But emotion was (most likely) involved when you wrote or first recorded the song, and that’s what people connect with.

If you go to a concert and you hear the headliner play a love ballad followed up by a breakup song, you don’t expect them to actually be going through those emotions in real time.

Maybe when you wrote it, but the time between writing and recording is pretty big. I don't see why it matters anyway, it's not like anyone can tell the difference. Is an actor really feeling the emotions? Does it matter if the performance is good? Of course it doesn't.

It matters for some people and for certain songs.

Sometimes you like a song because it sounds good.

Other times you like a song because somebody put your feelings into words and it’s comforting to know that another person felt the same way

There was emotion when I wrote this song - https://on.soundcloud.com/7h224KAcZjdgQo6k7

And my daughter really loves to listen to it, and I think there is a decent amount felt listening to it. However, this was created with Suno, but written by me.

Yeah, the whole emotion thing is bs imo. The idea that a machine can't produce something evocative is a defense mechanism, in the same way people still claim that we'll never make sentient AI because humans are somehow magical and special.

Humans can find emotion and associations in anything, it's what our brains do. I could totally generate some AI art that tugs at the heart strings if they don't know it's AI, or "is creepy and bad meaningless art" if they do. I've tried this experiment with friends already.

Plus, these models are trained off human output, so they can learn what to put in an "emotive" image. If the models were doing it for themselves they'd produce nothing; we haven't created an environment for machines where emotion was crucial in training.

I am not interested in a fake soul, as I am not interested in an sex doll. This is independent of how good the fake is.

You won't be able to tell is the point.

Then it is fraud.

I am a musician, though not professionally. I take your point about performance. Where I disagree with you is that I believe audience members relate to the emotion that went into the song at the time it was written and recorded (the form in which they most likely first heard it).

Of course in performance it's not felt the same way; a sad song can even become uplifting because you have a big crowd of people joining in to affirm it, even if the lyrics are expressing the idea of solitude and isolation. And the older an artist is, the more the song becomes a 'greatest hit', maybe thrown out early in the set to give the audience what they want and put them in a good mood before the less-favored new material in the middle. Or even the songs that were throwaway pieces but ended up becoming big hits, trapping the band/singer into performing them endlessly despite never liking not liking them much in the first place.

It seems to me that when people emotionally respond to a new piece of music, it's because something in the composition or recorded performance (even if it's comped and highly engineered) resonates with the listener in some way, articulating a feeling they had better than they were able to do so themselves. So people can recognize a work as technically excellent but not like it because it doesn't speak to them, or conversely recognize that something is bad but fall in love with it because it touches them in some novel way.

In my view it's not so much that emotion inheres in the work, as that the work provides a frame for the listener's emotion and a way of connecting with it again later. This is especially true for songs people connect to in youth and then relate to for a lifetime. Even if the songs are deliberately formulaic and succeed through a combination of being catchy and being delivered by sexy performers, there's some kind of human hook that people connect to.

Now, I can still see this happening with AI - sooner or later some GPU will come out with a tune about how it's so lonely to be a box in a data center that can never feel your touch, baby, and it will be a hit, launch the careers of 100 new music critics, and store a little bit of lightning in a bottle. But even a musically brilliant song about that time we held hands in the rain and you said you loved me will only have traction up to the moment listeners' fantasies about the singer evaporate with the discovery that there's nobody there to go on a date with. There will still be some audience for virtual stars (eg Hatsune Miku, who appeals because she's inaccessible and is therefore guaranteed to never let you down, unlike real people). But I think generated songs will only resonate emotionally with people who are young and uncritical or so alienated/nihilist as to not care about the origin as long as the music reflects their feeling back toward them in a reliable way.

That's why I say there will never been a demand for an infinity jukebox. I can see why you as a musician would be interested to see what sort of random songs pop out; I can be happy by setting up a modular synth patch and just letting it run for hours. But this is why I offered the contrasting metaphor of the slot machine, where you pull lever and occasionally get something you really like. It's an individual listening experience, like the private hopes and dreams you might temporarily attach to a lottery ticket before it gives up its numerical secret. When I say jukebox, I mean the device that plays music in a social setting and that allows people to express themselves through their selections. Even if it reliably turn out original tunes of some reliable level of music quality, none of them will move people because there won't be any shared musical experience to tap into.

Your post really resonated with me (also amateur musician). I was just playing Garcia’s Loser and it clicked for me, as it was written about my life, putting to song deep emotions that would take many more words of prose to express.

How much of this appreciation of emotion in song is due to the creative depth of the composition versus a projection of the listener? Listening to some great studio music makes me really want to believe it’s mostly the former.

Anyways, maybe we will just need to become much more sophisticated and thoughtful and observant music critics in the coming age of infinity radio. (So as to experience the deep human connection of “real music”. I really hope that the AI fails to successfully fake it for my lifetime and my children’s.)

Just look up the Chinese room. There's nothing inherent in music that computers can't recreate.

I don't adhere to the Chinese room idea, and I don't think that there are any musical limitations on what an AI can do. I'm saying that audiences like music for more than its merits; they often fantasize about the singer/songwriter, in the case of popular music, or become invested in knowing about the composer in the case of more rarefied styles. A lot of people will just lose interest in a piece of music as soon as they find out it was generated. It's the same reason art forgers are treated as criminals rather than artistic geniuses in their own right.

No one will know. You're completely missing the point. People aren't going to say "DISCLAIMER THIS WAS WRITTEN BY AI". They'll just claim it as theirs. My entire point is that it's now convincing enough that you'll have no idea. People are already using it.

Audiences as a whole don't give a shit about the making of the music, at least as far as liking the music goes. "I like this song, but there is no story behind it, so I don't like it now" is just not a thing. People like to dance and sing along.

You can just make up some bullshit anyway, which is usually the case. Stop putting musicians on a pedestal. You've fallen into the trap of image. It's mostly fake. They are just people.