Automating the black art: Creative places for artificial intelligence in audio mastering

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in the creative economy of music production. One sector in particular, audio post-production, is experiencing rapid change due to AI and various other forms of automation. This spells major changes, now and in the future, for skills, employment and work. Many accounts on the role of machine automation in occupational instability-specifically, reductions in human employment-have focused on the manufacturing (assembly lines) and service (financial, legal and administration) sectors: so-called blue-and white-collar jobs. However, there are as yet only limited forays into the possible consequences of AI in the creative economy, in particular on 'no-collar jobs'. Creative occupations were previously understood to be immune from the disruptions of AI due to the high levels of intuition, affective knowledge, 'gut instinct', and other human 'assets' difficult to replicate by complex algorithms and intelligent machines. Drawing on empirical research on AI in audio post-production, this article contends that there are conflicting notions of the possible impacts of these new innovations on human expertise and digital skills. The article highlights change underway in this profession of audio mastering as workers in the creative industries collaborate and compete with AI-driven technological innovation.

End-to-end Music Remastering System Using Self-supervised and Adversarial Training

“…Intelligent audio mastering is in its infancy due to insufficient training data for the system -lacking of resources, and semantic representation. Figuring out a sound trend requires big data collections and sensibly detectable analysis [4]. Also, aesthetical sound perception is hard to quantify and analyze by computing models [5].…”

How AI Can Be Applied in Creative Fields

“…This task is on the verge of a creative task, as it heavily relies on a branch of physics -acoustics, but in a lot of cases the songs can be improved with clever ideas, and there are famous mastering engineers with a well distinguishable style. AI is starting to get more relevant in this field as well, with companies such as LANDR and Cloud-Bounce proposing to master songs without the help of humans and relying purely on algorithms [32]. Currently these methods cannot compete with human engineers, but it is a much cheaper and more accessible way for artists to meg their music mastered.…”

Labour geography III: Precarity, racial capitalisms and infrastructure

“…The growth of work that develops Coe and Jordhus-Lier’s (2011) concept of constrained agency (Chan, 2014; Schwiter et al, 2018b) reflects the precarity of agency itself. This precarity of agency and resistance, as traditionally understood (reflected in, for example, workers’ collective organizations), relates to, inter alia, the accelerated pace of technological change, including automation and the applications of artificial intelligence (AI) to an increasingly wide range of tasks; and to gig work, platform economies and digital intermediation (Birtchnell and Elliott, 2018; Bissell and Del Casino, 2017; Pierce et al, 2019; Richardson and Bissell, 2019). Louise Waite and Hannah Lewis (2017: 954), whose research with asylum-seekers in the UK has inspired so much geographical work on precarity, highlight the importance of contesting discourses of the new economy, such as the ‘sharing economy’, through the lens of the ‘survival-oriented labouring’ of hyper-precarious migrants.…”