Move over ChatGPT, there’s a new AI tool that can make music (almost) out of thin air. After writing and creating art, AI can now even create music using just text prompts. This is through Google’s new AI system called MusicLM that can make music in any genre.
Google describes MusicLM as “a model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions”. It can generate complex compositions at 24 kHz that remain consistent over several minutes. The text descriptions are extremely detailed and include the style, genre and even the mood and tempo of the tune.
What is amazing is that the AI manages to capture nuances like melodies and moods as well. You can listen to what AI-generated music sounds like on Google's research paper.
This is not the first time AI has been used to make music. There have been many attempts like Riffusion, Dance Diffusion and Google-owned AudioML. Even ChatGPT’s OpenAI has its own music AI called Jukebox. But they have not been as successful as MusicLM is in creating layered tunes.
MusicLM was trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music to create songs with some level of complexity. The AI takes the descriptions and creates a “hierarchical sequence-to-sequence modeling task” and can create a musical narrative ranging up to 5 minutes based on the length of the description.
But there is one caveat. Google has trained the AI on copyrighted music and because of that, researchers found that 1% of the examples can be associated with existing songs. This could raise many ethical concerns since the AI could easily pick up copyright material, and this is why Google will not be releasing this AI any time soon.
The co-authors of the research paper acknowledged this saying, “We strongly emphasize the need for more future work in tackling these risks associated to music generation.”
Google has made 5,500 music-text pair examples available though for anyone who wants to listen to MusicLM’s creations.
ChatGPT has been taking the world by storm. From passing complex law and medical exams to writing CEO’s emails to realtors now using the AI to write property listings, ChatGPT is taking over plenty of highly-skilled tasks. We may not get to see that kind of uncharted growth for MusicLM since it won’t really launch, but it is another big step in AI advancement.
