Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have impacted robotics, medicine, finance and now it has reached music. Artificial Intelligence in Music (AIM) is a blossoming sector where the possibilities exist to merge music and machine. The industry is asking themselves – can machines create music using AI technology. Google has launched the Magneta project to ask and answer the questions, “Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music?” It's clear that both music industry and major technology players have started to take note of the new niche of AI-powered music composition. For the listener, it might be a sign of some entirely new music experiences.

Future of Music

Start-up companies have been researching how we can intelligently automate to program machines to do what humans can do with the click of a button. Jukedeck, a start-up, provides deep neural networks that attempt to understand how to compose and adapt music, that gives people the tools to personalize the music they need. This is an on-demand service that provides cheap, royalty-free original songs for everyone from video makers to online advertisers. However, challenges exist with technology and research. For Jukedeck, they are working at making AI capable not only of composing the music, but also actually playing it and creating the sound from scratch.

First AI Album

The first album composed and produced entirely by AI was released this year by Youtuber Taryn Southern called “I AM AI”. Southern is a singer and digital story-teller with over 450 thousand followers and 500 million views on YouTube. She collaborated with the technology Amper – an AI music composer, producer, and performer. The process consisted of giving information such as song length, tempo and key, Southern allowed the software do the actual composing and producing for her before re-arranging the various parts that it provided in order to create a structured song. Drew Silverstein, one of Ampre's founders stated that Amper is not meant to totally act alone, but to work in collaboration with human artists: “One of our core beliefs as a company is that the future of music is going to be created in the collaboration between humans and AI. We want that collaborative experience to propel the creative process forward.”

AI and Man

AI seems to have crept into the music industry offering opportunities and disruptive threats. Valerio Velardo, CEO of Melodrive, a startup that's pioneering adaptive music for video games summed it up best - "Nowadays everyone has a top quality digital camera in their phone, but this doesn't mean that professional photographers have disappeared," he says. "I think that it will be the same with AI. I completely doubt that the role of the composer will be harmed by this technology." Music has always been about story telling that people feel and connect with, AI in music, could be seen as an improvement to transform creativity and breakdown boundaries between man and machine.