Using AI in the Songwriting Process
Over the past few weeks I have been spending a little bit of time trying to find something interesting and useful in AI music. The one that I used that was kind of interesting is called Boomy. It creates tracks by selecting genres, sub-genres, and instruments, and then you scroll through until you find something that you like. This is the way that I think AI works at the user level, in which it generates permutations and then you select the shots that you want, not unlike going through a video and selecting stills that you like.
In Timber Cities, I picked up my guitar and started to play some chords against the AI track. What I realized is that these tools always bring me back to traditional compositional procedures--and is exactly what tools are supposed to do--to find the signal in the noise of an idea. We're pattern seekers, not noise seekers. We're looking for logical patterns that we can work with as building blocks. The Boomy algorithm generated a usable idea but it can't be used as-is as far as I'm concerned. It works like alternate tunings work, whereby the ideas that they generate wouldn't have come to you in standard tuning. Very often the alternate tuning pieces get re-standardized, and the original idea merely becomes the wireframe, but with AI tools the wireframe gets used as the structural foundation.
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