Will AI Music Composers Steal the Oscar from Musicians in The Future?

Will AI open up new creative possibilities or take the joy out of music?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now providing us with the next generation of electronic music, this time by utilizing machine learning to recognize the sounds, patterns, and genres of music and lyrics and then create new versions.

This was the method used to generate 'The official Tokyo 2020 beat,' in which an Intel AI utilized thousands of pieces of music representing themes of sports, Japanese culture, daily life, and nature to construct hundreds of possibilities before the final version was picked by the Japanese people.

AI music is emerging as a new sector, with start-ups developing faster and easier music composing tools, such as JukeDeck, a UK-based AI music start-up recently bought by TikTok that automatically translates video and matches it to music. Many music artists are experimenting with artificial intelligence for lyric creation, following David Bowie's lead in the 1990s with the song Hallo Spaceboy.

Others, like as Grimes on the tune So Heavy I Fell Through the Earth – Art Mix, are harnessing AI to create new neural synthesizer sounds. Then some use AI to help construct entire albums, such as Taryn Southern's I AM AI.

With artificial intelligence breakthroughs showing no signs of stopping, it won't be long before a machine can be used to create new versions of every musical genre that are indistinguishable from human-composed works.

Will AI usher in new creative frontiers or take the joy out of music?

Last year, during Barcelona's Sónar festival, artist and researcher Mat Dryhurst took the microphone and began to sing, but his wife, electronic musician and technologist Holly Herndon came out instead. When Dryhurst laughed, the sound was undeniably hers, high and loud as a bell—and not, as far as anybody could tell, some kind of artificial trick, but as real as any human larynx can be.

The performance was part of a demonstration of Holly+, Herndon's newest experiment in artificial intelligence, which takes one sound and transforms it into another using the magic of a neural net. Imagine Nicolas Cage and John Travolta exchanging faces in Face-Off, except this time their voices swap.

The impact of Herndon's voice emanating from Dryhurst's mouth was eerie. It was also a foreshadowing of things to come, of a world of shapeshifting forms lurking on the horizon: identity play, digital ventriloquism, art and artifice categories we don't even know what to call yet. Deepfakes, or audiovisual forgeries, have been around since the late '10s, and the technology is growing more popular in pop culture; only last month, Kendrick Lamar's "The Heart Part 5" video strangely warped the rapper's visage into the features of O.J. Simpson, Will Smith, and Kanye West.

Will artificial intelligence affect the future of music?

Taryn Southern, a YouTube star, celebrated the commercial release of her debut pop album "I AM AI" in August, which she made completely with artificial intelligence (AI) software. She mostly used Amper, an open-source AI music composer, and producer.

Southern used a creative approach that consisted of supplying information like song length, pace, and key to the program before re-arranging the many pieces that it produced to create a structured composition. Her debut was touted as the "first album created with AI algorithms."

A revolutionary technology?

As fascinating as it may seem, other specialists in algorithmic composition are less thrilled. "People have been experimenting with computer-generated music since Push Button Bertha in 1956," says Dr. Nick Collins, co-founder of Chord Punch, an independent music company that publishes algorithm-based compositions. "This is not the first album by AI."

Brian Eno, the sound artist and producer who collaborated with David Bowie and David Byrne before coining the phrase "generative music," has also been working with algorithmic and AI technologies since the 1990s.

Even though Eno has used music creation tools and an ambient music-producing application (Scape) to create several albums, the technology underlying Amper is unique.

Amper is an on-demand service that delivers affordable, royalty-free creative tunes for everyone from video producers to internet advertising. It is part of a new wave of AI music creation and production firms such as Jukedeck, Groov.AI, and Humtap.

Disruption anxiety

Artificial intelligence, like many innovative technologies, instills anxiety of disruption and duplication in every field it touches. An app that can recreate their work for less money and in less time is a terrifying possibility for freelance composers and producers who work generating original music for corporate advertising, for example.

However, John Groves, CEO of Groves Sound Communications and a worldwide heavyweight in applied commercial music, is worried about being rendered obsolete by AI applications. He described himself as "extremely thrilled" about the field's rapid advancement.

"It will infiltrate our business just like any other," he predicts. "However, we must accept it and recognize that the new potential exceeds the disruptive repercussions."

Dr. Collins recalls past concerns about emerging technology in the music industry. "It's like the Musicians' Union criticizing the introduction of MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) in the 1980s," he observes. "Look at all the creative opportunities that came as a result of that technology. "Valerio Velardo, CEO of Melodrive, a business pioneering adaptable music for video games, believes we are on the verge of the creative industries' "next wave of democratization."

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