The task of ambitious NoHo creators is not a small one. While the desire to make it big with your own sound has an obvious allure to it, actually reaching people in a way that they have never been reached before is certainly a challenge. But it is one that many people consider well worth it. When indie creators do manage to come up with big hits, they tend to be ones that niche listeners hold onto forever.
The big question these days is whether AI can be an effective tool in this process. Could the right program help NoHo creators successfully put their idiosyncratic talents to work and come up with something great? Is there an AI music maker out there that can effectively grasp individual human gifts and help elevate them to new levels?
What AI can and cannot do
To answer this question, let’s break down the elements of NoHo music creation and take a closer look at what all is involved in the production of indie success.
Emotional prompting
One of the things that people using AI programs need to be fully in touch with is the type of emotional prompting necessary to get the most out of their online tools. Consider the following points:
- Genres alone are insufficient. If you simply tell a program to come up with something like “jazzy piano,” it will give you a result that is fairly generic and not particularly nuanced. But if you say “fast, upbeat piano that mimics a post-war celebration,” you will get much more interesting results.
- Understand your emotional cues. You want to be as specific as possible when creating emotional cues. If your goal is to create a feeling of melancholy, use cues like “quietly devastated,” “aching with longing,” etc. If you want to create a sense of hopefulness, you might try cues like “reflective and hopeful” or “cautiously hopeful.”
- Context is critical. Context is everything when it comes to music. You can have the most beautiful four notes of music in the world, but it won’t mean much unless the larger score has meaning to it. When you are giving your AI program prompts, be sure to describe the context of your music in as great detail as possible. “A warm summer night in Paris, when the rain is gently falling on the Left Bank of the Seine.”
How to create the ideal human-AI hybrid
Given these points, the question then becomes how to best create a hybrid human-AI combination to come up with the best possible music. Important points to keep in mind:
- Ideation and drafting can take time and effort. Coming up with the core of what you want to refine can often be the hardest part when it comes to music creation. There are programs that are specifically designed to come up with different kinds of melodic “hooks,” so you should use one to come up with your basic arrangement. Go through the options carefully, and select the top few that you might choose the best from.
- Go through and find weak sections. There are programs out there that will split AI tracks into components (different instruments, vocals, etc), and which you can filter out to replace with live performances. This will go a long way in adding a much-needed human touch to your music.
- Iterative refinement of pieces. Music creation is never a one-off, and this goes as much for AI-produced programs as it does for anything else. You can create a “seed bank” of drafts, then work on refining your MIDI notes. MIDI stands for musical instrument digital interface, and they are digital instructions that tell instruments what notes to play and how to play them. You can tweak these until you end up with precisely the sound quality that you want.
Adding human imperfections
One of the reasons that indie music hits us the way it does is because it is so profoundly human. And while AI programs can be great at coming up with sound combinations and following instructions, it is hard to make them err. But adding in just the right degree of human quirkiness can often make all the difference when it comes to this kind of music.
Ways that you can do this include:
- Humanizing your MIDI. After you have generated your MIDI with AI, you can tweak different timing possibilities and the overall velocity of your DAW.
- Add in some live instruments. Programs definitely allow for the option of layering sounds together, so you should take advantage of this. Throw in an acoustic instrument on top of what the program comes up with.
- Try different versions of these things and bounce your ideas off of others to see how they resonate with potential audiences.
Using AI for production and mixing
Beyond handling the larger production process, AI can also be useful for taking care of some of the more granular aspects of music creation. For example, you can use it for things like stem separation, which can isolate specific elements within tracks so that you can tweak them individually.
Programs will also allow you to do things like intelligent mastering, which means that you can test how tracks sound across different sound systems to assess the different types of effects that they will have across diverse audiences and spaces.
Enhancement, not replacement
Indie music creators likely have many of the same concerns that artists do when it comes to the use of AI for music creation. But as you can see, AI can actually help talented creators utilize their strengths to the greatest degree possible. As long as you know how to use it effectively. Users should also keep in mind the ethics involved, and be upfront about their methods when it comes to advertisements. Brilliance will still be rewarded for what it is.