Gadgetory

the hopeful dreamers born from zeros and ones Taryn southern is an online personality who you might know from her YouTube channel or when she was a contestant on American Idol these days Taryn is interested in emerging tech which has led to her current projects recording a pop album these two things might not sound related but her album has a twist instead of writing all the songs herself Taryn used artificial intelligence to help generate percussion melodies and chords this makes it one of the first albums of its kind a collaboration of sorts between AI and human music making AI software has come a long way in the past few years to the point where it can Co produce an album like Terrance as a musician and producer the idea of AI being able to do what I do is freaky I met up with Taryn to find out about the process of collaborating with software maybe it's not as crazy as it sounds do you view a AI when you're working with these platforms as a tool or a collaborator hmm I've been using their word tool a lot just in talking with you but I do view it more as a collaborator and that it is giving me source inspiration material so a piano doesn't just give me its notes and I would think more of a piano as a tool yeah a tool is something we can wield and a collaborator is something you work with something we work with so yes I would say AI feels much more like a collaborator carburetor and a tool because I can also still tell it what to do right you have power over it yeah for now yeah Taryn uses several different AI programs to write her music including software from IBM Google and ampere most of these systems work using deep learning networks a type of AI that's reliant on analyzing large amounts of data basically you feed the software tons of source material from dance hits to disco classics which it then analyzes to find patterns picks up on things like chords length tempo and how notes relate to one another learning from all of this input so it can create its own melodies how is it affected your songwriting um well for one I have a new language around music that I didn't have before because I'm not a musician I don't I know very very little about music theory so I understand minor chords and major chords and I can plunk out a few keys on the piano but my musical knowledge really ends there and now using a I am I'm writing my lyrics and my vocal melodies to the the actual music and using that as the source of inspiration so what are the key differences between the different platforms you've been using the key differences are usability Watson and magenta you've you've got to go and github and sort of unpack the developer language and I had to definitely brush up on my skills with the help of some of the engineers on these teams so I think that that's a potential barrier to entry with some of these tools is just that it does require some some coding knowledge ampere is I think the easiest it's front facing the interface is super simple and intuitive how did you find amber amber was the first one I found because there when I went online to search what tools are out there I knew I knew of Watson but at the time they hadn't released an open source or public facing software so I searched to see what else was available and the first article that came up my music focused on amber so I went to their website and it was super easy to use most AI programs kick out MIDI and MIDI is sort of like sheet music and that it's instructions for how a melody should be played it's not audio it's a protocol amber builds tracks from pre-recorded samples and spits out actual audio not MIDI data meaning there's something to listen to right away from there you can change the tempo the key or swap out instruments so you can start with something played in one style and change out the set of instruments for it completely different sound this audio can then be exported as a whole or as individual layers of instruments which are known as stems stems can then be modified further within a digital audio workstation so there are a couple of other AI music making platforms that are out there but what differentiates ampar for us we are like we've always focused on speed quality and control and control is a huge element especially as an artist what do you want to manipulate we're one of the few that you can manipulate you know tempo key in instrumentation you know you're like I don't like this piano I'd rather have a guitar do that or I want this other piano in place of that so it's a lot more of you working with it and then creating the final product from there what's the process then to get those sounds into ampère we own all our own audio content we sample all our own instruments note by note because we want artists to be able to manipulate that so I have to record a guitar every note every possible thing it can do so that we can recreate a performance from that versus having a loop because we don't use loops in anything whatsoever everything is note to note terrons album doesn't just rely on artificial intelligence she also works with other humans including her producer Ethan they invited me to one of their recording sessions for her song new world so I could see how producers work with AI in the studio I like that with the AI material that you are given new ideas that you wouldn't come with up with on your own but that you still have the freedom to shape those ideas into something that makes sense to you so there's still creative expression involved and the end result still feels like something that represents me and Taryn and so I like that to get a sense of the difference between wearing AI song starts and the finished product here is an early ampere export and here is the final arrangement by Tara a lot of times when other musicians come in that have done a demo on a guitar they come in they lay down that guitar track and then we talk about what do we want to build upon that whereas in this case Taryn is coming in with her guitar is Vai so she presents that and then we talk about well what what do we see this turning into and then we can add elements around that and and restructure it so it's still similar to the more traditional sense of artists coming in in many ways like music is the highest form of expression that humanity has it's like our last bastion last Bastian and I understand that and it does force change upon people in some form or another and maybe some of that will be bad like I like I said I can't predict the future I do think it's break people out of their comfort zones and potentially results in new forms of music which could be seen as negative for other forms of music like did did the rise of hip hop and EDM take away from pop it changed it changed it it changed it and now we infuse EDM and hip hop into top pretty pie right yeah and so I think we'll see something similar this video is presented by a loft hotel's different by design if you enjoyed this please 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