Artificial Intelligence Gearing to Chart the Future of Music
Computers are making inroads in the music industry, capable of producing songs — and convincingly so — as illustrated at the South by Southwest festival in Texas.
Already, an album featuring eight tracks has been produced entirely with artificial intelligence, an unprecedented feat.
“I Am AI” was released last fall by YouTube star Taryn Southern, who doesn’t know how to play any instruments.
“For my first music video in 2017, I had a lot of friction as a non-musician,” the young artist told a panel discussion on Sunday at the festival running from March 8-17. “I wrote lyrics, I had a melodic line but it was difficult to compose and record the actual music.”
The pop artist said she began experimenting with AI two years ago, working with Amper, an artificial intelligence music composition software.
“In two days, I had composed a song that I could actually feel was mine,” Southern said. “It means that I don’t necessarily have to rely on other people.”
Founded in 2014 in New York by a group of engineers and musicians, Amper is part of about a dozen start-ups using artificial intelligence to break with the traditional way of making music.
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Drew Silverstein, said the aim is not to replace human composers but rather to work with them to reach their goal.
He said the company relies on tons of source material — from dance hits to classical music — to produce custom songs.
“The idea of Amper is to enable everyone to express themselves (through) music regardless of their background and skills,” Silverstein said.
The Amper app allows a user to pick a genre of music (rap, folk, rock) and a mood (happy, sad, driving) before spitting out a song. The user can then change the tempo, add instruments or switch them out until the result is satisfactory.
Two songs created by Amper at SXSW — using the public’s choice of pop and hip hop as the genres and tender or sad for the mood — clearly aren’t likely to top the charts. But the pieces were pleasant enough to the ear and perfectly usable as background music to illustrate a video or a computer game.
For some, such arguments are not convincing, as attested by a British musician at SXSW who didn’t appear happy with the competition and questioned whether the word creativity even applied when speaking about music generated by a computer.
“It’s still an algorithm,” Boisseau conceded. “It’s doesn’t mean people won’t enjoy it, but it’s not completely new.
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