Are you curious what a league of robots wreaking havoc on a synthesizer might sound like? You might imagine it sounds slightly more harmonious than a room full of monkeys.
The differences between intelligent machines and simians aside, something new is happening in the field of music commodification. Imagine that you are working on a quick video project and need original content for a background score but you don't have the time or funds to hire a composer. That's a quandary the new start-up company, Amper Music, decided to tackle.
Drew Silverstein, one of the founders of Amper Music, worked as a composer in Hollywood before he had the idea to create “artificial intelligence,” as he calls it, that could create music. According to Business Insider, he first wrote the algorithm necessary for the program in a massive excel spreadsheet.
A far cry from a roomful of robots, Amper Music will release its electronic composition services through a software that produces music from user genre suggestions: phrases such as “happy classic rock” or “dark epic cinematic.” Users will be able to cheaply and efficiently create and pick out the background music they need for their creative projects without worrying about copyright issues or having to hire a human composer.
Silverstein told Business Insider that Amper Music's tracks have passed several “blind taste tests” during which people couldn't tell if the music was made by a computer or not.
In response to Amper Music’s debut this year, critics might raise questions about the future of music, which is becoming increasingly easier to produce and consume. Silverstein doesn't foresee that his product will present a problem for the future of artistic expression, as the “commodity music” his software produces is for a different purpose than composed music, which will continue to exist as long as people feel the need to create.