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