William Su – Looking Outwards – 10

Aiva is an Artificial Intelligence capable of composing emotional soundtracks for a variety of media like films, video games, and commercials.

According to the team that worked on AIVA, it was trained to compose music composition by reading through a large collection of music partitions from Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, etc. It created a mathematical model of what music is and uses it to make its own unique pieces.

As someone who has worked on and with AI, the making of an AI musical composer doesn’t really come as a surprise to me. In fact, stuff like this has been around for ages like with vocaloids or other computer generated music technologies. What really interests me is how AI is accepted by society. Recently, AIVA became the first virtual artist to have its creations registered with an author’s rights society (SACEM). According to the team, this will not replace musicians or “steal” any jobs. However, this comes into question, when will an AI become so good at what it is trained to do that it could replace humans? And how will we respond to it? In this particular case, it looks like AIVA is marketed more as a tool but it is clear that it can save time, work, and money, maybe better than a trained musician.