AI Musician

How can AI can be used in the music industry? This week, Youth4Youth has been busy teaching the students at ESF South Island School about how Alan Turing was the first to record computer generated music using a large machine to generate three melodies: God Save The King, Baa, Baa Black Sheep and In The Mood by Glenn Miller. Students were able to explore Google’s Magenta project which produces songs written and performed by AI, Sony's Flow Machines which is an AI system that releases songs created by AI, Jukedeck and Amper Music which provide assistance from AI for amateur musicians attempting to develop their own musical compositions and LANDR which provides musicians with an alternative to human-based mastering.

It was great to hear the students' perspectives on some philosophical questions surrounding the use of AI in the music industry:

- Could artificial intelligence one day replace musicians?
- AI is capable of making music, but does that make AI an artist?
- Do AI algorithms create their own work, or is it the humans behind them?

It was great to show the students Latent Loops and teach them about how this software uses latent space models to represent compressed data where similar data points are closer together in space because this makes it capable of learning the basic characteristics of a training dataset and capable of excluding unrealistic examples. We also brainstormed the desirable properties of a latent space with the students, including expression, realism and smoothness.

We ended the session by discussing some thought-provoking controversial questions about the future goal of the music industry and why this goal might not be to compose a masterpiece made from scratch by solely AI, but rather to use AI as a musical assistant. We got into a very interesting discussion regarding if AI could write a beautiful song, what would it value and why would it choose to write about one thing over another? These are crucial questions if we are to use AI to create music in the future!