WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

In the short term musicians and artists will increasingly find themselves collaborating alongside with AI, but by next year we’ll start seeing AI’s go it alone.

This week it was announced that Taryn Southern, who’s no stranger to the music industry with over 500 million views on YouTube and over 450,000 subscribers, had released a new album, and her first song “Break Free” was, as you’d probably be able to suspect, an instant hit.

The song, and in fact the entire album, features an artist known as Amper, but in this instance what looks like a typical collaboration between two artists is much more than that, because, you see, this is Amper’s debut. And Amper’s not a person.

Like Magenta, Google’s own wannabe pop star, DeepBach and the creations from Jukedeck, Amper is described as “an Artificially Intelligent (AI) music composer, producer, and performer” who was developed by a team of professional musicians and technology experts, and it’s the very first AI to have composed and produced an entire music album, beating Sony and Flow Machine’s first AI produced album, which is due to be released later this year after it debuted two songs earlier this year, by a few months.

The album is called I AM AI, and “Break Free” which you can watch below was released on August 21st.

As film composer Drew Silverstein, one of Amper’s founders, explained Amper isn’t meant to act, or strike out, totally on its own and it was designed to work in alongside with human musicians.

“One of our core beliefs as a company is that the future of music is going to be created in the collaboration between humans and AI. We want that collaborative experience to propel the creative process forward,” he said.

That said, the team notes that, contrary to the other songs that have been released by other AI composers, the chord structures and instrumentation of “Break Free” are entirely Amper’s work.

Arguably, Amper is breaking the mould first laid down by some of the industry’s other notable AI’s, like the ones mentioned above – normally, the original work done by the AI is used, morphed and then, to some degree, reinterpreted by humans. In short, humans are doing a lot of the leg work and the post production, as Amper’s team noted, “the process of releasing AI music has involved humans making significant manual changes, including alteration to chords and melodies, to the AI notation.”

But none of that is the case with Amper, it only works with manual inputs from the human artist when it comes to style and overall rhythm, and most notably, Amper can make music in just seconds, and who knows, as Amper continues to release more songs it might even be picked by the industry’s first AI A&R company, or one day collaborate with other vocalist AI’s, like Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Scary.