Did AI Just End Music? (Now it’s Personal) ft. Rick Beato

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brilliant hi welcome to another episode

of Cold Fusion The Following song is

100% generated by AI

[Music]

abusion where

curiosity ignites and Minds take

[Music]

life a better future

can help us make a better future

everything you hear is all artificially

generated by AI generated I mean the

lyrics which was chat gbt the Rhythm the

vocals to get this output all I did was

type in a text prompt of what I wanted

there are a few revisions but still the

result is honestly insane and if you

think that's a one-off here's another

example I wanted a classical piece so I

type this

[Music]

how about some guitar driven

stuff

so you

cra a wild ride awesome

[Music]

[Applause]

R&B our souls please remember me

[Music]

awesome UK

[Music]

[Applause]

garage all very impressive even the

album covers were made using Ai and

that's just to let you know what we're

dealing with

here as some of you know I've been a

musician for the better part of 20 years

and a producer for a decade if you've

watched a cold fusion video before

you've heard some of my music so being a

technology Enthusiast as well a do have

mixed feelings about this AI has finally

come to something very close to my heart

we've seen AI voice swapping that could

get artists to perform songs in

different genres but this is something

totally different with this latest

generation of AI music it's not just the

vocals but the backing music which is

artificial which in my view is much more

difficult for AI to do coherently what

you just heard previously was from a

platform called udio and it was created

by a group of X deepmind Engineers it's

a watershed moment for AI music and

they're not the only ones a few months

ago there was a similar application

called sunno AI in a recent video I

looked at the AI deception and it was

about how some companies are lying and

over promising the capabilities of AI

but on the flip side I said that there's

also some companies that are obfuscating

the true extent of AI replacing jobs

today's episode falls in the second

category first was images graphic design

writing videos and now finally music

it's clear that AI music systems will

will eventually impact those in the

music industry but how in this episode

we explore AI music apps what they're

all about how it works its criticisms

and how AI could disrupt the music

industry I also had the opportunity to

speak to the amazing musician and

YouTuber Rick Bardo to get his thoughts

on this and I also spoke to Taran

Southern who's considered to be one of

the first artists to commercially

release music using AI all right so on

the count of three let's

go you are watching to Fusion

TV quote creating music is an inherently

complex process but we're streamlining

that making it more accessible and

intuitive than ever before end quote

that's from son's co-founder Mikey shaan

and it just about summarizes what these

AI companies are trying to achieve in

fact the premise of sunno and udio is

basically the same now anybody can

create music even though they have no

prior musical knowledge just type a text

prompt and Away you go users can provide

subjects instruments feelings and or

their custom lyrics and in just a minute

a track is ready to play 30 Seconds for

udio and 2 minutes for sunno both

platforms can extend tracks and provide

different variations and both are free

to use right now some say that Yo's

first version is already pretty good

better than Sun's version 3 I've used

both of them to gain Insight but I ended

up liking y's output more personally

because it was cleaner and possessed a

better understanding of less typical

genres so even though the examples I've

shown you and will show you are through

using yio keep in mind that a lot of the

content in this video also applies to

sunno sunno version 3 is now available

to everyone including those on the free

plan it is the best AI music generator

by far and it just got even better with

V3 a completely free AI music generator

launched called udio people have been

saying this is the chat GPT moment for

AI music or calling it The Sora of Music

a lot of the time people massively

overhype new AI launches that's how

everyone gets clicks but there's some

truth to this one to understand just how

revolutionary this Tech is it helps to

know how modern music is made before AI

the first step is to come up with a

guitar refi I made this one a few years

ago when marking around on my acoustic

guitar but for the final track I used a

Gretch electric guitar with a delay in

Reverb pedal and a distortion pedal I

was going for a calm 34 Walt time

signature with a post Rock feel

[Music]

after I recorded this I hopped into

Ableton and built some Bas and drums and

atmosphere around the guitar ref even

for this process every step involves

many substeps including eqing

compressing adding effects and just

listening to the components in isolation

and

[Music]

together as the song is being created

you'll definitely come across some

production problems where frequencies

Clash solving these issues are just a

part of the nature of mixing sounds

together finally I added some vocals and

then arranged the

track so in total a finished song can

take days or even weeks to complete and

sometimes the songs just don't work out

so you have to try again but with all of

that effort exploring the Sonic stage

and pulling a song out of the ether is

half the fun but now in contrast with AI

all people have to do is type in some

words and then get a song I hope you can

see the difference clearly now here's

some observations that I found with yudo

it includes production techniques like

side chaining tape effects Reverb and

delay on vocals in appropriate areas in

some outputs the vocals seem extremely

real there's also harmonies in there and

even for electric guitar it mimics the

sounds of different pickups all just so

insane some weaknesses include sometimes

it messes up big time and I'll show a

couple of examples of

[Music]

that it's very limited in flexibility

once you get an output you can't really

change it there's low Fidelity on some

tracks and it has some weaknesses in

some genres such as UK jungle okay so

what's the story behind these

applications sunno is a venture-backed

company founded in late 2023 all four of

the founders previously worked at Keno

an aite Tech startup for financial data

which was later acquired by S&P Global

sunno even partnered with Microsoft

co-pilot and is up to version 3 like

sunno udio was founded in late 2023 but

the company only recently went out of

stealth mode and made their application

public a couple of weeks ago it was

founded by an ensemble of former

researchers from Google Deep Mind and

has the financial backing of popular

Silicon Valley venture capital firm and

seen hwart and also from musicians like

common and Will i Am as you've seen well

heard the output is a rich combination

of all sorts of instruments so the

training data must have been significant

and that leads us to the next section

how do these applications work well

we'll dive in in a bit but first let's

rewind the tape a bit this isn't

strictly the first time this has been

tried making music with the aid of

computers goes back to 1957 lejaren

Hiller and Leonard isacson would compose

a piece called the iliac Suite this

piece of music is often considered to be

the first created with the aid of a

computer there were notable efforts in

the 1980s to point computers into a new

Direction generative music in 1984

scientist and composer David cope

created Emmy which stands for

experiments in musical intelligence it

was an interactive software tool that

could generate music in the styles of

different composers from short pieces to

entire operas and I said you know what

if I could create a

program that would create B carals and

cope and Stravinsky and Mozart and

anybody and the only way I could think

of doing that was to create a program

that was built around a database of

Music let's say I had a database of Bach

Corrals all 371 of them and he had a

little program that was sat on top of

this smallest program I could make that

would analyze that music and then create

a new Bo Corral that wasn't one of the B

Corrals that was in the database but

sounded like them all and some of the

outputs had been used in commercial

settings over the years there's a very

interesting story regarding Emmy and

I'll get into that later in the episode

so stick around for that and then there

was the computer accompaniment system in

1985 it used algorithms to generate a

complimentary music track based on a

user's live input the computer

accompanyment system is based on a very

robust pattern matcher that compares the

notes of the live performance as I play

them to the notes that are stored in the

score

even David Bowie developed a tool in the

'90s it was called the verbasizer a

digital approach to lyrical writing well

that's all well and good you might be

thinking but what about the modern stuff

well as you probably know from 2012 the

world switched from hard-coded narrow

algorithms to neural networks and with

that the modern AI boom had officially

started but the the question has to be

asked how are neuron Nets being used in

music Generation Well in 2016 Google's

Project magenta turned a few heads when

they released an AI generated piano

piece made by Deep learning algorithms

ultimately the next big step was to

generate music just based on a simple

text query in natural human language

Google's music LM did just that and

honestly it was impressive for the time

but far from perfect this was followed

by open ai's jukebox stable audio

adobe's music generation gen and

YouTube's dream track now these were all

Valiant efforts but they all had the

same problem they were ultimately fairly

limited they worked to a degree but more

often than not the composition sounded

rigid and just not very human to put it

bluntly but even with such limitations

there were some trying to push the

boundaries Taran Southern is often

considered to be one of the first

musicians to use modern AI to release

commercial music and this was all the

way back in 2017 if you can believe it I

asked her all about it I was having

trouble finding really high quality

music for the documentary that was

relatively inexpensive and so I was

looking for alternate options and I came

up upon this article in the New York

Times that was looking at artificial

intelligence as a way to compose music

and I thought well that's really

interesting so I started experimenting

with it was blown away by what was

possible you know this was even before

llms hit the scene and I think where we

were at with music creation and AI back

in in 2017 was actually pretty far along

um and so I was so excited by what I was

hearing that I just decided to create an

entire experiment out of out of the

project and made an album using I think

four different AI Technologies keep in

mind that what Taran did back in 2017

was quite different to what's going on

today there was still a lot of work that

had to go into the compositions but now

anyone can type in some text and get a

decent output so how does it all work

what's the tech behind it

like most modern generative AI

applications for example llms these

systems use vast amounts of data to

understand patterns and then create an

output based on the user's input for

chat GPT the output is text and for

these AIS its original songs and lyrics

we'll touch on the ethical concerns a

bit later but you can probably realize

something a large language model like

chat GPT for example generates text by

predicting the next word in a text

sequence but composing music is

significantly more complex due to a lot

of variables instrument tone Tempo

Rhythm sound design choices volume of

different components compression and EQ

are just some of the variables that has

to be considered in addition the system

must understand what the user wants and

how that relates to genres and

particular sounds in a coherent yet

pleasing way not easy by any means but

what about the audio synthesis itself

many point to audio diffusion as the

secret Source behind generative music in

simple terms it's is the process of

adding and removing noise from a signal

until you get the desired output we

first saw similar methods used in images

where image diffusion starts off with

random noise which is then refined to a

final image based on the interpretation

of the prompt audio diffusion Works in a

similar way this is a very high level

breakdown just to save time but if you

want to get into the depths of the

technicalities I'll leave a link to a

few articles in the source document in

the video description as always

if you've been following the generative

AI space for the last 2 years you

already knew this part of the video was

coming open AI CTO Mira morati was under

public fire following an interview about

the training data of their video

generation tool Sora when asked if the

impressive video output from Sora was

the result of data trained on videos

from YouTube Facebook and Instagram she

said that she quote was not sure about

that to many online the answer was

suspicious with only a few weeks since

the launch of yudo and Soo version 3

there's a question that has to be asked

were these systems trained on

copyrighted material one user set out to

investigate they ran their test by

entering in similar lyrics to the song

Dancing Queen by EBA in the prompt they

had no direct mention of the band or the

song but the outputs were very close to

the original including the basic Melody

Rhythm and even the Cadence of the

vocals now even human musicians are

continuously accused and taken to court

for a lot less as the user later point

points out it's not impossible to

achieve these results without the

original song being present in the data

set but the similarity is striking this

result was also solidified by other

experiments carried out by the user for

obvious reasons I can't play any of the

copyrighted music here to show you the

comparisons but as always I'll link the

original article in the show notes but

here's the thing it seems like the

founders already knew that this was

coming and they accepted it as part and

parcel of the new AI startup culture

anonio Rodriguez one of sunno ai's

investors told Rolling Stone that he was

aware of potential lawsuits from record

labels but he still decided to invest

into the company sunno AI has stated

that it's having regular conversations

with major record labels and is

committed to respecting the work of

artists if that's actually true is

questionable especially when a few weeks

ago over 200 plus artists wrote an open

letter to AI developers and tech

companies to quote cease the use of AI

to infringe upon and devalue the rights

of human artist end quote the letter was

signed by some big names old and new

from Bon joy to Billy eish and Metro

boomman all that begs the question what

does this mean for the future of the

music

industry one way to think of this AI in

the broadest sense is like an outof

control Central Bank monetary policy is

the equivalent of printing money leading

to inflation but this time it's diluting

and devaluing the supply of Music

instead of money if you're not the top

1% of successful musicians the music

industry is already a hard place to make

a consistent and stable income from Tik

Tok transforming how songs are consumed

and discovered to digital music

platforms relationships with musicians

the industry is already difficult but

now there's an unlimited supply of AI

music coming right at you like a tsunami

and it's going to be hard to stay afloat

if you're a musician who exclusively

make stock music or royalty-free sounds

for commercial purposes this all isn't

good news but what about other musicians

I sat down with Rick biard to discuss

what this means for the future so so so

do you think AI will completely replace

musicians one day at all or do you think

that that's not going to happen no I

don't think so no people have too much

fun playing real instruments I'm not

going to stop playing just because

there's AI guitar things say Spotify in

the future they have their AI versions

of songs and then you have people using

the models that already exist to make

their own music and uploading that to

Spotify what do you think that would do

to the potential income of the real

artists who are you know making that and

composing their own music oh definitely

have an impact in it yes it's just

deluding you know because there's no way

real artists could compete with

generative Creations right I mean how

many things can you can you put up there

in a day how many things can you

generate be very difficult to to compete

with that this is an interesting

question do you think that one day we'll

actually have a number one AI Billboard

song yes probably 2 years from now okay

you heard it here fast everyone there

will be a lot of news stories about it

and people will say boy I really like

this and then they'll just create more

and there will be more uh I can see a

time when you know nine out of the top

10 songs are AI generated wow in the

within 10 years I said in one of my

videos a year and a half ago I think it

was or so ago that people won't care if

it's AI if they like the

song and I firmly believe that it's just

a matter of how people are being

compensated now are you excited about

any aspect of this at all totally

excited I mean I I think that the jobs

that can be made easier can mastering be

done better by AI probably can mixing be

done better by AI probably there's a lot

of things vocal editing picking between

takes at least doing rough edits rough

edits for YouTube videos yes I'm excited

about it you know people when drum

machines came around in the 80s oh

they're going to take drum you know

drummers jobs away then drummers back in

the 80s emulated drum machines and they

play drum machine fills and they do all

these same kind of fills and then people

would bring in drummer the Drum Real

drummers to emulate drum machines they'd

have their things program do you think

becoming a professional musician or even

surviving as one or thriving as one

would be more difficult because of AI in

that case not sure about that I don't

know if if uh becoming a professional

musician will be affected by it I think

people enjoy playing music and uh

regardless of whether there are AI

versions out there that people are

listening to you know the rise of

autotune and things like that where have

a synthetic sound enabled these programs

I mean once you have a pitch corrected

voice how far of a stretch is it from

from an AI created voice that actually

has tuning imperfections in it like a

real person that's not that different

honestly how many things are actually

generated by computers grab some samples

off splice you create the high hat track

with an 808 high hat and you got your

you know you got your kick and you're

making a hip-hop tune and then you grab

you know some keyboard sounds and you

don't even know how to play the

keyboards and you hold down some things

and you you know you get some samples

from here and there you put them in and

then you create your vocal over that you

autotune and then you move notes around

it's you know it's pretty synthetic at

that point you know what's the

difference between that and AI the

current wave of AI including music

generators is made possible by neural

networks but what do they do and how do

they work fortunately there's a fun and

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okay so back to the video last year a US

federal judge ruled that AI artwork

can't be copyrighted as these apps gain

popularity we need to protect artists

but how this is done and how this will

be implemented is still up for debate

things are uncertain but one thing is

for sure we're heading into a new era of

copyright legislation around art and

artificial intelligence if you're more

interested in the law of copyright and

artificial intelligence check out my

conversation with Devon from legal eagle

in the future we're going to be

inundated with AI music but at that

stage live music performed by humans

will become increasingly valuable but

another thing that I'm worried about is

another form of AI fatigue where any

amazing human-made music that you hear

could be diminished in a few years

because those that hear it could just

think that it could be AI generated as

for me personally I think music AI

generators could make for a great

sampling tool for example I turned that

classical piece generated by AI at the

beginning of the video into a full track

I'll play part of it as an outro to this

episode but I'll leave a link for the

the full version below but in saying

that I can't help but feel a little

sense of loss that joy that comes from

having an idea in your head and turning

it into musical form is no longer

strictly human Music Creation is a

personal journey of Discovery and it's

unsettling that the art form is changing

but on the flip side I can understand

how freeing this is for those who have

no musical knowledge and just want to

create something I'm not blind to

that I know we covered a fair bit in

this episode but let me tell you a

little story that I think perfectly

encapsulates it all we have to go back

to 1997 to the University of Oregon

where a small audience is patiently

waiting to see a battle between a

musician and a computer Dr Steven Larson

is the musician in question and he also

teaches music theory at the University

he's ready to go up against a computer

to compose a piece of music in the style

of the famous Johan Sebastian bck the

idea is simple there's going to be three

pieces played live one that was composed

by the original buck one by Dr lson and

one by Emmy the computer generated music

which I mentioned at the start of the

episode all three entries will be

performed live to an audience and

they'll have to guess which piece is

composed by whom once all the

performances ended the audience

incorrectly thought that lon's piece was

made by the computer and the one

composed by Emmy they thought that that

was the original bark composition Dr

Larson was genuinely upset about this

quote bark is absolutely one of my

favorite composers my my admiration for

his music is deep and Cosmic that people

could be duped by a computer program was

very disconcerting end quote now you

could take that quote put it in any

conversation in 2024 about AI music and

it would be just as relevant the

circumstances have changed but as humans

we still perceive art the same David

cope the inventor of Emmy once revealed

that his artificial program can make

quote beautiful music but maybe not

profound music and I think I agree with

with that ultimately AI Generations are

going to get more polished better

sounding higher Fidelity and it's all

going to be at our fingertips but we