The following op-ed comes from oliveg Stavitsky (pictured inside), CEO of Endel, an AI-powered audio healthcare company based in Berlin. Endel says its patented technology takes input from a user’s movement, time of day, weather, heart rate, location and other factors, and then uses AI to generate personalized sound that adapts to changes in real time. Endel recently signed an agreement to produce health playlists for amazon music.
Currently, AI is seen as a threat, either as technology that will replace artists or musicians, or as a mere tool that will be incorporated into the creative process of composers and producers.
However, AI’s most disruptive role will likely be as a new means of translating music into more responsive and adaptive formats.
Technology has always played an important role in changing the way we produce, record and consume music.
Over the past 20 years, from iPods to AirPods, to mixtape on sound cloud to the above playlist SpotifyMusic has become more ubiquitous and portable than ever, and that has impacted its formats.
Artificial intelligence could create the next revolution in musical mediums. The medium is the message: the way music is conveyed to us today influences the format and the music itself.
On the one hand, Tik-Tok and streaming are shrinking music down to mid-sized 30-second clips/skits. On the other hand, YouTube gave birth to the functional music genre of infinitely long videos designed to help listeners sleep or study.
These long-form videos are essentially audio, rooted in Brian Eno’s ideas for creative music. Today, Eno’s ideas of music-as-a-system, a free-composer approach are ripe for innovation.
All around us is data: devices around us know our average heart rate and steps, time awake and asleep, gender, age, period pattern and menstrual cycle. Imagine feeding all this information into a generalized AI model and adding the derived artist to the system.
What you get is music that lives and breathes with you. That adapts to when you wake up, the number of meetings you have, your current heart rate, circadian rhythm, and movement. That knows when to be barely audible and when to protect you from the world.
“A new platform for AI-powered audio landscapes with such functionality is coming. What is missing is the legal infrastructure for such a platform.”
This AI-powered adaptive function audio version of your favorite music is the future available to us today. It opens up new opportunities for artists to create and monetize their art, for platforms that provide additional revenue streams, and for brands to breathe new life into their portfolios. Best of all: it can peacefully coexist with the traditional pre-recorded music we know and love.
Musical artists such as Grimes, Miguel, James Blake, Arca, and Plastikman opened up to the idea that their music would exist in a new way: as a living, breathing, ever-changing, constantly adapting being. adapted to the listener’s context. This handy approach to composing music by bringing the building blocks into a system and then watching it work doesn’t remove the artist from the equation. Artists are present, it’s just their role from active performer/composer to conductor/architect.
A new platform for AI-powered audio landscapes with such functionality is coming. What is missing is the legal infrastructure for such a platform.
Today, companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars and years building technologies that present new opportunities to artists, and rights holders are expected to bear the largest share of the costs. That balance needs to change.
Those of us in AI and music need to work together to establish a fair legal and business infrastructure that will enable this new adaptation, an adaptive approach. and new creations for music appeared.Global Music Business
