By Alex Hughes, BBC Science Focus Magazine | We’ve seen AI dominate the world of art and the written word, and now it is coming for music, but it has a long way to go. Opening up Google’s MusicLM, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform for making music, I hoped to hear soaring melodies, carefully modelled after the finest orchestras the world has to offer… I was, somewhat unsurprisingly, disappointed.
Announced back in January, MusicLM was Google’s first attempt at generating music through AI. Now, Google is letting people try it out for themselves, creating their own mini-masterpieces with AI.
In my time using the platform – requesting different genres, songs, styles and instruments – I was left feeling as if, unlike image and text generation, AI music has a long way to go.
And yet, this was the exact thought that a lot of the world had roughly a year ago when OpenAI first started its viral journey, producing AI images that, compared to what we see today, we’re pretty awful.
How Google’s MusicLM works
Google wastes no time to make it clear how premature this technology is. It is listed as ‘experimental technology’ for synthetic music only. It can’t generate vocals, and requests for specific bands or artists won’t be generated.
For now, that limits its ability to the still vast world of instrumental music.
Google offers up an array of prompt suggestions, ranging from the simple “high-pitched bongos with ringing tones” through to the ever-so-slightly more detailed “optimistic melody about the arrival of spring, full of joy and hope, tranquil flute in the background, upbeat guitar”.
However, no matter how complicated the prompt is, or how many details it is given, a lot of the songs that Google’s MusicLM can create suffer from a few repeating issues.
Whether the genre is death metal, acoustic pop, or fast-paced folk music, many of these tracks sound like they are playing through a wall, or even underwater.
That accompanied by an overwhelming bass presence on… well, everything, makes for an overwhelming sound.
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Read the full diagnosis here:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/future-technology/musiclm-google-ai/
Alex is a staff writer at BBC Science Focus. He has worked for a number of brands covering technology and science with an interest in consumer tech, robotics, AI and future technology.
We Asked Google’s New AI Music Bot to Write Us a Song. We Instantly Regretted It
