Metal Demands Musicianship. AI Doesn't Have It.
AI music will never beat a professionally mixed metal song. That's a fact.
This is a long rant on AI music in general, so if you want to read only about the implications in metal music, just scroll to the end of this blog.
I’ll start by saying that art is what makes human enjoy their lives and see the world through a different lens. It fills the heart with joy and makes the spare time more enjoyable. But, of course, humans also need to work to earn money and get something to eat, so it’s unavoidable that we have to get up early and do some boring shit to get a living and bring some bread to the table; but thankfully, with the wonders of technology, made available by the growth in capitalism and the brand-new techno feudalism (it’s been there for a while, btw, but we are just recently feeling its weight), we have arrived to the age of AI.
The Artificial Intelligence world feels like we’re in some kind of sci-fi movie, more into the dystopian future than anything. It comes with great dangers that now seem unavoidable, but that’s a topic for a different time. For now, I just want to point out that there are many advantages of AI in our daily use; when it first came, I was hoping it was going to be a huge help to buy our time back and release us from boring and repetitive tasks… even difficult tasks. Turns out it can, but if you work in a huge company, you won’t get the most out of it because of privacy policies and audit issues (at least that has been my experience). And on top of that, it also turns out that people are using AI to do the tasks that we actually want to do!
I think humans got it backwards. It seems that people are using AI to free up the “fun” time, so that you have more time to work. Why would you use a tool as a shortcut in art? It takes away all the fun in making it!
But I get it. It’s not art. It’s a product.
Product vs. Art
You will often see posts in social media, which I believe are rage bait posts, saying that people are angry at AI music because it does a better job than producers and mixing engineers do. I’ll leave the musicians for later. Maybe that's true in some cases, if there is in fact a mediocre guy doing the job. But if we're talking about someone who loves his/her craft, it's a whole different story. AI cannot replicate the taste of a person, his or her mistakes, the intention of his or her decisions, nor can it pour its heart and soul into a piece of art (spoiler: it doesn't have one). All AI can do is replicate patterns and copy them into a new heartless piece without any intention whatsoever. That's not art. That's a product.
Yes, AI is useful and awesome, unbelievably capable of doing great things. I use it almost every day for automation of different sorts and generating a consistent style for my brand (I still don't have the money to pay a designer 😭), but almost every use I give AI is for something that is supposed to be a product, not for actual art. As an example, the thumbnail for this blog is made with AI, because it’s serving just as marketing device, but it’s not pretending to be a piece of art that should be admired.
That being said, I have also used AI for art in a specific way, where everything was under my control and made with intention: I went through a break-up with the woman that was supposed to be my wife (she never gave back the ring) and that inspired me to write a song. After the song was made, I needed a video and I had specific images in my head, so I kind of made a script and started using AI for video creation, to portray the images I had in my mind that couldn't be possible unless I had thousands of dollars to spend on video production. I think the result is doing a good job to communicate a story in a beautiful way, but I’m not claiming to be a great video producer, I just wanted to do something meaningful.
Check out "Clumsy Clown - Abismo" if you want to know what I'm talking about.
With this I'm not saying you can't create art with it; I'm saying that if there is no intention, there is no art. I’m not sure if I’m hypocritical by saying that there is potential for doing art when using AI for visual results, but there is zero potential for AI in music; maybe because that’s what I do and a real video producer would say that there is potential in music but none in video production. But still, I’ve been reading post in AI “music” groups and don’t see anyone convincing me how AI can make an actual piece of art with music. To those that use AI for music making: Can you really be proud of a music piece made by AI and call it yours? I believe that is just a product and it’s evident when these so-called AI “musicians” throw something on the web and say they have made a song; even more so, when the brightest of them are creating a huge batch of heartless music and somehow making a ton of money with it. They cracked the system and learned how to win the capitalism game. Next stop: let’s win the techno feudalism world!
(btw, this is not a blog on politics, so I won’t explain those terms here. Be sure to understand what this means because it is some really dark shit. There are some great DW documentaries that you can watch)
The AI “Musician”
In music, I don't really see any drip of ability, will, control or intention over the final product. AI "musicians" I've talked to on social media are unable to show me how I can see their product as a piece of art that makes them proud. The day it happens, I'll change my mind on AI within music, but that day has not come, and I believe it will never come. Actually, you can do everything AI does, but with actual intent, within a DAW, using MIDI libraries, loops and other tools; I don't really use these tools very much, but at least they are made by a human and his talents or feelings are poured into every note.
I don’t see the fun in making prompts again and again until the result is something close to what I want. That is just randomness and cannot be called art. You can use the same amount of time actually learning some music and how to operate a DAW and pour some intention into the sounds
Are we going to get to a point where people are proud of their prompts? I know you need some writing ability to create a good prompt, but prompts are not art. I don’t feel a particular awe from reading a prompt and that same feeling translates to a piece of music that is generated by AI.
I recently read someone saying something like this: “if you really like a song and after they tell you it’s made by AI you stop liking it, then you don’t have a problem with the piece of art. You have a problem of beliefs”. Maybe that’s true and this is what I have to say:
Defining art is difficult, so in my own definition, art is made by humans to express a feeling or communicate a story.
AI music is not made by a human, it’s made by a machine; therefore, it’s not art.
It’s difficult for me to like an AI song because, at least at the moment, you can tell it’s AI. It’s getting harder and harder, but given that I’m a music producer and mixing engineer, I can still tell.
Even if it is good, I cannot connect emotionally with a song if I know there was not a human behind it.
Even if it is REALLY good, I will choose to discard it from my playlists the moment I discover it’s AI, because I know the meaning that music
The Democratization of Music
One of the arguments that these AI music lovers use in favor of AI music and that the actual owner of SUNO shamelessly uses is that music AI has democratized music. That is just bullshit. Music had already been democratized years ago and I’m just one of the millions that were benefited by this democratization.
I remember when I was just a 14-yo kid, dreaming of being the next Metallica and actually being part of a new “Big Four” in my continent. At the time, recording was impossible to me. All I knew was that you needed to pay expensive studio sessions and needed to have an established band before that happened.
But I thrived.
I got a copy of Guitar Pro 5 and started writing my own material and showing my songs to everyone, proud of what I had done with a piece of software that could let me listen how my songs would sound in reality. However, recording professionally was still a dream far away from reality and I could not afford becoming a full-time musician, because, of course, you have to become a good and useful member of society. Years later, when I was studying my accounting degree, I discovered that there was this thing called “audio interface” and you could record your own music with it. Basically, a tiny studio that could do what the huge studios did at the reach of your hands.
That was what changed my life and what changed a lot of people’s lives. That piece of gear was super inexpensive and allowed me to record professionally my songs. That was the real democratization of music. All of a sudden, I could record my material and have a full-band playing with my riffs. That was a tool allowing me to do great things instead of doing the work for me and taking all the fun out of it. This was the tool that allowed me to become what I am today and offer mixing services to people who can record themselves, but don’t know how to mix yet, are not interested in doing it or simply don’t have the time to do it.
But with AI, what do we have?
Just a tool that makes all the pleasant work for you, so that you can have a final product that you can put out there and say it’s yours. Not only it deprives from every ounce of creativity that you may have, but that thing is fed from musicians that did not agree to have the algorithm learn from their material. Probably didn’t even know that their music was being used to feed such a terrible tool. What a lack of originality.
AI does the fun for you, so that you can focus on the boring part! You can market like a pro! That’s great, isn’t it?
…Isn’t it?
The Collage
There are some among us who can create actual music and choose to use AI as a tool. They argue that if you are not up to date with the world, you are doomed to fail. They argue that they’re just using it as idea generators but do the rest of the job themselves. They argue that they use it to create new sounds or just create loops to be used in their music. They use AI to create a collage of sounds.
Collage is a genuine form of art. I can’t argue against that. But do they really believe that collaging AI generated sounds is just fine?
Let’s start with the first argument. “If you are not up to date with the world, you are doomed to fail”. That’s a lie. In art, it is very common that, even though there are tools that can help you do the work faster than you (or in this case, doing the work for you), there are artisans who still do it by hand because there is human value in that. Art is enjoyable, so why give it to the machines? It is true that we want to get a living from art (which is harder than some other more secure careers), but we don’t just make a product. Looking at a DAW is not the same as looking at a spreadsheet. There are feelings involved. We want the difficulties that come with making music. It’s not supposed to be easy; accessible, yes, but not easy.
I won’t say much about the argument of “using it as idea generators but do the rest of the job themselves”. Well, that’s just taking the joy out of the process and prioritizing the product over the art. I must say, however, I’m open to see what other musicians and producers do with this; I may find that there is actually a merit to this, or some kind of fun (like the example in video production that I mentioned earlier).
About using it to create new sounds, loops and samples… well, why the fuck would you use it like that? You have some options here:
Learn to use a synthesizer. It’s really fun and they usually come with great presets programmed by an actual human.
Buy loops or sample libraries. They are not really expensive (you can even find some for free) and you will be paying a real human trying to make a living from his/her art instead of a huge company that only cares about money. You can even pay a subscription like splice, which costs a bit more than a SUNO subscription, but has a lot more to it to create real art.
Learn to program your own drums or sampled instruments. It’s way more enjoyable.
These options have in common that you are in control of the sound and that you do every move with intention. I can’t begin to imagine how many times I would have to run a prompt until I get a sound that is barely close to what I have in my head. What a waste of valuable time!
Some genres suffer more than others
Finally, we get to what the title is about. Sorry to take so long to get here, but I really wanted to have a proper talk about this, and if you made it through here, I want to thank you so much. You don’t find many people who like to read or who even care about the impact of AI in today’s world.
Most genres are already suffering the consequences of the AI flop in music. That is because most genres are a product or their fans don’t really care about who’s behind and just want to enjoy a good tune, regardless of how it was made.
However, that is not the case in Metal. Metal is a very energy driven genre, and a huge part of the appeal has always been the inhuman abilities of the musicians. I know, Metal is no stranger to the huge storm brought by AI, but I firmly believe this is not really a threat for the genre.
Metal is all about musicianship and this is a genre that has evolved because players are always in a constant exercise of taking the human abilities in music to the extreme and that's part of the charm. Even from the beginnings, Metallica and other thrash bands took the genre farther by trying their hardest to be the fastest band. Extreme metal took that to another level: impossible blast beats and tremolo picking with extremely low tunings. That required a different approach in the technical side of music recording that made almost mandatory that engineers are specialized to the genre.
You can even see that there is an insanely amount of Metal fans that are also musicians; you don’t see that happening very often in other genres. The human element… the musicianship is inherent to Metal and fans look for it. You can't take that out of the genre. I don’t really see a fan that is excited of a song that sounds super-fast and aggressive if there is not an actual human behind it. I know there may be cases, but I don’t think it’s going to be so generalized in this genre as it can be for Pop or Country.
Also, metalheads are very picky about artistry, so it matters that a human artisan was behind making all the instruments work together, from picking the right sounds to the final mix. It’s not uncommon that a metal fan knows an engineer who worked in a particular album, but I don’t see that happening so much with fans of other genres. I’ve met Metal fans that know names like Rick Rubin, Flemming Rasmussen, Bob Rock, Andy Sneap, Jens Bogren, among others. But I have not met fans in other genres that really care about the man who’s behind the sound unless a producer turns out to be another celebrity. Maybe that’s my perception of my own small world, but I’m yet to be disproved on this.
Finally, some of you have seen that, unfortunately, there are many gatekeepers in genre. If you are new in the genre, I’m not pleased to inform you that there are some assholes who think that “common” folks shouldn’t be listening to Metal and that this is a genre only for the worthy. I’ve met people like that since my school years, and I see them all over the internet time and again. I don’t like that, but it is how it is. Do you think that a genre with that number of gatekeepers will be an easy pray for the AI slop? I don’t think so. The hardcore fans and gatekeepers will also be the ones making sure that musicians keep a high bar on how they make music. At least these people will have a good role for the genre.
In conclusion, I don’t believe Metal will be unharmed from AI, but I also believe that due to the nature of the genre and the evolution throughout its history, AI won’t really stand a chance. Metal will always be a human genre. Human talent, artistry and musicianship cannot be replaced in Metal because it is an inherent part of it.
If you made it through the end, I really appreciate it. If you are interested in metal production (recording, mixing, etc.) maybe you will find this blog useful, so I’d appreciate if you subscribe below or share with someone that also enjoys this kind of content.
Keep Metal alive!
