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/
