While Hatsune Miku‘s voice was still generated by a vocal synthesiser, the voices of today’s music avatars is produced by artificial intelligence. One particularly successful project is “ABBA Voyage”. Using sophisticated technology, avatars of the four ABBA members Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were brought to life on stage in London,…

While the first and second generations of virtual musicians required human singers to provide the vocals and studio bands to interpret the music, Vocaloid software, developed by Japanese synthesiser manufacturer Yamaha in the late 1990s, enabled the creation of purely computer-generated voices for the first time. This resulted in the creation of the music avatar…

The rise of generative AI has made it easy to create virtual musicians. Their look can be designed using AI, and the songs they perform and videos they appear in can be created using the right AI tools. However, the concept of virtual artists dates back much further than the recent rise of generative AI…

As we saw in part 14 of the series using the example of the AI company Anthropic, the music majors are already taking legal action against copyright infringements that they believe are taking place through the training and use of AI models. At the same time, however, they are also supporting projects such as the…

We saw in part 17 of the series that voice clones such as ‘Fake Drake’ raise copyright issues, although the legal situation in the US and the EU is different. However, deep fakes go far beyond copyright and can affect a person’s privacy and therefore their general personal rights. In this part of the series…

In mid-April 2023, there was a lot of excitement when the song “Heart on My Sleeve” appeared on the Internet and went viral. It features Canadian rap superstar Drake in a duet with his famous compatriot The Weeknd. Fans were already thinking that Drake had released a new song with a crazy new promotional campaign…

As we saw in part 15 of the series ‘AI in the Music Industry’, artificial intelligence will not have a copyright personality for the foreseeable future. However, it is being discussed that the output created by AI creates could be protected by a related or neighbouring right, as in the case of images (film and…

In 2017, something revolutionary happened, and yet hardly anyone took notice. In March of this year, the Luxembourg branch of the world’s oldest music collecting society, the Société des auteurs, compositeurs et éditeurs de musique (SACEM), for the first time recognised an AI as an author and registered the musical works it produced for use.…

As we have seen in previous parts of this blog series, AI applications are quickly reaching the limits of copyright law. This starts with training the AI with huge amounts of music data, continues with processing that data in the hidden layers of the AI, and ends with AI output such as voice clones. Copyright…

Text-to-music generators are an important development for user-friendly music creation, using simple commands (prompts) to tell the AIs what music to make, as we know from ChatGPT. Not only are new pieces of music created en masse by AIs, but also voice clones of superstars that are indistinguishable from the original. The most popular tools,…

Another company at the forefront of AI research and driving the transition from Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is Google and its parent company Alphabet. In particular, in the area of AI-generated music creation, Google created early AI applications with Magenta Studios, which ultimately opened the door to Artificial General Intelligence…

In 2023, Open AI’s “ChatGPT” caused a sensation. For the first time, AI has arrived at the heart of society and become accessible to the public. GPT technology is not only the basis of the popular chat bot, but is also used in the AI software “Jukebox”, which can compose music on its own without…

An important pioneer in AI music creation was François Pachet, who originally worked at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris before moving to the SONY Computer Science Laboratory to experiment with AI in music improvisation. Among other things, he created the first AI that could interact with jazz musicians on stage in real…

David Cope (see part 8 of the series) had already shown early on that it was possible to use artificial intelligence to imitate the compositional style of deceased musical greats. The next step was to take on greater challenges. To demonstrate the technical possibilities of AI, various projects have ventured to complete unfinished musical works.…

It has always been a dream of mankind that music would not only be produced by instruments played by musicians, but that machines would be able to create music on their own. As early as the 18th century, music boxes that could play well-known melodies were very popular, and composers in the rank of Mozart…

An early application of artificial intelligence is in production music. This involves the creation of music databases that can be used by producers of TV and feature films, commercials and games to acquire music at low cost. Another area of music production where AI has become indispensable is the mastering of music recordings, which used…

Spotify was one of the first streaming services to use AI technology to successfully persuade users to use its service. However, Spotify has also been accused of misusing AI to create fake artists in order to get a bigger slice of the streaming pie. The misuse of AI to manipulate music streams is the dark…

One of the most important applications of artificial intelligence in the music industry is music recommendation in music streaming services such as Spotify. The history of music recommendation goes back to the early 2000s, when LastFM’s Audioscobbler and Pandora’s Music Genome Project transformed internet radio into music streaming.

Music recognition was one of the first applications of artificial intelligence. Music recognition software therefore belongs to the first or second wave of AI technology in the 2010s, which also saw the development of well-known chatbots such as Siri or Alexa. It therefore corresponds to ‘weak AI’ or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI), which has been…

Music recognition was one of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence in the music industry. Back in the early 2000s, AI was being used to identify songs and categorise genres. The pioneers in this field were the open-source project MusicBrainz and the companies Gracenote, Shazam and SoundHound. Here is the story of these four pioneers…