is examining how individual electronic music producers can turn their music into infinite and interactive streams. Aimi’s listener app invites fans to manipulate the system’s generative parameters such as “intensity” or “texture”, or deciding when a drop happens. The listener engages with the music rather than listening passively.
It’s hard to say how much heavy lifting AI is doing in these applications – potentially little. Even so, such advances are guiding companies’ visions of how musical experience might evolve in the future.The initiatives mentioned above are in conflict with several long-established conventions, laws and cultural values regarding how we create and share music.
Will copyright laws be tightened to ensure companies training AI systems on artists’ works compensate those artists? And what would that compensation be for? Will new rules apply to source separation? Will musicians using AI spend less time making music, or make more music than ever before? If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s change. As a new generation of musicians grows up immersed in AI’s creative possibilities, they’ll find new ways of working with these tools.
Such turbulence is nothing new in the history of music technology, and neither powerful technologies nor standing conventions should dictate our creative future.