> the reasoning "classical music is important because it is written" is backwards.
This is of course silly; there are important traditions of broadly non-literate music, and modern popular music (with its huge variety of "genres", including metal, EDM etc.) clearly qualifies. I have only argued here that classical music being written makes it special/unusual, in a way that's legitimately compelling to some. (Including academic elites, and people looking for stuff to train an AI on.)
Do note that classical music being "written down" is not something that has happened "after the fact": the written form is how the pieces are published to begin with! (There's an interesting contrast here with 'folk' tunes, that spread orally in many subtle variants and are only written down afterwards.) Now, it is also true that performance practice can add a lot, historically; you don't have to reproduce strictly what's written. But the abstract "blueprint" to what you're performing is given by the written piece.
> I have no doubt that just like millions of humans, multi-modal AIs will be able to use the vast library of recorded music
Training an AI on recorded music is really really hard. They have to learn about how the acoustics of every single instrument works and this overwhelms the information that we actually care about, of how a piece of music goes. The difference there is absolutely clear, and quite massive.
This is of course silly; there are important traditions of broadly non-literate music, and modern popular music (with its huge variety of "genres", including metal, EDM etc.) clearly qualifies. I have only argued here that classical music being written makes it special/unusual, in a way that's legitimately compelling to some. (Including academic elites, and people looking for stuff to train an AI on.)
Do note that classical music being "written down" is not something that has happened "after the fact": the written form is how the pieces are published to begin with! (There's an interesting contrast here with 'folk' tunes, that spread orally in many subtle variants and are only written down afterwards.) Now, it is also true that performance practice can add a lot, historically; you don't have to reproduce strictly what's written. But the abstract "blueprint" to what you're performing is given by the written piece.
> I have no doubt that just like millions of humans, multi-modal AIs will be able to use the vast library of recorded music
Training an AI on recorded music is really really hard. They have to learn about how the acoustics of every single instrument works and this overwhelms the information that we actually care about, of how a piece of music goes. The difference there is absolutely clear, and quite massive.