We all know how Dall-E is transforming the art industry whilst criticism has risen among the people. But what about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the music industry? Firstly, AI was more a complementary tool for artists to overcome the creativity block. While musician Grimes is excited about the technology, she also fears that one day “AI will make musicians obsolete”.
Every year, countries over the world compete each other at the AI Song Contest which looks like Eurovision but with AI as addition by putting a lot of music in the neural networks where patterns will be learnt in the computer. These neural networks get bigger and more complex by day to understand and to interpret what they are doing in details. Besides, to train AI for the analysis of music and to generate a new song create the downside of an environmental impact when it comes to overusing electricity.
According to Professor Nick-Bryan-Kinns from Queen Mary University of London, scepticism will stay for a while regarding to what extent AI will completely take over the music industry. The computer can easily make a lot of tracks, but a human still needs to select parts for editing to decide which one is nice or which part the AI needs to work on. From this perspective, humans train the AI to make music what other humans like. But we do not know what computers like. It would be creepy and astonishing at the same time if computers listen to their kind of music among them.
Like every nightmare when people say that AI will take over the jobs, musicians should not fear for new technology into music. As the invention of the gramophone was introduced, the only change it made was how music was consumed differently. Besides, AI can be a big contributor of creating new music genres e.g., the content of one single music can be put in another style of music while three or more various genres can be explored at once. Real musicians experience these kind of mash ups as difficult in a studio while AI operates the combining with a lot of genres as a piece of cake.
If we look at the sunny side of AI in the music industry, it allows us to make music easily. Nowadays, you can use your phone to make professional sounds compared to twenty years ago. For now, we use AI as a tool but who knows, next year as your fellow partner in creating music. It could suggest you some guitar riffs or recommend lyrics for a certain genre. Since AI can interact with real-time data, we might enjoy bands consisting of humans and robots, or only robots?
References
Ling, T. (2021). AI is about to shake up music forever – but not in the way you think. [online] BBC Science Focus Magazine. Available at: https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/ai-music-future/.
Singh, A. (n.d.). How Is Artificial Intelligence Transforming The Music Industry. [online] Available at: https://www.globaltechcouncil.org/artificial-intelligence/how-is-artificial-intelligence-transforming-the-music-industry/ [Accessed 10 Oct. 2022].
Dazed (2020). Grimes says she worries AI will one day ‘make musicians obsolete’. [online] Dazed. Available at: https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/51378/1/grimes-says-she-worries-ai-will-one-day-make-musicians-obsolete-web-summit.
