Why Artificial Intelligence May Be the Next Big Thing in Music

Thanks to new technology, you can become a song producer without any training.

An artificial intelligence (AI) system from Google can generate music of any genre, given a text description. Google has yet to release the software, but experts say it’s a sign of things to come.

“AI streamlines and can accelerate the creation of songs by managing the songwriting (lyrics / melody) and its simultaneous recording, revolutionizing the publishing and recording industries through a simple but creative impulse,” musician and AI expert Martin Clancy told Lifewire in an email interview.

Machine Music

Google’s software, called MusicLM, was trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music to learn to generate songs from descriptions. Researchers wrote about the new software in a recently published paper and acknowledged growing concerns about creativity and AI.

“We recognize the risk of potential abuse of creative content related to the use case,” the paper’s authors wrote. “We strongly emphasize the need for further future work to address these risks associated with the generation of music.”

Clancy says MusicLM has the potential to revolutionize songwriting. “Imagine being able to choose your preferred genre, adjust your musical skill level and even adjust the music to match the physical settings,” he said. “The added ability to use human humming or whistle prompts and tree settings is interesting. These are all parameters within Google MusicLM.”

Mansoor Rahimat Khan, the CEO of Beatoven.ai, an AI-powered music startup, said in an email interview that AI can help people generate musical ideas.

“An artist is limited by their own creativity,” he added. “Using AI, they can go beyond their imagination and integrate AI-generated music as part of their compositions and song-making process.”

But Khan says AI has the potential to disrupt music. “More people will become songwriters because the barrier to becoming a music creator is reduced by simplified music creation tools that do not require deep knowledge of music theory and music production,” he added. . “The positive result of this may increase the size of the music market, but the negative result may be the amount of effort that can be made to develop and master the skill of music composition, and the production may be lose its value.”

The musician known as SPLY85, a DJ and AI enthusiast, pointed out in an email interview that using AI for song creation can be time-consuming. SPLY85 says that with most AI software, it’s more complicated than telling a computer to make a hit song.

“I learned that making music with neural networks requires a solid understanding of both music theory and programming,” SPLY85 said. “One must have a deep understanding of how music works in order to build effective neural networks and effectively train them. In addition, one must have a strong programming background to implement them neural networks and make them work in a music production environment.”

Wallpaper Music

Emilio Guarino, a music producer who uses AI for music in his work, said in an email that he is always surprised by the songs the software produces. “I’ll play around a bit to give it some audio information to mutate, and what it comes back with is always surprising, unlike improvising with a real person,” he says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, and you just have to react to the moment. So a legitimate way that AI can improve creativity is by providing some new stimulus to work and develop.”

However, Guarino and others say they don’t see AI completely replacing humans in the music process.

“There’s definitely going to be AI that makes some kind of music for playlists, but I think it’s mostly ‘wallpaper music’ that people put on in the background,” Guarino said. “They’re not super connected to it; it’s basically there to go along with other activities. But there’s still a lot of music where people really want to connect with an artist who has a distinct musical personality and a point of view, not a black box that creates vibe music.”