What is AI? Garage Band Edition
JoeMerchant writes:
With all the bruhaha around ChatGPT, GPT-3 and friends like: Jasper, Article Forge and growthbar, let me just reminisce about the summer of 1984 when I made a word-salad generator that would log on to (teenage enemy) BBSs at 4 in the morning and fill their pages with uncanny valley residing content peppered with local usernames and hot topics of the day, fed at a semi-human imitating 140-240 baud with occasional pauses "for thought" - sysops would sometimes listen to their servers and content dumped in at full speed sounds different than human driven keyboard output, but humans can be imitated...
Swerving back to the title content: Garage Band, similar to AI story writers, Garage Band is one of many Digital Audio Workstation programs out there, used by the likes of Moby, Ed Sheeran, Trent Reznor, and let's be honest: "Avid Pro Tools is the DAW of choice, being used by producers on 65% of the top 100 albums from the past 10 years." The thing about Garage Band is: if you have any recent Apple gear (we still have a 6 year old iPad mini), then you have it included with your OS: for free. If not, there are many many free, low cost, and not so low cost DAW tools out there, but focusing on the "so free it's bundled with the OS" Garage Band, which has gadzillions of tutorials available, let me just hit the high points of what I discovered yesterday after basically ignoring the depth of what DAWs have become over the last 40 years.
See, in 1983 I was directly programming the 4 channel sound synthesizer on Atari 400/800 computers, in 1989 I built a MIDI controlled sound synthesizer out of some PLDs and a (fixed point 16 bit) TI DSP. I briefly opened various DAW softwares over the years since then, including Garage Band about 5-6 years ago - even bought a little keyboard as controller input to Garage Band for the kids to see if they would take an interest (they didn't). At that time, I went just deep enough into the software to see the drum sequencer and the thousands upon thousands of synthesizer voices, fancy real instrument interfaces, etc. What I didn't discover at that time were the Autoplayers - which basically give the DAW operator a studio full of session musicians who can drum in various styles and auto-play appropriate melody lines, chord progressions, etc. on basically all the instruments, started with a single click, then tunable in three to thirty dimensions to whatever you may be looking for in your musical production.
Couple this with ChatGPT writing lyrics and a good singing synthesizer or two, and Pop music is going to have a hard time keeping up with the flood of semi-original studio quality productions coming out of pre-teens' bedrooms.
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