Will.i.am<\/a> is one of the few who have admitted to playing around with the technology in the studio.<\/p>\nPlay is the operative word. Slavens said his experiments with AI supercharged his imaginative energies. Making tracks by playing with his own idea and AI prompts felt like a return to the boundless make-believe of his childhood. This was what he thought being a musician would be like when he was a kid.<\/p>\n
The experiments followed a fallow period for Slavens. It took him three years to cut his last album, Alphabet Girls, Vol. II. He dropped it in 2022 and \u201cnobody cared,\u201d he said. He estimates this masterwork was streamed seven times. He all but quit recording his compositions.<\/p>\n
Until, that is, a recent trip to Hawaii. A musician buddy there had been sending Slavens some of the AI tracks he had produced, using ChatGPT prompts to write the lyrics. <\/p>\n
Slavens was astounded by the depth and quality of the songs. He would send the music to other players, and nobody could believe how far AI had come so quickly.<\/p>\n
\u201cMan, let\u2019s make AI music,\u2019\u201d said his fellow musician when Slavens arrived in Hawaii for a visit. <\/p>\n
Slavens realized that, rather than just taking what AI spat out, he could collaborate with a free musical program, feeding it his lyrics and style prompts.<\/p>\n
One of the songs he sent me is from a genre Slavens calls \u201cexotica,\u201d the slightly tropical-inflected lounge music popular in the 1950s. <\/p>\n
In \u201cKnock Lightly,\u201d Slavens\u2019 pastiche of a sweet 50s love song, a robot woman\u2019s voice reminded me of the slightly husky tones of Doris Day. \u201cShe\u201d is clearly not Doris Day, but she sounds just as accomplished, like she must have had a 15-year career in movie musicals, then married her producer, with whom she had 12 children including a future Idaho congressman. Or one imagines.<\/p>\n
The she-robot also sings as if English is her second language, rhyming \u201cquietly\u201d with \u201clightly\u201d in a way that only Marlene Dietrich or Brigitte Bardot could have gotten away with. <\/p>\n
The other track Slavens shared is a clever cat-and-mouse concept in which he asks his AI collaborator \u201cwhich one of us is real?\u201d in a kind of prog-rock style, like Supertramp jamming with Autotune.<\/p>\n
Slavens remains conflicted. He is as skeptical as anyone about the net effect of AI for humanity \u2014 particularly as it takes jobs from humans. At the Dallas forum, he wants to share the wonder that experimenting with AI made him feel. But he doesn\u2019t want to become a lightning rod for one of the most divisive issues in modern music.<\/p>\n
Slavens doesn\u2019t think people will care about his AI compositions any more than they did about his last album. In fact, he expects the proliferation of beautiful music that will eventually arise from AI to result in less music sharing, as people compose music for their own listening pleasure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Music generated by artificial intelligence is spreading rapidly, but it remains taboo among aficionados and artists, as Paul…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":277710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,11890,64684,13431,975,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-277709","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-commentary","11":"tag-contributing-columnists","12":"tag-denton","13":"tag-music","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115317241620188303","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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