Admittedly, our testing artists did push Jen past the boundaries of what a “regular” particular person may ask in a question, veering extra towards a “document retailer clerk” stage of familiarity with recorded sound. Cleveland, as an example, didn’t get something good out of a question for “mid-tempo California storage rock influenced by ’70s Indonesian pop,” whereas Heywood expressed dismay that Jen didn’t appear to acknowledge his request for “city pop,” a kind of Japanese music that got here to prominence within the mid-’70s and has seen a minor resurgence in reputation lately. However to Heywood, that form of breadth of music is important, particularly as a musician.
“A number of musicians or producers, once they ask one thing of one another, they’ll use bands and different artists as a reference level, like, ‘We’re going to go for a Prince kind of sound,’ or, ‘Let’s add some Clavinet like Stevie Marvel,’” Heywood explains. With Jen’s lack of information of each present recording artists and even some pretty widespread genres and devices, it makes it arduous to actually land on one thing particular.
“I stored attempting to coax some heat out of it, like vinyl hiss or saturation or one thing lo-fi or classic sounding, however all the things it made had the identical form of hi-fi, video-game-menu-screen-type sound to it,” Heywood says. “They even provide you with ‘lo-fi’ as a immediate suggestion, however that didn’t appear to make a lot of an influence. In case you’re attempting to get a sure sound, like ’80s funk, the closest you’re in a position to get is one thing that sounds extra like Daft Punk.”
Each electrical guitar sound that WIRED and the testers generated sounded virtually too clear, and it was nearly not possible to get it to supply a monitor that wasn’t in a 4/4 time signature until you used the phrase “waltz” within the immediate.
A few of this, says Jen cofounder Shara Senderoff, is to be anticipated. The instrument is in its alpha part, and the 10-second and 45-second tracks it generates are “meant to encourage and supply a place to begin for creativity, not essentially a ultimate product,” she says. New capabilities are coming, and since Jen was educated utilizing a restricted information set, it has room to develop and “will increase considerably within the beta part,” Senderoff provides.
All the things Jen made beneath the guise of rock music, Heywood says, was akin to “the clip artwork model” of the style. Cleveland was in a position to coax out some songs that sounded “like they might be utilized in a automobile business” or that had been “entering into Black Keys territory,” however says greater than something, she felt like all Jen’s musical ideas had been simply plain hokey.
“It felt just like the form of music I’d make if I had been messing round with my associates, joking concerning the cliches of different genres,” she says. “I may see among the songs on an excellent dangerous Netflix relationship present, however nothing I made felt like a menace to me personally.”
However what about everybody who makes the tracks you may hear on a Netflix relationship present? May Jen be a menace to their jobs? In accordance with Blickle, virtually definitely.
“In case you’re a producer with a small price range and also you’re simply attempting to get your content material out, now you possibly can say, ‘I’m not even going to pay a designer or an animator. I can simply use a picture generator,’” he says. “The identical factor is true for a music price range. If they will pay nothing for one thing that was going to value them $2,000, then nice, somebody will assume that’s $2,000 of their pockets.”