Speaker 1: Earlier this month, the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra got on stage
Speaker 1: to play a symphony written by the famous check composer
Speaker 1: Antony Davor Jack. The orchestra was premiering a piece of
Speaker 1: music the world had never heard before. Divorjack died more
Speaker 1: than a hundred years ago, and he left behind just
Speaker 1: the beginnings of a composition, just two sheets of music.
Speaker 1: So a computer program powered by AI studied the rest
Speaker 1: of divor Jack's music and completed the composer's unfinished work.
Speaker 1: This is what the software spit out, something in the
Speaker 1: style of Davor Jack that was still an entirely new symphony.
Speaker 1: For years, we've worried about robots replacing the jobs of
Speaker 1: truck drivers and call center asians and accountants, but experts
Speaker 1: said creative jobs were going to be safe, that computers
Speaker 1: were still so far from making things that are new
Speaker 1: and subjective that move us. So consider the fact that
Speaker 1: AI wrote most of this. Today, in the show Reporter,
Speaker 1: in the tallya Drosiac visits three musicians using artificial intelligence
Speaker 1: to make their music, including the guy behind this robo
Speaker 1: Divorgac symphony. If computers can now compose something this beautiful,
Speaker 1: what's left for us humans to do. Am Ito, you're
Speaker 1: listening to Decrypted stay with us. M Hey Nat, welcome
Speaker 1: to the show. Thanks for having me. So you're our
Speaker 1: European tech reporter out of Brussels, and you normally write
Speaker 1: about Europe's regulatory crackdown on the tech industry, but today
Speaker 1: we're talking about something completely different. Yep. So we've been
Speaker 1: writing about the use of AI and self driving cars
Speaker 1: and chatbots and voice assistants, but in the world of music,
Speaker 1: this is all still kind of new. I mean, musicians
Speaker 1: just started using AI as a tool a few years ago.
Speaker 1: So I talked to three different composers who are using
Speaker 1: AI in really different ways. The first guy I want
Speaker 1: to introduce you to is Ben Waki. He's a French musician.
Speaker 1: He's known in France for these French pop songs, but
Speaker 1: he's also composed music for artists like the famous French
Speaker 1: rocker Johnny Halliday. So this is a pretty famous guy
Speaker 1: out of France. Yeah, he's well known, but he's gotten
Speaker 1: even more attention recently because of his experimentations with AI
Speaker 1: generated music. And how did he get into that. So
Speaker 1: there's this guy called Francois Pachet who for a long
Speaker 1: time was ahead of the research lab run by Sony
Speaker 1: in Paris, and Paschet has kind of become known as
Speaker 1: the godfather of AI music because he's really done a
Speaker 1: lot of research in this area. France called me a
Speaker 1: long time ago. He discovered my my songs in the
Speaker 1: late nineties, and he was interested by my way of
Speaker 1: composing songs, always searching for unexpected coat changes, and and
Speaker 1: he invited ben Wata's lab to try out some of
Speaker 1: the tools that he's been developing over the past few years.
Speaker 1: And one of the tools that Pesh's team developed is
Speaker 1: this machine learning tool that generates music. So how does
Speaker 1: it work? So first, the program basically ingests a bunch
Speaker 1: of sheets of music that the musician wants the program
Speaker 1: to train on, and then the computer cuts it up
Speaker 1: into really tiny bits of music and rearranges it into
Speaker 1: a whole new composition. So let me give you an example.
Speaker 1: So a few years ago, ben wa fed this program
Speaker 1: four seventy lead sheets of jazz standards from the thirties
Speaker 1: up through the fifties and sixties, and out came these
Speaker 1: two bars of music that he really liked, very jazzy.
Speaker 1: I can definitely sense the influence. Yeah, so Ben Wah
Speaker 1: really liked the sound of what the computer came up with.
Speaker 1: It's just two bars at the beginning, UM with ascendant
Speaker 1: melodique movement. That's it is really unexpected and that I loved.
Speaker 1: I was at the first first time. So he asked
Speaker 1: the system to generate new ones based on those new parameters,
Speaker 1: and then I reiterate with the machine like you know,
Speaker 1: if if it were a workmate something like that. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like, um, two artists collaborating on a song,
Speaker 1: but it's just that one of them is a machine exactly.
Speaker 1: And so that ultimately led to this full song that
Speaker 1: he released under his artist name Skeige. It's it's ding
Speaker 1: those doings are those use Yeah, I definitely recognized the
Speaker 1: melody from earlier, but it doesn't sound as jazzy. It
Speaker 1: sounds some a little old timey and familiar. At the end,
Speaker 1: I had really, uh, very interesting melody. I was able
Speaker 1: to say, Okay, I'm proud of this melody and I
Speaker 1: think it's new. I think it's interesting because I couldn't
Speaker 1: have made it by myself. So the collaboration with AI
Speaker 1: is really interesting because it gives me something new. So
Speaker 1: for this song, the AI was really just the initial inspiration,
Speaker 1: but Benuah made a ton of creative decisions to bring
Speaker 1: this song to the finish line. So in that sense,
Speaker 1: maybe you can call this AI light right. And so
Speaker 1: Bena released this song back in and since then, Francois
Speaker 1: Pachet from Sony moved over to Spotify, and Ben has
Speaker 1: been helping francoise new work at Spotify and they're they're
Speaker 1: building these tools from scratch with researchers for various tasks
Speaker 1: that are involved in creating a song. And one of
Speaker 1: those tools that they've developed, they've incorporated into Ben's new
Speaker 1: album called American Folk Songs. So been one and I
Speaker 1: talked about one song called black is a Color. The
Speaker 1: melody is based on this famous folk song called black
Speaker 1: is the Color of My True Loves hair. Um. It's
Speaker 1: been covered by people like Pete Seeger Nina Simone. I'm
Speaker 1: sure you've heard it before. I actually don't think I have.
Speaker 1: UM is that bad? I grew up into dead well,
Speaker 1: I think most of our listeners have. So Ben Wass
Speaker 1: song is based on this acapella version sung by Pete Seeger.
Speaker 1: Black Black, Black, Color of My True loves hand and
Speaker 1: he had Spotify's AI program. I'll add all these harmonies
Speaker 1: in the background to make it sound so much a chair.
Speaker 1: Black black, black is the color of my true love's head.
Speaker 1: Her face is something wondrous fair. But yourlest eyes and
Speaker 1: the daintiest hands. I love the ground she STIs. I love.
Speaker 1: I thought that it could be very black in Sparring,
Speaker 1: to have something very sophisticated with a simple melody like
Speaker 1: black is the color, and I got a really unnam
Speaker 1: is amazing result. I was blown away by this result.
Speaker 1: Black black, black is the color of my true loves
Speaker 1: her her face is something wondrous fair. I think, no, no,
Speaker 1: no human could have composed this string arrangement because it's
Speaker 1: too weird. There are two strange things in it too,
Speaker 1: strange chord changes and internal movements. But it's still really,
Speaker 1: really beautiful. And I think that this kind of result
Speaker 1: is very encouraging for for musicians like me and after me,
Speaker 1: musicians did something new, something that they find in Sparring
Speaker 1: for their compositions. You know, it's really different from the
Speaker 1: music i'man're still listening to, uh and definitely a little weird,
Speaker 1: but I think I like it. It's beautiful. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: sounds I don't know, both old and knew at the
Speaker 1: same time. But what's interesting to me is how he's
Speaker 1: really revamping this traditional folk music, and I can imagine
Speaker 1: it might sound strange for some American audiences who grew
Speaker 1: up listening to this type of music and then have
Speaker 1: it repackaged in a totally different way. So the original
Speaker 1: melody and the lyrics were obviously written by a human
Speaker 1: a long time ago, but the arrangement we hear in
Speaker 1: the background was all composed by a machine. Is that right?
Speaker 1: Mostly so, Ben Watt did make a few choices and
Speaker 1: editions along the way. He used Pete Seeger's voice to
Speaker 1: create an au ac choir, for instance. He also composed
Speaker 1: and recorded some chord sequences. One was in the style
Speaker 1: of like an epic Game of Thrones type sound. Another
Speaker 1: one was in a Bossa Nova style, and he fed
Speaker 1: that into the machine, which in turn generated a whole
Speaker 1: new string arrangement for the background on sound and for
Speaker 1: the final recording. He also chose the string quartet and
Speaker 1: the director to play that new composition. Okay, so still
Speaker 1: a lot of human intervention there, Yeah, exactly. Uh, And
Speaker 1: this is a tool that Spotify is making available to everyone,
Speaker 1: so not quite yet. They eventually want to release the
Speaker 1: tool on open source on the Internet, possibly by the
Speaker 1: end of next year, but it could take longer than that.
Speaker 1: And so the next composer and entrepreneur I want to
Speaker 1: introduce you to is this guy called Pierre Bahl and
Speaker 1: he's based in Luxembourg. He studied computer science. He's a musician,
Speaker 1: his father is a film and music producer, his mother
Speaker 1: is a singer, and he and his brother started this
Speaker 1: company called Ava. This is the startup that made the
Speaker 1: Divor Jack inspired symphony that we heard at the top
Speaker 1: of the show right, and he and his brother were
Speaker 1: inspired by how important music is in film, but how
Speaker 1: long that process can take in terms of creating a soundtrack.
Speaker 1: So they wanted to see if they could train AI
Speaker 1: and see if it could basically help a composer create
Speaker 1: that type of music, not just for films, but also
Speaker 1: for commercials, promotional videos, video games, and also just generally
Speaker 1: assisting composers in their work. So purefed the machine with
Speaker 1: thirty thou scores of history's greatest composers from Bach, Bitovin,
Speaker 1: and Mozart. So basically it all starts by teaching and
Speaker 1: algorithm to to learn the patterns and music. You know
Speaker 1: that there's this common knowledge that music is sort of
Speaker 1: emotional and it's it's the opposite of math. But actually,
Speaker 1: if you look at music very carefully, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of patterns in it. Um So AVA understands all these
Speaker 1: patterns which are very very mathematical at the core, and
Speaker 1: EVA uses that to generate different kinds of music depending
Speaker 1: on what you're looking for. So let me play you
Speaker 1: two songs in a completely different style. The first one
Speaker 1: is this classical song called I Am a h This
Speaker 1: makes me think of a winter ballet. Does that make sense? Absolutely? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I totally think of forest blanketed and snow and little
Speaker 1: bunny rabbits popping by. I see that too. Let me
Speaker 1: play a totally different song. This is a pop song
Speaker 1: called Guiding Light. So background music is a big industry,
Speaker 1: and this just underscores the strength of Ava's business model.
Speaker 1: I mean, for the most part, if you're come penny
Speaker 1: or like a podcast, you can pay a composer to
Speaker 1: make custom music, or you can use these catalogs with
Speaker 1: songs that you're licensed to use. Right, That's what we
Speaker 1: do for this show. We use these big catalogs of
Speaker 1: songs UM that we're allowed to use, but it's really
Speaker 1: hard because you know, these are already existing songs. A
Speaker 1: lot of other shows use them, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: I know, I drive our producers crazy because I'm really
Speaker 1: picky about which tracks they use for different sections of
Speaker 1: our show. Yeah, yeah, I mean, so that's the big
Speaker 1: opportunity for EVA. You could have a custom made piece
Speaker 1: of music, but because you're having a computer do it,
Speaker 1: it's probably cheaper and faster than having a human composer
Speaker 1: do it. How long does it take to create like
Speaker 1: a new song, you know, like three minutes, three and
Speaker 1: a half minutes, So it depends. It depends with the
Speaker 1: algorithms that we use, because we have different algorithms that
Speaker 1: we've used of the basket full of years. The very
Speaker 1: first ones that we had it took usually forty eight
Speaker 1: to say many two hours because we had to retrain
Speaker 1: av the influences that we wanted her to specifically emanate UM.
Speaker 1: But more recently it takes about like forty five seconds
Speaker 1: to a minute to create a piece of music from
Speaker 1: three minutes long. Now, so you know how earlier the
Speaker 1: first example from ben Wa was just this starting point
Speaker 1: and there was still like a ton of human intervention
Speaker 1: that was involved. How complete is the music that Ava's
Speaker 1: software is generating, well, Pierce, is it kind of depends
Speaker 1: on who's playing around with the tool, Like someone who's
Speaker 1: highly musically trained might make more tweaks and changes to it,
Speaker 1: whereas someone who isn't might leave it as is, though
Speaker 1: the quality might not be as good as a result.
Speaker 1: So in the songs that we just listened to earlier,
Speaker 1: did human composers tweak those songs? So nope, that was
Speaker 1: composed entirely by Eva, but humans did assign the different
Speaker 1: parts of music two different instruments. We'll be right back, Okay,
Speaker 1: So before the break, we met two musicians who are
Speaker 1: using AI to make music in really different ways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Bena uses AI kind of as a collaborator, Pierre
Speaker 1: Berrow uses AI specifically for background music. But the last
Speaker 1: guy I want to introduce you to takes it even further.
Speaker 1: His name's ash Kusha. Yeah, thanks so much for for
Speaker 1: having us sober. We're really and he's an electronic musician.
Speaker 1: He's Iranian born and based in London. The question for
Speaker 1: me always was how I can I can make very intriguing,
Speaker 1: complete and complex piece of music only using a computer.
Speaker 1: And also what if the part of the composition that
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of can be partly made by the computer.
Speaker 1: So that question took me twelve years to go through
Speaker 1: all the different parts, from instruments, replicating sound of violence,
Speaker 1: field recording, synthesizing voice, and finally to finding a way
Speaker 1: to generate lyrics. Um, that is what initiated oxyen. It
Speaker 1: was trying to tackle what is a non human creative engine.
Speaker 1: And a few years ago Ash started building virtual entertainers
Speaker 1: for video games. So you know how they have these
Speaker 1: avatars and video games, is that like Mario and Mario
Speaker 1: kart am I adding itself is a non gamer. Well,
Speaker 1: so Ash made a virtual avatar that makes music and
Speaker 1: he called her Yonah. So this is like a whole
Speaker 1: virtual character that writes her own music. Yeah, so you
Speaker 1: can kind of think of it as infusing an AI
Speaker 1: with a personality too. So in this case, Ash trained
Speaker 1: Yonah's AI on Margaret Atwood's novels and also on articles
Speaker 1: about teenage life. So Ash's company ox Human created Yonah,
Speaker 1: and she's an angsty teen in a dystopian world. That's
Speaker 1: a really good way of putting it. So, yeah, let
Speaker 1: me play you a song that Ash just released in September,
Speaker 1: written and sung by Yona. I never felt alone. You
Speaker 1: never said a word. I fell from my prone. You
Speaker 1: didn't want me there, you didn't want me near, You
Speaker 1: didn't want me there. I never heard you say it's
Speaker 1: every life I live. I it's definitely very weird, very dystopian.
Speaker 1: I feel like she's going to come and kill me
Speaker 1: in my sleep. Yeah, I mean it's definitely a little eerie.
Speaker 1: And some of the comments on the video are kind
Speaker 1: of funny, like one user says this is creepy, and
Speaker 1: other one says, don't listen to this when you're high,
Speaker 1: and another guy says, don't mess with organic music. Um,
Speaker 1: And I think part of what makes it extra creepy
Speaker 1: is that you can watch Yona sing this song on
Speaker 1: YouTube and she looks half human half robot. If you cry,
Speaker 1: would every smile, I'll make you stare? I get where
Speaker 1: do you were? Were they all happened? You know? So
Speaker 1: this definitely really creeps me out. But now that I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about it, maybe that's the point that it's disturbing yeah.
Speaker 1: So Ash's goal with Jonah and his other characters he
Speaker 1: has other AI based characters is to really have um
Speaker 1: have them in vogue emotion and the people listening to it.
Speaker 1: So in her music you get this sense that she's sad,
Speaker 1: and Ash says it's easier to get human reaction through
Speaker 1: sad and romantic music. Um, we want to make something
Speaker 1: that when you listen to Yon know you you believe
Speaker 1: that there's something being said. So the nature of of
Speaker 1: the scales that we use, and and the and the
Speaker 1: type of music that we use, it's very personal, it's
Speaker 1: very deep, it's very um yeah, it's in the sense
Speaker 1: is romantic. I think the other thing he says is
Speaker 1: that he's not trying to replace traditional music in any way,
Speaker 1: but to create a whole new form of sound and
Speaker 1: a whole new genre. We we could try and make
Speaker 1: the best rock track, but I think there are many
Speaker 1: many good musicians that do that. Creating genres takes time,
Speaker 1: and it's just a subculture and it's seen pretty much,
Speaker 1: so it takes time, so we want to give it time.
Speaker 1: At the beginning of soundings sometimes wonky and it's a
Speaker 1: bit weird, but that's what we're looking for. And so
Speaker 1: with that also goes a different form of consumption. So
Speaker 1: this type of music might be consumed through games or
Speaker 1: virtual reality or different types of concerts, and there's the
Speaker 1: market for that. Yeah. I mean he's already ashes already
Speaker 1: monetizing his virtual entertainers. I mean Jonah performed at events
Speaker 1: and shows and at a poetry festival recently. Wow. So
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of like um hatsen Amiku and Japan.
Speaker 1: Do you know about her? I have no idea who
Speaker 1: that is. So she's just like they call her a
Speaker 1: virtual pop idol um but it's it's not like they
Speaker 1: have like tons of people who go to her concerts
Speaker 1: or her or it or whatever you would call it.
Speaker 1: M Yeah, and she gets projected onto a screen and
Speaker 1: you know, they use the software for her um to
Speaker 1: to sing, if you can call it that. That is
Speaker 1: the idea of the modern, the contemporary of pop culture,
Speaker 1: which is alter egos and creating almost cartoon characters. So
Speaker 1: we we are kind of adopting all of these things
Speaker 1: into a new form of expression. This is why we're
Speaker 1: not apologetic about, you know, not being digital or being
Speaker 1: a bit weird and not complete or perfect. That's how
Speaker 1: she is. And I think, um, the gaming generation, the
Speaker 1: video game generation and Juris and Alpha is going to
Speaker 1: be more except thing. So now we started this episode
Speaker 1: with this idea that creativity is the last frontier of AI,
Speaker 1: and of course that begs the question, if AI can
Speaker 1: now make music, is there anything left for us humans
Speaker 1: to do? And you know, having listened to your conversations
Speaker 1: with Benoir and Pierre and Ash and having listened to
Speaker 1: their AI generated music, I think it's all really interesting
Speaker 1: and there were definitely sections of their songs that I
Speaker 1: really liked. But the question we posed at the start
Speaker 1: feels still very premature to me. It feels like we're
Speaker 1: still very very far from AI replacing human composers. And
Speaker 1: I personally still prefer all of the artists I listened
Speaker 1: to who are writing their own stuff instead of having
Speaker 1: computers write their stuff. You know what. It reminds me
Speaker 1: of the conversation that I had with a Barrow from Ava,
Speaker 1: and he said that people were really upset when synthesizers
Speaker 1: were first introduced thirty years ago, and now it's totally normal.
Speaker 1: So I guess I can imagine a day when I
Speaker 1: was just going to be another tool for musicians and
Speaker 1: people won't even bat an eye. Natalia drags Jack. Thanks
Speaker 1: for coming on the show today. Thanks for having me Aki.
Speaker 1: So before I let you guys go, I want to
Speaker 1: let you know that this is the last episode of
Speaker 1: this season of Decrypted, and we're going to be publishing
Speaker 1: a special bonus episode in two weeks where this show's
Speaker 1: original co host, Brad Stone and I are going to
Speaker 1: be talking about our favorite episodes that we've ever done
Speaker 1: and update you on the people and the stories we've
Speaker 1: covered over the years. So if there's an episode you
Speaker 1: want to talk about, tweet at Meat at seven or
Speaker 1: email me a I t O one six at Bloomberg
Speaker 1: dot net. Decrypted is hosted by me. Shawn ween is
Speaker 1: our executive producer. Ethan Brooks mixes show today. Nate Linkson
Speaker 1: and Neville Gillette helped with recordings. Francesca Levy is the
Speaker 1: head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you in two weeks