Google Music Generation

 And more.

Google’s AI music generator is like ChatGPT for audio

It can write 5-minute songs based on short text prompts.

By Kristin Houser, April 17, 2023

Google has unveiled an advanced AI music generator that can turn a snippet of text into a song — but legal concerns might prevent the tech giant from ever sharing it with the public.

The AI revolution: ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and other advanced AIs capable of generating impressive text or images in response to user prompts exploded in popularity in 2022, but they weren’t the first generative AIs, nor the only examples of what the neural networks can do.

Several companies have also trained AIs to generate music in response to text, audio, or image prompts — OpenAI, the research firm behind ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, even released an AI music generator called “Jukebox” back in 2020.

These systems haven’t been as enthusiastically embraced as their text- and image-generating counterparts, though, mainly because their outputs aren’t as impressive — most are low-fidelity, simplistic, and lacking in traditional song structures, such as repeating choruses.

What’s new? Music-making AIs are getting better, though, and perhaps the most impressive example of the technology is MusicLM, an AI music generator unveiled by Google in January 2023.  ... ' 

An AI Drummer Robot

ACM NEWS

Meet The Band's New Drummer: Keirzo the Robot

By The Lighthouse, Macquarie University (Australia),  March 30, 2023

Macquarie University's Richard Savery playing along with Keirzo the drummer robot. 

Macquarie University's Richard Savery said Keirzo the drummer robot learns from human musician; "Through inbuilt microphones, it listens to drummers, and then it tries to adjust the way it plays."

Keirzo is a vaguely humanoid-shaped construction with ear-like sound inputs, a speaker where a mouth might be and a range of motor-driven robotic 'arms,' some fitted with drumsticks, others with a small round rubber mallet.   Keirzo's music - including rap lyrics - is produced entirely by the robot, says Richard Savery, who is a developer of artificial intelligence and robotics in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature, and a professional saxophonist, clarinettist and flautist.

"It listens, it plays, and behaves just like a collaborating musician on stage, responding to the human members of the band," Savery says.

"It's all AI underneath and a whole bunch of different deep learning elements.

"And while I don't have to pay Keirzo – robots cost a lot to make and maintain and train. Everything is an expensive process."

From The Lighthouse, MacQuarie University (Australia)

View Full Article   

Google’s new AI turns Text into Music

Have not followed this up as yet, but quite interesting, will.  Note this is not yet publicly released/supported, but a demo for 'future research'.   (Added: Apparently due to copyright challenges) 

Google’s new AI turns text into music   From TheVerge

The examples the company has shared are music to my ears.

By Mitchell Clark

Song of the bots. Illustration: The Verge

Google researchers have made an AI that can generate minutes-long musical pieces from text prompts, and can even transform a whistled or hummed melody into other instruments, similar to how systems like DALL-E generate images from written prompts (via TechCrunch). The model is called MusicLM, and while you can’t play around with it for yourself, the company has uploaded a bunch of samples that it produced using the model.

The examples are impressive. There are 30-second snippets of what sound like actual songs created from paragraph-long descriptions that prescribe a genre, vibe, and even specific instruments, as well as five-minute-long pieces generated from one or two words like “melodic techno.” Perhaps my favorite is a demo of “story mode,” where the model is basically given a script to morph between prompts. For example, this prompt:   ...  (more at the link above) 

Deep Learning Could Bring 3D Concert Experience Home

 New Realism in concerts

DEEP LEARNING COULD BRING THE CONCERT EXPERIENCE HOME  in IEEE 

The century-old quest for truly realistic sound production is finally paying off

QI “PETER” LIYIN DING  JOREL OLAN

OW THAT RECORDED sound has become ubiquitous, we hardly think about it. From our smartphones, smart speakers, TVs, radios, disc players, and car sound systems, it’s an enduring and enjoyable presence in our lives. In 2017, a survey by the polling firm Nielsen suggested that some 90 percent of the U.S. population listens to music regularly and that, on average, they do so 32 hours per week.

Behind this free-flowing pleasure are enormous industries applying technology to the long-standing goal of reproducing sound with the greatest possible realism. From Edison’s phonograph and the horn speakers of the 1880s, successive generations of engineers in pursuit of this ideal invented and exploited countless technologies: triode vacuum tubes, dynamic loudspeakers, magnetic phonograph cartridges, solid-state amplifier circuits in scores of different topologies, electrostatic speakers, optical discs, stereo, and surround sound. And over the past five decades, digital technologies, like audio compression and streaming, have transformed the music industry.

And yet even now, after 150 years of development, the sound we hear from even a high-end audio system falls far short of what we hear when we are physically present at a live music performance. At such an event, we are in a natural sound field and can readily perceive that the sounds of different instruments come from different locations, even when the sound field is criss-crossed with mixed sound from multiple instruments. There’s a reason why people pay considerable sums to hear live music: It is more enjoyable, exciting, and can generate a bigger emotional impact.

To hear the author's 3D Soundstage audio for yourself, grab your headphones and head over to 3dsoundstage.com/ieee.

Today, researchers, companies, and entrepreneurs, including ourselves, are closing in at last on recorded audio that truly re-creates a natural sound field. The group includes big companies, such as Apple and Sony, as well as smaller firms, such as Creative. Netflix recently disclosed a partnership with Sennheiser under which the network has begun using a new system, Ambeo 2-Channel Spatial Audio, to heighten the sonic realism of such TV shows as “Stranger Things” and “The Witcher.”

There are now at least half a dozen different approaches to producing highly realistic audio. We use the term “soundstage” to distinguish our work from other audio formats, such as the ones referred to as spatial audio or immersive audio. These can represent sound with more spatial effect than ordinary stereo, but they do not typically include the detailed sound-source location cues that are needed to reproduce a truly convincing sound field.

We believe that soundstage is the future of music recording and reproduction. But before such a sweeping revolution can occur, it will be necessary to overcome an enormous obstacle: that of conveniently and inexpensively converting the countless hours of existing recordings, regardless of whether they’re mono, stereo, or multichannel surround sound (5.1, 7.1, and so on). No one knows exactly how many songs have been recorded, but according to the entertainment-metadata concern Gracenote, more than 200 million recorded songs are available now on planet Earth. Given that the average duration of a song is about 3 minutes, this is the equivalent of about 1,100 years of music. ... 

Up Tempo Music for Sales

Creating sales environments.  Experimented with. 

Can up-tempo music move shoppers to buy more green goods?

by Tom Ryan  in Retailwire

New university research finds up-tempo, major mode music can offer a way for green companies to overcome the consumer “attitude-behavior gap” where what consumers say differs from what they actually do.

Researchers from the University of Bath noted that studies have shown that about 30 percent of consumers claim to care about brand ethics but that a mere three percent translate their words into action. A similar number claim to care about green consumption but only five percent purchase green products.

Their research found major mode music was effective in reducing the attitude-behavior gap by 40 percent to 50 percent. The reason was attributed to the type of music being associated with positive emotions (i.e., happiness, joy) while minor mode music is linked with negative emotions (i.e., sadness, anger).

Since fast tempo music similarly tends to generate positive feelings, the research suggests the attitude-behavior gap is smallest when major mode music is played at a quick tempo.

Music has been found to be processed by the same parts of the brain responsible for emotion and memory, often elevating an emotional response when used in advertising or on selling floors. The reaction, however, can be positive or negative depending on the context and sound.

A study that came out earlier this year from Nanyang Technological University found consumers associated higher-pitched commercials with healthier food products.

At the store level, a university study from 2017 found people buy more in crowded stores if the sound system is playing a fast-paced song rather than a ballad. The study’s advice: “Consider Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga if aisles are packed.”

Many grocers, however, broadcast light music under a theory that minor and downtempo music tends to support more thoughtful browsing.

“In retail, it’s common knowledge that if people walk slower, they see more, which is more likely to trigger them to buy more,” Dr. Megan Phillips, senior lecturer of retailing at Auckland University of Technology’s department of marketing, recently told New Zealand’s Stuff. “They might see something they forgot, or something might be tempting (i.e., a deal too good to turn down).”

Augmented Reality for the Ears: Sharing Music

Don't do this, but idea is interesting.  Might also be used to share presentations and comments on them.

Augmented Reality Is Coming for Your Ears, Too

By Wired, August 20, 2021

Sharing your earbuds with somebody is, in every important aspect, gross. There must be a compelling reason to want to wedge another person's waxy nub into your external auditory meatus. Such as love, or an unbearably long flight with no other options (the two are not mutually exclusive). Or a shared experience that demands, in some way, that two or more people hear the same audio tracks simultaneously.

For entrepreneur Jonathan Wegener, it was a culmination of events that led him to build a new app that requires shared AirPods. Back in the early 2010s, when Wegener was building the memory app TimeHop, he was also digging Improv Everywhere's Mp3 Experiments in New York, a "participatory audio experience" that delivered coordinated movement instructions to thousands of people wearing headphones. He deemed the Mp3 Experiment "mind-blowingly cool," both private and communal: A voice whispering in your ear, a sense of camaraderie with strangers as you participate in the same public performance.

Then, several years later, Apple's AirPods came out, and Wegener, like millions of others, was stunned by the effortless, wireless audio they offered. He watched two friends in Greece, a couple, split a pair of AirPods so they could listen to music together.

So he started building his next thing: PairPlay, a clever if obvious play on Apple's "AirPlay." It's an iOS app that guides partners, friends, or kids through imagined scenarios within their own homes. It's part of a larger trend in which audio-focused entrepreneurs are taking advantage of a perfect storm of technology—from increasingly sophisticated processors to sensors that track people's movements to personal devices that can deliver remarkably good sound.

From Wired   View Full Article 

Focus Music

Amazon Alexa Music has been pushing what they call 'Focus Time Music'   With claims for 'perfect sound when you are studying, working, reading or writing '.   They just suggested the idea to me.  Something I have tried myself for years, with playlists, particular artists, etc.    For me its jazz.   Does it really work?  More than other methods.   Seems you could do some controlled  experiements,anyone know of any?  How about taking that to creativity?   Here is what they write about it. 

Consider the Flow, Tempo and Rhythm of Process

Had been looking at how different streams of work and delivery could be combined and transferred between  flows and tasks?    And had some time ago thought of the analogy of the combination of streams of music, rhythm, tempo and other musical measures and ideas.   Now discovered the Algoriddim system.   Could this be taken beyond music? Say to process flow and results?

Algoriddim’s Djay Pro AI can transfer vocals and rhythms between songs
JEREMY HORWITZ@HORWITZ JUNE 18, 2020 7:04 A

Algoriddim’s live DJ mixing and editing app — Djay Pro — has been a standout on iPads, iPhones, and Macs for years, enabling users to slow songs down, speed them up, scratch them, and blur them together with ease. Today, the company is evolving the iOS version of the app with AI features, using a trained neural network to transfer one song’s vocals or rhythms to another track in real time.

Djay Pro previously focused on synchronizing the speeds of two different tracks, rebalancing their volume levels or equalization and playing with each song as it “spun” on a virtual turntable. Algoriddim’s new Neural Mix feature goes deeper, isolating and pulling out vocals (a trick best suited to hip hop tracks) or percussive/harmonic components (ideal for electronic music). DJs can use the AI-powered feature to create background-free a cappella tracks or voice-free instrumentals from existing songs or place one song’s words on another’s background.  .... " 

Amazon can now find Acoustic A capella Versions of Songs

This struck me as interesting,   have followed the way musical pieces are classified, combined and described online.   In fact have had much trouble with systems like Alexa and Google Home, and voice search within their systems .    Even a slight 'mistake' in the voice description, which would be easily understood by a human musician, often  stymies the search leading to more wasted attempts.   This combined with slight mispronunciation of terms adds to the complexity of search.

Amazon can now find a cappella and acoustic versions of songs   By Kyle Wiggers in Venturebeat

Just over a year after Alexa gained the ability to announce titles and artists before songs play, Amazon’s voice assistant today gained a range of new music-focused features powered by AI and machine learning. With any luck, they’ll make it easier to request specific versions of a song or album or ask for music by language.

Starting today in the U.S. in the Amazon Music app for iOS or Android and on Echo devices, Alexa users with an Amazon Music account can request a cappella, live, remastered, remix, lullaby, deluxe, acoustic, instrumental, compilation, or kids’ renditions of songs, artists, and genres. Saying commands like “Alexa, play the Con Calma remix” or “Alexa, play live J. Cole songs” kicks off the search for an alternative recording. Alternatively, while a song is playing, asking “Alexa, play the acoustic version of this” switches to the requested version.

Amazon says that Amazon Music customers with Echo devices in the U.S. will also now hear a “more natural” version of Alexa’s voice when she introduces music, including curated content like playlists and stations, or when music is requested by mood, genre, lyric, and more. Additionally, language-based requests on Amazon Music have expanded to support over 60 languages, including Vietnamese, Persian, Nigerian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Maori, Icelandic, and more, allowing listeners to combine an era or genre with their preferred language. And artists including The Weeknd, Justin Bieber, and Selena Gomez will announce their newest releases and hits on Amazon Music instead of Alexa for a limited time.

The enhancements follow the launch of Alexa’s Song ID, an opt-in feature that lets Echo smart speaker users ask Alexa to announce the title and artist name before each song plays. At the time, Amazon pitched it as a music, station, playlist, and chart discovery service for Alexa users, who it said ask Alexa devices “hundreds of thousands” of questions per day to find out more about the music they’re hearing. ... "

Musical Octaves Are Learned

A bit of knowledge about how the brain works in context.   Gives us a hint about how to use the broad biomimicry we like to use to build our own intelligence models.  But is there something in the architecture of the brain that makes us more likely to learn octaves?   So our experiences are molded into a particular sensing.    Reminds me of the many 'optical illusions' where where we can experience things that are not there.  Good article at the link.

Perceptions of Musical Octaves Are Learned, Not Wired in the Brain
Singing experiments with residents of the Bolivian rainforest demonstrate how biology and experience shape the way we hear music.

In the lowlands of Bolivia, the most isolated of the Tsimané people live in communities without electricity; they don’t own televisions, computers or phones, and even battery-powered radios are rare. Their minimal exposure to Western culture happens mostly during occasional trips to nearby towns. To the researchers who make their way into Tsimané villages by truck and canoe each summer, that isolation makes the Tsimané an almost uniquely valuable source of insights into the human brain and its processing of music.

Most studies about music perception examine people accustomed to Western music, so only a few enclaves like these remote Tsimané villages allow scientists to make comparisons across cultures. There they can try to tease apart the effects of exposure to music from the brain’s innate comprehension of it — or at least start dissecting the relationship between the two. “We need to understand that interplay between our genes and our experience,” said Josh McDermott, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the senior author of a recent paper involving the Tsimané in the journal Current Biology which suggests that a feature of music most of us might consider to be intrinsic — the perceived organization of musical pitches into octaves — is a cultural artifact.   .... '

(Update) Comments on: Echo Auto Gets an Unexpected Ad Stream (Update): Free with a Buick

( Update:  I was mistaken below. the music and station formats you get depends upon the name of the subscriber.    So you can ensure your get a full subscription by installing the device in the same name.   Also Ads are then also gone.   The installation and maintenance of Alexa Smart Home is still too obscure,   for something that claims to border on intelligence.     A very astute and friendly Amazon call center person led me through the process )  ....

Been now using the Auto Echo for several months, this lets you connect with the Echo infrastructure cheaply from most cars.  The capability was advertised as providing the same Alexa environment you got at home, including smart home connections.    It works fairly well via a smartphone Echo App.

In just the last few days Amazon has started to insert amazon Advertising into the requested music stream, even for unlimited music subscribers.    Most requests for genre or even more specific music are converted into a 'station' request.   So the channel then includes advertising, fairly often in my estimation.   This is quite annoying, especially if you are paying for and expecting advertising-free streaming music, as I am.

In some cases I can buy directly by voice, adding more interaction delay.   Even Playlist requests convert into Stations, sometimes stretching the 'radio'  definition.    At home requests for music than come from Prime or Unlimited music come advertising-free as they always have been.   Station requested from Tunein or IHeartRadio seem to be working as before, with no additional ads.

I assume this addition of ads pays for the new auto infrastructure.  But the overall impression is negative.   I  pay extra for advertising-free, but now I get ads.    Its obvious that playlists and genres are being reinterpreted to get more ads to me.   The experience with Echo Auto is good, but not completely seamless.   This additional intrusion into the channel will not help sell it. 

I'd like to see Amazon's view of this.

Update:  I see that Echo Auto devices are being given out free with Buick automobiles in a promotion now.    Assuming these are being used to promote the use of Alexa infrastructure.  Again the way they work, interspersing Amazon ads,  would cheapen the gift,  if the promotion devices work the same way.

Ticketing with a Blockchain

Interesting example of a kind of smart contract embedded in the blockchain to enforce agreements regards how tickets can be used.    So this means when a ticket is sold, if you can examine the context of the sale.    The ticket as redeemed it can be checked as to that context.

From the Hewlett Packard Enterprise:

Rock and roll and blockchain
Musicians get a lot of revenue from their live performances, but they lose income due to things like scalpers and ticket scams. So musician Jason Robert is creating a blockchain-based event ticketing platform to cut down on fraud, reduce price gouging, and help maintain the health of the live entertainment industry.

As a professional musician, Jason Robert has played in venues around the world, including Bonnaroo and the Newport Folk Festival. He opened for The Roots, and wrote songs for shows on NBC, ABC, Fox, Showtime, and Netflix. .... 

Q: What problems are there with live-event ticketing?
A: A lot of people are taking money, almost literally, out of the pockets of musicians. These days, artists get a lot of their revenue from live performances, but scalpers and tickets scams are getting money that should go to them. And that's a major, major problem.
The problems have to do with the primary and secondary ticket markets. If fans are lucky, they can buy tickets in the primary market. But that doesn't happen very often. Something like 50 percent of the primary market tickets are withheld from the general public. Brokers, scalpers, and bots buy up a large percentage of these tickets in the primary market. That creates the illusion of a sellout, which artificially pumps up the price on the secondary market. So a scalper may have purchased a ticket for $50, but it ends up on third-party websites for some crazy mark-up, like $150. Fans are forced to pay that because there's no more inventory left. And none of the markup for those tickets goes to the musicians or the music industry. It mostly goes to brokers and scalpers.
Not only that, but upwards of 20 percent of tickets sold on secondary market platforms are fraudulent. A broker, scalper, or nefarious reseller will buy a ticket, then create a fake PDF version of it. They’ll list that PDF on several secondary market platforms that don't talk to one another, whose databases don't know the inventory. Maybe one of those tickets is legit, but the others are frauds.
Q: How do you hope to solve the problem?

A: We’re working on a blockchain-based event ticketing platform which will enable event organizers and musicians to program the rules that govern the behavior of the ticket. For example, they can set a cap on how much the ticket can be sold for on the secondary market. In fact, they could restrict secondary market sale all together. So, if an artist wants to sell a ticket for $10 and have zero secondary market, they can do that. Also, by setting the terms of engagement, artists could get additional revenue if they allow a percentage markup on the secondary market and require that they get some of that money.

On the platform, everyone can see the transactions that happen on the blockchain. So, as a fan, I can go online and could see how many hands it's passed through. I can see the original face value of the ticket. And I know the ticket is verified and authentic, because it can’t be digitally reproduced. That solves the problem I described earlier about fake PDFs. Also, because the ticket money circulates in the music industry instead of going to scalpers, the industry becomes more sustainable.

Another possible use for blockchain is rights attributions for creative works. If I'm an artist and I release a song and get it on some TV show, I can define the rules of how much the music supervisor pays for that song. I also can see in real time who is using that creative work, and I get paid instantly, as opposed to having to wait six months or sometimes a year.  .... "

Storing Data in Music

Intriguing idea, in theory not that hard.   Why might it be used?  A kind of Steganography?

Storing Data in Music 
ETH Zurich
By Fabio Bergamin

Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland have developed a method for embedding data in music in a way that is imperceptible to the human ear, and transmitting it to a smartphone. The researchers found that under ideal conditions, the technique can transfer up to 400 bits per second without the average listener noticing. The researchers used the dominant notes in a piece of music, overlaying each of them with two marginally deeper and two marginally higher notes that are quieter than the dominant note. The team also used the harmonics of the strongest note, inserting slightly deeper and higher notes there as well. The data is stored in these additional notes. Said ETH’s Simon Tanner, “What we’re doing is embedding the data in the music itself; transmitting data from the loudspeaker to the mic.”  .... ' 

Itunes Shutting Down, History and implications.

A favorite prof at Wharton discusses ITunes.  Long been interested in how the music industry has been changed by tech.

Game-changer to Digital Dustbin: Why iTunes Is Shutting Down

Wharton's Peter Fader and UT-Arlington's David Arditi discuss why Apple is shutting down iTunes. 

[Podcast] and transcript ....

If video killed the radio star, as the old song goes, then iTunes killed the record industry. Now, 18 years after Apple launched the music download store, the company announced that iTunes is shutting down.

During its Worldwide Developers Conference this week in San Jose, California, Apple announced iTunes will no longer exist as a digital jukebox but will be reformed into three separate apps for music, television and podcasts. While the change has been a long time coming —  sales of digital music downloads have dropped for six straight years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America  — it marks a significant shift in the company’s business model and in the kind of consumer behavior that Apple helped shape when it first opened the digital store in 2001. Music lovers were no longer bound to the full purchase of an album that was packaged and sold by a record label; they were free to buy single songs for 99 cents, which ushered in a new era of pick-and-choose consumption.

“iTunes is a cancer for the music industry. This was obvious 15 years ago … Good thing it will finally go away,” Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader wrote on Twitter. When Knowledge@Wharton asked him to explain his tweet on the K@W radio show on SiriusXM, Fader didn’t mince words. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)  ... "

MuseNet Writes Music

OpenAI does some things with generating music.     Back to the meaning of creativity, will we ultimately be able to tell?  I listened to a number of their examples, impressive.

MuseNet
We’ve created Musenet, a deep neural network that can generate 4-minute musical compositions with 10 different instruments, and can combine styles from country to Mozart to the Beatles. MuseNet was not explicitly programmed with our understanding of music, but instead discovered patterns of harmony, rhythm, and style by learning to predict the next token in hundreds of thousands of MIDI files. MuseNet uses the same general-purpose unsupervised technology as GPT-2, a large-scale transformer model trained to predict the next token in a sequence, whether audio or text.  ... " 

DJ's Spin Code

I changed the title,  they will likely not write code in the future, they will create algorithms by some interface other than 'writing code'.   Coding, as it has developed, is far too inefficient and error prone.

DJs of the Future Don't Spin Records—They Write Code
in Wired  By Michael Calore

Artists in the underground electronic music culture are performing live-coding shows or "algoraves," in which they program software algorithms to create new forms of music. Musicians synthesize individual sounds on their computers, then direct the software to string those sounds together based on a set of predefined rules; the end product has the artist's signature, but is algorithmically sculpted. When the same routine is run again, the song will sound familiar and contain the same elements, but the composition will be structured differently. Performances often are enhanced with screens displaying the running code as trippy visuals. A popular venue for this emergent art form is the Algorithmic Art Assembly, a two-day festival in San Francisco ..... "

Google Celebrates Bach Birthday with AI

Nicely done, with a basic description about how current AI systems work.   And some creative and playful Bach arrangements as well!   All guided by a learning database of 306 genuine Bach compositions.  All at the link.

Google writes:

Today we celebrate world renowned German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach with our first ever AI-powered Doodle! Made in partnership with the Google Magenta and Google PAIR teams, the Doodle is an interactive experience encouraging players to compose a two measure melody of their choice. With the press of a button, the Doodle then uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach’s signature music style (or a Bach 80's rock style hybrid if you happen to find a very special easter egg in the Doodle...:)). 

The first step in developing the Doodle? Creating a machine learning model to power it. Machine learning is the process of teaching a computer to come up with its own answers by showing it a lot of examples, instead of giving it a set of rules to follow as is done in traditional computer programming. The model used in today's Doodle was developed by Magenta Team AI Resident Anna Huang, who developed Coconet: a versatile model that can be used in a wide range of musical tasks—such as harmonizing melodies or composing from scratch (check out more of these technical details in today’s Magenta blog post).

Specifically, Coconet was trained on 306 of Bach’s chorale harmonizations. His chorales always have four voices, each carrying their own melodic line, while creating a rich harmonic progression when played together. This concise structure made them good training data for a machine learning model. 

Next came our partners at PAIR who used TensorFlow.js to allow machine learning to happen entirely within the web browser (versus it running utilizing tons of servers, as machine learning traditionally does). For cases where someone’s computer or device might not be fast enough to run the Doodle using TensorFlow.js, the Doodle is also served with Google’s new Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), a way of quickly handling machine learning tasks in data centers— yet another Doodle first!

These components, combined with art and engineering from the Doodle team, helped create what you see today.... "

AI Changing Music Industry

Better ways to re-use, enhance, even creatively construct to goals.   Sounds like a method we could use on data assets to improve their value.

How AI Is Changing the Music Industry
ABC News   by Katharine Gammon

Artificial intelligence (AI) is working its way into audio mastering through services like LANDR, which has enabled more than 2 million musicians to master 10 million songs since its launch in 2014. Traditionally, audio mastering requires a room with specialized acoustics, which enable a person to hear flaws in the music, remove glitches and crackles, and add loudness to make the sound fuller. However, experts say some aspects of mastering, like equalizing the loudness levels of different songs on a CD or matching the spectral content in bass and high frequencies, are easy to automate. Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Roger Dannenberg said computers could soon make an impact in music composition, but he sees a weakness in AI with regard to production, a more creative process in which the music is manipulated after it is recorded and decisions are made about mixing and arrangement. Dannenberg said, "A computer can write a pop tune, but you can't perform it and make an arrangement unless you get human performers and producers." ...

Wearable Music

New limits to music accessibility.

New wearable tech lets users listen to live music through their skin

It's inspired by deaf fans of live concerts to help them "feel" the music. By Jenifer Ouellette in Ars Technica

" ... The tech is called Music: Not Impossible (M:NI), and it's the brainchild of former Hollywood producer turned entrepreneur Mick Ebeling, founder and CEO of Not Impossible Labs. The user's kit includes two battery-powered wristbands, two ankle bands, and a harness that fits across the back and shoulders. It interfaces directly with a venue's sound system and sends electrical pulses (coordinated with colored LED lights) corresponding to various tracks in the music to the sensors against the skin. Lady Gaga, Hans Zimmer, and Pharrell are fans, with the latter declaring he had "felt the future" after trying M:NI out. The Las Vegas show was presented by Zappos Adaptive and the Church of Rock & Roll.  ... "

Beyond Musical Improvisation

Have always mused that improvisation should exist beyond music.   Business process extension that lead to better results?  Creative extension of the basic?  Note AI connection.   Real time aspects for business?  Here an example in the musical realm that lets you think about it.  Technical explanation and online demo at the link:

Piano Genie: An Intelligent Musical Interface

We introduce Piano Genie, an intelligent controller that maps 8-button input to a full 88-key piano in real time:

Piano Genie is in some ways reminiscent of video games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero that are accessible to novice musicians, with the crucial difference that users can freely improvise on Piano Genie rather than re-enacting songs from a fixed repertoire. You can try it out yourself via our interactive web demo! .... "