As we experience rapid development in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the music industry is one of the areas where it’s trying to find its application. Seemingly, an unlikely industry for the application of AI tools, where traits like human creativity and musical talent are key for success, AI appears to be a promising entrant. One of the impressive current examples is an AI-based music-generating platform called Boomy (Boomy, 2023). I discovered Boomy through a social media post where the influencer challenged the viewers to guess which music was created by humans and which one was AI-generated. Interestingly, for most of the cases, it was very difficult to tell them apart correctly. It immediately made me curious to check the platform out and see if that’s actually possible to create such music without any musical background. To my surprise, it was! Apart from its impressive music-generating capability, I was pleasantly surprised with its user interface. As it allowed me to create a complete song within a few steps. In the pictures below I tried to include the main stages of creating a song through Boomy to give an idea of how AI is making the process so easy. The first step is to choose a genre you prefer:
Afterwards, you are presented with the style of music you wanna proceed with:
And in live time, it composes the track based on the previous steps:
Lastly, it presents you with a final song with the option to name, edit, or add your own vocals on top of it.
So as you can see, the process of creating new music is easy enough for a beginner without any musical knowledge. However, the question of how exactly the ‘new music’ is new still stands. Similarly to other AI generative tools, Boomy is also exposed to the question of how it sources the sounds it uses to create the music. Are the any potential copyright infringements? And if so how exactly it’s planning to solve them?
In addition, to the quality of the music itself, while it delivers surprisingly high-quality content, for an experienced ear it can still be distinguished from a professionally produced track. So to call it a replacement for human musicians is an overstatement at this moment. However, it can definitely be used by beginner producers to start their journey in the music industry. And for other users, it can be a neat trick to impress friends.
All in all, it technically can help you to produce a song without a musical background, but it is still far from replacing traditional processes of music production. What do you think about Boomy? Would you consider using similar AI-based tools to jumpstart your career in certain industries?
References:
Boomy – Make Generative Music with Artificial Intelligence. (2023). Boomy.com. Retrieved October 19, 2023, from https://boomy.com/
I find it so interesting that tools like this open new possibilities to use skills that are difficult to learn. Normally, I would never think of producing, music but with these kind of tools that is all of the sudden possible. So how do you differentiate a top music producer from an ordinary person in their student room? I wonder how these tools are going to influence markets for music producers. As currently, you kind of sell these skills when making music or write songs or any other creative outlet. In the future, it is too difficult to differentiate human-generated and AI-generated songs. Will there be no more jobs as music producers? What is the value of creativity? Or do we create a new skill set of using AI to write songs that are even better than human-generated songs?
Hi Omil!
It was incredibly interesting to read about the tool Boomy and use it for my first ever time! It showcases a fascinating intersection between AI tools and their potential infiltration in one of the most creative and emotional human expressions: music. As writing texts can already be done easily by AI already, so can beats be made. 1+1 = 2 you would say? Easy maths. No.
I have a couple of friends that are working full-time in that specific industry day in day out. I’ll reckon indeed they will be able to pick that one AI song out of ten other songs. Though, most often listeners -like me and you- will not recognise differences. This demonstrates how far AI has come in understanding and mimicking music composition and replicating the real world. So far, so good.
Though, this music composition part is where it becomes complicated. The range of creativity is still limited (i.e. at Boomy, you can only pick a few genres, instruments, tones etc.). And if you can pick more, the music composition starts to look like a regular mainstream music composition program like Ableton again, where human input, adjustments and improvements are needed.
For the near future, this will mean that humans always should be involved to provide musical input, personal preferences and artistic identity to create a certain song. Otherwise, copyright infringements potentially occur like the recent Drake example, in which his voice was entirely replicated. Yet, the potential of AI can be underestimated tremendously (as I have learned one lesson from reading these blog posts).
Let me know what you guys think of this issue!
Hi Omil,
I think you written a very interesting blog-post and exposed me to another brilliant application of artificial-intelligence and its capabilities. Since I do like usic very much do not (yet) create music, your blog post stood out to me.
A good point of your blog: I appreciate how you have included screenshots to show how to use the app. Without actually visiting the website, readers now have a bit more grasp of this artifical intelligence application. Another thing I like is how you include the potential downsides/threats like copyright infringements. It gives another dimension to the blog post.
One point of improvement: After reading the post, it isn’t exactly clear to me how detailed you are able to make the music. A question I had for example was: are you able to specifically adjust the generated beat/melody it gives you or can you alter your own vocal input.
All in all, great job!