At its worst, AI is thoughtlessly used to clone voices and generate grab-and-go lyrics in the style of famous musicians. But there's another side of AI that deserves a better reputation.

AI is changing how we produce music for the better. Just take a look at the way it's speeding up creative workflows, giving us new ways to search sample libraries, helping to develop advanced plugins, and creating affordable mastering options.

If you're looking to get a different perspective on the AI and music debate, here are some of the positive ways that AI is being used.

1. Advanced Vocal Synthesis

Deepfake vocal clones of famous artists have stirred up mixed feelings in the music industry. Yet, in the background, the same advancements are helping to push vocal synthesis into new territory.

Trying to build a human voice with a computer isn't anything new. A singing synthesizer like VOCALOID6 has a history going back to the 2000s, and in its more recent iteration, has started using AI to improve the synthesized voice instrument.

You can type in lyrics, select the pitch, and fine-tune the accent. It can sing in Japanese and English, and as of 2023, Chinese too.

Much like any software instrument, like that of a virtual piano, it attempts to recreate the real thing. But unlike how deepfake music is created, the company worked with real singers to develop several vocal profiles.

If you're looking for a younger alternative then try Synthesizer V by Dreamtonics. The company was founded in 2019 just as AI technology began to accelerate and reach mainstream status, and the results are impressive.

2. Quick Stem Separation

Separating stems from a track—extracting just the vocals, or maybe the bassline—has always been difficult to do, and even with the right tools, the results were far from perfect. Thankfully, AI-powered stem separation is changing this process for the better.

Software like RipX by Hit'n'Mix can produce high-quality stems without as many audio artifacts as you would commonly hear in the past. While a drag-and-drop web app like LALAL.AI streamlines the process for non-technical users.

Stem separation is a starting point for a whole host of creative productions including remixing, sampling, and creating backing tracks, and the advancements AI brings to this area are a boon for DJs and producers.

Most incredibly, AI takes it one step further into live performances where you can split the stems of a song in real-time. Gone are the hours spent prepping a track. If you can think of the song you want, you can load up a deck and isolate the groove on-the-fly.

It's also worth noting that good, open-source, AI stem splitters have quietly been around for years on GitHub, including one called Spleeter. A plugin version of this was built for Ableton by the artist Azuki, which you can buy for as little as $1 from Bandcamp.

3. Affordable Mastering

When you compare AI mastering to human mastering, the main benefits you get from going the AI route are time, speed, and cost.

Say you need a track polished in a few hours, as opposed to several days or longer, or you don't have a budget to get it done, that's where AI mastering steps in. The main downside, of course, is that the results won't match that of a seasoned studio professional.

Regardless, for many beginners to music production, and for those who like to do it as a hobby, having a cheap option like this helps to lower the barrier of entry. Options like LANDR, for example, charge $10 for a single master.

In this case, the machine learning algorithm is put to work analyzing your song, identifying sections and transitions, then it applies settings like EQ, compression, and loudness based on what it hears. The exact parameters it looks at, and how the changes are decided on, are secrets of each company's model.

The popular music hosting platform, SoundCloud, has also integrated an AI mastering feature into its site and is notably backed by Dolby (famous for its movie theater sound systems). With the Next Pro subscription, you can get 3 free mastering credits and extra purchases will cost $3.99.

4. Better Ways to Search Your Sound Library

Organizing your files isn't a very sexy use of AI technology, but one that is quietly reshaping how we navigate sounds in a DAW.

Take, for example, Algonaut Audio Atlas 2. Traditionally, finding a drum sample meant trawling through lists and folders, playing each sample till you found the one you were looking for. But what this plugin does is use AI to listen to each waveform and intelligently arrange them on an interactive visual map.

Samples are grouped together based on their sound characteristics, resulting in continents with like-sounding audio such as kick drums, toms, bongos, or cowbells, to name a few. Hovering over an individual dot will play the sample for you to hear.

There are other methods too. Splice is a web-based sound library that uses AI to make searching for samples more intuitive by helping you find samples that are similar sounding. Hunting through your sound library is less a chore and a lot more fun thanks to AI.

5. AI-Powered Emulators

Emulators make up a huge part of the plugins that are developed for music production, and before now, building them involved a lot of guesswork. But with access to AI technology, developers are able to get even closer to the authentic sound of old audio gear.

Take, for example, the AI-powered TAIP tape plugin by BABY Audio that emulates the sound of old analog tapes. To train the algorithm, two types of audio were fed into the system. One that had the tape effect and one without. The AI model is tasked with learning the characteristics that set them apart so that it can apply them to new audio.

Here's how it sounds:

As BABY Audio writes, "used genuinely and with a legitimate purpose", AI could be the future of music technology. This is one area of music production that AI fits in perfectly since the ultimate goal is to recreate an old sound as faithfully as possible—whether a human or AI system is able to do that better, doesn't matter so much.

On the one hand, you have Open AI's Jukebox producing music without the hard work, while on the other, creative AI-powered emulators are offering improved tools that can be put to work producing something original.

The AI Behind the Music Scene

AI technology is changing the way we explore samples and arrange new music, offering some fresh advances in the area of emulators and vocal synthesizers. Live-stem separation alone is enough to see how this technology can free us from tedious prep work.

Vocal clones and lyric-writing chatbots are sensational, but the lasting benefits of AI come from the AI-assisted music production tools that are helping us to focus on the creative side of things.