‘There’s a Wide-Open Horizon of Possibility.’ Musicians Are Using AI to Create Otherwise Impossible New Songs
[PhilNote: just as at the birth of the synthesizer, AI can create new sounds and tonalities based on existing instruments and voices. It is a new potential creative tool.]
It’s the job of forward-thinking musicians, then, to wield the technology for the exact opposite purpose: to push against standardization and explore uncharted territory they could not have conjured on their own.
For their most recent album Chain Tripping, YACHT trained a machine learning system on their entire catalog of music. After the machine spit out hours of melodies and lyrics based on what it had learned, the band culled through its output and spliced together the most intriguing bits into coherent songs. The result was a jumpy and meandering interpretation of dance pop that was strange to listen to and even stranger to play.
“I think often musicians underestimate how much the way we play is based on our physical experiences and habits,” Evans says. She says it took the band many excruciating hours to learn the new music, because many riffs or chord changes would deviate just slightly from the ones they had relied on for decades. “AI forced us to come up against patterns that have no relationship to comfort. It gave us the skills to break out of our own habits,” she says. The project resulted in the first Grammy nomination of YACHT’s two-decade career, for best immersive audio album.
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Arca and the Bronze team soon began collaborating on an installation by the French artist Philippe Parreno that currently resides in the newly reopened lobby of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The music creaks and burbles out of swiveling speakers that seem to move along with you. The output changes with the temperature and crowd density, meaning no two days in the space will be the same.
Arca says that listening to the music that she ostensibly composed is a strange and gripping experience. “There’s something freeing about not having to make every single microdecision, but rather, creating an ecosystem where things tend to happen, but never in the order you were imagining them,” she says. “It opens up a world of possibilities.” She says that she has a few new music projects coming this year using Bronze’s technology. ...
When more AI creations are released, there will be inevitable legal battles. Existing copyright laws weren’t written with AI in mind, and are extremely vague about whether the rights to an AI song would be owned by the programmer who created the AI system, the original musician whose works provided the training data, or maybe even the AI itself. Some are worried that a musician would have no legal recourse against a company that trained an AI program to create soundalikes of them, without their permission.
See the full story here: https://time.com/5774723/ai-music/?fbclid=IwAR3xo7AJSfLU1scdhJPYsETc_QTjEcfXKXGipRDEtlZ4fTRILScs6jgvHe0