Musicians around the world have described artificial intelligence as a threat to creativity, but the CEO of a popular platform told AFP he thinks critics are getting it all wrong.
BandLab, a primarily free online music workstation and distribution platform based in Singapore, has more than 100 million registered users.
It recently added an AI-powered music-making tool called SongStarter, which generates song ideas from genre, key, rhythm, and lyric prompts.
For BandLab founder and CEO Meng Ru Kwok, whose company bought music magazine NME in 2019, AI is no substitute for a real musician.
“It’s not called SongFinisher. It’s called SongStarter. It’s not trying to replace people’s creativity… (with) a magic button vending machine approach where you press and a song comes out,” Meng told AFP in an interview.
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“You still have to use your human creativity to build on it, to turn it into something.”
Proponents of easy-to-use apps like BandLab say they have revolutionized the music industry by allowing artists to be their own producers and bringing cheap bedroom recordings to the charts.
However, many musicians worry that artificial intelligence will be used to reproduce voices and sounds and also that it will become even more difficult for professional artists to make a living in a brutally competitive industry.
Meng, a Radiohead fan from a billionaire family, believes there is no going back from the shift to more self-production.
One of BandLab’s biggest hits came via American lo-fi indie artist David Burke, better known as “d4vd”.
Relying entirely on the app to record and master the track in his sister’s closet, d4vd’s song “Romantic Homicide” recently surpassed one billion Spotify streams.
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“He did it on his phone with just headphones. It’s his talent after all. We’re more like somebody’s guitar, you know? We’re an instrument,” Meng said.
“Disaster Scenarios”
“The definition of music creators will change. In the same way that before everyone did not think of themselves as videographers or photographers. Today, with a mobile phone, everyone is an extremely casual photographer,” he added.
Among the newest AI features on the way is Voice Cleaner, designed to improve the quality of voice recordings.
Meng wants critics of artificial intelligence to see the technology not as an end to human creativity but as a tool that enhances it.
“There are a lot of disaster scenarios for any kind of innovation in technology, right? So if we look back historically, what’s happening with artificial intelligence is, in my opinion, a technological evolution, and it’s not as simple as a simple evolution.” He says.
The Cambridge maths graduate uses the invention of the phonograph – later called the gramophone – as an example of how the new technology once instilled fear when musicians thought it would be the end of live performances.
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What would Radiohead say? –
Meng learned to play the guitar as a teenager and was a fan of alternative bands such as Radiohead and The Strokes.
Later, he became obsessed with the classics, from singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell to blues icon BB King.
Asked how he would pitch BandLab to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Meng says he’ll try to reconcile the band with the app’s social features.
The 35-year-old’s father is a palm oil tycoon and his great-grandfather, Robert Kwok, is Malaysia’s richest man.
Meng also owns Swee Lee, one of Asia’s leading musical instrument retailers.
“My mom always jokes that my son sells guitars,” he says.
Source: AFP