To answer that question, it is necessary to answer the question "why did we want actual human singers in the past?"

If you think it is because there was no alternative, then you will see no barriers to the adoption of the sort of system you imagine.

But if you think it is because all human art is a form (however weird, tangled and opaque) of story telling, and for it to work, the person experiencing the art needs to be believe that there must be a story to be told, then your imagined system is not that interesting.

However, we are seeing an overwhelming propensity even today for people (even people who ought to know better) to ascribe intentionality and even emotion to computer systems that demonstrably do not have it (and as far back as Eliza in the 1970s). It seems likely to me that most people will rapidly come to believe in a sufficiently intentional and emtional backstory to your putative wunder-singer that their belief will satisfy their desire for "a person behind the art".

Whether a machine can sing like a human does not matter much as far as appreciation of art: all art is self-expression, and self-expression always requires a self to express and a self to receive. Someone programmed the voice to sing something to someone for some reason.

Both human and software-generated singing exist today, and either can be boring nonsense or speak to you and leave an emotional impact.

(That said, if said machine is actually a derivative work produced from vocal samples without appropriate licensing, that’d make it dubious legally or morally. To my knowledge, preexisting software-generated singing like Vocaloid does not suffer from this problem.)

The production of art demonstrably does not require a self.

The production of art that people want to experience probably requires a self, but may only require the belief that a self was involved.

The experience of art requires a self, as do all experiences.

If your definition of art includes things made without a self, a thinking mind with intention and agency then go ahead and ponder how the Sun and human DNA are art, I’ll wait for when you come back with a new definition.

that there can be art made without a self does not imply that anything made without a self is art.

that there are things made which are art does not imply that anything made is art.

that things can be made does not imply that everything is made.

You are welcome to produce a definition that separates those things.

You have seen my definition. By definition an act of self-expression cannot occur without a self.

Without clarifying what makes something art, your claim that art can be something produced without a self (i.e., is not self-expression) demotes art to the level of “any random thing”.

With multimodal vocal-LLMs we’ll be able to prompt any kind of personality to the singer.

“You are a castrato who sailed with Black Beard and survived the holocaust with a degree in Klingon studies from Oxbridge…”

As a choral singer, if there’s an app that one day allows me to sing with a fake choir of extremely good singers, I would enjoy doing that all day long. And it would allow my actual choir to practice way more, making our performances far better.

This exists right now!

Not as an app exactly, but you should check out Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurt’s suite of tools called “Holly Plus”:

https://holly.plus/

I’m pretty sure you can access their model somehow and even train your own voice using their “spawning” approach.

She did an awesome TED talk demonstrating this:

https://www.ted.com/talks/holly_herndon_what_if_you_could_si...

Here’s a cool example, using Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPAEMUzDxuo

I don’t think it’s quite at the level of consumer use yet, but I know they’re working on it. Definitely check it out.

From what I've seen, the music industry (all genres including pop, classical, etc.) tends to be more about personality than actual content these days, so it's not really an issue.

Virtual singers are already pretty good anyways, I feel we've already passed the point of diminishing returns.

And even if you look at virtual singers, the ones which are popular are the ones from ten years ago, not the newer ones with more realistic voices.

What do you mean by "ten years ago"? Yamaha Corporation produces vocal synths since 2000s, but it is quite pointless to use technologies of Vocaloid 4 if you can use Vocaloid 6.

> these days

How far back are you counting as these days? I'd the entire recording industry has always been about attaching an image to songs.

Aren't we there yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatsune_Miku

I saw somewhere that this "girl" fills concerts.

Star Trek: Voyager "Virtuoso" thought of that already. Their answer was that you get something which is barely recognisable as music.

If you had to pick one and only one, which would you pick?

- art is the process of creating

- art is the outcome of creating

I know which one I'd pick.

The popularity of karaoke suggests that the quality of the singing is not especially relevant.

People like to song along though.

People like playing drums too, but a drum machine means that if you're not any good at it or too busy but you need drum sounds you can have drum sounds.

There are rights issues if the result is it replaces a particular singer, if you made it so that Sneaker Pimps can fire Kelli but still have her voice on subsequent songs that's a problem. But suppose you're a bedroom musician, and you realise you've got a piece that really wants somebody with a different voice than yours to make it work - you can pay someone, but technology like this offers a cheaper, easier option.