Both are, fundamentally, temporal structures, that unfold over time. Ideas are introduced, developed and referenced later. Events (can be) foreshadowed. Composers play listener expecation & surprise as well as storytellers do.
I agree, that stories are more complex in the sense, that the nets would need to create a story that is consistent with a certain setting (real world, Tri-Island-Area, Middle Earth, or whatever), and creating an (interesting) setting that is internally sound is probably very hard.
Can you link an example? What Iāve heard so far did not sound convincing at all.
If we assume that the story is provided through text, then creating pleasant music just requires mimicking a structure, but if you do the same thing with texts, you just get grammatically-correct meaningless phrases. For music, structure is enough, for text itās not.
If we assume that the story is provided through a different medium than text, something more formal and simpler, then creating a pleasant story might be an easier task. Still, there is a reason why mimicking a music style is trivial while natural language processing is the holy grail of artificial intelligence.
You canāt get very good results right now, but you can perceive the evident evolution (final composition at the end of the video):
And here you can test how good you are at distinguishing Bach music from generated music that mimics the style of the composer:
I was trying to say something like this. Language understanding is difficult because it requires logical reasoning. (If the child wonāt drink the milk, boil it. Does āitā refer to the child or to the milk?). Now, I suppose writing a story is even more difficult because it requires logical reasoning and creativity. Neural networks, as far as I recall, are good at creativity, not so good at logical reasoning. (But of course they can do it, since our brains do it after all. Interestingly, evolution had to build logical reasoning using an extremely unfit architecture, because it had to work with what was available. About this, there is a funny story, ātheyāre made out of meatā.)
Neural networks can be very good at both logical reasoning and intuition, depending on the goals of the neural network and the way they are designed.
Past artificial intelligence technologies like āBig Blueā (the one that beat Kasparov at chess) still used brute-force techniques to understand which moves to do. Modern technologies based on neural networks, like āAlphaGoā (the one that has beaten every professional Go player out there) achieve good results even when they donāt even search for the best possible move. Their decision can be based on āintuitionā.
I think that we are far from general solutions able to create any kind of pleasant music, but itās more important to observe the trend over the years.
Just a few years ago these results were quite difficult to reach and it wasnāt clear whether a neural network would have ever been able to achieve the creation of music. Today you clearly see that the goal is within the realm of doable things, itās just a matter of time.
And if you take into consideration the acceleration that neural networks have experienced in the last years, it makes sense to conclude that we are not very far from the objective.
I just have to mention it: Tower of Guns
Although the story isnāt generated but picked randomly from a pool (so itās not always different), they all make sense, I swear
Tower of Guns is a first-person shooter that takes place in a tower filled with a variety of guns. The player must ascend the tower by advancing through a series of randomized areas. Each area contains a number of arenas and a boss fight that the player must clear to advance.
At the beginning of every run, one of several āstoriesā is selected at random, ranging from a soldier ordered by his superiors to climb the Tower of Guns, to a gun-toting barbarian guide protecting an evil priest on his way to a dark ritual at the top of the tower, to an āinebriated scholarā trying to get to a friendās home who has confused the Tower of Guns for his friendās apartment building. Aside from on-screen text appearing at the beginning and ending of every level, these stories do not impact the gameplay in any significant way, and can in fact be toggled off completely at the beginning of a run.
I was disappointed with the way SH went. 3 was pretty good. Four was difficult to control and put me off playing. The PS3 HD collection were really bugged and didnāt work properly. I stopped around then.
I think it is odd they didnāt remaster the original game.
Yeah, true. But I still think it would have been great. The original PS1 game even today has a great spooky atmosphere and play good. Puzzles are good too. Just look what they did with Crash Bandicoot Trilogy HD.
