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During AEP's August quarterly partnership meeting, we discussed the positives, challenges and questions revolving around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the arts and how to use AI as a tool in art-making and teaching. During the presentation, questions were raised about how to use AI as an art-making medium and threading the line between artist appropriation and personal creative thinking.

Nettrice Gaskins, a working artist who predominately uses AI in her work, suggested that AI is like remixing music which uses a machine to change an existing piece of music to create something new. Another comparison was made between AI art and photography. At the time of its invention, photography was a revolutionary and unknown medium that was discounted for its seeming lack of artistry. However, photography is a medium that requires practiced technical skill from the artist to capture beautiful and thought-provoking images. AI will change the art sphere and it will take time for others to learn how to use the technology effectively. However, it is a tool, just like photography and remixing. Gaskins described her art-making process, one that she has been perfecting since 2016, and explained how her art has progressively improved through exploring different specific prompts that she feeds into AI generators. Gaskins explained that she had a clear picture of what she was looking for in her art and through inputting specific prompts, she was able to create the work of art she had envisioned. Over time, she also began teaching the AI system what she looks for in her work, and it was learning along with her. AI grows with the artist.

Camille Dempsey, a professor of educational technology at Pennsylvania Western University, proposed that using AI in schools is a necessary step forward to increase student knowledge in technology. AI and technology are not leaving anytime soon. There is a growing number of companies who are using and producing AI tools. As educators, we should be prepared to use technology in new ways that reflect the use of technology in the wider world. There are resources available - such as ISTE - to help educators to learn to integrate AI into their programs.

Since AI can be considered a tool, there are also ways of using it incorrectly. Artists can masterfully use AI generators to create personal works of art. However, this also means that there are people who can otherwise exploit artists and plagiarize their work for personal use. To protect artists, there should be heavy consideration on how we regulate the use of AI. To enforce and promote AI regulation, students should also be taught how to use AI effectively and responsibly. Without educators actively teaching and promoting responsible ways of using AI, students will grow up without vital information about how to interact with this growing technology.

There are still many unknowns about the future of AI and arts education. However, by changing the mindset from seeing AI as an unnecessary evil to instead using AI as a tool to promote new ways of thinking, creativity and learning, we will be able to unlock the full potential of AI responsibly.

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Artificial Intelligence and Arts Ed: A Recap From AEP's Quarterly Partnership Meeting - Arts Education Partnership

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During AEP's August quarterly partnership meeting, we discussed the positives, challenges and questions revolving around the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the arts and how to use AI as a tool in art-making and teaching.

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Use of Artificial intelligence generates questions about the future of art

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Artificial intelligence is everywhere and part of our conversations about education, politics and social media. It's also a hot topic in the arts world as programs that generate art using AI are widely available to the public. But what goes into these programs, and the work that comes out, are heavily debated. Jeffrey Brown explores the influence of AI for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz:
Artificial intelligence, or A.I., is everywhere. It's now part of our conversations about education and politics and social media. It's also become a hot topic in the art world.

Programs that generate art using A.I. are widely available to the public and are skyrocketing in popularity. But what goes into these programs and the work that comes out are heavily debated in the arts community.

Jeffrey Brown explores the influence of A.I. on art, and where it may be headed next. It's part of our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown:
Anadol's artworks are made in a Los Angeles studio in which computers, software programs, screens and a 3-D printer with a giant robotic arm replace more traditional artist's materials.

Here, he and a team, including computer and data scientists, engineers, researchers, architects and designers, build enormous data sets requiring huge computing power - you can't do this at home - and run them through or train A.I. programs they themselves have created.

The input can vary. Right now, at New York's Museum of Modern Art, Anadol has created a piece titled Unsupervised created from images, research and other data from the museum's entire archives. In another example back at his studio, the input is a whole lot of flowers.

This is your brush in this case.

Jeffrey Brown:
It's the stuff of sci-fi, yes, but art and technology have been connected and debated forever, including in the early decades of photography.

Dhyandra Lawson is an assistant curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, known as LACMA.

Dhyandra Lawson, Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Photographs were dismissed and marginalized from fine art discourse. It's because of the president of the apparatus, the machine, the camera, right, which people had claimed, critics claimed, took away the artist's special hand.

Jeffrey Brown:
Access, that is, for everyone, including to a new kind of artmaking on A.I.-generating apps available to the wider public, offered by companies such as Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and a proliferation of others, which allow the artist in each of us to create an artwork through simple prompts.

It's easy and fun, but has also raised a host of new questions. Last year, for example, an A.I.-generated work won a prize at the Colorado State Fair, outraging other contestants. And some artists, like Molly Crabapple, see another, more urgent threat.

Molly Crabapple, Artist and Author: I see a world where illustrators like me, people who make our living drawing pictures, are completely replaced by these apps because they can make images faster and cheaper than any human possibly can.

And, even worse than that, this generative A.I. was trained on our stolen images.

Jeffrey Brown:
Artist Refik Anadol agrees with such concerns. His work, he points out, differs from widely available apps, in that he and his team generate their own data sets and take care with their sources, what is sometimes referred to as ethically sourced data.

He remains a big believer in the future of this technology. He's convinced that the work going into his art, for example, the mapping of coral reefs, can help with environmental and a host of other big problems in the world.

But, he cautions:

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Use of artificial intelligence generates questions about the future of art

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Artificial intelligence is everywhere and part of our conversations about education, politics and social media. It's also a hot topic in the arts world as programs that generate art using AI are widely available to the public. But what goes into these programs, and the work that comes out, are heavily debated.

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“Artificial Intelligence and the Arts: Toward Computational Creativity” by professor and researcher Ramón López de Mántaras

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Art Trend of 2022: How AI Art Emerged and Polarized the Art World

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AI art has been everywhere from social media to the cover fashion magazines to museum exhibitions. Take a look at history in the making this past year.

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The Washington Post's dance critic Sarah Kaufman takes a look back at the evolution of dance and technology through two of its spearheads: Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppiello, the founders of Troika Ranch, a performance group that merges electronic media and dance. Coniglio reflects on "Loopdiver," their 2009 piece that serves as inspiration for their current work in progress, "Swarm." (Video: Nicki DeMarco/The Washington Post)

In a live performance, technology typically plays the role of fairy godmother, dressing up the stage with wondrous special effects. But it's far more interesting when it plays God.

When technology is used to create the art, as opposed to simply jazz up the show, that's where innovation lies.

From pop concerts to ballet, high-tech effects are usually a secondary feature, worked into the design elements. You remember Beyonce interacting with an army of clones in her animation-enhanced performance of "Run the World (Girls)" at the 2011 Billboards Music Awards. That was a collaboration with media artist Kenzo Hakuta, a Sidwell Friends graduate who studied under video pioneer Nam June Paik.

Locally, French Canadian artist Liz Vandal brought state-of-the-art technology to bear on her fantastical computer-designed, custom-printed and laser-cut costumes for the Washington Ballet's "Alice (in Wonderland)" last spring.

But what about using technology not just to enhance art, but to generate it? Putting a processing chip into the role of choreographer is a whole different matter. Now we're getting at more complicated questions about how we relate to the digital world, about the balance of power between our machines and us.

In fact, the tensions that drive science fiction are no longer theoretical - they're real, at least on the experimental margins of the dance world.

In the case of Troika Ranch, a performance group that for nearly 20 years has merged electronic media, dance and theater, the latest bout of man vs. machine is being fought in two places at once: a garage in Portland, Ore., and a dance studio in Lausanne, Switzerland.

What the founders of Troika Ranch - choreographer Dawn Stoppiello, working in Portland, and composer Mark Coniglio, on a residency in Lausanne - hope to end up with is a performance that is entirely out of their control. It will be born onstage, spontaneously, through a two-step process involving cameras, computers and the abilities of specially trained dancers to react instantly to digital cues.

First, motion-sensor cameras in the theater will track the positions of individual audience members, then feed that information into a computer. The cameras, otherwise known as Kinect sensor devices, are the same ones that Microsoft sells for its Xbox 360 hands-free gaming system. You read that right: The equipment that lets Fruit Ninja aces whack watermelons with a sweep of the arm has galvanized the techies of postmodern dance. For around $150, experimental artists can get their hands on motion-capture capabilities similar to those that cost Hollywood millions to create, for example, Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" movies.

But back to the dance. The second step is more complicated: The audience images will trigger the software to choose snippets from a choreographed "graphic score," and send them to the dancers onstage. They won't know what sequence will come to them, or how many times they might have to repeat it, or at what speed. But their job will be to perform the score perfectly and without delay.

"It's impossible, of course," says Coniglio, "and that's where I believe something interesting will happen."

How will the dancers get the computer signals? Stoppiello and Coniglio are experimenting with head-mounted video screens or multimedia eyeglasses. As the dancers perform what Stoppiello calls "little atomic sequences of movement" in whatever order the devices tell them to, they, in effect, will become human iPod shuffles.

The work, which Stoppiello and Coniglio aim to finish this year, is tentatively titled "Swarm." Picture it as full-body gaming meets "virtual theater" glasses, plus a sophisticated hokey-pokey. Danced on the fly.

The new movements

What inspires Stoppiello and Coniglio is this: Technology is changing our habits, perhaps even our thinking - but most fundamentally, our bodies.

People no longer simply walk down the street. They walk while fiddling with their cell phones, "so their head is dropped down and they're walking without looking up, a start-stop kind of thing," says Stoppiello, 46, speaking - by cell phone, of course - from Portland. "The touch-screen physicality, that pinch and spread of the fingers, these gestures we do now that we didn't use to do: It's just like a vocabulary."

She and Coniglio, 52, have been investigating the body's relationship to technology since 1989, when they were students at the California Institute of the Arts. They formed Troika Ranch when they moved to New York in 1994. Formerly married, their artistic partnership continues. (True technophiles, they collaborate via Skype if they can't meet in person.)

In their early works, the body was central and digital media had a supporting role. To make this easier, Coniglio created the interactive performance software Isadora, named for modern-dance pioneer Isadora Duncan, which makes it possible to create and layer video and sound in real time. Since he began selling the program in 2003, thousands of artists have used it, he says, including the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Wooster Group, choreographer Bebe Miller and, most recently, director Francis Ford Coppola, with whom Coniglio has consulted for an interactive film.

But in 2007, with a piece called "loopdiver," "we completely changed the media-body relationship," says Stoppiello. "I had been watching videotape of myself being looped over and over, rehearsing, because I was using snippets of tape to teach how to use Isadora," and she started to wonder: Could she learn how to perform those endlessly repeating sections - live?

She and Coniglio created a five-minute performance, with choreography, lighting and music, and programmed the elements into Isadora. The software created loops of each element, stretching the performance to nearly an hour. Stoppiello and Coniglio showed the looped choreography to their dancers and told them to learn it - to replicate some 3,000 edits that the computer had made to the original flow of the dance.

The result: Dancers who stuttered and shook like animated GIFs of themselves, who in their slow, halting progress from one set of steps to another looked like they were trapped in a machine. "What you saw onstage," says Coniglio, speaking via Skype from a studio in Lausanne, "was the computer process in their body."

" 'Loopdiver' was all about the edit as an idea," says Stoppiello. "An edit can exist in video, but not in the body. We can't move from Point A to Point B without a transition and in zero time. But video and sound does it all the time. We've accepted the edit as just a part of life, but we never think about the fact that it's a lie. It's a behavior that humans cannot do."

Audience members often told her afterward that they empathized with the struggling performers.

"Loopdiver," Stoppiello says, emphasized the fact "that all of our technologies, all the rhythms of those machines, have changed us. They've changed our physicality and how we move in the world and our relationship with time.

"That's why I want to do this: There's more to discover in the world," she continues. "I want to use the computer to change how I choreograph. So that it intervenes in my process, and it doesn't let me just do what spills out of my head. Something I do with the computer disrupts that flow and causes me to do something I wouldn't do of my own accord."

Longtime followers of modern dance may recognize the ghost of Merce Cunningham in those comments. Cunningham, the revered dance experimenter who died in 2009 at 90, helped develop software in the late 1980s that allowed him to program digital stick figures to dance his steps. The software, originally called LifeForms, could also randomly reorder the steps. What Cunningham liked about asking the computer to shuffle his steps - similar to the "chance operations" he had used for years by flipping coins or rolling dice to rearrange sections of a dance - was that these means let him move beyond his own self-expression. Letting go of control, he believed, brought him closer to something spiritual.

"The feeling I have when I compose in this way is that I am in touch with a natural resource far greater than my own personal inventiveness could ever be," Cunningham once wrote. "Much more universally human than the particular habits of my own practice."

Coniglio and Stoppiello also speak of feeling a profound human connection through their use of machinery, but where their work departs from Cunningham's, they say, is that they are granting even more power to the computer.

"If you adopt a rigorous computer process - an inhuman process - into the work," says Coniglio, "then you have to make the work in a different way."

This has opened the door to that hard-to-find place in any art form: a new frontier.

The garage sessions

The Troika Ranch founders can go on and on about databases and lumens, and about Isadora and how it interfaces with another software program called NI Mate, and about how some mix can make all their interactive dreams come true.

But what does that have to do with any of us real folks?

Part of the answer lies in Stoppiello's garage. That's where she hosts an occasional "salon du garage," as she calls it, jokingly. She has been experimenting there with "Swarm." This December, as part of a master's degree program she is pursuing at George Washington University (it's called "low-residency," and she often communicates with instructors via Skype), she staged a performance that went like this: First, she cut a couple dozen pictures out of magazines, and with a partner, created a movement response to each picture. Then she brought in audience members, and told them to hang the pictures in whatever order they wanted on a clothesline that was strung around a square taped-off space on the floor.

"They could change the pictures as much as they wanted or not at all," says Stoppiello. She and the other dancer stood inside the square, and whatever picture was hung in front of them triggered their movement. Part of the game was seeing when the audience would figure out that the pictures they selected had an impact on the moves they saw. "Some people picked up on it really quickly, other people had no idea."

That's key. For all their use of technology, Stoppiello and Coniglio are most interested in what it reveals about our humanity. "Loopdiver," which was performed in small venues in Chicago, a few other U.S. cities and Berlin between 2009 and 2010, was at its core an intimate experience for both audience and dancers. (Troika Ranch will revive it this June in Moscow.)

"You had to see it very close up for it to have any meaning, and being that close to the audience was very moving," says Stoppiello.

That experience made her crave even more audience interaction, which prompted her to imagine how spectators' behavior, captured by the Kinect cameras, could trigger the way the dancers move in "Swarm."

"Is it possible to get the audience to start out knowing nothing, and will they ever make an association with their behavior and the results around them?" she asks. "We're very curious."

"The story is always in the people," says Coniglio, echoing her thoughts from an ocean away. "Always.

"I love computers; they are the clay that I build pots with," he continues. "But art is still about stories, and people are really good at that."

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he first half of Lifestyle of the Richard and Family is all too familiar theatrical content: the unhappy couple; the disaffected teenager; the dinner party; the secrets; the affair. The characters and beats come from a kind of theatre that steadfastly refuses to go out of style, no matter how stale it is.

But something is strange about the words coming from these mouths on stage. The sentences, while technically complete, veer off on weird tangents. There is no witty dialogue here; if the lines are funny it is because of their nonsense. But playwright Roslyn Helper can be forgiven. She wrote the play with the help of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a spectre that haunts the modern workforce. Some studies suggest up to 30% of people could lose their jobs to it. Driverless vehicles could see the end of truck drivers, robots could increasingly take over even complex manufacturing, personal assistants and customer support workers may be made redundant. Robots look set to judge gymnastics. Not content with the three options provided in reply emails in Gmail, Google will now even write a whole email for you.
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So if AI is the way of the future, is it the way of theatre?

Lifestyle, a play presented by Next Wave festival and Melbourne Knowledge Week, suggests not. The "artificial" of AI sits heavily on the work; it's amusing for its glitches rather than its sense. But as AI encroaches on our day to day lives, it will increasingly make its way into the art world. So how will it be used? And what does it mean for how we understand art?

AI is a learning system. To create AI artists, humans will need to select the information the system learns from. So while AI is nominally intelligent and separate from humans, its algorithms are built through the lens of human bias. We are currently seeing a distinct white male bias in AI. Not surprisingly, the history of western theatre is also one of white male bias.

Lifestyle isn't the only work in Next Wave to be thinking about this robot future. Bureau of Meteoranxiety is an installation piece acting as satire on contemporary mindfulness and self-care, and our disconnection from nature and fears about climate change. As part of the work, you are invited to talk with an AI chatbot, Gail, about your weather-based anxieties.

Roslyn Helper's play, Lifestyle of the Richard and Family, was written in part by artificial intelligence. Photograph: Snehargho Ghosh

While she often seems to answer a question that is slightly different from the one you actually asked, there is something strangely comforting about this discussion of weather. Yet Gail's female name (most chatbots, in a position of subservience, have female names) hides the male influences that have gone into her. In my discussion with her she quotes (uncredited) the work of male poets and then, gallingly, Donald Trump.

By using AI in this artistic context, the artists encourage us to view the technology through a critical lens. The Bureau, and Gail, feel like services people might very much want to use, but if we did, whose biases would we be fed? For that matter, whose biases exist in the AI we increasingly use? If AI becomes the artist, how will we know to look at who created the AI? Who is the creator's creator?

Singularity, part of Melbourne Knowledge Week, had perhaps the most pessimistic view of an AI future. Imagining an Australia in 2040, when most people dine alone, the audience was segregated into single eating booths and served by robots fulfilling "all of [our] nutritional and emotional needs". In fact, large wooden boxes hid the artists sitting inside these moving robots, feeding a person at one table a grey cube of jelly while serving the person sitting next to them an inscrutable progression of images via screens.

Lifestyle of the Richard and Family eventually reveals its origins in predictive text. Photograph: Snehargho Ghosh

But if this future was supposed to be an allegory for how robots will make our lives dull, it fell down at the first hurdle, as I watched audience members during the performance pull out their phones to amuse themselves. The technology of today has long surpassed the imagined technology of tomorrow.

Perhaps AI art is only as interesting insofar as you know what has gone into its creation. Little is said about how SwiftKey, the AI that co-wrote Lifestyle, was specifically used, but the strange beginning of the work pays off when Helper and director Harriet Giles break out of the mould of traditional theatre: the cast dance; screens show us the predictive text used to write the work; the world dissolves further and further into the creative imagination of performance - which can only ever be truly realised through human collaboration.

Next Wave has long held the edict of asking artists to be as ambitious as possible, so it is only natural that the artists of today, in their ambition, ask what AI can do for them. For the moment, the artists seem to be coming out on top.

Bureau of Meteoranxiety is showing in Melbourne until 19 May. NextWave festival runs until 20 May

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Since American Idol star and YouTube sensation Taryn Southern started composing music with AI in 2017, musicians all over the world have begun wondering about the implications of AI and modern technology where music production is concerned. Technology has long been an important part of the music industry, with artists utilising loop pedals and digital production software. But, if modern AI technology can now produce complete songs, is there a risk that human songwriters will become obsolete? Let's a closer look at the role of artificial intelligence in music.

What AI Means for Music

It's reported that Taryn Southern, an active VR/AR evangelist and keen sci-fi advocate, first looked to AI to help create music because she lacked knowledge about music theory. Instead of struggling to write the chords she could hear in her mind, she looked to technology for assistance.

The ability to use computer programming to communicate music is not a new one. The idea of the MIDI format (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was the brainchild of electronic musicians back in 1981. The initial idea was of a 'Universal Synthesizer Interface'; a program designed to translate musical data between instruments. Over the years MIDI files have developed into the widely used files that musicians and DJs still use today, to manipulate and translate music as required.

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It's this same computerisation of music that has enabled the use of 'AI' - or neural network technology - in the creation of music.

How Artificial Intelligence Generates Music

Music generating technology like Amper Music (as was used by Taryn), IBM Watson Beat, and Google Magenta's NSynth Super, has the ability to read and interpret audio samples or MIDI files to create something new.

For example, a user could tell the software what kind of music they want. They'd input information about a wealth of existing music, and the computer would analyse the data and 'strategically randomize' it to produce new pieces of music. The user could then instruct the software to change specific things, thereby teaching it more about the preferred outcome.

This AI technology works using a sort of reinforced learning technique. Once an answer or suggestion has been affirmed, it will remember this and learn from it to produce further pieces of music.

The Role of AI in Music: The Pros and Cons

Using artificial intelligence in the creation of music is perceived by some as a helpful tool and by others as almost 'the beginning of the end'.

Pros of AI

In Taryn's case, AI software enabled her to communicate melodies and chords that she didn't know how to put together herself. Taryn asked the computer program to generate music based on her requests in regards to style, and then tweaked it as necessary. It produced a tune, which she then altered to fit with her own lyrics and vocal melodies, editing it as many times as necessary. The end product was therefore a collaborative effort, rather than a piece entirely produced by technology.

Taryn's story has a distinctly positive feel that highlights the advantages of using AI in music production. For some, this kind of software can be an extremely helpful tool. It can serve as a source of inspiration, and as an ideal jumping off point should a musician be hit with writer's block.

Cons of AI

Conversely to seeing AI as a tool, some musicians consider AI to be hugely detrimental to the music scene. At the moment, because such technology is still so young, the music it's producing is not necessarily conducive to what we want to hear. In short, it's not of great quality. This means it can still take hours to develop a 'good' song, by which time many would argue that the user may as well have invested the time in creating something themselves. Those who have produced their own music, or even fans of authentic, artistic music, will also argue that a computer could never emulate the work (and human touch) of a true musician.

Music has been an integral part of the story of humankind for millennia; in fact, the first known piece of music is believed to be around 3,400 years old. Songs have long been used as a means of communicating messages and folk stories, encompassing everything from societal ethics to world history.

Because many people see music as such an innately human expression, it is often considered as too precious to impart onto technology. The thought of a computer generating a 'random' piece of music that hasn't been painstakingly created by an artist is almost seen as sacrilegious.

The Legalities

More food for thought is the implications of the law; i.e. who owns the music that the software produces? At the time of writing there are no set rules surrounding this, and in the case of Taryn Southern, it's reported that the ownership of each piece of music has been determined individually.

There's also the issue of copyright. Some users of AI music production software will feed the computer existing songs within their instructions, to serve as parameters for the software to use to create a new piece of music. While it won't produce an exact copy, it could be argued that a significant proportion of the generated song is already owned by another artist or production company.

What does AI mean for the future of music?

Regardless of which side of the argument you fall on, it seems likely that the use of AI in music production will only become more frequent. Our modern world is preoccupied with technological advancements. With Tesla's self-driving car on the horizon, and the development of AI machines that can beat professionals in games like chess, it seems inevitable that AI and machine learning will increasingly seep into just about all aspects of modern life.

Instead of shying away from the idea of this Black Mirror-esque future, the best approach to take is one of optimism and curiosity. While there are always bound to be diehard old school musicians who refuse to use tech, as there are readers who still refuse the Kindle, music producers should consider AI as something to be embraced.

AI music software is still very much in its infancy, but with more investors interested in the development and outcomes of such technology, and considering the rapid growth rate of other tech advances in recent years, it's only a matter of time until AI-produced music is seen as the new norm.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The article was produced by Laura Apps on behalf of main photo by Clockready, used under a Creative Commons 2.0 license. , one of the UK's longest-running DJ equipment retailers. Learn more at https://www.thedjshop.co.uk
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The Pros, Cons, and Future of Artificial Intelligence in Music

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Since American Idol star and YouTube sensation Taryn Southern started composing music with AI in 2017, musicians all over the world have begun wondering about the implications of AI and modern technol

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Wondering who that hot new collaborator is, on your favorite artist's new album?

It might just be artificial intelligence.

Progress in AI music is accelerating rapidly, thanks to researchers and musicians at major tech conferences and universities who want to integrate widespread AI into the music world.

How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Helping Musicians Unlock Their Creativity
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Many artists feel we're about to enter a "golden age" of creativity, powered by artificial intelligence, that can push music in new directions.

Let's look at some of the newest ways artificial intelligence is transforming the music industry from top to bottom.

Creating New Songs with the Help of AI

For 30 years, musician and composer David Cope has been working on Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI). EMI originally began in 1982 as an effort to help Cope overcome "composer's block," and now his algorithms have produced a large number of original compositions in a variety of genres and styles.

AIVA uses AI and deep learning algorithms to help mainstream users compose their own soundtrack music and scores. It's the perfect tool for content creators on Youtube, Twitch, Tik Tok, and Instagram who need a steady supply of music but don't have an endless budget for royalties.

Grammy-nominated producer Alex da Kid used IBM Watson to analyze five years' of hit songs, as well as cultural data from films, social media, and online articles to figure out a theme for an AI-generated song that fans would enjoy. The final song, " Not Easy," reached number four on the iTunes Hot Tracks chart within 48 hours after its release.

Composers Drew Silverstein, Sam Estes, and Michael Hobe were working on music for big-budget movies like The Dark Knight when they started getting requests for simple background music for television and video games. They worked together to create Amper, a consumer-friendly online tool that helps non-musicians and online content creators make royalty-free music - using their own parameters - in a few seconds.

Creating Virtual Pop Stars

One thing is clear: Since the start of the pandemic, fans miss going to concerts.

To fill the void, Authentic Artists has introduced a large collection of AI-powered virtual artists who can deliver new music experiences.

Authentic Artists' animated virtual musicians generate all-original compositions to play on screen, and also respond to audience feedback by increasing or decreasing the tempo or intensity, or even fast-forwarding to the next song in the set.

Finding the Next Big Artists

Audio-on-demand streaming like Spotify totaled $534 billion in the United States alone, according to Buzz Angle Music's 2018 report.

So how do promising new artists get discovered, with all that competition?

Artificial intelligence helps the music industry with A&R (artist and repertoire) discovery by combing through music and trying to identify the next breakout star.

Warner Music Group acquired a tech start-up last year that uses an algorithm to review social, streaming, and touring data to find promising talent. In 2018, Apple also acquired Asaii, a start-up that specializes in music analytics, to help them boost their A&R.

AI Complementing Creativity

AI technology is transforming the music industry in a myriad of ways, but creatives shouldn't be worried about losing their jobs and being replaced by computers. We're still a long way from artificial intelligence being able to create hit songs on their own.

But as tools develop and the music industry learns how to use AI as a supplement to human creativity, our world will continue to sound sweeter and sweeter every year.

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How Artificial Intelligence (AI) Is Helping Musicians Unlock Their Creativity

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Artificial intelligence is now helping musicians and producers get in the groove to create their own tunes and find new artists. Find out how AI is transforming the music industry, from discovering new artists to creating your own TikTok tracks.

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We spoke to artists, AI experts, and music industry professionals to find out how artificial intelligence could impact music in the coming years.

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We spoke to artists, AI experts, and music industry professionals to find out how artificial intelligence could impact music in the coming years.

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AI and the Future of Teaching & Learning