Will A.I. Replace the Music Producer?

The music industry is always trying to predict the next breakthrough, and if you’ve attended a music convention in the past 10 years, you’ve probably been to at least one panel that asks some form of this question : Are robots about to replace composers? My hot take on the subject is that, yes, a lot of music will be written by A.I. in the future. Algorithms and other forms of big data have already influenced the music we listen to, and frankly, it’s not for the worst…

You might have noticed that a lot of major artists are now releasing albums full of short, catchy songs. They often start with a taste of the chorus to let you know what’s coming. The pop hits of the streaming age are punchier, they go to the point, and they are inspired by how people listen to music, rather than taking wild guesses like they used to.

After all, pop music has always been inspired by the medium that supports it, from the single era of the 1950s, to the weirdly sequenced albums of the 90s, when CDs annihilated the constraint of time. It would only make sense that, at a time when technology is becoming smarter, music would become more intelligent too.

This being said, I doubt that A.I. will replace the human composer. Before you think I’m just an old reactionary, let me add this : I do think artificial intelligence will play a huge role in the future of art. A lot of music is mathematical, but taste, sensibility and the proverbial authenticity also plays a huge role in what we like about a good song.

Sooner than we think, I could see A.I. generating drum beats, bass lines and other forms of arrangements. In a way, sample databases like Splice are already doing an awesome job at filling in the blanks of the producer's creative process and helping them create more quickly, or taking oblique pathways. But, at the moment of going to press, there still needs to be a human behind a piece of art if you want a human to relate to it. Some call it branding.

Analogously, there’s probably a robot out there capable of producing a pretty nice abstract painting, but wouldn’t it be more meaningful to buy something from a local artist you’ve actually met?

As technology becomes better at creating music, I think we’re just going to see more and more “regular folks" trying their hand at production and stumbling on hits. To them, A.I. might be a tool more than a competitor. 

For instance, I could see an aspiring rapper inputting a few hits of the moment in a program and getting back a unique, algorithmically-generated beat to spit bars on. But those initial hits would have had to have been created (or at least curated) by a human with a creative vision. The same way anyone could've come up with punk, but it took some peculiar minds to reject conventions and dream it up. We have yet to see an iconoclastic computer, although I’m sure someone is working on that.

Also, music producers are a dime a dozen. There isn’t a great need to create a technology that will render human artists useless for the simple reason that art is fun to make, and most people do it for free… When they’re not getting into debt for the privilege. Not that I could relate! (Laughs nervously. Still laughing... Oh jeez, now he's crying.)

While there are many applications for self-generated music - ambient music being only one of them - most likely, the human dimension of art will always win over it’s merit. Great artistic movements have been all about rebellion, emotion and happy accidents. Three things A.I. isn’t great at, at least at the moment.

A.I. might eventually replace a certain type of producer, but we’ll always need humans to dream up the next revolution.