ABOUT THE TEAM

Donn is an Irish music producer who creates a broad range of musical styles. Emmanuel, Stefan, and Maarten develop AI-driven creative tools for musicians at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) Paris. Donn has been collaborating with the CSL team for the past two years, using the lab’s music tool prototypes to produce music in novel ways. His enthusiasm for the potential of AI in music production has steadily grown during the collaboration.

ABOUT THE SONG

This song by Donn is one of several he did that make use of AI technology developed at Sony CSL. Donn was the first musician to use the technology in music production. Donn: “I generally have a clear idea of the type of song I want to make when I write music. On this particular occasion, I entered the song creation process without any preconceived idea, instead allowing the conversation with the AI to be the focal point in directing the piece. Collaborating with AI felt liberating, enabling me to explore new paths.”

The first part of the song evokes a dark mood, and features slow but complex and quirky rhythms. It then takes a surprising turn with a trance-like melancholic coda. AI tools were used interactively in the creation of the bass, lead, and rhythm tracks of the song, as well as in the mixing.

ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS

Anyone who has ever made music with a computer probably knows the following dilemma: You can either start from readily available content like loop libraries, but then run the risk of not being original at all. Or you can create original content from scratch, but it can take weeks to get to a result.

The AI tools developed at Sony CSL are designed to offer a solution to this dilemma by allowing for a dialog between musician and technology. This way, both the production process and the result become more lively, and entertaining.

For this song Donn has deliberately taken this conversational approach. To create the musical ingredients for the song he used DrumNet, BassNet, and LeadNet — three AI tools that generate new audio or MIDI tracks based on some existing audio inputs. The tools have high-level user controls to quickly explore different variations of the generated track. Furthermore, Donn used FM-Pro, an AI tool that suggests combinations of melody and harmony.

Donn created a rudimentary rhythmic pattern to start the dialog, and used BassNet, LeadNet, and DrumNet to create new tracks in response to that pattern, feeding the output of one tool to the next. He took the most interesting (and sometimes surprising) results, and arranged these into a song structure.

The mixing process of the song features Sony CSL’s AI tools ResonanceEQ and ProfileEQ. These are AI-powered equalizer plugins that perform self-adaptive audio processing: They adapt to the input audio to let the musician easily adjust its subjective color.