I got a request today from a customer, for whom I in recent years have “cleaned up” some of his arrangements - to make them playable for real musicians on real instruments. Some things had to be changed, but basically I left his arrangements intact and that way provided performance material for his recordings.
Anyway, today, besides sending me his arrangement files (Finale .musx and .pdf), he additionally sent me mp3 files of arrangements of that piece he had done using AI tools.
So his wish now: can you please change my arrangement so it sounds like in this mp3 file?
I listened to both tracks, and they sounded way better than the arrangements he had done by himself.
There was a decent instrumentation, there were stylistically correct embellishments, there were slight variants and variations on the melody. I told him that the arrangements give a very good impression, but I would not want to put them back into notation.
In a way, if he uses AI to get ideas for his arrangements I feel he should do the notation of it himself - or ask the AI to help him with it. I’d rather do what I can do best - but it is not copying AI generated music “back to notation”..
Has anyone come across this situation, too?
Are these particular AI tools capable of exporting the results to a MIDI file or a musicxml file? If so, most of your human assistance would hopefully only be needed to tidy things up so that there not too many instances (none, preferably) of unnecessary accuracy, for example, notes tying across a barline to a really short note.
Some years ago the leader of a latin band asked me if I could assist him with notating the brass parts from MIDI files he had created at the keyboard and also from MIDI files which he had acquired elsewhere. Most of the time it was simply quantizing so that everything started on an easy-to-calculate part of the beat, some rounding-off of note lengths, and generally simplifying the notation. The only time I had to refer to a recording was when the MIDI file had not been played to a metronome. The printout had been done from an early DAW - late 1990’s maybe, I don’t know which one, but its notation capabilities were quite unsophisticated. Where the beats were in the notation printout of the file was nearly impossible to work out because of the mass of ties, double-dotted notes, 128th-notes, etc. In that particular case, what started out as about five pages of absolute pigeon scrawl finished up as two very legible pages of quite simple notation. It wasn’t until some years later that I found a MIDI application with time dilation (I think that was the term used), where the user could play the MIDI file and press a key or click with the mouse on the first beat of each bar (using one’s ears as the guide, of course). The application would then stretch or shrink the MIDI data to match, with the end result being notation which actually made sense. This would have saved me a lot of time.
I’d be tempted to charge an arm and a leg, if I took the job at all.
The tool (Suno) gets fed with a MIDI file, but cannot export back to MIDI; instead, it offers export into “stems” - audio files of the generated instruments.
Theoretically, one could somehow try to turn those back into MIDI and then use them to get back to a notation.
I feel terrible about the whole thing - as if I would be used to clean up mistakes for some anonymous entity.
Among so many other issues, these apps are a threat and an insult to human creativity. Don’t take the job.