Eastwest partners with ACE Studio

[Linos]

Eastwest Sounds announced that they partner with ACE Studio:

https://www.kvraudio.com/focus/ace-stud ... tion-65954

Not long ago, Herb Tucmandl, CEO of Vienna Symphonic Libraries, announced that VSL are researching and working with AI for future libraries.



There is a lot of movement in the world of orchestral samples. After years where innovation seems to have stalled, major changes are afoot.

[Duncan Krummel]

I can appreciate that ACE Studio has taken an approach that stays away from fully generating entire pieces, but to be honest it feels like it’s just passing the puck on from automating the writing to automating the musical expression and interpretation. I don’t want a human-less interpretation of music, even if this finally improves EW’s inconsistency with things like legato transitions. Would love to be wrong here.

[Luke]

I have the same concerns as Duncan.. My attitude for the moment is one of "wait and see." With what we do with mockups, one of the few bastions left in stitching together samples, is the personal musical interpretation of the phrasing and expression. Modeling gives great freedom in that arena. But perhaps there could be a way to work with this technology and integrate our vision of these components in its renditions. That is my hope.

[Guy Rowland]

I can appreciate that ACE Studio has taken an approach that stays away from fully generating entire pieces, but to be honest it feels like it’s just passing the puck on from automating the writing to automating the musical expression and interpretation. I don’t want a human-less interpretation of music, even if this finally improves EW’s inconsistency with things like legato transitions. Would love to be wrong here.

Can open, worms everywhere...

I'm going to struggle to feel nostalgic for lumpy legato or dynamic crossfades. It's always been Frankenstein's monster - the game has always been to make the least monsterish monster. It's not really a hill I fancy dying on.

There is human skill here of course in making dead samples sound as least bad as possible. There is too in, say, the dying art of rotoscoping, but however much I admire the geniuses who can pull that off without ending up in an asylum I don't think I'll mourn the loss of humanity.

I don't really know what these guys have in mind. But if I can command realistic transitions in a way I haven't been able to before, without the burden of interminable engineering pain, I'll live with the bittersweet knowledge that the good old days ain't coming back.

Doubtless the trickery will go far beyond this. I will probably be able to whistle a tune into my phone, press a button and it will sound like Alan Silvestri. But what am I saying? I can do that right now if I want.

I think a dividing line between good and bad AI is juusst beginning to emerge. Vague though it is, if a tool under the command of a creative person helps him or her achieve a better result than conventional techniques, then hello - this could be Good AI. If it can be autonomous and replace the creative process (or claim to), well, that might very well be Bad AI.

Stem splitters? Good AI. Dialogue isolate? Good AI. Sumo? Bad AI.

[Lawrence]

I LOST AN ENTIRE CUBASE FILE!!

I have a songwriter/client who hires me to take his very basic piano/vocal .mp3 (he is self-admittedly NO singer and can barely play piano), learn the tune, orchestrate it, sing and mix it. He asked me to replace a vocal with a new lyric on a song he had hired me to work on two years ago, ...and I COULD NOT find the Cubase file. He sent me an .mp3, and it was clearly me singing and playing.

Sometimes I find Mac search to be oddly unreliable. It's probably user error but regardless, that file was not showing up though I went through my drives forensically. I was really panicked.

Thankfully, the new lyric scanned just like the older one. The solution was simple-AI. Strip the vocal off the file and re-sing. It took me hours to come to that simple solution, because I'm well over one hundred years old and used to doing things manually.

My point (as Guy also opined) is that among the Bad Consequences there are going to be Good and Helpful Things to be gotten from our new AI overlords, and there will be picking and choosing.

I'm not sure about the Ace Studio thing. We'll see.

[Duncan Krummel]

Time will tell, Guy. I do hear you, though. I’m no fan of bumpy transitions, but I’m feeling exhausted by sampling in general these days.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to appreciate art separated from the humanity behind it. Give me a human interpretation of garbage before you give me a synthetic interpretation of a masterpiece.

Anyways, I am still waiting to see what EW + ACE brings to the table. I won’t write it off outright, but it doesn’t excite or inspire me. So, I guess in this regard, I fully sympathize with your optimism, Guy and Larry. I don’t share it per se, but I’d also like to be wrong.