The World’s First Album Composed and Produced by an AI Has Been Unveiled
The World’s First Album Composed and Produced by an AI
Has Been Unveiled
by Dom Galeon on August 21, 2017 58816
A music album called I AM AI, the featured single of
which is set to release on August 21st, is the first album that's entirely
composed and produced by an artificial intelligence. It works in collaboration
with a human artist, who provides inputs that Amper uses as composing
parameters.
A New Kind of Composer
“Break Free” is the first song released in a new album by
Taryn Southern. The song, indeed, the entire album, features an artist known as
Amper—but what looks like a typical collaboration between artists is actually
much more than that.
Taryn is no stranger to the music and entertainment
industry. She is a singer and digital storyteller who has amassed more than 500
million views on YouTube, and she has over 450 thousand subscribers. On the
other hand, Amper is making his debut…except he’s (it’s?) not a person.
Amper is an artificially intelligent music composer,
producer, and performer. The AI was developed by a team of professional
musicians and technology experts, and it’s the very first AI to compose and produced an
entire music album. The album is called I AM AI, and the featured single is set
to release on August 21, 2017.
Check out the song “Break Free” in the video below:
As film composer Drew Silverstein, one of Amper’s
founders, explained to TechCrunch, Amper isn’t meant to act totally on its own,
but was designed specifically to work in collaboration with human musicians:
“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.”
That said, the team notes that, contrary to the other
songs that have been released by AI composers, the chord structures and
instrumentation of “Break Free” are entirely the work of Amper’s AI.
Not Just Music Production
Ultimately, Amper breaks the model followed by today’s
music-making AIs. Usually, the original work done by the AI is largely
reinterpreted by humans. This means that humans are really doing most of the
legwork. As the team notes in their press release, “the process of releasing AI
music has involved humans making significant manual changes—including alteration
to chords and melodies—to the AI notation.”
That’s not the case with Amper. As previously noted, the
chord structures and instrumentation is purely Amper’s; it just works with
manual inputs from the human artist when it comes to style and overall rhythm.
And most notably, Amper can make music through machine
learning in just seconds. Here’s an example of a song made by Amper, and
re-arranged by Taryn.
Yet, while IAMAI may be the first album that’s entirely
composed and produced by an AI, it’s not the first time an AI has displayed
creativity in music or in other arts.
For example, an AI called Aiva has been taught to compose
classical music, like how DeepBach was designed to create music inspired by
Baroque artist Johann Sebastian Bach. With this in mind, the album is likely
just the first step into a new era…an era in which humans will share artistry
(and perhaps even compete creatively) with AI.
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