Music is all around us and has been important to mankind for centuries. Every year thousands of people take music lessons and some of them are dreaming of becoming world-famous. YouTube star Taryn Southern is one of those people whose dream is to become world-famous. In 2004, she auditioned for American Idol and is now trying to become famous through YouTube. Her newest album “I AM AI” is a collaboration between her and Artificial Intelligence (CNN).
Over the world, there are multiple startups making big steps in the field of artificial intelligence and music. Where Taryn Southern let the AI of Amper Music compose music according to her own liking other start-ups are planning let AI create albums on their own. A.I Music, one of these startups is even located on the famous Abbey Road. While none of these startups offer a complete album production by A.I yet, it might just be around the corner. Over the last few years, we have seen some big improvements in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning. If the trend continues we might be able to listen to an album entirely composed of a computer.
A list of known start-ups currently working on artificial intelligence music:
– Amper Music
– A.I Music
– Brian.fm
– Popgun.ai
– Juckdeck.com
– Groov.ai
Techstars, a so-called “music accelerator”, is working together with leading companies from the global music business. From Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group to Sonos, they are all watching the trend of music composed by artificial intelligence. The group that Techstars has formed invests $120k per year in 10 potential music startups.
While improvements in artificial intelligence are made and startups work harder to let A.I create the perfect solo album, musical talent isn’t about to be beaten by artificial intelligence. The current solutions in the market create music based on your input and are certainly not perfect yet. Artificial intelligence might greatly extend the long-tail of the music industry when acceptable A.I music hits the market. What do you think that will happen?
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As with any industry, AI has its impact on the music industry as well. Well, with music, or art as a whole, implementation of AI is much trickier. Firstly, in most of the other implementations, AI and robotics have been used to gain efficiency and reduce costs. In Business that is the goal. But Art fundamentally defers with business on that. Art’s purpose is not to be efficient or to be done at the least time or cost. Its purpose is to portray the emotions of the artist for an reaction from the audience. Art is conveyance of creator’s emotions through music, drama, literature and so forth. Therefore, until emotions can be transcoded into the binary, AI music or any art for that sake shall not be of any use. Not surprisingly, human brains are also set in a way that the left side is in charge of efficiency and calculations and the right side is in charge of creativity. It just goes another step to prove the point that that even in nature, they are separated. Given that we use AI to find the right chord progressions or the right strings to play shall maybe lead to one perfect song but it shall restrict artist’s creativity and the industry as a whole.
Yet, on the opposing note, AI could help solve the more laborious parts of music creation such as recording or editing. Tasks which are repetitive and do not require much of creativity.
Overall, AI shall have its impact on the industry. But for now the music creation shall still be in hands of the humans until machines start to feel emotions and find the need to share them.
Hello Max! Thank you for your article, I find the topic extremely interesting so I would like to share my thoughts on it. Although I haven’t heard about the companies working on Artificial Intelligence application in music, it comes to me as a little surprise that the technology is being put to use there, like it happens sooner or later with every industry.
However, for me personally, music isn’t just about the melody. It is also, or even primarily, about the emotions of the music artist which inspired him or her to compose it. When I listen to a new song or album I often search in the Internet for some information about the background of its creation. If I knew that the song was entirely composed by the machine I think I couldn’t feel emotionally involved in it and listening to that music would be no longer that pleasurable for me. In my opinion, this is the case with all the arts – we are enticed by them because we want to admire someone else’s creativity, talent and/or personal emotions. The fact of being artificially created by the computer’s algorithms takes away most of the charm.
That being said, I can easily see where music created with the help of AI might be a good idea. We don’t always listen to the music to admire the beauty of it, sometimes it serves only as a background, for example – while sitting somewhere waiting in the lobby, watching a documentary movie or a youtube vlog or preparing a corporate presentation. That’s where I think the use of AI to music creation might come handy. I just learned that there exists such a company as Jukedeck ,which uses machine learning technology to compose a music for you, all you need to do is tell them what genre, mood, tempo, instruments and track length you want. That makes finding your perfect fit that you want to use for special purposes so much easier.
To sum up, if I were to answer to the question from the post’s title – I think AI might help with music creation in some specific situations, but it cannot beat the musical talent and human factor associated with music by its nature.