From ‘80s new wave to ‘90s grunge to the latest pop single, music has changed a lot over the decades. Those changes have come not only in terms of sound, though; lyrics have also evolved as time has passed.
So what has changed about the lyrics we can’t get out of our heads? After analyzing 12,000 English-language pop, rock, rap, R&B, and country songs released between 1970 and 2020, researcher Eva Zangerle of Innsbruck University and her team have found that lyrics have been getting simpler and more repetitive over time. This trend is especially evident in rap and rock, but it applies to other genres as well. Another thing Zangerle’s team discovered is that lyrics tend to be more personal and emotionally charged now than they were over 50 years ago.
“Just as literature can be considered a portrayal of society, lyrics also provide a reflection of a society’s shifting norms, emotions, and values over time,” the researchers wrote in a study recently published in Scientific Reports.
Bonne nouvelle, les David Guetta de demain, ça ne sera pas vous ! Il vous suffit de balancer quelques mots dans une IA, et hop, elle vous pond un morceau de musique entier, avec une qualité discutable ! Mais pour faire souffrir ses voisins, c’est pas mal et l’exploit technique est intéressant quand même. C’est exactement ce que propose Stable Audio 2.0, la nouvelle version du générateur musical de Stability.ai.
Vous lui donnez des instructions en langage naturel, genre « Compose-moi un morceau de rock épique avec un solo de guitare déchirant sur le thème de l’espace« , et bim, l’IA se met au boulot ! En quelques secondes, elle vous sort une piste audio complète de 3 minutes, en stéréo 44.1 kHz s’il vous plaît.
Voici ce que j’ai fait rien que pour vous :
Stable Audio 2.0 ne se contente pas de générer de la musique à partir de zéro. Vous pouvez aussi lui filer vos propres samples audio et lui demander de les transformer comme bon vous semble. Par exemple, vous prenez un extrait de votre morceau préféré de Metallica, vous le refilez à l’IA en lui demandant de le remixer façon dubstep avec une touche de jazz manouche, et voilà, c’est parti mon kiki !
Bon, je vous vois venir avec vos grands chevaux : « Oui mais Korben, et les droits d’auteur dans tout ça ?« . Eh bien figurez-vous que les petits gars de Stability AI ont pensé à tout. Pour entraîner leur modèle, ils ont utilisé une base de données de sons sous licence provenant d’AudioSparx, en donnant la possibilité aux artistes de se retirer du projet s’ils le souhaitaient. Et pour éviter que des petits malins utilisent des samples protégés, ils ont intégré une technologie de reconnaissance de contenu qui empêche l’utilisation de matériel copyrighté. Bien vu les gars !
Alors, vous en pensez quoi ? Perso, je trouve que c’est une sacrée avancée pour les créatifs en herbe comme pour les pros de la musique même si on est encore trèèèès loin d’un rendu propre. Pour le coup, je préfère Suno. Mais ça peut donner de l’inspiration. Ça ne remplacera jamais le talent et la sensibilité d’un vrai musicien mais ça reste un bon logiciel dans la boîte à outils des artistes
Pour tester Stable Audio 2.0, c’est sur le site officiel. C’est gratuit pour 20 crédit et hyper simple à prendre en main, vous m’en direz des nouvelles !
On Tuesday, the Artist Rights Alliance (ARA) announced an open letter critical of AI signed by over 200 musical artists, including Pearl Jam, Nicki Minaj, Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Elvis Costello, and the estate of Frank Sinatra. In the letter, the artists call on AI developers, technology companies, platforms, and digital music services to stop using AI to "infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists." A tweet from the ARA added that AI poses an "existential threat" to their art.
Visual artists began protesting the advent of generative AI after the rise of the first mainstream AI image generators in 2022, and considering that generative AI research has since been undertaken for other forms of creative media, we have seen that protest extend to professionals in other creative domains, such as writers, actors, filmmakers—and now musicians.
"When used irresponsibly, AI poses enormous threats to our ability to protect our privacy, our identities, our music and our livelihoods," the open letter states. It alleges that some of the "biggest and most powerful" companies (unnamed in the letter) are using the work of artists without permission to train AI models, with the aim of replacing human artists with AI-created content.
Les tarifs de Spotify vont augmenter courant 2024 en France. C'est ce qu'annonce le service de streaming musical dans une lettre ouverte, où il dénonce vertement une nouvelle taxe française que l'entreprise ne pourrait « tout simplement pas absorber ».
The European Commission (EC) has sided with Spotify, fining Apple nearly $2 billion for abusive App Store restrictions on developers that it found violated antitrust laws by degrading music streaming apps (other than Apple Music) and spiking prices.
"Apple applied restrictions on app developers preventing them from informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services available outside of the app (‘anti-steering provisions')," the EC found.
"This is illegal under EU antitrust rules" and harms consumers "who cannot make informed and effective decisions on where and how to purchase music streaming subscriptions for use on their device," the EC said.
Accusé par Spotify d'abus de position dominante, Apple écope d'une amende record d'1,8 milliard d'euros, sur décision de la Commission européenne. Apple annonce faire appel et dénonce une décision biaisée.
La fonction « Apple Music Replay », accessible depuis le web, permet désormais de générer un rapport musical une fois par mois. Une tendance amenée à se généraliser sur toutes les plateformes ?
Brussels is to impose its first-ever fine on tech giant Apple for allegedly breaking EU law over access to its music streaming services, according to five people with direct knowledge of the long-running investigation.
The fine, which is in the region of €500 million and is expected to be announced early next month, is the culmination of a European Commission antitrust probe into whether Apple has used its own platform to favor its services over those of competitors.
The probe is investigating whether Apple blocked apps from informing iPhone users of cheaper alternatives to access music subscriptions outside the App Store. It was launched after music-streaming app Spotify made a formal complaint to regulators in 2019.
Last Friday, musician Benn Jordan assumed his phone was glitching when he tried to pull up one of his albums and couldn't find it on Spotify. Then he noticed all the notifications he'd gotten from fans asking why he'd removed his music on all the streaming platforms where his music could typically be found, including Apple Music, iTunes, Deezer, and YouTube Music.
But Jordan had not made any such decision. By the time night fell on Friday, the gravity of what had happened finally sank in, and he realized something was "very, very wrong."
For the past 17 years, Jordan has paid his digital distributor, TuneCore, thousands of dollars to manage his music on streaming platforms. Under his alias The Flashbulb, Jordan had released more than a dozen albums, reaching 1.9 million listeners on Spotify who added his songs to more than 300,000 playlists last year alone. In total, he had earned over $400,000 in sales since signing up for TuneCore in 2007.
The new iCloud for Windows app, which does a surprisingly good job of looking like a native Windows 11 app. It also respects the system dark mode setting.
Big news for people who prefer iPhones but also prefer to use Windows PCs: Apple has quietly overhauled its entire suite of Windows apps, including non-beta versions of the Apple Music, Apple TV, and Devices apps that it began previewing for Windows 11 users over a year ago. Collectively, these apps replace most of the functionality from the iTunes for Windows app; iTunes for macOS was discontinued all the way back in 2019. Apple has also released a major iCloud for Windows update with an overhauled design.
All of the apps are currently available in the Microsoft Store. While the previews that Apple released last year required Windows 11 22H2 or newer, the final versions of all four new apps also work in Windows 10 for people who have chosen not to upgrade or whose PCs do not meet the system requirements.
The Apple Music and Apple TV apps both offer access to Apple's streaming music and video libraries for people with subscriptions, though both apps will also import and play your local music and video libraries from iTunes if you have them.
Je sais, il existe beaucoup d’alternatives gratuites à Spotify ou Deezer qui font la même chose, mais sans lâcher un kopeck. Je vous avais parlé de Nuclear il y a quelques semaines d’ailleurs, qui était très cool.
Et bien aujourd’hui, je vous cause de Spotube qui n’est pas basé sur Electron (!!), utilise l’API de Spotify pour son catalogue de titres et de playlists et qui va récupérer les sons sur YouTube. Un fonctionnement assez classique pour ce genre d’outil, mais surtout un client sans pub, sans collecte de données et bien sûr compatible tous OS.
Avec Spotube, vous pourrez parcourir vos propres playlists Spotify, les morceaux que vous aimez, les genres musicaux, les artistes…etc mais également télécharger localement les morceaux ou encore afficher les paroles des chansons de manière synchronisée avec le son pour vos soirées Karaoké.
Le projet est sous licence libre et en constante amélioration. Il y a encore des petits bugs parfois, mais c’est parfaitement utilisable pour dandiner vos petits popotins sur les derniers tubes.
Hot on the heels of Google's "One" subscription plan obtaining 100 million users, YouTube is also hitting that big milestone, with 100 million people paying for Premium and YouTube Music. YouTube's subscription data didn't make it into the earnings call three days ago.
It's hard to know what exactly is driving YouTube's subscriptions. Premium gets you both ad-free YouTube videos and YouTube Music, and it's easy to imagine people sticking to one or the other. Ad-free videos have been getting the most aggressive promotion lately, with Google cracking down on ad-block users by blocking video playback and displaying interstitial pop-ups. After warning users that ad blockers violate YouTube's terms of service, the pop-ups show a big "try YouTube Premium" button. Premium also added an exclusive "enhanced bitrate" 1080p setting, although 2K, 4K, and 8K options have always been free.
There's not much new on the music side of things. YouTube Music is free with ads and a more limited feature set, but subscribing gets you ad-free playback, background playback on phones, and access to YouTube Music streaming on Google's various speakers. YouTube's blog post highlights quotes from many big music industry CEOs celebrating the service.
Universal Music is set to pull its songs from TikTok after a breakdown in negotiations over payment, which would remove the social media platform’s access to music from stars such as Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, and Drake.
Universal, the industry giant that controls a third of the world’s music, has been in tense negotiations with Beijing-based TikTok for the past year, according to people familiar with the matter.
Universal on Tuesday accused TikTok of “bullying” and said the company wanted to pay a “fraction” of the rate that other social media sites pay for access to its music catalog. As a result, Universal said it would stop licensing its content to TikTok when its contract expires on January 31.
There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: the surprisingly complex physics of two simply constructed instruments: the Indonesian bundengan and the Australian Aboriginal didgeridoo (or didjeridu).
The bundengan is a rare, endangered instrument from Indonesia that can imitate the sound of metallic gongs and cow-hide drums (kendangs) in a traditional gamelan ensemble. The didgeridoo is an iconic instrument associated with Australian Aboriginal culture that produces a single, low-pitched droning note that can be continuously sustained by skilled players. Both instruments are a topic of scientific interest because their relatively simple construction produces some surprisingly complicated physics. Two recent studies into their acoustical properties were featured at an early December meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, held in Sydney, Australia, in conjunction with the Australian Acoustical Society.
The bundengan originated with Indonesian duck hunters as protection from rain and other adverse conditions while in the field, doubling as a musical instrument to pass the time. It's a half-dome structure woven out of bamboo splits to form a lattice grid, crisscrossed at the top to form the dome. That dome is then coated with layers of bamboo sheaths held in place with sugar palm fibers. Musicians typically sit cross-legged inside the dome-shaped resonator and pluck the strings and bars to play. The strings produce metallic sounds while the plates inside generate percussive drum-like sounds.
Les Francofolies de la Rochelle et le Printemps de Bourges ne seront plus soutenus par Spotify en 2024, alors que le service de streaming menace de couper ses investissements en France en réaction à la taxe streaming du gouvernement. Le géant suédois reproche à l'État français de mettre en péril les entreprises du streaming.
Mathematician and early AI theorist David Rothenberg was fascinated by pattern-recognition algorithms. By 1968, he'd already done lots of work in missile trajectories (as one did back then), speech, and accounting, but he had another esoteric area he wanted to explore: the harmonic scale, as heard by humans. With enough circuits and keys, you could carve up the traditional music octave from 12 tones into 31 and make all kinds of between-tone tunes.
Happily, he had money from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and he also knew just the person to build this theoretical keyboard: Robert Moog, a recent graduate from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was just starting to work toward a fully realized Moog Music.
The plans called for a 478-key keyboard, an analog synthesizer, a bank of oscillators, and an impossibly intricate series of circuits between them. Moog "took his time on this," according to Travis Johns, instructional technologist at Cornell. He eventually delivers a one-octave prototype made from "1960s-era, World-War-II-surplus technology." Rothenberg held onto the keyboard piece, hoping to one day finish it, until his death in 2018. His widow, Suhasini Sankaran, donated the kit to Cornell in 2022.
L'application Spotify permet d'écouter des heures de playlists musicales. Mais, saviez-vous que ces mêmes playlists cachent un petit jeu de snake étonnant ? Voici comment y jouer.
En 2024, le gouvernement instaurera une taxe streaming prélevée sur le chiffre d'affaires des services musicaux. Un impôt pour financer le Centre national de la musique… qui pourrait avoir pour effet de favoriser les géants américains. C'est du moins l'argument défendu par Spotify.
Vous avez déjà réécouté tous les titres de votre rétrospective Spotify Wrapped 2023 ? Le plaisir auditif continue avec une playlist inédite : celle de la rédaction de Numerama !
Les séquenceurs MIDI sont des logiciels qui, lorsqu’ils ont émergés à l’époque, nous permettaient de jouer avec des claviers électroniques pour créer grâce à notre ordinateur, des mélodies envoûtantes et parfois, avouons-le, un peu cacophoniques.
Si vous souhaitez vous y remettre, sans pour autant vous prendre la tête avec des softs complexes ou onéreux, vous êtes sur le bon article puisqu’aujourd’hui je vais vous parler d’un outil nommé Cacophony.
Cacophony est un séquenceur MIDI minimaliste et ergonomique, spécialement conçu pour vous aider à composer sans avoir besoin de vous former. L’une des choses qui m’a vraiment séduit dans Cacophony, c’est cette interface épurée, utilisable sans souris, qui ramène à l’essence même de la composition musicale.
Ce séquenceur MIDI est open source, et offre toutes les fonctionnalités de bases nécessaires aux débutants, ce qui signifie qu’il n’est pas aussi évolué que les logiciels professionnels, mais qu’il vous permettra de vous amuser et bien sûr commencer à créer de la musique.
De plus, il prend en charge l’exportation vers différents formats audio (wav, mp3, ogg, or mid) avec possibilité de séparer les pistes. Vous pourrez donc facilement sauvegarder votre œuvre d’art et la partager avec vos amis.
Il est disponible sur Linux, MacOS et Windows et sa frugalité vous permettra de le faire fonctionner sur d’anciennes machines. Par contre, c’est open source, donc gratuit si vous le compilez vous-même. Autrement, si vous voulez récupérer le binaire directement, il faudra payer un peu moins de 10$ via Itch.io.
Si ça vous intéresse, vous pouvez télécharger le logiciel en allant sur leur site officiel.
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Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/
Abonnez-vous aux newsletters Numerama pour recevoir l’essentiel de l’actualité https://www.numerama.com/newsletter/