AI has certainly brought about a wave of intrigue within the music industry, owing to its remarkable capabilities, particularly in music production. However, it also presents limitations. My conviction in this matter arises from an experiment I conducted with a friend who has a livelihood as a music producer. Given my unfamiliarity with music production, I believed that collaborating with a music producer would provide more value to the experiment.
Traditional music producers possess a unique blend of creativity and technical expertise, including keen listening skills, a profound grasp of recording technologies, and extensive musical knowledge (Malta, 2021). As we started our short journey to find suitable AI tools, an immediate limitation became apparent. No single AI could seamlessly integrate the numerous steps required for music production, including melody creation, percussion arrangement, lyrics composition, and vocal creation. Consequently, we had to aim for distinct AIs to fulfill each of these tasks. We ultimately enlisted the help of four AIs: AIVA, The Infinite Drum Machine, AI Songwriter, and Uberduck. These AI tools gave us a large volume of possibilities, based upon the prompts we provided to guide them towards our desired outcomes. For instance, we used prompts such as “create vocals in the style of the famous rapper Drake” and “generate lyrics based on our childhood” to instruct the AIs effectively.
The end result of our experiment was undeniably impressive, but it came with a caution. The AIs, with their current online resources, were not self-sufficient in producing music. My friend and I found ourselves making numerous adjustments at each step of the process to fine-tune the AI-generated music to our satisfaction and to reach an acceptable result. I am excited to discover what will be the future outcomes of AI in music production as it is for now at the early stage its development.
Sources:
Malta, S. (2021). Retrieved from: https://www.edmprod.com/what-is-music-production/
