never be *that good*, but I have fun doing it.
Now I guess using AI strictly for mastering is OK , but even then the results haven’t been good for me.
I think you nailed it here. The originality happened 25 years ago. That was fun! Then 25 years passed, life went on, and this project gave two old friends a reason to reconnect and see what the technology could do with our old songs. That was fun too!
My musical taste tends toward less produced, rougher/lo-fi recordings, e.g. Guided By Voices. So, it follows that I prefer the original recordings.
There is one aspect that I find slightly dehumanizing -- the AI changed the singer's voice so drastically that I don't recognize the original singer anymore. The uniqueness of the voice has been smoothed out to be much more generic. For me, music (and art in general) is in part an expression of one's identity, so I'd consider this a negative outcome. I'm sure similar things could be said of the instrument performances as well.
But again, this is all just my two cents, and it's a matter of taste. Ultimately if you're happy with the results, that's what matters!
I've read the "how revival works" section, but still have no idea "how the revival works".
("We've used ai" is all I got from both this intro on HN and the we pages I read, though possible I missed some section.)
Can you share?
I.e. Did you take original audio recordings and run it though some audio chain that optimizes the mix and volumes? Did you put the sheets and lyrics into ableton and recreate the music? Did you feed audio files into chatgpt and prompt "make it better"? Something else?
In the interest of transparency, understanding what happened here will significantly guide my own emotional response :). I appreciate the details of 5 core principles, but spending so much time on principles without actual detail on what got done makes me skeptical and even cynical, which may not be the intent. For example, I personally distinguish between a raw photo, edited photo, composite image, and AI regenerated image, and one of the things I'm trying to understand is the path / traceability from human to final audio file.
Thx!
I might have to revisit some of my old songs...
FWIW, I'm (now a hobby) musician and have done studio work. Even the latest and best models have this unmistakable sound.
The originals sound very much like demos, and from a producer's perspective are very low quality (no offense). They're definitely more raw, but objectively not as good - i.e harmonies aren't tight, the levels are not well balanced, etc.
It's funny that people hate that AI can improve this, because even without AI, modern music uses a ton of digital tools to mix and master - and true musicians don't care whether it's digital or not.
These commenters would be the same people who boo-ed bob dylan when he went electric.
Look at John Mayer - he uses AI to model amps, instead of lugging around giant heavy tube amps.
Question for you - what was the workflow exactly? I've been wanting to test out some AI tools to do similar things with my music.
Sad and awful.
It's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and especially against the Show HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html). If you'd please review those and not post like this again, we'd appreciate it.
If you'd like to make your substantive points thoughtfully, that's fine.