The past few years have seen an explosion in applications of artificial intelligence to creative fields. A new generation of image and text generators is delivering impressive results. Now AI has also found applications in music, too.

In January, a group of researchers at Google released MusicLM – an AI-based music generator that can convert text prompts into audio segments. It’s another example of the rapid pace of innovation in an incredible few years for creative AI.

With the music industry still adjusting to disruptions caused by the internet and streaming services, there’s a lot of interest in how AI might change the way we create and experience music.

Image by Dung Nguyen/Pixabay

Automating music creation

A number of AI tools now allow users to automatically generate musical sequences or audio segments. Many are free and open source, such as Google’s Magenta toolkit.

Two of the most familiar approaches in AI music generation are:

  1. continuation, where the AI continues a sequence of notes or waveform data, and
  2. harmonisation or accompaniment, where the AI generates something to complement the input, such as chords to go with a melody.

Similar to text- and image-generating AI, music AI systems can be...