A digital destiny
“I’ve yet to hear a piece of AI-generated music that is either breathtakingly beautiful, or very surprising,” says composer Robert Laidlow, in an interview with
Science Line. Though Laidlow admits to using AI assistive software himself, the notion of AI one day fully supplanting human composers is one that even the developers of these existing platforms dispute.
“I think what AI is going to excel at is creating soundtracks for use cases [that] human labour cannot scale,” says Pierre Barreau, the CEO of Aiva. In an interview with Globant, Pierre continues, “for example, video games have hundreds of hours of gameplay, and yet only two hours of music, which means that the same tunes loop over 50 times in the ears of the gamers”.
While human composers – with all their off-road nuances, personality and genre-expansive capabilities – always will surpass AI composers, it’s understandable that many are worried about AI’s intrusion into work previously done solely by them. But, the huge demand for ‘functional’ music has swelled as the rise of YouTube and podcasting has increased. Meeting this demand efficiently is a task at which these services excel. So don’t think about beating your monitor with a baseball bat just yet.