Barack Obama: “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine. Music like Bob Dylan or Stevie Wonder, that’s different”::Barack Obama has weighed in on AI’s impact on music creation in a new interview, saying, “For elevator music, AI is going to work fine”.
It’s more or less only (that is mainly) useful for building components that you then use in your man-made tracks. It’s a tool, just like AI image generators are tools albeit there the replacement use-case is substantial. AI-generated voice also needs to be considered in this context I think.
Yeah generative music has been a thing for a long time, Brian Eno is probably the household name recognizable for generative compositions, but most sequencers have had randomization elements built in for a long time now. I use one where you feed it a scale of notes and can define the chance a certain note will play and chances around the quality of the note like duration, velocity, etc. Even my entry level MicroFreak has a randomization option which you can use to get musical ideas from. There’s some cool eurorack modules like Mutable Instruments Grids which function like this for drum sequencing, where you have this axis to explore and can control via an lfo if you want.
I realize generative and AI are a technically different, I think AI is much better at “can you create a synth preset to make x sound” or “write a specific genre of melody/chord progression/etc.” It’s a lot better at factoring in the broader context.