How AI is used in the music industry

21

October

2023

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Writing this during the Amsterdam Dance Event weekend, this blog is written about using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the music industry.

AI technology is increasingly used as support in various industries. One of these industries is the music industry and the opportunities are truly endless. The use of AI in the music industry can be divided into three uses. Firstly, there is instrumental and vocal reproduction. Here, tone transfer algorithms are used to reproduce existing music with different tones or voices. A recent trend on social media platform TikTok is the AI Music covers, where the user can choose the singer (who does not need be able to sing) and the song. AI will generate the song using the input “artist”. For example, listen to this song where Freddie Mercury sings Skyfall by Adele. Obviously, Freddie Mercury had sadly passed away long before this song was released:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx_nltXJwJo

A second way of using AI in the music industry is mixing and mastering, which helps artists to balance instruments or clean up the audio in a song. For example, Paul McCartney has used AI this summer on an old recording from 1978 of John Lennon to clean up and use the vocals for a new song.

Third and last, AI is also used for song composition. This might be the type of use where the current music industry is most afraid of. AI models are trained based on the melodies, rhythms and forms of current music. Then, based on that, users can give instructions on what song should be composed. AI is able to generate high-quality music which is easily modified to one’s liking. For example, Don Diablo, a Dutch DJ is nowadays referring to himself as a “digital artist”, due to his use with AI. According to him, the opportunities are endless, and he does not see this technology developing further as a risk to the music industry.

Bibliography:

Palamara, J. (2023, August 14). 3 ways AI is transforming music. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/3-ways-ai-is-transforming-music-210598

Reid, J. (2023, June 13). Paul McCartney says A.I. got John Lennon’s voice on ‘last Beatles record’. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/13/paul-mccartney-says-ai-got-john-lennons-voice-on-last-beatles-record.html

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ChatGPT: A storyteller with dyscalculia?

10

October

2023

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a very relevant trend and has already been discussed several times in the first weeks of Information Strategy. One of the most popular examples of generative AI nowadays is ChatGPT. Shortly after its release, I used ChatGPT in December 2022 for the first time. At the time, I was pursuing the pre-master at RSM before starting BIM, and we had a course called Research Training that made use of R.

I was very interested and had never used something similar before, so I was looking for something I could feed it. Luckily, some of the content of the Research Training course was unclear to me: the perfect time to put it to the test. It was already known that you should ask ChatGPT specific questions in order to retrieve the most useful answers. Therefore, I copied and slightly adjusted the readability of the exercise into the website. There was an exercise that gave seven observations (7, 15, 26, 25, 7, 1, 5). The student had to determine the Z-score of these seven numbers. This has to be calculated using the formula Z = (x-μ)/σ.  I was surprised by the extensiveness of ChatGPT’s answer (see picture below that was made in December). Not only did it provide me with the answer, it gave me a step-by-step guide on how to answer the question. I was blown away!

But then… 1.52 was not the correct answer. How was that possible? It just guided me through all the steps to land here? I read through the steps again but this time, I used my calculator to check its calculations. It turned out ChatGPT was not as smart as I thought. Out of all the relatively difficult tasks it had to think of, it calculated the mean incorrectly; the easiest of them all! I copied the question again and ran the question another couple of times. It gave me different results every time. All in all, a slightly disappointing, yet funny, outcome of the first use of ChatGPT.

AI needs a lot of practice and input in order to improve itself. Therefore, I tried the exercise again in October, almost a year after its first release. Although the setup of the answer was improved, the answer was still wrong.

In conclusion, ChatGPT is still fairly new and this is only one of its many great functionalities. After all, it made a relatively small mistake in this question. However, the input is clear to me and looking at the answer, ChatGPT does understand it. Therefore, the question to me remains how it still arrives at the wrong conclusion.

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