AIVA – Music Engine
aiva.ai
aiva.ai
(I don't quite recall off-hand if it was these folks or someone else who claimed to have fed their AI a corpus of tens of thousands of classical pieces in "digitized sheet music" form as part of the training process - something that would be a treasure trove for academic music corpus studies, if it existed!)
[1] End-to-end systems do exist, and their output is quite interesting, but in a "quirky, weird but it actually sounds nice" way - sorts of like the musical analog of the DeepDream doggie pictures. Arguably the most successful (of the ones that are openly available) is "Hexahedria"/Daniel Johnson's "biaxial music composition" (aka "tied parallel networks") project, which was featured here before. The "BachBot" and "DeepBach" projects also deserve mention, but their scope is rather limited as their names suggest.
I believe that this same model can be applied to many more creative applications, including music. A lot of the pure AI creative applications I've seen still have a long way to go before they get close to what talented human creatives can do.
Indeed, up till now, all of the orchestral tracks we released where orchestrated by humans.
However, we've just finished automating that part of the process as well; our Beta will allow users to generate scores that are orchestrated for a wide variety of ensembles.
And regarding our database, we have over 30.000 scores right now, digitized in MIDI format. :)
> Music Engine / AI at the service of Composers
> The most ambitious composers create memorable and uniquely personalized scores. Our Music Engine was built to scale and supercharge your creative process.
This made me think that your tools would help me compose. However, the demos seem to show music just being created at the click of a button. Is this a tool for composers (and if so, how?) or a tool for users who'd otherwise go to stock music libraries?
The tool we are developing is indeed aimed at composer. Have you seen this video which walks you through the interface? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuU3UI7iJSo
Basically, you can select an influence (either stylistic, like Modern Cinematic, or using an existing piece of music), create a piece, and download the MIDI file generated by AIVA.
The value we are trying to add for composers is by giving them an original, 2-3 minutes long theme in seconds, that they can modify however they want in their own creative workflow (Digital Audio Workstation or Notation program). You could think of this as a composition assistance that gives you a sketch, as opposed to starting out with a blank slate, and potentially having to face writer's block.
FYI, our closed beta is going live in early January, and we'll be on-boarding new users on a regular basis from there.
Hope that clarifies!
I actually like this a lot compared to AIVA's most obvious competitor (Jukedeck). Jukedeck promises a finished product in seconds, and their output always ends up sounding really, really tacky as a result. And I actually mean that it sounds really, really tacky for royalty-free music, so that ought to tell y'all something! Now, say anything about AIVA's existing output, but tacky it is not. In fact, it seems to show quite a bit of the "true", weird, serendipitous creativity that also occurs in openly-available, verifiably end-to-end systems (and that makes their output musically interesting), so there's clearly some real achievement here.
I don't do as much composition as I'd like to anymore (mostly due to a lack of time and due to writer's block), but a lot of my writer's block doesn't come from the initial blank slate (I have no problem doodling about on an instrument or with my voice or on FLStudio/LMMS/Rosegarden/etc.) but rather from fleshing out ideas into full songs (I'm especially terrible at endings).
To the extent that this is a common POV, it is a bit of a problem for AIVA, in contrast with open systems. Because how do you assess the "art" that might or might not be embodied in AIVA's algorithms, when those algorithms are not in fact available for scrutiny? Where's the compelling expression, the impressiveness, that is supposed to be a defining feature of "true" art? It's nowhere to be seen, really - all we have is some "magic" and we can at best surmise about what it might be doing under the hood. The developers of, e.g. BachBot, DeepBach and other open systems seem to be in a rather more enviable position as "true" artists!
However a more painful problem it was solve for me is putting non-copyrighted sound tracks in my videos. I'd pay for royalty-free music generated on-demand.
I'm ambivalent about the idea of "AI"-assisted creative production and the trend toward homogenization.