CES: Will.i.am Discusses the Intersection of Music and Tech
By Phil Lelyveld
January 10, 2024
Musician will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas — who is also a noted technologist, entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist — discussed his work with Mercedes-AMG, why he attends the CES conference each year in Las Vegas, and his vision of the future. In 2022 he was asked by Mercedes to reimagine a vehicle. He loves pattern-matching, he said, and seeing how things align. After developing ideas with his team and auctioning off the working prototype WILL.I.AMG to raise funds for his inner-city education philanthropy, he went back to Mercedes with a simple but powerful pitch with a focus on audio.
Car passengers are accustomed to the roar of the internal combustion engine as a car’s ambient sound. Electric vehicles are either silent rides, or they have artificial sounds pumped through the speakers to correspond to normal driver activities like acceleration and braking.
Our experience with music has been how it was captured on lacquer. Unchanging and repeatable. What if you captured data from the car’s sensors — accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, brakes, etc. — and use it to create a real-time audio driving experience?
He pulled a team together on his own and developed MBUX Sound Drive, “a fusion of cutting-edge technology and musical artistry, raising the Mercedes-AMG in-car entertainment experience to an even higher level,” which is being demonstrated at CES 2024.
The future of in-car music, will.i.am said, is real-time live music generation. Music unfolds and gets remapped and rearranged based on what you do. Even if you have a fixed commute, there are differences every day in how you wait at a light, hit a bump, or weave in traffic. It will turn your daily commute into a new experience every day.
It will turn drivers into composers the way Instagram turned people into photographers. Professional musicians could sell pieces to be reworked by the car’s motion, and drivers could capture and share their driving compositions.
Will.i.am comes to CES to see “what the big boys are afraid to put out fast.” He primarily looks at the small booths where he can find great ideas presented by “big brains with small budgets.” But he also has seen amazing ideas in prototype demos from big companies that won’t be put into products until Legal sees how the public responds to them.
Will.i.am has been working in AI since at least 2015, when his team prototyped a smartwatch and later implemented their AI into Beats headphones. He linked AI to the term Abracadabra. Folk etymologies attribute it to ancient Greek or Latin words meaning “I will create as I speak.” Historically, it has been used for incantations, but it also echoes how we interact with AI algorithms, he said. Just as abracadabra incantations summoned change, he proposed that AI will overturn old industries and create new ones.
The people who will create those new industries, he posited, are the downtrodden who will use AI to learn and advance from their oppression — like the people digging up the minerals in Africa and South America that are used to make consumer electronics. The future isn’t “Terminator” with one global OS and AI. It is “Star Wars” with multiple robots, multiple operating systems, and multiple AIs.
AI can already be your genie for information, he suggested. As AI spreads, it will be everyone’s genie for aspirations.
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