Boiling Down my Insights [Week 5]

This week I focused on gathering together all my information. What was most important was finding my final crystallized insight. I had three more interviews planned for this week. I decided to go ahead with two of them and send a polite email to the third expert Dylan Wood, a Product Owner at Ableton. Although I knew his input would've been useful for my assignment, I had to prioritise finishing off my research and working toward the end goal.

Interviews

I did an interview with Sam Gribben at 11:30am on Tuesday. Sam is the CEO of Melodics, a company that encourages enjoyment in the music practice for beginners. They primarily work with midi keyboards and create practice software. He talked about the multiple components of user-experience. I learned about the two arguments - companies would love to make music easy and accessible to everyone. However, music is a skill. And a beginner isn't going to be able to create something unique on their first try, no matter how user-friendly. Melodics brings in the element of enjoyment to encourage practice and entry into the music industry. He also helped me understand the importance of human interaction in music. AI, VR, and AR won't be used to faze humans out of the industry, but it will serve as great tools to facilitate creativity.

I also did an interview with Nick Maclaren at 1pm on Wednesday. Nick is a famous producer and a Chief Strategy Officer at NZ company Serato. He had significant knowledge of the music industry as he's been a producer for a long time. His insights for the future brought up something I hadn't considered before - there was an element of gate-keeping to the hobby. People take pride in learning a complicated piece of software. Although with user-experience improvements, producers may be able to do more in less effort, many enjoy being 'experts of their craft' and prefer the difficulty. However, this means it's harder for beginners to get into the skill. Nick also mentioned how, with the internet, it has been easier for musicians to have recognisable output. Anyone can upload their songs online and be seen. However, there is still a pyramid aspect of the music industry economy. It's hard to make money unless you're famous.

Final Insight

To find my final insight, I was interested in comparing my previous insights against each other. I also wanted a new understanding based on my interviews. I made a bullet point list of essential points brought up in interviews that I wanted to consider.

Bullet Points to consider

• New Creative Opportunities

• Accessibility

• Hobby Gatekeeping

• Enjoyability

• Machine Learning and AI advancement

• AR and VR advancement

I came up with this:

[Bravo, 2017]

Machine learning-influenced music production will revolutionise the music industry by 2030 - prioritising accessibility and eventually creating a new genre.

This insight builds upon one of my previous ones (A new genre of music pioneered by machine learning and artificial intelligence will be prevalent, creating a new breed of producers and new creative opportunities in DAW innovation.) but adds more depth to my previously vague 'creative opportunities'

I created a table of my insights with comparison grades out of Originality, Usefulness, and Believability.

Overall the insight based on my interviews won. This is because it had significant research behind it. It also had more usefulness than my entertainment-based insights, such as VR concerts or interactive recordings. Evidence as to why my insight is final is the amount of research I have that backs it.

Research related to Final Insight

I cut and pasted relevant research snippets with reasoning from my precedents. This will help me formulate my final video and article.

Machine learning-influenced music production will revolutionise the music industry by 2030 - prioritising accessibility and eventually creating a new genre.

Gated Reverb - New creative opportunities often create unintentional trends/sounds

The sound was created through the use of a new audio console. It included a mic hanging in the recording studio that allowed the sound engineers to talk to the band. These audio consoles were primarily used for optimising music for CD and radio.

AI composed album - evidence of humans working with AI in the present day. A human is needed to provide the emotion.

According to him, the machine does indeed write original melodies. However, a human is needed to stitch the songs with structure and emotion. SKYGGE's album 'Hello Word' features a multitude of genres to showcase AI capabilities.

Flow Machines works by analysing several musical scores to spot the patterns. In return, it will deliver its own tune creating with the pattern found. The user can give the machine whichever songs they want. For the song 'Multi Mega Fortune' in the album, Michael Lovett gave the Flow Machine some of his favourite American R&B tunes. It would then give 8-10 melodies in return. He would sift through the songs, then do it again. Eventually, a few small melodies stitched into a full piece. It is regarded as a music production assist tool rather than a creation tool.

Jim Morrison Prediction - Genres often come with the introduction of new tech/sounds/culture (as well as genius minds)

He predicted that in 4 or 5 years from 1969, there will emerge a new genre of music. This music will have elements from blues and folk and a third genre that is yet to be discovered. "A lot of people like Mozart were prodigies; they were writing brilliant works at very young ages," Morrison mused, "That's probably what's going to happen: some brilliant kid will come along and be popular. I can see a lone artist with a lot of tapes and electrical … like an extension of the Moog synthesizer — a keyboard with the complexity and richness of a whole orchestra, y' know? There's somebody out there, working in a basement, just inventing a whole new musical form."

Your Brain on music - Humans will be involved with future music regardless of how advanced technology gets.

How it can make you want to move or how playing music can give you feelings of excitement and accomplishment. Archeology has revealed that music dates back to our earliest ancestors in Africa - a 43,000-year-old bone flute being the oldest instrument found to date.

Interview Quotes

These timestamps result from listening to my interview recordings and noting down any relevant quotes being said.

Fabio

Talking about his interaction with creating algorithmic composers - Rule-based approach 14:03 - 14:43

Machine learning composer 14:55 - 15:20

Supervised machine learning 16:07 - 16:42

Concerns toward AI music 16:43 - 17:41

Young

Opinion on the future - Music production is becoming more user-friendly 3:03 - 3:44

New AI tools will crack hard software problems 4:07 - 4:50

DAW tools for user-friendliness 5:00 - 5:40

The complexity of DAWs 6:00 - 6:46

Emotional connection in music 9:48 - 10:15

Accessibility on the quality of music 13:15 - 13:48

Future music accessibility 17:23 - 18:13

'Democratising' music 18:15 - 19:13

Opinion on AI music 20:22 - 21:11

Sam

User experience arguments 7:19 - 8:28

Making software easy but not dumbing it down 8:37 - 9:03

Melodic's goal of music accessibility 9:42 - 10:08

Future of music industry - accessibility 10:45 - 11:23

AI and human interaction in music 12:30 - 12:42, 13:03 - 13:18

AI music's place in the future 13:51 - 14:29

Nick

Where the music industry is going - making difficult things easier 6:18 - 7:29

Rethinking what needs to be a barrier 7:34 - 7:59

Challenge for companies moving forward - gatekeeping 8:01 - 9:08

What the industry will look like in the future - using tech to assist humans 11:08 - 11:27

Opinion on the future of music with AI 12:00 - 12:20

AI as tools 12:45 - 13:25

The past of music compared to the present - internet 17:33 - 18:22

AI tools for mixing 23:20 - 24:20

Automated DAWs 24:21 - 24:48

Draft Article

I usually start off articles by writing down anything relevant. This draft has a bunch of different ideas together that I am going to flesh out in the coming week.

The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) invented in 1977 is a mainstream music synthesis software that is immovable as an industry staple. Music production's journey has been a technological movement from only mastering raw audio to using electronic tools in DAWs to create music. NZ Industry leaders say accessible tools are the next step. From there, automation and machine learning will open up new creative opportunities to push industry boundaries.

"The real interesting part about machine learning and AI is the ability to help with mixing. Because now everyone can make music at home in their room… But the real hard bit is to make that song sound as good as something produced commercially." says Nick Maclaren, the Chief Strategy Officer at NZ music software company Serato. "...if you completely rely on an AI system to make your music - is it really 'your music'? I think that if there's a way that you can guide it or train it and get it to make something that ultimately comes out of your brain, then there's still some art there."

Aside from AI shaping the tools for creation, the music scene recently has seen albums born out of human-AI interaction. 'Hello World' is a collaboration between French producer Benoit Carre and AI Flow Machines.

TED talk by Alan Harvey goes into depth on the human brain on music.

References

Bravo, L. (2017, February 8). close up photo of turned on digital midi controller photo [Photograph]. Unsplash. https://unsplash.com/photos/jUwvjOmCTWc

Deahl, D. (2018, August 23). Inside Imogen heap’s cutting-edge VR concert. The Verge. https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/23/17769166/imogen-heap-concert-oculus-vr-headset-thewavevr

Fischer, R. (2016, March 22). How Jim Morrison predicted EDM to rolling stone in 1969. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/how-jim-morrison-predicted-edm-to-rolling-stone-in-1969-235437/

Harvey, A. (2018, June 27). Your brain on music | Alan Harvey | TEDxPerth [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZFFwy5fwYI

Marshall, A. (2018, January 12). Is this the world’s first good robot album?. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180112-is-this-the-worlds-first-good-robot-album

Morrison, J. (2006, May 4). Jim Morrison - The Future of Music [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS3dIyHpAgc

The Verge. (2018, August 23). Inside Imogen Heap’s cutting-edge VR concert | The Future of Music with Dani Deahl [Video]. YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoDqeunBH10

Vox. (2017, August 18). How a recording-studio mishap shaped '80s music [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxz6jShW-3E

Your EDM. (2014, October 29). The doors' Jim Morrison predicted EDM was the future in 1969 [Video]. https://www.youredm.com/2014/10/07/jim-morrison-predicts-future-music-edm-1969/