r/singularity • u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: • 5h ago
Singularity is Nearer Claude Opus 5.5 wrote an oboe concerto that 60% of listeners thought was human-composed—higher than actual pieces by Handel at 58% and Vivaldi at 43%
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u/krakenpistole ▪️ AGI July 2027 4h ago
You're gonna need an absolutely elite oboist to play that.
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u/DukeRedWulf 3h ago
Yeah, in terms of pure technicalities - all those demisemiquaver runs seem like a lot!
[For everyone who's not familiar with music notation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty-second_note ]•
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u/SilasTalbot AGI | Aug 29, 2027, 2:14 a.m. Eastern Time 4h ago
There are fewer than thirty oboists in the world qualified to play that piece, a mere half dozen perhaps, to slay. At this moment, I'm inclined to think you are not one of them.
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u/Regardedbro 3h ago
It’s not too bad actually! Well within any professional concert oboist’s abilities.
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u/jamesbrotherson2 4h ago
A problem with the AI compositions is that none of them can follow a repeated melody. It’s just a tune that kinda goes no where. Excited to see where it is next year tho
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u/Ophelius314 3h ago
I agree, I predict AI writing original masterpieces very soon. AI slop is temporary.
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u/BoldTaters 1h ago
This one, at least, is able to work in a repeated motif but you're right about the lack of melody. It's improving but not quite on par with a human. Better than most humans, honestly, but most humans wouldn't want to try.
Points subtracted for the Prompter making the AI write for harpsichord. Vile instrument.
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u/Important_Chef_9144 4h ago
As a musician, I can say that is really good!
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u/SizeableBrain ▪️AGI 2030 4h ago
As someone who used to hear symphonies when falling asleep due to hypnagogic hallucinations, I think my brain made up better ones :)
Or maybe Claude was speaking to me!
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u/lovesdogsguy 4h ago
I have extreme musical ideation too. I hear the symphonies in hypnagogia as well, and it also comes when I'm reading a book (I think that part is neurological — something about reading stirs it up) and when I'm tired.
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u/SizeableBrain ▪️AGI 2030 4h ago
I don't get it much these days.
I think I have to be in a really good state of mind, well rested and relaxed for it to happen.
I have 4 kids now.
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u/Important_Chef_9144 4h ago
Believe me, it is pretty good. The counterpoints... Wow.
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u/SizeableBrain ▪️AGI 2030 4h ago
I listen to a fair bit of classical and there's no way I would think this is AI if it was playing on ABC Classic on my way to work.
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u/Mistuv 4h ago
I'm not particularly fond of the music, though likely because I'm not really a fan of this type of music. I've heard other stuff that Opus 5.5 composed that I've liked way more (like the video below, where every part of it was made by Opus).
I wonder what their music-making abilities will be like once they start training these frontier models on sound, because as far as I'm aware, none of the big models right now are trained on sound. You can ask them, and they will give you a detailed list of how they analyze sound through a bunch of tools.
As a result, they can't process sound directly, unlike with images. Right now, when Opus is making music, it can't really listen to it and address some of the shortcomings because the tools they use are quite limited.
When I put them to the test, Astra was best at transcribing the music into musical notes, but lot of the beauty of music, it sounds very jagged, and the mistakes they are making are not the type a human would make. Those tools are not particularly made for such detail. They are more analyzing speech and whatnot.
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u/Regardedbro 3h ago
Classical pianist here - this is actually quite good! As other commenters have pointed out, it bulldozes through the standard structural conventions for a classical concerto of this type, but that’s what I like about it. Despite disregarding standard development it, in my opinion, has a very pleasing “classical” symmetrical balance. I played the basso continuo part on my harpsichord at home and it unexpectedly “fits” the human hand very well. Would love to hear it performed by human musicians SLIGHTLY slower (the tempo here is rushed).
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 27m ago
It's interesting that you mention the music fitting well to actual human hands. I've seen Opus 5.5 make renderings of musicians playing instruments with their hand and finger movements actually matching the notes played (admittedly with a few occasional distortions). I was watching a gorgeous AI-generated film about Emperor Nero in Ancient Rome, and everything looked highly impressive and nearly flawless for a while, but it got to a part where Nero's playing some sort of quirky Roman instrument and his fingers weren't even touching the strings. Models like Opus 5.5 look like a very promising step forward in matching music to actual instrumentation, and I imagine they could be used to generate 3D animations as references for pure video generators like Seedance that struggle with these sorts of little details.
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u/ochrence 1h ago edited 1h ago
Speaking as a composer, this is severely lacking in phrasing and form, and is similar in this regard to all other LLM compositions I’ve ever heard. The higher-level organization is just not there. It’s like Mozart’s gag composition Ein musikalischer Spass but without the self-aware bits.
You may well find human-written music worse-organized, but not by any known artists from the musical period imitated here.
edit: For comparison, listen to how beautiful and lyrical this actual oboe melody by Vivaldi is. Each line flows and develops into the next effortlessly: https://youtu.be/z_nFYc_bSDU
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u/Regular_Post9884 56m ago
It hasn't been trained on music and it doesn't have auditory processing abilities yet. That could change with a little work. Just like LLMs couldn't code very well a few years ago, and now they are starting to code better than humans.
With a little investment and training, these could be writing better music than any humans in history.
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u/ochrence 38m ago
I think there are rather fundamental aspects of how these models work — token-by-token prediction, text-based ingestion, and above all else an incentive to converge to a trained “mean” — that limit anything we could recognizably call LLMs to musical pastiche, even if this were a perfect Vivaldi imitation.
To achieve creativity and innovation you must, knowing rules and conventions on a very deep level, have an intuition about when to follow them and when to break them. It’s not just combining different influences, but also about consciously going against the grain sometimes. That is the very biggest problem, because in most other avenues you’d want to be focusing on having the models break rules less.
If I heard anything I thought to be a good creative work out of these models, perhaps I’d change my mind. But please forgive me for not holding my breath.
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u/Glsbnewt 3h ago
Curious, did it write a midi file, or did it work directly within your notation software?
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u/DankestMage99 3h ago
I have been playing music for a long time, but I’m the first to admit I’m not any good at it and my theory is way too rusty to know how this stacks up to any sort of true classical music.
I say that because I think for most people, classical music doesn’t seem that difficult to “fool” the general public it’s not human made. Classical music, for the most part, feels much more mathematical than contemporary music, so it makes sense that AI would be decent at creating it. And most people aren’t schooled in classical to know nuances about it. That’s why people can still somewhat tell contemporary AI music from the real thing. But that window is closing fast.
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u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 4h ago
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4h ago edited 4h ago
[deleted]
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u/ImprovementNo592 3h ago
Ahh, the ghost in the machine. It's going to get out soon... Happy Halloween! :)
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u/greatblueplanet 4h ago
I’m interested in playing with this! How can we try it? Did you plugin an MCP?
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u/Saint_Nitouche 3h ago
As someone with no musical ability, training or knowledge, I like this a lot.
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u/7ofErnestBorg9 2h ago
This has nothing to do with music, and everything to do with heuristics. AI will never compose music.
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u/eques_99 3h ago
Those 60% of listeners are thick, and chose that piece because it's more accessible and boppy than Handel etc.
That very accessibility and boppiness is exactly what should have flagged it as AI.
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u/leeta0028 4h ago edited 4h ago
As a classical musician I would think this is a poor student piece, mainly because it doesn't follow the conventions of the style it's imitating in terms of musical development (it starts "spinning out" and using sequences right away instead of establishing the home key and musical ideas first and developing them logically.)
However, if I'm honest with myself, I wouldn't have ever guessed it's AI. It certainly come a very long way from the nightmare fuel compositions that the earliest attempts at AI compositions produced (though those had their own charm, they reminded me of the technically correct joke pieces Mozart sometimes wrote.)