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As AI gradually infiltrates every aspect of our digital lives — from essay writing to conversations with therapists to the creation of original art — it’s not surprising that AI would make a foray into music. It’s also not surprising that Google is the first major player on the scene.
According to reports, the company is developing an AI bot that can generate “original” music from both text and sound prompts — users would be able to type in increasingly specific prompts noting genres and styles, or even build songs based on a hummed or whistled melody. MusicLM is the internal name for the future app.
MusicLM is a “model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions” that “generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes,” according to a research paper published on Jan. 26. According to the paper, songs can be created from richly written captions such as:
The main theme of an arcade game. It’s upbeat and fast-paced, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but it contains unexpected sounds such as cymbal crashes and drum rolls.
Examples of the AI-generated songs have already been posted to Google’s Github account as part of a preliminary release of the MusicCaps dataset, which contains 5,500 music-text pair pairs.
Additional sequences of timed text prompts, as well as a library of sounds and other AI prompts generated from sources such as art archives, contribute to the structure of songs.
The launch of such a platform will undoubtedly spark new debates about the role of artificial intelligence in intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, fueled by a slew of artists and art repositories who have refused to allow public use of their work in the creation of AI bots like these — others, meanwhile, are capitalising on the surge in AI-powered technology. Additional AI advancements pose unique risks for the humans who power the technology, as exploited workforces bear the brunt of data mining and moderation.
As of now, the Google AI music maker will not be released anytime soon, with the company citing ongoing concerns about cultural programming biases, glitches, and plagiarism concerns that must be addressed before its release.
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