AI Entrepreneur and Roboticist Carol Reiley and Grammy Award-Winning Violinist Hilary Hahn Launch DeepMusic.ai

Press Releases

Dec 16, 2020

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Today, DeepMusic.ai is launching an organization whose groundbreaking mission is to weave together the artificial intelligence (AI) and arts communities. Co-founders Carol Reiley, serial tech entrepreneur and CEO, and Grammy Award-winning violinist Hilary Hahn, VP of Artistic Partnerships, have teamed up to empower professional artists to work together with AI. DeepMusic.ai is founded on the belief that the brightest future is where highly trained artists can use AI to augment their creative process.

DeepMusic.ai commissioned three original AI-assisted pieces to show what happens when AI is put into the hands of professional human composers. As part of the launch, DeepMusic.ai is debuting special world premieres of these pieces by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang, multi-award-winning film and concert composer Michael Abels, who scored the movies Get Out and Us, and Grammy Award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Dana Leong. Each composer had ultimate say in how AI contributed to their piece. The composers took a variety of approaches to co-composing with AI, which they have shared in their artist statements. Further details about each commissioned piece:

Using Open.ai’s MuseNet, David Lang composed “out of body,” a two-minute piece that he describes as “furious and explosive.” Lang created this body of music by working from AI-generated notes created from double and triple stops for a solo violin he wrote and fed to the software, specifically to be performed by Hilary Hahn. “I began with the idea of writing a piece in which a computer and I were both compositionally equal,” said David Lang. “While I did enlist the assistance of my tech guru friend, I’m proud to say I did not cheat at all in that I laid all the computer notes into my original piece in the order it was generated. It is true, however, that the AI generated many options, and I chose only the one that was most aesthetically pleasing to me. I never asked myself which option was aesthetically pleasing to it.” View Hilary’s violin performance here.
Michael Abels used AIVA for his score, “Gift of the Machine.” In the work for piano, the artist fed the AI examples from his own pre-existing work, and then used portions of the AI-generated response to compose the work. “Art is completely subjective and appeals to people in ways that are not fully explained nor quantified,” said Michael Abels. “This is part of why I was drawn to this project — to discover whether an AI-assisted composition could appeal to the heart and mind of the listener. Working with AI inspired me to make some choices that I would not have made otherwise, which demonstrates to me that AI could very well have a place in the creative process. But ultimately, making creative choices is what a composer does, and what composers have done for centuries.” View the piece performed by pianist Dominic Cheli here.
Collaborating with AIVA, Leong feeds his musical threads (containing musical parameters such as tempo, key, and influencing phrases, melodies & rhythms composed for orchestra and electronic instruments) into the AI workstation. The outcomes are a multitude of AI generated musical “offspring” which are then again deconstructed and woven back, by Leong’s human hand, into a beat driven, melodious orchestral cyborg. “I created one of the world’s first collaboratively composed electronic orchestral pieces,” said Dana Leong. “It was a uniquely challenging process to collaborate with AI software that takes my musical ideas/descriptions/instructions and generates musical examples. I hope AI will be able to eventually reduce some of the tedious and less fun parts of orchestrating music for large ensembles. Fingers crossed!” View the piece composed and performed by cellist Dana Leong here.

“While AI can compose pieces, only people can endow a composition with meaning,” said Carol Reiley. “Just as human composers have to learn to work with other skilled artists, it is time to make sure that AI composers can work with skilled artists as well. I’m thrilled to spearhead this project to ensure that what’s being created are beneficial tools. Artists working with AI scientists collaboratively may actually enhance the creative process and lead to new breakthroughs and genres of art.”

“Even though the combination of art and AI is not a new concept, we are far from clarity and cohesion between the two worlds,” said Hilary Hahn. “There’s an opportunity for artists to have a seat at the table to help shape the future of music. AI and art aren’t incompatible, so if we can bridge the gap in this crucial time, we can end up with something meaningful.”

Visit DeepMusic.ai to watch the three performances and read each composer’s statement. In addition to the world premiere, Deepmusic.ai compiled a database, aggregating a list of the leading AI composition software programs and is developing tutorials to use them, as well as guidelines for professional musicians to work with AI. Whether it be in music generation, performance, business models, or legal and ethical issues, Deepmusic.ai’s ultimate goal is to educate and bring access to art for everyone through the enhancement of human creativity.

About Deepmusic.ai

Deepmusic.ai is a groundbreaking collaboration between the artificial intelligence (AI) and art fields. By bringing together award-winning artists with leading artificial intelligence solutions, the company is bridging the gap between culture and technology to find a common language. Deepmusic.ai wants to allow artists to leverage AI to be an enabler for creativity. Through a feedback loop, the goal is to move AI forward to ensure that the technology is useful and valuable to any artist (expert or amateur).