An amazing perspective on AI and music by Spotify CTO and CPO Gustav Söderström

If you think about music, it's going through a journey of more capable tools. Go way back, even if you were a musical genius like Bach, you literally needed access to an orchestra to be able to realize that genius.

Even if you could play multiple instruments yourself, you couldn't play them at the same time. Then we got to recorded music, and you could record one instrument at a time. So you got more and more independent.

And then somewhere around the 80s, the synthesizer came along and meant that you didn't have to be able to play all the instruments yourself. You could sort of "fake" the drums using the synthesizer and the guitar and so forth. So I think there's been this progression of more powerful tools that enabled more and more creativity.

Then somewhere in the 90s, the digital audio workstation came along — and being a Swede, I'm very proud of this — and Avicii came along. Avicii wasn't very proficient at any one instrument or a singer. In a previous world, he would not have been considered a very creative person because he couldn't realize that without access to this tool: the digital audio workstation.

Turns out he was one of the most creative people we had that we are very, very proud of. For him, the digital audio workstation was what Steve Jobs would call "a bicycle for the mind". It meant that he could get more productive, and he could express his genius. And the big question with this next round of tools is the same: is it amplifying creativity, or is it replacing people?

I think it's amplifying creativity. It's giving more and more people access to be creative. You need even less motor skills than on a piano. You need less technical skills than their own workstation. So I think of them as tools.

And there's this interesting question of what is A.I. music? I think people say A.I. music, and they mean something that was prompted with not too much of a prompt and not too much work, like it's one hundred percent A.I. But the truth is that much of music being made today is a combination. I think many of the big artists are using AI for parts of their songs, or parts of the track, or the drums, etc.

So I think there's actually a scale between zero A.I. and one hundred percent A.I. And we're on this progression where it's actually going to be very difficult to say, what is an A.I. song?

Taken from the Big Technology newsletter https://lnkd.in/gB69DNhQ

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