What Artificial Intelligence means for musicians

MusicLM: Generating Music From Text

An AI service that will generate music from your written description.

Although it isn’t fully released yet they have a number of examples of music generated from text on their site

The Ai gathers thousands of ideas and samples from youtube videos and then cross-pollinates them into “original” music – if you can think of it they can hum it.

I  had a quick gander at the youtube videos that they are using to train the Music LM 

It turns out it is not just a bunch of drum breaks and guitar solos but a wild and rather wonderful selection of sounds and performances 

Including someone playing their ukulele in a public loo and a young girl screaming – I have a feeling if you have ever posted a youtube video it is fair game for the bot to put it in their lexicon of musical chops. 

 I guess if they use one of our tunes or performances as a source seed for the AI  it is our fault for not reading the youtube google small print in the first place.

Other “fun “ uses for AI 

This morning I listened to a webinar by Ariel Hyatt CyberPR launching her new course for musicians on how to use chat GPT to talk to our fans and compose social media posts – apparently something that will save us thousands of hours. 

(luckily as Music MLM will be writing our music we won’t have to bother with that either – bring on the margaritas)

She is also recommending that we all use Dall e – to generate our artwork – hey who cares about visual artists LOL 

I kind of thought talking to your fans and actually making creative social media post was part of a modern musicians art practice – I am so last century 

On a more fun tip, I liked Iamlxgend’s video  where he used AI to assist him in writing and composing a tune 

He used Lyric Studio to suggest lyrics but then heavily adapted and then did the same with re melody and chords suggested by its sister service Melody Studio.

But then he changed/ added /adapted the generated ideas and used his own considerable talents to add a beat a  bass line and his beautiful voice to interpret the melody. 

I wasn’t so into him using AI mastering tool Landr and yes DALL-E  to make an album cover but hey that is what his video was about.

Using this exciting technology  

I just popped on to Dall-e and it wasn’t working – I got the repeated your request was cancelled message 

so as not to  be put off (or to feel my not-so-precious or important time was being wasted ) 

 I popped onto Lyric studio with the idea of generating a little smart-ass lyric about AI and robots and feeling bad – but that didn’t go well either 

I tried 

“Artificial Intelligence- I am stupid but at least I am real”

They suggested 

“ I don’t need a job and I don’t need a record deal”

Which is mean but relevant, they also suggested 

“I don’t have to be a man about what I own anyway”

 WTF ???

It was also clunky and annoying and kept asking me to join a paid scheme.

It was very generic and I guess the point of any creative act is to follow your own unique thought processes  

So I guess the answer, for now, is rather than being very very afraid the thing is to be very very weird.