 Cool. The hopeful, the dreamers, born from zeros and ones. Taryn Southern is an online personality who you might know from her YouTube channel or when she was a contestant on American Idol. These days, Taryn is interested in emerging tech, which has led to her current project, recording a pop album. I'm faking. These two things might not sound related, but her album has a twist. Instead of writing all the songs herself, Taryn used artificial intelligence to help generate percussion, melodies, and chords. This makes it one of the first albums of its kind, a collaboration of sorts between AI and human. Music-making AI software has come a long way in the past few years, to the point where it can co-produce an album like Taryn's. As a musician and producer, the idea of AI being able to do what I do is freaky. I met up with Taryn to find out about the process of collaborating with software. Maybe it's not as crazy as it sounds. Do you view AI when you're working with these platforms as a tool or a collaborator? I've been using the word tool a lot just in talking with you, but I do view it more as a collaborator in that it is giving me source inspiration material. So a piano doesn't just give me its notes. And I would think more of a piano as a tool. Yeah, a tool is something we can wield, and a collaborator is something we work with. So yes, I would say AI feels much more like a collaborator. Collaborator and a tool, because I can also still tell it what to do. Right. You have power over it still. For now. Taryn uses several different AI programs to write her music, including software from IBM, Google, and Amper. Most of these systems work using deep learning networks, a type of AI that's reliant on analyzing large amounts of data. Basically, you feed the software tons of source material, from dance hits to disco classics, which it then analyzes to find patterns. It picks up on things like chords, length, tempo, and how notes relate to one another, learning from all of this input so it can create its own melodies. How has it affected your songwriting? Well, for one, I have a new language around music that I didn't have before, because I'm not a musician. I know very, very little about music theory. So I understand minor chords and major chords, and I can plunk out a few keys on the piano. But my musical knowledge really ends there. And now, using AI, I'm writing my lyrics and my vocal melodies to the actual music and using that as the source of inspiration. So what are the key differences between the different platforms that you've been using? The key differences are usability. Watson and Magenta, you've got to go on GitHub and unpack the developer language. And I had to definitely brush up on my skills with the help of some of the engineers on these teams. So I think that that's a potential barrier to entry with some of these tools, is just that it does require some coding knowledge. Amper is, I think, the easiest. It's front-facing. The interface is super simple and intuitive. How did you find Amper? Amper was the first one I found because when I went online to search what tools are out there, I knew of Watson. But at the time, they hadn't released an open source or public-facing software. So I searched to see what else was available. And the first article that came up about AI music focused on Amper. So I went to their website, and it was super easy to use. Most AI programs kick out MIDI. And MIDI is sort of like sheet music in that it's instructions for how a melody should be played. It's not audio. It's a protocol. Amper builds tracks from prerecorded samples and spits out actual audio, not MIDI data, meaning there's something to listen to right away. From there, you can change the tempo, the key, or swap out instruments. So you can start with something played in one style and change out the set of instruments for a completely different sound. This audio can then be exported as a whole or as individual layers of instruments, which are known as stems. Stems can then be modified further within a digital audio workstation. So there are a couple of other AI music-making platforms that are out there, but what differentiates Amper? For us, we've always focused on speed, quality, and control. And control is a huge element, especially as an artist. What do you want to manipulate? We're one of the few that you can manipulate tempo, key, and instrumentation. You know, you're like, I don't like this piano. I'd rather have a guitar do that, or I want this other piano in place of that. So it's a lot more of you working with it and then creating the final product from there. What's the process then to get those sounds into Amper? We own all our own audio content. We sample all our own instruments note by note because we want artists to be able to manipulate that. So I have to record a guitar, every note, every possible thing it can do so that we can recreate a performance from that versus having a loop because we don't use loops in anything whatsoever. Everything is note to note. Taryn's album doesn't just rely on artificial intelligence. She also works with other humans, including her producer, Ethan. They invited me to one of their recording sessions for her song, New World, so I could see how producers work with AI in the studio. I like that with the AI material that you are given new ideas that you wouldn't come up with on your own, but that you still have the freedom to shape those ideas into something that makes sense to you. So there's still creative expression involved and the end result still feels like something that represents me and Taryn, and so I like that. To get a sense of the difference between where an AI song starts and the finished product, here is an early Ampere export. And here is the final arrangement by Taryn. I'm learning how to break free, I'm breaking, I'm breaking free. A lot of times when other musicians come in that have done a demo on a guitar, they come in, they lay down that guitar track, and then we talk about what do we want to build upon that. Whereas in this case, Taryn is coming in with her guitar is the AI, so she presents that, and then we talk about, well, what do we see this turning into, and then we can add elements around that and restructure it. So it's still similar to the more traditional sense of artists coming in. In many ways, music is the highest form of expression that humanity has. It's like our last bastion. Yes, our last bastion, and I understand that. It does force change upon people in some form or another, and maybe some of that will be bad. Like I said, I can't predict the future. I do think it will break people out of their comfort zones and potentially result in new forms of music, which could be seen as negative for other forms of music. Like, did the rise of hip hop and EDM take away from pop? It changed it. It changed it. It changed it. And now we infuse EDM and hip hop into top 40 pop, right? And so I think we'll see something similar. This video was presented by Aloft Hotels, different by design. If you enjoyed this, please subscribe to our YouTube channel.