We’ve talked about how technology improves areas like medicine and education. However, something as abstract as arts can also benefit from it, Artificial Intelligence is being used to create music.

We might be more used to see it on services like Pandora or Spotify, where Machine Learning and Deep Learning are employed to recommend you content based on your musical tastes and activities you have in common with other users.

Other platforms offer creative tools for musicians who want to improve their work, like LANDR, that uses machine learning to analyze mix quality, production style and genre of a track, in order to help you optimize it.    

Thereby, providing computers the ability to learn and combine sounds can open the door to start building tools that allow us to experience different processes of creating music.

Artificial Intelligence to create music

Artificial Intelligence gives music producers an idea of what people are consuming through a detailed analysis, and it gives musicians tools to explore new and different type of sounds.

There are many projects trying to figure it out how this technology can increase the productivity of arts and specifically, music. Let’s see some examples:

Nsynth Super

Google has a project, called Magenta, dedicated to research about the use of AI in the fields of arts. Thanks to the effort made in this project, another group inside Google created a musical instrument: The NSynth Super.  

The NSynth Super is a physical interface for the NSynth (Neural Synthesizer) algorithm they designed. By using Machine Learning to understand the characteristics of sounds, it is able to create more than 100,000 new sounds.

This experimental instrument is open source and it was built in collaboration with musicians to get to know how it can improve their creative process.

Amper Music

Amper is an AI composer that helps you create original music for any kind of content. You just have to select a mood, a style and a length for your composition; customize it the way you want it, and finally render your track.  

This is a startup founded in 2014. One of its founders, Drew Silverstein, is convinced that the future of music will be created through the collaboration of humans and AI. A collaboration and not a replacement.

Jukedeck

Jukedeck is another startup, based in London, dedicated to compose and produce musical AI. Like Amper, it provides musicians a tool to help them in their creative process, whether it be a soundtrack for a video or for the love of music-making.   

They also offer an API for developers who wish to integrate this personalized music function into their apps.

AI for art buyers

AI is starting to influence arts in other levels as well: As we mentioned before, art can be very abstract and subjective, but there is a way to discover shopping trends by using AI and data analysis.

The auction house Sotheby’s (founded in 1744 in New York) recently acquired the Thread Genius startup as part of their digital strategy.

They designed an algorithm to predict which luxury items clients might be more willing to buy according to their previous acquisitions. This way they are improving recommendations to buyers and its business.

Conclusion

As we can see, AI is becoming more used in many professional areas. Its use represents new ways of getting things done. We are interested to see how it´ll be developed in other art fields.

What do you think about the use of AI in music? Are you interested to participate in projects who involve art and AI?