Technology is making its way to the music industry, not just in how we experience a live concert, but the ways that we experience and discover new music as consumers. When going through the history of music distribution going from vinyl records to cassettes to CDs to finally digital streaming, there would have to be an easier way to discover music that you may not see at your local record store right away. According to Bernard Marr’s “The Amazing Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming The Music Industry”, he mentions how the playlists and queues that are generated for us in Spotify are created through artificial intelligence, and there are so many further ways that artificial intelligence can make getting popular and recording music easier for artists.
The concept of gathering information and bringing it to the forefront is prevalent here. As said in the article, “about 20,000 new songs and artists are uploaded daily on streaming platforms”, and the AI would be the one to go through and match the preferences of the individual when generating a discovery playlist. The article goes into the possibility that there might be a way the AI could identify artists that are worthy to make it bigger and reach more fans (Marr). The AI could take the information and characteristics of artists that are huge right now like Billie Eilish, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Tyler, the Creator, etc. and apply them to the endless artists that upload music each day in order to see who a user may enjoy more than another.
As a musician, myself, it drives me crazy sometimes to be sitting staring at my laptop hours on end mixing and mastering my recorded music, especially after spending the hours before recording multiple tracks for a song. It could cut down the time when producing this music having an AI technology that takes in my specific music preferences and applying it to the music on its own. For more well-known acts, this could even break down the time taken to record and master music, therefore having more music being released, even constant music being released just by one artist.
The Amazing Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming The Music Industry
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/07/05/the-amazing-ways-artificial-intelligence-is-transforming-the-music-industry/#b55aa0a50721
The ability for AI to shape the way music is promoted and curated on streaming services is truly interesting, as it makes the often overwhelming libraries of music more personalized and relevant. For a listener, this makes new music discovery easier and more exciting; however, I’d like to emphasize the prospects of AI that can benefit an artist’s workflow and composition process.
An especially relevant case study on this lies within American pop band YACHT’s new album “Chain Tripping,” which was composed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. In an interview with Ars Technica, the band specified how using their back catalogue as information “allowed [them] to find melodies in between songs.” In order to find a collection of these melodies, rhythms, and motifs, they utilized MusicVAE, a machine learning application/”notebook” developed for Google’s “Colabatory” AI research project. MusicVAE takes multi-track music sequenced to MIDI and creates a library of sounds that work effectively like a painter’s color palette, giving the musician room to mix and experiment with these sounds to improve the composition process. In the case of YACHT, they used a technology primarily about moving forward to look back. Through using the software with their older music, they were allowed to quite literally compose an album out of their artistic journey, which allowed for a uniquely profound listening experience.
As someone who has taken interest in composing and producing music, I see many positives and negatives towards the idea of AI-assisted creation. Something incredibly appealing to me is along the lines of what YACHT did, using a library of melodies and structures of a body of work that means a lot to the them to create something new and meaningful. However, I see possible corporate applications that aren’t necessarily as positive. Record labels could use this composition principle to sort through popular charts to create music that is specifically designed to trend and make money. Unlike the former, which uses AI to make music feel more personal, this application would make music feel more calculated, formulaic, and less artistic.
Sources:
https://magenta.tensorflow.org/music-vae
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/08/yachts-chain-tripping-is-a-new-landmark-for-ai-music-an-album-that-doesnt-suck/
https://www.spin.com/featured/ai-music-artificial-intelligence-feature-holly-herndon-yacht/
Another way to look at technology in the music industry is Bluetooth. We often take for granted how mobile our music is now that we can connect to hand held speaker wirelessly. Advances such as streaming and Bluetooth allow music to be more accessible and mobile. As AduioEngine said “It’s almost impossible to deny the power of wireless streaming and Bluetooth- it keeps everything nice and tidy while adding almost unbridled convenience to your listening.”
Source: https://audioengineusa.com/explore/3-ways-bluetooth-music-receiver-will-change-your-life/