Artificial intelligence may be well-equipped to handle big data and analytics in its current form, but as it evolves, it’s shaping up to double as a great tool for musicians to learn and hone their craft. No matter where you are in the music world, there are technological tools available to help you, from the budding guitar player working on lessons in Yousician and the lyricist scribbling in Google Docs, all the way up to professional musicians taking advantage of AI-trained mixing and mastering services like LANDR. With the way that some AI programs are shaping up, however, they could make learning to create music and eventually getting that music made and ready to show to the world easier than ever before.
One particularly promising program in that vein is a platform made by Third Space Learning. It’s been made hand in hand with the University College London, and has around 100,000 hours of audio analysis under its belt. The point of the tool is to essentially monitor a student’s technique and progress by listening to them play and analyzing that audio on a deep level to determine how well their learning is going, and where they could improve more. Similar systems can be tied to current solutions, allowing scenarios like students interacting with instructors online and getting the equivalent of in-person one-on-one time by having a bot and instructor collaborate to decide what a student should work on next and how well they’re doing.
Not too long ago, it was thought that AI, by their very nature, could never actually be creative. This is quickly being proven false through projects like Google’s Magenta, an AI music framework that has already resulted in the first song ever composed by a bot, along with an AI-based duet tool that listens to a human musician play a virtual piano, and plays a suitable harmony. This swing toward the creative has yet to invade the writing world, as proven by an AI-generated Harry Potter fan fiction that’s nothing short of ridiculous, and human musicians likely have little to worry about in the way of being replaced. Creative works are, after all, inherently unique.