A Use For AI In Music

 

I realized a long time ago that you don't want a lot of options when you're in the flow of creativity. I bought a synthesizer in 2005 which I still haven't completely explored.

There's so much work involved in drilling through menus just to find a sound. Usually what happens (and I think it's the way it's designed) is that you just grab a sound and just go with it. There's no creativity involved at all; it's just pressing buttons. Musical instrument manufacturers have always capitulated to what the musical community wants and I understand that.  But over the decades this has lowered the quality of interacting with synths in the flow of creativity. Since it's so much work to use a synth, you surrender to it, not unlike surrendering to algorithms. But I see this as an opportunity for AI to help us weed through all the options. How I would use it is to create a template to use at the start of a project whereby all the sounds are already discovered. But I can do that manually. What I typically do at the beginning is create a sound world, and all the songs on the album exist in that world, which gives me a framework to work in. Use of AI to decrease the amount of time scrolling through banks of sounds would be helpful, but if time isn't an element, why make it an element?

4/9/2021 

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4/9/2025: The paradox now is a lack of options when generating music with AI. What I would find useful is to have options for each of the fundamental musical elements: melody, harmony, and rhythm. But in most generators, all you have are vague categories describing the music. It's music composition as a listener, not as a writer. As a writer you ultimately want things to be very specific. When I start a piece of music just with the guitar, usually I'll come up with a unique chord progression or riff, but this isn't an option in AI-generated music; you're kind of stuck with whatever samples are there. They can be interesting, but there's a different result from both ways of working. The gap that needs to be closed to allow the user to create music on a more musical level, as one would with a guitar or a piano.