Chords for How Auto-Tune DESTROYED Popular Music

When I recently interviewed Billy Corrigan of Smashing Pumpkins, he had this to say about artificial intelligence creating [E] original music.
AI systems will completely [Em] dominate music.
The idea of an intuitive artist beating an AI [N] system is going to be very, very difficult.
In a recent article in Billboard magazine entitled, What Happens to Songwriters When AI Can Generate Music?
Article begins, if you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, you have no idea what's coming next,
says Alex Mitchell, founder and CEO of Boomi, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.
Boomi is one of the many so-called generative artificial intelligence music companies.
Others include [G] Soundfull, BandLab, Songstarter, and Authentic Artists,
founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the [Ab] 70s,
and the drum machine in the 80s and 90s.
So it goes on to say, in each of these cases, however, trained musicians were required to operate the technology in order to produce songs.
The selling point of generative AI is that no musical knowledge or training is [N] necessary.
Anyone can potentially create a hit song with the help of computers that evolve with each artificially produced guitar lick or drum beat.
About a month ago, I was down at the public library with my daughter, Layla, who's nine, and she said to me,
you know, I saw on YouTube Shorts the other day that kids are cheating on their essays by having this program write it for them.
It's an AI program.
So I come back to the studio and I look it up.
It's called ChatGPT, and I started experimenting with it about writing songs, writing code, doing course outlines for a college course, whatever.
And it will do these things.
Now, it will also do things in the style of people.
So, for example, we'll compose a relationship breakup song by Ed Sheeran.
_ _ So right now it's writing it.
So it does a verse, pre-chorus, chorus based on songs Ed Sheeran has written in the past.
So it has all these things from the Internet that has been put into this, and it's spitting out its own original AI-based song lyrics.
Verse one.
It's hard to say the words.
I've been trying to find.
I want to let you know that I need some time to figure out my life and what I really want.
I love you more than words, but I can't go on.
That's pretty terrible, right?
Pre-chorus.
It hurts me deep inside to see the pain in your eyes, but I have to try to follow my heart and be true.
And then the chorus.
This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do.
I'm breaking up with you and it's tearing me in two.
Oh, that's awful.
I never meant to hurt you.
You mean the world to me, but I have to set myself free.
Well, those are pretty terrible lyrics, but maybe they're not that different than Ed Sheeran's lyrics.
I don't really know because I'm not really a scholar on his lyric writing or the lyric [E] writing that his team of people that write songs for him do.
But really, the question is, why [F] does Billy think that AI is going to take over?
It's probably because people don't notice when something has been digitally altered.
[Gb] And one of the culprits of this is something that happened in 1998.
A song that came on the radio that when I first heard it, I thought, what is that?
You probably know what song I'm talking about.
No matter how _ bad.
This is Cher.
[Gb] _ The song Believe.
[B] Everybody knows this song.
_ There's [Db] no talking to you.
When I first heard it, I didn't know what it [Gb] was.
I asked an engineer at the studio I was working at, NRG out in Los [Bb] Angeles.
He said, oh, it's a thing called Auto [N]-Tune.
Little did I know that 24 years in the future, now it's 2023, that that effect would be on virtually every pop song, every hip hop song, almost every rock song.
It's on metal songs.
It's so invasive in contemporary music.
It's really hard to imagine.
Now, it didn't happen all of a sudden.
You started seeing it creep into popular music.
I remember if I think back, what are heavily Auto-Tuned songs?
I'll give you some of them.
There's this by [Bb] Maroon 5.
_ _ _ [Bb] _
_ _ _ _ _ [C] That's so Auto-Tuned.
_ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _ [Eb] _
When I heard it, I thought, what's wrong with the vocal?
[Cm] _ _
_ _ [Ab] And here, the high notes.
[Eb] _ _
_ _ [Bb] _ _ _ _ [Cm] _ _
_ _ [Ab] _ _ _ _ [Eb] OK, that song came out in 2002.
Nowadays, you have artists that have built their [D] entire career on Auto-Tune, [Bm] like T-Pain.
[Em] _ _ [C] He even has his own Auto-Tune plug-in.
[Bm] _ _ _ _ [Em] _ _
[C] _ _ _ _ _ _ [Ebm] The amazing thing [Gm] about T-Pain is that he can actually sing really well.
You just rarely hear it.
Here's an actual example of T-Pain singing.
[F] _
_ [Fm] _ _ [Fm] _ _ _ [Ebm] _ _
_ _ [Ab] _ _ _ [Eb] _ _ [Fm] _
_ _ [Gm] _ _ Or [A] you hear it on songs like [D] this.
_ [A] _ _ Despacito. _
[Bm] _ _ _ _ _ _ [G] _ _
_ _ [D] _ _ _ _ _ [A] _
It sounds very [Bm] robotic.
_ _ [Abm] I can completely [D] imagine a computer creating this thing.
This is one of the things that the heavy use of Auto-Tune has done.
It's not just heavy use of Auto-Tune, [N] though.
It's also heavy use of beat correction in rock music, beginning in the year 2000.
The use of drum machines and drum programs to create loops and beats for songs,
where everything stays right in time.
There's no tempo variation.
I've harped about this on my channel for years.
This is going into the seventh year of my channel.
I've talked about the _ _ dangers of music becoming completely computerized and lacking humanity.
This is a really important thing.
This is why we're at this point.
If you use Auto-Tune so much that the voice sounds robotic and it doesn't have any nuance
to it, any inflections, and it just sounds like it's a completely synthesized voice,
then when AI creates that synthesized voice, [Gb] people aren't going to be able to tell the difference. _
Computers can create these kind of beats like this.
That's one of the most [Gm] overused beats that there is right there in Despacito.
Every hip-hop song, every pop [Gb] song.
Justin Bieber.
_ [Bb] _ _ _ _ [F] _
[Db] _ That's completely [Ab] Auto-Tuned.
_ _ [Bbm] _ _
_ [Fm] _ [Gb] I can easily hear a computer [Db] generating [A] that.
BTS.
_ _ _ [Dm] _ _ _
[D] Now [C] the production of this stuff is actually [N] incredibly good.
But the fact that it's so digital, it is so computer-driven, the drum beats, the way the
compression is on it, everything about it, the vocal production is so edited.
I remember seeing this thing with Phineas and Billie Eilish.
They were being interviewed by David Letterman.
Phineas showed a vocal track of Billie Eilish, who's an excellent singer.
There were 80 takes that were put into this, or 80 edits in her lead vocal.
Now I'm not sure why Phineas showed that.
To me, the idea is that you showcase [F] a person's singing ability.
Not that it took 80 different edits to make up a vocal take.
Because to me, that's really strange, when Billie is an excellent singer.
But if [Fm] songs are going to be hyper-edited through [Ab] pitch correction, timing correction,
note-by-note guitar parts.
There are guitar players out there that punch in every single note.
Every note is fixed.
[Ab] Every note is manipulated somehow.
Computers can easily do this right now.
And they will get better at this over time.
And the thing is that the general listener doesn't know the difference.
And they frankly don't care.
[B] And I don't think that they're going to care when musicians and songwriters are replaced by AI.
Really, the only [Gb] question is, who gets paid for it?
Who are the songwriters?
Are they the programmers that program it?
I don't know.
These are important questions to ask.
But this is where we're at in [Gb] 2023.
I've harped on this for years [D] on this channel.
People are sick of me harping on it.
[Ab] But AI will be able to do this.
I mean, this is Billy Corgan's point.
And I think that he's right about it.
Love to hear your thoughts.
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