ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Musicians are assured: artificial intelligence won’t take your job

The artificial intelligence explosion is affecting — and often improving — most industries, all over the world, including music. But, as Stuart Dredge reports, musicians and composers should not be concerned that they might be replaced by these new technologies

Laife CEO Billy Mello

Billy Mello: “Nothing will surpass a moment of inspiration from a singer, songwriter or instrumentalist”

Infinite Album’s Karen Allen

ARTIFICIAL intelligence technologies are playing a growing role in the music industry in a range of ways: from powering the recommendations and personalised playlists of streaming services to analysing and tagging catalogues of music to ensure their metadata is accurate. Then there are AIs capable of creating music: a field that can raise tensions with human musicians who worry that the development of AI music will squeeze them out of the industry. Startups developing this technology say otherwise. One, Endel, has collaborated with musicians including Grimes and Plastikman. Another, Splash, recently raised $20m of funding to continue work on its music-making game that puts AI-generated beats and loops into the hands of children, with which they can create music. Midemlab 2021 will showcase some even newer startups in this field. Infinite Album uses AI to create soundtracks for livestreamers on Twitch, as an alternative to unlicensed music. “There’s still a sense that AI music is meant to replace artists and artistry and that’s just not true. AI music is brilliant at filling in holes that human-created music can’t do, and doing that at scale,” Infinite Album co-founder and CEO Karen Allen says. “In our case, that’s creating music in real time that is responsive to the action of the game as it’s played. It solves a very real copyright issue for livestream gamers by giving them constantly adaptive music, rather than repetitive playlists.” Infinite Album is planning to work with artists to create add-on sound packs, which Allen says will give them a direct hand in how the company’s AI creates music in their style. “It’s not recreating their catalogue, it’s an entirely new creation, every time, infinitely,” she says. Billy Mello, CEO of fellow Midemlab finalist Laife, also sees creative AI playing a positive role in the music industry. His startup has developed a system to generate personalised music to help people with their mental health and sleeping. Mello is excited about the potential for creative AIs to make music that is “as bespoke as possible for as many people as we want” in the future. “Unsupervised machine learning for music creation can generate loads of new connections, ideas, concepts and harmonic sequences. The possibilities are there, and we just have to input the correct data for it to work.” Mello agrees with Allen on AI playing a complementary role for human musicians rather than trying to replace them. “We are slowly understanding all the possibilities AI music can deliver and we know that the machine won’t take our jobs. Nothing, at least for now, will surpass a moment of inspiration from a singer, songwriter or instrumentalist,” he says. “Also, even when we at Laife generate AI music, we still rely on real musicians to add a layer of feeling and humanity on top of it. I’m working more with musicians than I had in my previous 30 years in the music industry.” Midem Digital Edition 2021 will be exploring AI’s potential in the How Ai Is Shaking Up The Music Industry session, with Hitlab, a Canadian company founded by Michel Zgarka, using AI to connect artists, audiences and brands worldwide.. n