MUSIC AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Jon Heindel
Artificial intelligence has been used for decades to help humans with tasks that are difficult to do by hand, but have you ever considered how it could be applied in the music industry? This article explores some of the ways that AI is being used to improve music production.
BEAT DETECTION Beat detection is the process of determining which part of a piece of music corresponds to specific drum beats and other rhythmic elements. This is important, especially in electronic dance music (EDM), because knowing whether a beat has dropped can give DJs and producers insight into how well their tracks are playing in clubs and venues.
Beat detection has been an active area of research for decades. This dates back as far as 1954 at the Haskins Laboratories, where scientists were considering how audio signals could be used to drive motors on tape recorders.
MELODY IDENTIFICATION When people talk about AI in music production, Melody Identification is one of the first things that comes to mind. As anyone who's tried to hum a tune knows, it's not always clear how to identify different melodies. Humans can get around this by using other information such as relative pitch or chord progressions; we call this "relative perception."
However, unlike humans, computers don't have the capability for relative perception. This means that they're really bad at identifying melodies - unless you give them some help. Recent developments in Machine Learning have shown that if you focus on one note at a time, melody identification is possible.
IDENTIFYING INSTRUMENTS Identifying musical instruments has historically been very difficult for computers; commercially available programs like Sound Analysis or Melody Seeker are pretty much useless (unless they're given help from humans).
Recently, however, deep learning methods have made big improvements in this area. Nowadays, commercial applications of machine learning for instrument recognition are popping up all over the place.
STEM CREATION Audio stem creation refers to the process of separating a piece of music into its different parts (such as vocals or bass). This has been an active area of research for quite some time now; one early work from 1988 shows how humans are capable of identifying individual frequencies within the music.
More recent work has shown how deep neural networks can be used to separate audio signals into their respective components after being given examples of transposed audio material.
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