The age of technology is bringing numerous changes to not just music production but our everyday lives. The rise of AI personal assistants has changed how we research, educate, look for jobs, and even operate in our own homes. However, not everyone sees AI as helpful, especially when bots can make art now. The music industry specifically has seen some unique challenges with AI that affect everyone from a composer to a backup singer. So, what’s making producers so nervous about the rise of AI? Grab a coffee and come along as we tell you all about the impact of AI on music production.
The Ethical Dilemma
As AI has grown more prominent in recent years, the ethics behind the tech have been blurry at best. There haven’t been many, if any, clear rules regarding the materials used to train AI. Many visual artists have expressed anger and concern that their artwork has been used to train image-generation bots without their permission. The same goes for music.
We often hear about it less, but there are AI models that can mimic instruments and even human voices almost flawlessly, and those models are trained on music that already exists. However, in a world where machines can mimic, fuse, and transform sound, it’s nearly impossible to tell what music production techniques they have been trained on.
The unethical use of AI in music production can lead to fraudulent royalty claims en masse. Anyone can enter a prompt into a bot, release the song as their own, promote it, and start collecting money from it. What startles real producers about this is that listeners are being pulled away from hardworking musicians’ works and distracted by fraudulent tracks, taking from their audience and royalties.
Independent artists often make a living from their music, and just like in visual art, AI can threaten that living. The best thing we can hope for is a system that categorizes fully AI works apart from traditional music. Finding this balance has never been more important, and big tech companies are struggling to find morally and ethically sound solutions.
It’s Not All Bad
Despite the moral chaos surrounding creative AI, there are tools that producers can benefit from as well. For instance, programs like LANDR offer AI mastering, which can be tricky and time-consuming in audio engineering and music production. The AI master may not come out perfect, but it might get producers closer to the sound of their final goal or even provide them with a new WAV file to tweak and master on their own without going back into the mix.
Another company, Vochlea, has created a plugin that allows music producers to convert their voice into MIDI. Their software, Dubler, lets users sing, hum, whistle, or speak into their microphone and choose an instrument to convert it to. Do you have a killer bassline in your head, but you don’t play the bass and don’t want to bother programming it on a keyboard? Dubler can help bring that bassline into your project. It’s helpful technology that doesn’t rely on generative AI to get that musical vision into the DAW.
For those not aiming to produce original works but covers, AI can help with that, too. It can be a real burden removing vocals from a track you’re only using for karaoke, but there’s a cool website for this. Vocal Remover is a program that uses AI to split vocals and instrumentals, providing the user with either a clean vocal to sample or a clean instrumental to sing over. It takes some of the work out of manually and painstakingly extracting the stems yourself.
In Conclusion
Music Production is an ever-evolving field with millions of mediums, programs, and techniques. With AI added to the equation, there is much to discuss concerning ethics. Everyone from the CEO of a major music publishing company to the smallest indie artist playing at a birthday party is affected by AI, and we should be talking about it. Optimistically though, some helpful AI tools can make the music production process smoother and remain ethically sound. There are pros and cons, but only time will tell how it will affect the music industry in the long term.
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