How Music AI Is Useful: Engagements with Composers, Performers and Audiences

Abstract

Critical but often overlooked research questions in artificial intelligence (AI) applied to music involve the impact of the results for music. How and to what extent does such research contribute to the domain of music? How are the resulting models useful for music practitioners? In this article, we describe how we are addressing such questions by engaging composers, musicians, and audiences with our research. We first describe two websites we have created that make our AI models accessible to a wide audience. We then describe a professionally recorded album that we released to expert reviewers to gauge the plausibility of AI-generated material. Finally, we describe the use of our AI models as tools for co-creation. Evaluating AI research and music models in these ways illuminate their impact on music making in a range of styles and practices.

Using Incongruous Genres to Explore Music Making with AI Generated Content

“…We note similar observations of the use of generative AI FolkRNN by Folk musicians [6] -a congruous setting in contrast to our incongruous approach. Firstly, there are similarities between how the Punk musicians chose outputs from our plugin to work into a composition to the way that folk musicians repeatedly listened to FolkRNN outputs to select a musical phrase to use in their composition.…”

“…An overview of decades of traditions and approaches to exploring incongruous, speculative, surreal, and often absurd approaches to music making and technologies is given in [33]. Given the early stage of this research area and our exploratory approach we reflect post-hoc on similarities and differences to the congruous use folkRNN by folk musicians [6].…”

“…In contrast, Ben-Tal et al [6] examine how the outputs of their FolkRNN generative folk music system are used by themselves as performers and composers. Importantly, they also explore how FolkRNN is used by folk musicians either directly as part of their research or serendipitously through the FolkRNN webpage.…”

On Creativity, Music’s AI Completeness, and Four Challenges for Artificial Musical Creativity

“…Developments and breakthroughs in artificial musical creativity will have major economic and social consequences, significant impact on the balance of the art sector and its market dynamics, and they will come with new legal and intellectual copyright issues. Such topics require responsibility and more extensive discussion amongst experts and in the public sphere (advancing, e.g., discussions of Holzapfel et al, 2018;Ben-Tal et al, 2020;Sturm et al, 2019b;Brown, 2021).…”

I Keep Counting: An Experiment in Human/AI Co-creative Songwriting

“…Selecting the best output and transforming it into a plausible creative production is then likely to be done better by humans. An example of such human-computer collaboration is the composition of the album Let's Have Another Gan Ainm (Sturm and Ben-Tal, 2018) for which the musician Daren Banarsë selected melodies generated with the folk-rnn system and then modified them (Ben-Tal et al, 2020). The idea of co-creative colleague, as well as the notion of a creativity support tool, are also described as roles for AI in the creative process by Kantosalo and Jordanous (2020).…”