What's a "Moral Compass Cricket Thingy"?

[Moonface]

You ever heard of a site called Bandle? I just learned it exists and it splits the song apart into individual instruments and it reminded me of that post you made talking about AI or something being able to highlight certain instruments in a song or something to that effect.

[Maniakkid25]

I have not. I looked into it, it's pretty neat. It's another one of those "guess the thing from the clues", but with instruments. It took me an embarassing amount of time to figure out today's song considering how many times I've heard it. The difference here is this is clearly a MIDI instrumentation of the song, rather than extracting the various parts from the song. That's the reason you might use an AI splitter, after all.

I know you didn't ask this, but I think AI splitters are an actually defensible use of this AI stuff. Rather than stealing music to make your own, it's just listening REALLY hard and grabbing the individual frequencies. It's actually how the newest Beatles song was made. Yes, there was a new Beatles song made. In 2023. We live in amazing times. But anyway, they happened to have an AI that could extract John Lennon's voice from an old demo of the song that was originally too noisy to use, and had some George Harrison guitar work from when they tried to make it the first time, and out came Now and Then. It's a fine song; not a lost classic or anything, but perfectly acceptable.

[Moonface]

Ah, I wasn't aware the site was using a MIDI version of the song. I didn't really get to hear the song because the streamer I saw using it today got the answer in like 5 seconds with just the first clue.

Oh yeah, I agree that using AI for the purpose you mentioned is a good use for it. Especially since I don't know if a human could even replicate what the AI is doing if they were working from a commercial release of a track from somewhere like Spotify or a CD.

[Maniakkid25]

Realistically, you can't. You would want the "stems", or individual instruments of the song (most songs are built piecemeal, rather than played all at once in a single recording). Once a song is released into the wild, it's just one giant mash of frequencies that you'd need to pick apart individually. I guess with some software trickery, you could isolate frequncies, but not to the point that you'd retain the original timbre of the instrument.

Edit: and immediately, now that I think about it, that "software trickery" is literally what MP3 does, but in reverse? Like, MP3's whole schtick is that it takes out the frequencies that do not add anything to the song, and that compresses the file data. Theoretically, a human with the code of an MP3 compression algorithm could reverse-engineer a way to get out individual instruments? It's a long shot, but it is a possibility, now that I think about it.