My thrilling creative journey from Atari to DALL·E 2

My obsession with sounds and digital music making began at age 18.

I grew up dabbling in digital music as a teenager using Windows 3 series and softwares that I could lay hands on. Back in the early 90s, I was spending hours on my computer and visiting my friend's studio to use analog synthesisers, drum machines, and recording equipment.?

Even for a pro like him, it was a laborious process that required a lot of time and effort to produce even a single piece of decent sound.

In 1989, a company called Digidesign released a Mac product called Sound Tools. This was a computer-based stereo digital audio recorder that featured non-destructive editing. This concept — where you can cut, copy, paste, move around and process the recording without affecting the original audio — was a huge leap in music production.

The 1990s would prove pivotal for the music industry as analog gave way to digital, affecting all corners of the music world. On the consumer end, cassettes gave way to CDs and eventually MP3 files and CD-Rs burned on personal computers.

1990 also brought the arrival of the third generation of Macintosh music ware enabling many new concepts such as the use of internal computer cards for direct-to-hard-disk recording systems and MIDI sequencers with 512 channels and could incorporate digital audio tracks.

It turns out both AR Rahman (ARR) and I were dabbling with the same tech around the same time, on the equipment, from similar makeshift studios.

His path breaking movie Roja broke music barriers while I changed gears to pursue traditional survival technique - focus on engineering studies.

?That’s when programs like Pro Tools, Cubase, and Logic Pro allowed people like ARR to record, edit, and mix audio entirely within a computer. These early DAWs were limited in their capabilities, but they provided a level of flexibility and convenience that had never been seen before.

Even though you had lots of vivid imagination, putting all this together needed lots of skill.

My midlife and The Mac era?

The obsession with creative tools in my youth led to continued dabbling in tech as an engineer and weekend hobbyist? — much of which has been focused on using audio technology to satiate my creative urge.

From the beginning Apple was the computer for artists and musicians. PC’s with Windows and mainframes running UNIX were for businesses and crunching numbers.

When Apple acquired Emagic in 2002, the company’s co-founder, Gerhard Lengeling, moved to California to take on a new role as senior director of software engineering (music applications). Within a couple of years, Lengeling and his team had developed Logic 6, but also another entirely new DAW.

Apple and Steve Jobs announced Garage Band in his keynote speech at the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco on January 6, 2004. Musician John Mayer assisted with its demonstration.

Suddenly, Garageband let anyone from a veteran sound engineer to a novice teenager cut a track that’s professional-sounding enough to make it directly onto the radio — which it often does.

Today my niece and nephew (12 and 11 years old, respectively) along with many of their friends, are expressing their creative sounds using a MacBook using GarageBand and Ableton Live with ease. I envy them so much. These same sounds would have required years of professional training and at least $10K worth of software and hardware when I was their age.

The Mac (DAW) is to them what the complicated analog setup with cassette player was to me.? Because it exists, a generation of sounds are being put out that might not have been otherwise.

The generative AI era

Through the lens of my own experiences, I’m constantly on the lookout for new technology that could further democratise creativity and usher in the next wave of sound making and storytelling.

Few things have grabbed my attention like generative AI.

Generative AI refers to machine learning algorithms that enable computers to use existing content like text, audio, video, images, and even code to automate the creation of entirely new pieces of content.

In simpler words, the promise of generative AI is it lets anyone create using their imagination, not technical skill.

I’m finding myself once again obsessed by what this technology could enable, and spending as much time as I can learning and building for it.

Today, the technology is nascent. And in many ways it’s over-hyped, which makes it very easy to dismiss, or even despise (much like the Mac in 1990s). But I encourage you to play around with it yourself, and form your own opinion. The more time I spend with it, the more I am convinced that the next wave of creative expression will be powered by the work being done today with diffusion models and machine learning.

The prompt in DALL.E 2 app created this banner image.

DALL.E 2: ‘Generate an oil painting of a leader who can calm things around and usher in world peace’?

Or AIVA.ai creating a melody based on cues:

Welcome to the new world.