Hello World is a new album that features everything from cowboy sci-fi to Europop. It could change the way we think about AI and creativity,
AI is already good at creating ‘rule-based’ music like classical fugues, or ‘chill-out’ songs (Credit: Getty)
Schedel, who is a musician as well as an academic, agrees this could be a worry and says you’ll likely see AI take over fields like jingle writing and video game music in the near future. “I used to get money to write up little, ‘Introducton to my YouTube channel’ songs,” she says. “Why would you pay a real person 50 bucks, when you could pay an AI $2 and you can’t tell the difference?”
But, she adds “if the AI is better than 95% of random musicians off the street, is that so bad?” Ultimately, though, she thinks the reason people should be excited, rather than worried, about AI music is it might push us somewhere new. “What I’m super excited about is cyborg music – the combination of human and machine intelligences,” she says. “I think we can really, absolutely, use machines to augment our own creativity and create music that neither humans or computers could make by themselves. I think that’s thrilling.” She also points out a simple reason the computers aren’t going to take over anytime soon – music’s a communal activity: we all like live shows.
There’s one reason why computers won’t take over: music is a communal human activity (Credit: Getty)
How long until the future of AI music becomes clear and we know who’s won: the humans or the machines? Honestly, who knows. It’s not even clear what the future of Flow Machines is. François Pachet, its main developer, is now director of Spotify’s Creator Technology Research Lab where he’s developing “the next generation of AI-based compositional tools for musicians.” If your Spotify playlists soon start filling up with songs that sound suspiciously ‘off’, like they were made without any human involvement, you know what’s happened.
Recently, it’s often felt like AI is about to take over the music world – that soon, computers will be making our favourite songs. AI has been used to write classical music and Irish folk songs. It can stitch together black metal albums and Christmas carols. Start-ups like Jukedeck, Amper Music and Melodrive have developed AI that can make tunes in the style of your choosing (‘synth pop’, ‘dreamy electronica’) at the click of a button. Tech giants are involved, too (Google’s Magenta project has developed several AI music tools including a synth that can meld sounds together, such as a sitar’s pluck with a cow’s moo. Why exactly you’d want to do that is another matter).
Computers have also long been able to produce music that’s better than people
For musicians, there’s been one good thing about these projects so far: the music they’ve produced has been easy to dismiss, generic and uninspiring – hardly likely to challenge Bob Dylan in the songwriting department. But Carré’s album, Hello World, is different for the simple reason that it’sgood. Released under the name SKYGGE (Danish for shadow), it features everything from sci-fi cowboy ballads to Europop, and unlike most AI music, if you heard it on the radio, you wouldn’t think something had gone horribly wrong