Browsing Tag

AI

Delve into the digital abyss with Intonation Effigy’s harbingering journey, Artificial Intelligence

Posted on 6 April 2024

Intonation Effigy’s latest single, ‘Artificial Intelligence‘, composed by Keegan LaBrot, is a dark and harbingering journey into the underbelly of electronica. This cinematically dystopian instrumental release is larger than life in its encapsulation of the ever-lingering threat of AI’s inevitable domination.

The track is a masterclass in creating a disquieting and artfully disconcerting atmosphere. Intonation Effigy’s use of complex and glitchy time signatures is a sonic visualisation of the tumultuous epoch we are entering. The equilibrium between dark, bass-drenched synthetics and light, almost ethereal aesthetics is a testament to Intonation Effigy’s ability to emotionally round out his immersive productions. The track is a journey, not just through sound, but through the emotional landscape of a world grappling with the rise of artificial intelligence.

As the third single from this artfully profound visionary, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ establishes Intonation Effigy as an essential name to follow in the electronica scene. This track is more than a musical composition; it’s a statement, a reflection of our times, and a glimpse into a possible future dominated by AI. For fans of electronica looking for depth, complexity, and emotional resonance, ‘Artificial Intelligence’ by Intonation Effigy is a must-listen.

Artificial Intelligence dropped on March 19^th; stream the single on Spotify now.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

How Rock n Roll Legacy Bands Are Bringing in the Future with AI and AR

Posted on 12 November 2023

If the Download 2024 line-up drama which has left rock and metal boomers crying because they won’t see Metallica or Iron Maiden headlining again has taught us anything, it is that rock fans aren’t too partial to change. But that hasn’t gotten in the way of two of the biggest legacy bands bringing in the future by embracing modernity with rapidly evolving AI and AR technology.

If you have been on any social media platform this week, you are probably already aware of the controversy, condemnation and clamouring praise falling around the AI-assisted new release from The Beatles, but The Rolling Stones using Augmented Reality (AR) might have slipped you by. On this page, we’ll cover all that and more to prove that the existential threat of AI may be ever-looming, but for now, it is helping to facilitate creativity and bring bigger and more immersive experiences to fans.

How AI Brought Back the Beatles

With a superlatively unbeatable track record of number 1 hits and a legacy of being one of the most influential bands in history, it would be nothing short of a miracle if any contemporary artist or band beat the Beatles in that regard in today’s music industry. Especially as the mainstream has divided into endless streams of creativity music fans can use to float their sonic boats.

That didn’t stop some from bemoaning The Beatles for using AI to polish a demo which was recorded 45 years ago. One writer for the digital rag, UnHerd, even went as far as to say that the release of ‘Now and Then is a sign of our cultural doom loop’. Josiah Gogarty attempted to be damning in his exposition of the captivatingly haunting single and only succeeded in making it seem infinitely more appealing by describing it as “less a song than a séance, calling forth the warbling and jangling of the dead”.

Was it lost on Gogarty that AI did little more than clean up Lennon’s vocals from a rough demo by separating the background noise? There was nothing artificial about the distinctive rock n roll soul that rang through the release. In fact, it reaffirmed why the world fell head over psychedelic heels for the Beatles when they shot to fame in the early ’60s. Furthermore, McCartney has already confirmed Now and Then will be the final Beatles song; I think we can let the Beatles have one final chart-topper for all they’ve done for the music industry. Even if you aren’t overly fond of their music, which I can’t claim I am, the Beatles still paved the way for and gave inspiration to everyone from Nirvana to My Bloody Valentine to The Smashing Pumpkins to Bowie to Radiohead to Oasis.

The Digitalisation of the Rolling Stones

Seeing the Rolling Stones in a stadium or an arena may take a massive chunk out of your pay packet with most of their standard ticket prices falling above the £100 mark. Thanks to Augmented Reality, their loyal fans can bring them into their living room for a fraction of the cost, all thanks to Snapchat’s AR Studio. Which has been pulling out all the stops for the promotion of the band’s new LP, Hackney Diamonds. How much of a success it will be is yet to be seen. I can’t imagine there is much cross-over on the Rolling Stones fans and Snapchat users’ Venn diagram. Regardless, it is a great opportunity for Stones fans across the globe to be part of this seminal event.

The band’s creative team has worked closely with Snapchat’s AR studio in Paris to unlock an AR experience which will project 3D bitmoji avatars of the band. If you feel inclined, you can get up and dance next to them or ‘snap up’ some digital band tees, because what would a gig be without merch?

This new marketing venture won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and if it isn’t to your taste, that’s fine – they’re hitting the road in 2024, you can catch them then. But don’t let your technological cynicism get in the way of celebrating this landmark move which can allow Stones fans who won’t be able to attend a show in person.

The Dandy Warhols are Psyched Over the Potential of AI

The Dandy Warhols, a band with a rich history in the psychedelic rock scene, expressed excitement about the potential of AI in the realm of art and music in a recent interview with the Dallas Observer. This enthusiasm stems from their long-standing practice of incorporating various tools into their creative process, viewing each technological advancement as a new instrument to enhance their work.

Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the band’s singer-songwriter, likens AI to any other tool that has been invented, suggesting that it should be used to create great work. The band’s latest single, “Summer of Hate,” showcases this embrace of technology with its AI-generated music video, demonstrating the band’s willingness to experiment with new methods of expression.

Despite some concerns about the effects of AI on the recognition of artists’ contributions, The Dandy Warhols remain hopeful about the opportunities AI presents for independent artists to innovate and push the boundaries of their art.

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To keep up to date with future evolutions of the music landscape, keep following our blog. For advice on how to keep pace with the music industry in 2024, contact our consultancy team, which can show you the cutting-edge ropes you should be using to keep pushing your career forward.

Article by Amelia Vandergast

Sean Grant & The Wolfgang synthesised dystopia in AI (Nothing Rests Everything Moves)

Posted on 3 August 2023

The age of the artist is playing its swan song, and it hums to the tune of the latest single, AI (Nothing Rests Everything Moves), by Sean Grant & The Wolfgang.

The diaphanous vocal lines cascading into the cinematically dystopic darkwave atmosphere constructed by clamorous industrial tones created an evocative juxtaposition that paints the vulnerability of sentience in contrast to the inexorable existential threat of artificial intelligence.

Sean Grant & The Wolfgang have metamorphosed a myriad of times since they introduced themselves on the airwaves with their critically acclaimed EP, 7 Deadly 7, in 2016; each evolution in their always sonorously synthesised sound lends itself effortlessly well to the discontent in the collective psyche.

As a complete antithesis to Grimes’ latest single, I Wanna Be Software, through which she willingly volunteers herself to a dark future of transhumanism, which still probably isn’t as cold as getting into bed with Elon Musk, this latest installation of transcendently discordant soul taps into the powerlessness of the average human as exponential technological progression threatens to tear away our purpose and replace it with inadequacy.

Admittedly, Sean Grant & The Wolfgang didn’t appear on my radar until I saw they were venturing into Manchester to perform with The Battery Farm and SOURDOUGH; all it took was one hit of AI to convince me to grab a ticket and get down the front for the live rendition of the obsession-worthy single released via their label, Vandalism Begins at Home.

Stream the latest single from Sean Grant & The Wolfgang on Spotify and give them a follow on Instagram and Facebook.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Ai Kittens showed us the future of neural network music ahead of his AI-generated album using Blink-182’s discography database.

Posted on 12 November 2022

Here to prove that Ai in the music industry doesn’t equate to the redundancy of human creativity, Ai Kittens gave us a view into the process of creating neural network music based on the discography databases of iconic artists. He’s rewired the sounds of everyone from RHCP to the Weeknd, and on November 18th, he’s unleashing his next album. Blink-182 fans might want to pay attention.

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Ai Kittens, welcome back to A&R Factory! We loved getting stuck into your album arranged from Rage Against the Machine’s music last year; plenty of other people have, judging by your streaming stats! Clearly, there is an appetite for tech-driven original reformations of iconic music; would you say this is the future of music?

Undoubtedly, such tools will be available to more and more creative people every year, including well-known artists. Probably even now such tools are used in creative camps, but we don’t know about it. Some attempts are made by guys from Bored Apes, but there it seems AI art is just a cover to sell to a label. With my works, I want to show that by using neural networks everyone can be a creator and producer.

I would also like to point out that neural networks are an endless source of inspiration for the artist, the only question is if you can make maximum use of it.

You prepared 260 songs, and only 15 made the cut for the album; do you think the LP format is outdated in the age of AI music?

In fact, in order to get 260 tracks, 3,600 tracks were generated, from which I made this sample.

In my opinion, listening behavior doesn’t change much, and of course, no one will listen to all 200 songs because that is almost 5 hours and 30 minutes of music with no repetition. This music will have some kind of development; for example, it is possible to make an album with lyrics for a real band and perform it all at concerts. Of course, my dream would be if Blink182 would use it. But I spent that summer and part of the fall in LA and couldn’t meet the guys in the band.

It changes the approach to how the album is made, and how the hit song is searched for because you can listen to it before you do something yourself. You just have to listen to it and conclude whether you like the track.

Can you run us through the process of authentically arranging music via AI and what tools you use to create music from artist databases?

I use the Open Ai Jukebox neural network. Unfortunately, the company stopped further development because they found more profitable solutions with images. A server with video cards and the right settings is enough to get results. For the generation, I used two genres and text; the genre gene is punk, the artist gene is Blink 182, and I used four texts to randomize the results. I have 1 million 200 thousand songs of different genres and artists.

As a result, I get, with some probability, tracks that sound like I overheard them at a band rehearsal and recorded them on a tape recorder. And then the musician just plays that recording back at a rate of about 5 songs a day. So it only took us two months to do all 260 tracks.

If I worked with a real band, I think getting that many demos in that amount of time would be fantastic.
All that remains is to write the lyrics and sing them. (Although I have a separate project called Ai Lyrics for that). With him, I’ve already written about 50 pop songs in the style of Bruno Mars and Weeknd. You should also try to generate some lyrics in the style of your favorite artists. It’s a lot of fun.

What made you choose the Blink 182 back catalogue to generate an album from?

Last year I saw a newsletter from Kobalt, a music publisher where artists of all different levels submit requests to find songs for themselves; there I saw a request from Blink182. They were looking for a song with a different intro than their regular songs.

I decided to generate those songs for them. After I got the first generations, I wrote to Kobalt music, but no one answered me further than the secretary. I went to their office in L.A., but they kicked me out of there like I was crazy. Then I tried to meet John Feldman to show them the song demos, but that too ended in failure.

Blink182 is a great love from my childhood. It’s music I listened to as a teenager. Why not make more music like this if the musicians don’t make it themselves? But while I was putting it all together, the band was already going on a stadium tour in 2023. And they even seem to be alive and showing some activity.

What would you say to the AI sceptics who believe that embracing AI will make human creativity redundant?

AI will not replace humans. It will always be only a support for humans in the search for inspiration, to reduce the creative routine. After all, a living person needs money, a machine does not.

What can we expect from Ai Kittens next?

Next Friday, the blink182 album will drop. I’m trying to publish music every Friday; I have so many songs to release. You have no idea how much I want to show you what I have for Bruno Mars and the Weeknd.

But it’s so hard to communicate with them. I can’t catch Anderson Paak in LA in the next 2 months, but I caught him in Bali last week. Hope he will listen to my neuro stuff and maybe it will be the basis for the next 5 platinum albums…

Listen to Ai Kittens on Spotify. Follow his innovative career on Instagram.

Interview by Amelia Vandergast

The Apple of Our AI: How Artificial Intelligence is Enabling Creativity in the Music Industry

Posted on 24 September 2022

Conversations around AI and the music industry have often been sticky with pessimism, which is no surprise given that fearing the unknown has always been a fundamentally regressive part of the human experience.

It certainly doesn’t help matters when horror films play on our fears. In the age of the advancement of medical technologies, Frankenstein’s monster was created, and techno-horror has been giving us the creeps since The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). For the non-tech-minded masses, tales of horror are the bases for their cognitive biases.

The prospect of an increasingly more digital future, which threatens our creativity and labour even more than late-stage capitalism, has confounded the fear of progressive change to the nth degree. No one welcomes the increased possibility of redundancy in a world where your worth is determined, in large, by your contribution to it and the respective paycheques. But the advances of AI don’t need to mean doom, gloom, and dystopia.

There has long been the belief that AI in the music industry will be the final death knell for artists. But an increasing number of artists are proving that embracing AI doesn’t have to be synonymous with the cannibalisation of creativity. And whether you realise it or not, AI is already having a drastic impact on how you discover and consume music. It is also helping to rectify one of the main issues in the music industry; the oversaturation of it, which drags talent under the swathes of poorly produced spaff.

The main inspiration behind this article was the recently released AI Stable Diffusion music video from the UK alternative artist, Witch of the East, who has been showcasing her AI-created art before launching the music video for her single, A Tale of the Lonely.

Stable Diffusion is a recently introduced text-to-image model which professes to enable billions of people to create stunning art in seconds. But make no mistake, producing the trippy gothic Francis Bacon-Esque music video took hours. And Witch of the East has been a beguilingly sensational artist in her own organic right since the launch of her grungy 2019 debut album, Queen of Insecurity. The video, which takes you down a blackened occultist rabbit hole, provides a mesmeric aesthetic to her off-kilter confession of destabilising loneliness, one that is sure to provide ample resonance as we slip into the promise of a winter of discontent.

In her own words, “AI tools are just another way to bring ideas to light; an extra colour on the paintbrush or musical note on the spectrum”.

How AI is Improving the Music Industry

For any optimism around AI, it is crucial to understand that AI isn’t here to replace human capabilities but to enhance them through higher productivity and efficiency. In the same way that you wouldn’t bemoan a washing machine for speeding up the process of laundry, AI shouldn’t be begrudged for the way it can speed up processes and take the slog out of repetitive tasks.

Music Composing & Mastering

Take AI’s role in music creation as an example. AI tools, such as Magenta, Amper, and Flow Machines, can analyse the data in compositions to reveal characteristics and patterns that will take the sound to the next level, sparing the process of trial and error. The human role remains, while AI provides efficiency.

AI can also be a great music mastering tool. While this limits the need to outsource, AI mastering tools such as LANDR, which can finish the task in minutes, means that more artists can get a professional finish without the cost – which many cannot afford in our current financial climate.

Music Marketing & Promotion

AI has long been integrated into marketing to determine target audiences, monitor consumer behaviour, and put products in front of the right people at the fraction of the cost of traditional marketing methods. In the music industry, AI can determine engagement, track patterns, and help artists to increase revenue by targeting the right audiences.

If you have ever used YouTube to listen to music, which two billion people worldwide do, you have already experienced the benefits of AI and machine learning through the recommendations. Those recommendations happen through deep insights into tastes based on listening patterns. The Spotify Discovery playlists are also AI-curated through big data insights and machine learning to save users the hassle of manually searching for music that hits the spot.

Talent Discovery

AI filtering engines filter thousands of songs every day to introduce music fans to new artists they would otherwise have missed by going off past listening habits. These filtering engines don’t discriminate on genre; they make recommendations based on the quality of the music. So, for any artist afraid that the insurgence of AI in the music industry will mean that they’re competing with flawless melody-making robots, the reality is that the artists who deserve to break through based on the quality of their music have a better chance of making a mark.

Major record labels are also leaning on AI more to discover new artists. With advanced analytics, such as predictive modelling, they can mine Spotify, SoundCloud and other streaming platforms for the best unsigned talent. This type of AI may leave people in A&R fearing for their relevancy in the music industry, but A&R reps are still a crucial cog in the industry machine, as it isn’t only streaming sites that are mined for musical talent. Music blogs, social media platforms and touring data can also be mined by AI filtering engines to see who is hot.

Final Thoughts

A music industry that revolves around metadata isn’t our future; if you peek behind the curtain and look behind the scenes, it is our present.

Music traditionalists may not like the advancements made in the industry with their preference of nostalgically lusting for the days when everything was analog. But these misinformed dinosaurs shouldn’t lead the discussion on machine learning in the music industry. Ironically, they are probably already enjoying the benefits of personalised music recommendations; unless they can’t pull themselves away from the records they listened to when they graduated high school.

Using AI tools to dive forward your music career can lead to lower production costs, reduced human error and increased time efficiency; forget the plot to iRobot, and embrace its potential.

Article by Amelia Vandergast

Image Credits: Witch of the East

Ai Kittens bring in the future of mid-tempo metal with their AI-generated single, Alone with Yourself – Gen 103.

Posted on 25 December 2021

As we move through the rapid reforms in our digital spaces, it was only a matter of time before an AI band started to use neural networks to generate songs. At the vanguard of digital pioneering in this corner is Ai Kittens. To date, they have released over 150 authentically arranged tracks based on Rage Against the Machine and the licks of Tom Morello.

In this instance, in all sincerity, we can confirm that Ai Kittens are bringing in the future of mid-tempo metal. For RATM and Morello fans, Ai Kittens single, Alone with Yourself – Gen 103, is the perfect introduction to their atmospheric sound, swaggering rock guitars and ability to use technology in a way that completely reinvents music.

We do not doubt that there will be plenty of rock purists quick to criticise the nature of this project, but we have to hand it to Ai Kittens for their ingenuity. This method of ‘mining’ music which evades the usual copywriting issues with sampling, has all the potential to better the airwaves in the future.

Alone with Yourself is now available to stream on Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Singer-songwriter [ai] has released their archaically infectious serenade, ‘Love in the Time of Tuberculosis’.

Posted on 27 April 2021

The idea of archaic disease probably won’t leave your heart beating faster in any positive way but the latest subversively amorous single from [ai], ‘Love in the Time of Tuberculosis’, definitely can.

If you can imagine what would happen if Nick Cave’s macabre mind melded with Tim Minchin’s ability to lyrically laugh in the face of mortality and the not so romantic aspects of existence, you’ll get an idea of what is on offer in this uniquely captivating soundscape.

The baroquely theatrical pop track comes with Brian May-style guitar solos, arresting piano-led progressions and [ai]’s ability to pull poetic parallels from across the ages. The single is a poignant reminder that the world has always been full of catastrophe, and it didn’t just start going to pot in 2020, we’ve had 100 years of adversity, no matter how much we feel personally slighted in the present.

You can check out Love in the Time of Tuberculosis for yourselves by heading over to YouTube.

Review by Amelia Vandergast.

Johannesburg producer HYMR impresses on futuristic marvel ‘Artificial Intelligence’

Posted on 14 August 2020

The City of Gold in South Africa is the home of producer HYMR and he returns to wave the flag of his country proudly on electro road-trip ‘Artificial Intelligence‘.

Written as a musical abstract painting, ‘Artificial Intelligence‘ is the latest album to come from South African producer HYMR. Considering technology as both a solution and threat, ‘Artificial Intelligence‘ focuses on fundamental issues affecting the world and mainly the threat of pollution and climate change.

A self taught pianist, HYMR has been seeking out music from a young age. He loved playing pianos anywhere he could find them- in school, in shops and in hostels.

The highlights on this album in my eyes are definitely ‘Polluted Planet‘, ‘Here We Are‘ and ‘We Belong Together‘. The production is extra special here and the music takes you into a new world. I close my eyes and imagine the world in a better place, away from all the destruction that it faces.

Johannesburg producer HYMR takes us on a wild journey through the ups and downs of AI and the way he has constructed ‘Artificial Intelligence‘ is quite impressive. With the troubles in his home country, South Africa should be proud of this fantastic producer who will surely be getting lots of calls about festivals in 2021.

Stream the new album right here on Spotify.

Click here for the Facebook page.

Reviewed by Llewelyn Screen