Music has always been directly connected with the human expression of emotions. But, technology has established many innovations, especially the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like every other field, the music industry has been affected and redefined by the emergence of this new technological domain. AI influences the way that the music is composed, produced and even its creativity.
In general, AI is seen and confronted as machines or any other system with humanoid behavior, performing tasks previously requiring human reflection.
However, the term « intelligence » remains open to debate, since, by logic, a machine has neither consciousness nor true understanding. Rather, it refers to the ability of AI machine to logically analyze data and contexts in order to solve a problem or create a work from user requests in the most relevant way.
In the case of music creation, this algorithmic capacity enables AI to generate works which, although aesthetically convincing, raise questions as to their artistic creativity. Generally speaking, creativity is one of the many aspects of each person’s personality. It is based, above all, on the experiences, emotions and intentionality of each human being. This is the main reason why there are so many different musical styles, rhythms, lyrics and so on.
Is the AI creative?
Currently, AI can be used to generate visual and musical works with impressive results, thus worrying creators about the authenticity and recognition of their work. This concern is shown by the Hollywood strike, which began on May 2nd, 2023 and ended on November 9th, 2023, with writers and television and radio artists protesting against the fast implementation of AI in the artistic field.
A proposed definition of creativity has been put forward by Margaret Boden (in 2016) and refers to “The ability to come up with new, surprising and value-bearing ideas and works […].”, highlighting three characteristics: novelty, surprise and value. Now, while AI can generate original and sometimes surprising works, the question of their subjective value remains open to interpretation.
However, AI systems are still limited in that they cannot function individually: they cannot imagine concepts, emotions or situations they have never encountered in their databases. So, although they are powerful tools for assisting creation, they cannot, at this stage, fully replace human creativity. Consequently, it is quite obvious that we have to make a distinction between human and artificial creativity. On the one hand, as has already been said, human creativity relies more on the personality, emotions and experiences of the individual, whereas AI operates solely on databases.
Perhaps it’s more a case of co-creativity?
A more appropriate expression seems to be “co-creativity” between humans and machines, rather than calling creative the artificial intelligence.
An interesting project is the one launched by IRCAM (in French: Institut de recherché et coordination acoustique/musique), a French institute dedicated to the research of music and sound. This project is called “REACH” and it is about an AI listening to a musician playing and improvising at the same time, based on the music corpus with which it has been trained. The aim of this project is to demonstrate how promising the music-machine interaction can be and how AI can accompany musicians on stage. The AI should only be considered as a tool for musicians.
Τhis study allows us to get closer to a collaboration between human and machine, rather than opposing these two forms of creativity. In this way, AI is seen as a tool to aid composition, simulating the inspiration of musicians rather than replacing it.
Sources :
https://inuaai.com/ai-in-creative-industries/
https://www.ircam.fr/projects/pages/reach-project
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/20/business/musicians-union-streaming-residuals-ai/index.html
Etudiante en Master 2 Droit de l’économie numérique (2024-2025).
