What does A.I. mean mean for your music?

As artificial intelligence seeps into every aspect of modern life – self driving cars, telephone answering systems, speech and facial recognition - so its impact in the world of music production continues apace. Here we reveal how it will impact on your music making. The good. The bad. The future!

Had we been discussing artificial intelligence a decade or so ago, we'd have still been whispering in hushed tones, like the machines were listening, waiting to leap on us Terminator-style, then rip us to shreds and take over the world, laughing in robotic Daft Punk-style voices. But that was a decade ago. Now A.I. seems to be part of our everyday lives, like the (irritating) phone systems we use when calling banks, the facial recognition software used on phones, the speech recognition used by Siri, plus endless other, frankly not that terrifying advances. Self-driving cars are probably not that far off, self-driving planes are already up there, and drones are developing minds of their own. And as scary as all this sounds when you type it like that, we do seem to be getting more artificial, without questioning many motives and consequences. Maybe our minds are already being controlled.

But enough scary conjecture, because we're here to talk about music production, and in this world, artificial intelligence has been with us since the first DAW, even arguably the first hardware sequencer that put everything in time for us. Yes, while advances in music technology have not always adhered to strict A.I.rules, the end results have done what A.I. is designed to do - help humans do mundane and time-consuming stuff... easily! Cut and paste a block of music here, and repeat some notes there. It's all A.I. really.

But in 2022, things have moved rapidly on from getting beats placed in time and copying and pasting notes. Now those beats can be created for you from a few taps (EZ Drummer); the notes can be produced automatically (any number of chord players and producers) and your whole song can be mixed for you (iZotope Neutron) and even mastered (it's iZotope again, with Ozone).