Artificial intelligence is integrated into the composition and musical production, as has been recalled in the latest calls for Sónar D in Barcelona, ??including the one organized in 2023. Numerous advertisements for web pages such as YouTube or Facebook and background songs for videos on social networks Social networks like Instagram or TikTok have been created with this tool, fundamental in the fourth and fifth industrial revolutions.
The phenomenon is not new, nor is the alliance with the media 2.0. For example, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance bought the Jukedeck platform in 2019, which allowed users to modify music to match their audiovisual material. The following year, Shutterstock, a repertoire of images and sound and provider of editing tools, acquired assets from Amper, which automatically plays songs based on certain preselected parameters: mood, instrumentation, tempo, or duration.
Other applications of this type, such as AIVA or Beatoven, offer video game developers, podcasters and other types of digital content generators simple, practical and royalty-free backgrounds. Regardless of the avant-garde proposals of the organizers of Sónar D, the technological division of the festival of the same name held between June 15 and 17, these issues are the focus of much of the interest of the participants in this meeting.
In fact, something similar happened in the Catalan capital between February 27 and March 2, when the 2023 Mobile World Congress (MWC) was held, a complementary event to Sónar D. American, Japanese, Chinese and United States experts The most advanced countries in Europe shifted their attention from the pyrotechnics of multinationals to the intersection of artificial intelligence and big data in products and services designed for millions of professionals and individuals around the world, not just for the select minority of yesteryear.
This has been exactly the atmosphere that has been breathed in the Sónar digital fair, where it has been recalled that four years ago an algorithm, designed by Endel, already signed an agreement with a record label. Certain economic analysts celebrated then —and celebrate today— that music is ceasing to be “an expense” for initiatives that stand out on the cultural scene with little budget. However, other voices are deeply critical of this trend.
Among them, that of the professor and inventor Tod Machover stands out, who is in charge of the Opera of the Future group at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his opinion, they are “infinite pieces that have not been composed by anyone.” Considering that he has been working with “hyperinstruments” that use sensors, signal processors and software since 1986, he is not suspected of rejecting innovations. But he does not resist claiming the “human touch”, although, like the main speakers at Sónar D or the MWC, he does not succeed in defining it univocally.
