Experiments have been going on with software to generate music for many years, but the artificial intelligence behind AIVA is only the first commercial product that really makes an impression. We’re going to work on it.
Just as an intelligible text is not a concatenation of arbitrary groups of letters, music is not a concatenation of random combinations of notes. Like language, music has its own syntax, grammar and style. Because music is about pitches, and therefore frequencies, there is a mathematical component in music. The first attempts to produce pleasant sounds on the computer therefore relied entirely on these mathematical laws.
As early as the 1990s, David Cope managed to capture the work of composers such as Bach and Mozart in lines. This allowed him to create ‘new’ work, which even experts could not always hear were not original compositions. For a long time, however, it was nothing more than a few successful imitations and, except for a number of CDs, it did not lead to commercial products.
In addition to being able to analyze music structures, neural networks can now do that too. Just as these networks have learned to ‘look’ to determine what, for example, a face is, they can also be used to learn the essence of pleasant-sounding music. That process of facial recognition can even be reversed to facial production, and so can the process of music analysis be reversed to music production.
Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist
The first major success of this turnaround from analysis to production came from AIVA (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist), a composition system that is the first in the world to be recognized by a collecting society. Since 2019, the AIVA Music Engine has been available to a wide audience as freeware and as a commercial product. The possibilities of this program have now expanded to such an extent that it is worth a closer look.
After you’ve created a free account, you can easily create great-sounding music in one of several styles with just a few mouse clicks. At the moment there are twelve to choose from, but this number is steadily growing.
By default you end up in Simplified View, where you can choose from four genres (Film music, Produced music, Easy Listening and Pop/Rock) each with a number of styles, such as World Music, Ambient Electronic, Songwriter or Heavy Rock. In all these variants, the parameters are already selected by the system.
After choosing a style, you can set a number of parameters, such as the global tempo, duration and number of compositions. The wide choice within the various parameters gives you a good idea of ​​the variety of music that AIVA can generate within a theme.
That said: you can also just leave everything to AIVA and let the program create a piece of music for you. The composition(s) will then appear in your track overview with information about the style, instruments, key, time signature and tempo.
More control
If you want more control over the end result, you can choose . when generating new music Advanced View. You will now see more specific styles (including film music, jazz, pop, rock, tango, ambient and hip-hop). After choosing a style, you will arrive at a screen where you can choose a key and make a choice from one of the many instrumentations.
Which ones are available depend on the style chosen. You can also choose a duration (for free accounts a maximum of three minutes) and the number of compositions to be generated.
In both Simplified View and Advanced View you have the option to disable melody generation (useful when you only want an instrumental piece of music) and to turn off the percussion in instrumentations that contain rhythm instruments.
If you want to exert even more influence on the composition, you can upload a midi file of an existing or your own song in Advanced View and have it used as an influence. AIVA analyzes this music and will try to make something related to it. Outside of the instrumentation, however, you will not always be able to recognize the connection.
Own contribution
You absolutely do not need a musical background for the possibilities we have seen so far. That changes when you want to tackle an automatically generated track yourself in the editor. Then some musical feeling is useful if you want to determine the instrumentation yourself. You can choose an alternative for all instruments chosen by AIVA and also adjust the sound mix and tempo.
If you have more musical baggage, you can really customize the composition. Not only can you modify each generated note in duration and height, you can also add notes yourself within an existing part or even add a whole new part to the piece.
Moreover, all this can be done in two modes: the Editor that shows you the music per part as a piano roll, or the spectator in which you see all parties at once. There is, however, a catch here, because only in the most expensive subscription do you own the copyright of each generated work.
What does AIVA cost?
AIVA is fun and interesting for music lovers and hobby composers to experiment with and regularly produces really good sounding material. The free version is sufficient for these groups. The download limit of three songs per month is not a problem, because you can always listen to the songs created online.
If you want to use music for something that generates money (such as a YouTube channel), you need at least the cheapest subscription (15 euros per month) and you have to be an avid vlogger to make it profitable. If you work professionally with music, then the most expensive subscription (at 49 euros per month) is required, but this is still a lot cheaper than hiring a composer of flesh and blood.
.