As requested by Unchained Music community member St Ill I’ve begun the journey down the rabbit hole of AI tools that can be used to assist in the creation of music.

While AI still isn’t quite at the level of top songwriters and producers, it’s getting closer every day. And while some may shy away, or reject AI within the creative process, to me it seems an inevitable progression into music, and the following tools can be used creatively to speed up and enhance the creative process.

At the end of the day, all tools are tools, and in the words of Soundwaves Photon - art created by AI still goes through a human that has experienced life and inspiration before it goes out into the world.  Many audiences connect with artists as humans with a story, or as creators/tellers of stories.  I believe this will be true, no matter how sophisticated AI creation tools become.

With that said, below are some AI tools I have found and tried that can be used to enhance the creative process. 

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‍AI ASSISTED SONGWRITING AND MUSIC CREATION

‍Below are some tools that most likely won’t generate a fully formed, high quality song, but rather give assistance on the creation of music.

‍Lyric Generators

‍Below are some generators that can be used in the process of writing lyrics/verses. Since lyrics are essentially poetry set to music, I’ve also found poetry generators useful in this process.  Most often, the full song or poem these generators spit out isn’t amazing, but may have one or two great lines, or word combinations in them that can spark inspiration and be incorporated into a full piece of music.

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These Lyrics Do Not Exist
This is a very simple generator, which creates songs on mood, genre and with a keyword. I’ve found it useful in it’s speed and simplicity for “mining” phrases or combinations of words. This one is free to use.

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Keywords To Lyrics
Even more simple than TLDNE above - I’ve found this AI tool is useful for quick generation of full songs to search for inspiration.   Also free - the website only asks you mention them in the credits if you use a piece.

Rytr
More sophisticated than the above projects, Rytr can take longer prompts (keywords or song themes), and uses a “tone” or emotional mood to create the song lyrics.  This one is free for limited use, after which you must pay a subscription for use of the AI.
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‍AI Assisted Writing

Word Palette

This is a fantastic tool, that is still in development.
It creates rows of suggested words from a “word pallet”, that is, texts you have entered from which it draws the randomised words.

While it has some bugs, I still find it very useful to find that missing word or theme for the next line of lyrics.   This one is free, and at the moment only for Apple devices.

AI Music Creation

There are quite a bunch of AI music creation companies emerging at the moment. Many of their main focus is creating generic “production music”, that is, music that can be used in the background of content such as videos made for YouTube, or Ads.  Hence, the quality still leaves something to be desired for releasing as actual music. But, like all AI music creation tools, the quality is improving. And another use case for these is using the AI created content to inspire new productions.

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Soundraw.io 

This Japanese company have made a super simple interface that can quickly generate dozens of tracks in a multitude of genres.  These tracks can be customised - tempo, instruments and genres can all be adjusted.   For me personally, I would find this super useful in generating “vibes” and chord progressions to create my own songs from as the quality isn’t quite there for releasable tracks (although its perfectly usable for tracks in the background of videos or ads). If you do go down the inspiration route, do consider subscribing and supporting the company who are providing the tool to do so.  ‍

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AI ART

‍Just a few years ago, AI visual art was abstract and novel at best. But it has now progressed to the point where it can create mind-blowing stuff.
The majority of this art has come from Midjourney and DALLE-2. While they can’t do everything, the results can be pretty impressive. 

Midjourney

Midjourney uses Discord as its interface to generate images.  You can write a prompt, and it will generate 4 variations, from which you can create larger scale images.  Midjourney’s free account can be used to create art that isn’t used for commercial purposes. With their paid subscription, you can use the assets you create. 

Below is a piece I created with Midjourney, that was then edited by the team at Zerothree and became the artwork for a track I released with Beacon Bloom called Club Jesus.

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ONWARDS

In future updates of this article we’ll take a look at AI production tools and mastering as these tools have also greatly progressed in recent years.

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Disclaimer: Unchained Music is not affiliated with any of the above projects.

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