Artificial Intelligence is becoming increasingly more involved in our daily lifes: think of your personal assistant like Alexa, or the weather forecast for your location at any given moment on your mobile device. It has impacted us in a lot of ways. It makes tasks easier to do, recommendations more applicable, et cetera.
Like the majority of people, I love listening to music. At first, you might not be able to instantly identify an AI application in music, but they are definitely there. One of the most common used ones would have to be the ‘song radio’ option on Spotify: if you really enjoy one song, and are in the mood for songs that are in the same genre and sound the same, you can play the ‘radio’ with songs that are alike. In my experience, this option works really well; I have discovered numerous new songs through using this function. However, can this be taken even further?
Imagine having a playlist with all the songs that you like, and an option to create a whole new song with AI, that best fits your style and preference of sound. Does that not sound amazing? Customized songs that fits your current mood. This is something that is not far in the future. In fact AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist), created by Aiva Technologies, has already composed a multitude of classical music songs. This was thought to be impossible, because composing classical music is seen as an emotional art and a unique human quality. However, AIVA managed to create songs that are actually really good (based on preference, of course), you can listen to the music through the link I have posted below.
What does this mean for the rest of the music industry? Will we see new music on the top charts that was created by AI? Will we have our own music, based on our preferences? I’m excited to see the advancements that AI will make in the music industry. Are you?
Listen to AIVA’s music here!
Hi Lars,
Very interesting blogpost, thank you for sharing this! I had not heard of this AI technology before, but I think it sounds really interesting. I love listening to music and using the recommendation systems used by music playing applications to find new bands and artists. Although this technology sounds interesting, I also have my doubts with it. When listening to music, I know that it is created by humans, and I don’t know if I could listen to music where I know that the human component is missing. I think I would have to get used to it, but maybe in the end we would not even think about it anymore. The music of AVIA does sounds really cool, so who knows what the future would bring!
Cheers,
Hillene
This is a really cool area of AI implementation and I’ve never actually considered that something like this could be possible! I’ve given some songs a listen, and it’s really interesting how much a lot of them sound so… natural? To me, they seem to follow a sort of the same pattern as the songs composed by humans. Also, it’s interesting what songs the creators were ‘feeding’ the AI in order to create these songs. For example, to me, ‘The Battle for Andromeda’ sounds as if it was composed by John Williams (Star Wars, Indiana Jones, etc) or ‘Letz make it happen’ sounds very similar to the theme from TV show Westworld.
The songs that are currently on display are believe more suited for a movie to play in the background than something to be played in a theatre. At its current state, I don’t believe that it compares to the classical composers of old. Furthermore, until the AI learns how to produce lyrics that make sense and sing them naturally to the music, I don’t think that we will see AI music in the top charts.
Still, I am very excited to hear any new music made by AI, as this may create a huge impact on the music industry as they may stop signing artists to make songs altogether as the AI will be able to do it better.