Generative Music: Humans & Computers as Co-Composers

The time is almost here: The band AIC/DC will soon perform in front of their largest audience yet. The anticipation and excitement during rehearsals have reached their peak – until, on the day of the gig, the lead guitarist is struck by a moment of panic. The piece "Datastruck," which is supposed to be played in E minor, had been practiced entirely in D minor by mistake. There isn’t enough time to manually transpose the notes, and the gig is far too important to improvise.

Thankfully, the drummer has a brilliant idea. He remembers a solution a colleague had recently mentioned: Generative Music.

????An Insight into Generative Music: Symbol- and Audio-Based Approaches

During our monthly team talks, where we discuss current topics or creative presentations as part of our "Science Slam," we recently had the chance to learn something fascinating from our colleague Ingrid: how artificial intelligence can compose or even create entirely new music.

We first learned about so-called "symbol-based generative music." This technology focuses on musical notation and works with various formats like MusicXML, LilyPond, MIDI, or piano rolls. While symbol-based music needs to be rendered as audio or played by musicians to be heard, it offers incredible flexibility for editing and adapting compositions to individual styles.

Ingrid shared an example with us: Using the MusicLang model, she composed the first 10 bars of the classic "Take Five." The piece was programmed and then played back using a computer tool. It sounded impressively authentic, just like "Take Five"!

??From Prompts to Entire Songs: Audio-Based Generative Music

But AI can do even more. Beyond composing notes, it is now capable of generating entire songs, including vocals and instruments, from scratch. Audio-based generative music, such as sound generation with tools like SUNO, makes it possible to create complete songs based on simple text prompts.

At the end of the team talk, things got creative: We used SUNO to generate a song about national accounting in Arabic with just a simple instruction. The result was an amazingly original track – listen to it here: ??????? ??????? by @forebodingdj991 | Suno

The advancements in generative music demonstrate just how far technology has come. From symbolic notation to direct sound generation, there are now numerous possibilities to reshape the world of music. And who knows, maybe generative music will one day save your next big performance too!