Last month, we spoke about connectivity and how music provides a medium and a platform for everyone to share and enjoy. This month, we want to address connectivity on another level – how musicians are using and driving AI to produce exciting and intriguing new forms of music.
A year ago, we shared a story and some music from Folk-RNN a computerized/ machine learning system “trained” on folk music that composes ORIGINAL music.
The team behind this research, Dr. Bob L. Sturm of Queen Mary University of London and Dr. Oded Ben-Tal – a senior lecturer at the music department, Kingston University, created The Bottomless Tune Box to showcase music created with this new invention.
This year, Drs. Sturm and Ben-Tal were finalists in Queen Mary University’s Media Relations Award program for a presentation that demonstrated “the potential for AI augmenting human creativity, and opening new avenues for music practice.”
It is a brave new world in music, and folk-rrn is part of the pioneering wave that will eventually change many facets of our lives – artificial intelligence that can learn and be creative.
We support folk-rnn’s work, and will feature it whenever we can because it represents an evolutionary step for both machines and humans – the new world of joint growth with human inception and collaboration with evolving machine capabilities.
We believe that this is the future – joint work with input from both sides of the equation. Communication will continue to evolve and, as in the past, music will be one of the leading parts of the change. We continue to be in contact with the good doctors and use some of their music.
Some of the latest human-AI collaborative pieces are quite interesting – one which can be heard on YouTube is especially fascinating because it is played on a trombone/trumpet by Torbjorn Hultmark, a noted European musician – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kLxvJ-rXDs
