ABOUT
BITTER SWEET A.I. SYMPHONY IS A RADIO DOCUMENTARY/PROJECT PRODUCED BY JOSHUA COASE.
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JOSHUA IS INVESTIGATING WHAT IMPACT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL HAVE ON THE MUSIC INDUSTRY IN THE FUTURE.
THIS IS BEING PRODUCED FOR JOSHUA'S FINAL MULTIMEDIA PROJECT AT BOURNEMOUTH UNIVERSITY.
CONTRIBUTORS
JOSHUA COASE
Joshua is a final year Multimedia Journalism student at Bournemouth University, UK. He is the Creator/Producer of Bitter Sweet A.I. Symphony.
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Joshua is the Head of Sport and New Music Monday Show Presenter on Nerve Radio. He comes from a musical background, having passed Grade 8 Rockschool Vocals with Merit, as well as passing both Grade 5 Trinity Guildhall Keyboard and Grade 5 London College of Music Popular Music Theory with Merit. He also studied Music Technology at A Level.
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Joshua has previously worked as an intern at AFC Bournemouth and has been an accredited journalist at various ATP/WTA tennis tournaments for UBI Tennis. He is a Salzburg Global Seminar Alumni having participated in the 10th Salzburg Academy on Media & Global Change in July/August 2017.
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David is the Lead Audio DSP Engineer at AI. Music. He joined the company in September 2017 and acts as the lead researcher for the company, looking at the audio signal processing and artificial intelligence specifically.
His background is in mathematics and music technology and David has recently finished a PhD at the Queen Mary University of London. He was studying digital music and artificial intelligence in music in particular and saw the chance to work at AI. Music as a natural progression in his career.
Rebekah Lutton, who goes by the stage name Lilla Vargen is an up and coming singer-songwriter from Northern Ireland. Renowned for her soft, soulful and evocative voice accompanied by soft piano and guitar melodies, she is certainly an artist on the rise.
Lilla has over 230,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and is against the idea of A.I. being more prominently used in the music industry in the future as she fears that the use of A.I. in production may go too far.
Eliza is the Head of Operations at Jukedeck. She previously worked as an Executive Assistant at a London financial technology start-up.
Eliza has an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London and a BA in Music & Technology from University of East Anglia.
She comes from a musical background, being an operatic performance scholar at university and was also part of a contemporary jazz ensemble.
Taryn is known firstly for being a singer-songwriter, making a name for herself on YouTube but in recent years has turned towards telling stories about the future and helping companies do the same.
As well as being a musician, she describes herself as being a digital storyteller, future architect, VR/AR evangelist and general internet person. The 31-year-old has over half a million subscribers on YouTube and her videos have received more than 700 million views online.
Taryn is currently working on an exciting project where she is creating the world’s first album to be entirely composed and produced with A.I. She is using Amper Music to create all her tracks, including her first single Break Free. The album, titled I AM AI, is due for release in Spring 2018.
Rick is the CEO of Ditto AI, an artificial intelligence company which focuses on capturing human knowledge to recreate human expertise perfectly. This is so that their customers can be sure that any advice or recommendations they are given are complete, consistent and correct every single time.
As well as building this company Rick also has a musical background and has been making his own music since the initial move from the analogue to the digital age.
CASE STUDIES
Amper is an A.I. based composer, performer and producer which empowers the user to create and customise original music in a matter of seconds using their unique software.
The company, based in New York, USA, retains the copyright to every track that is created but they give the user a global, royalty free perpetual use license for the track to be used in whichever way they want, whether that be for personal or commercial use.
The A.I. start-up was founded back in 2014 by Sam Estes and Drew Silverstein with the vision and goal to create software which widened peoples opportunities to create music without the need for expensive equipment/software or recording studio.
Amper finally went public and was announced to the world in October 2016 and has been developing and trialling its software ever since in Beta on their website.
The software originally only featured a couple of genres to choose from when creating music but now users can choose from Hip Hop, Cinematic, Classic Rock, Modern Folk and 90’s Pop. The catalogue of genres is expected grow exponentially over the next few years.
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You can find out more information by visiting their website:
AI. Music is a start-up company which is exploring what happens when you apply the latest techniques in AI to music creation. The company, based in London, UK, was founded by Siavash Mahdavi in 2016 with the aim to evolve music from a static, one-directional interaction to one of dynamic co-creation.
This is one of two A.I. companies taking part in Abbey Road Red, a start-up incubator run by the studios that aims to forge links between new tech companies and the music industry.
With 18 employees at the moment the company is rapidly expanding and growing, with plans to launch publicly and announce themselves to the world in February 2018. Therefore, much of what the company is working on right now is being kept under wraps.
The company is working on a tool which will ‘shape-change’ existing songs to match the context in which they are being listened to. For example, when you listen to a song, e.g. a Rihanna track, it could be an acoustic version in the morning and then at the gym it could become a deep house or drum’n’bass track and then it could become a jazz track when you’re winding down in the evening.
You can find out more information by visiting their website: www.aimusic.co.uk.
Jukedeck is a UK start-up company based in London which uses state-of-the-art technology and A.I. to dynamically shape music to different situations, using machine learning so that the programs musical tools get better over time.
Similar to Amper Music, customers can set their own parameters, including genre, instruments, length of track and its tempo. In around 20 seconds the system composes the unique track. The customer gets an MP3 which can be downloaded, costing the individual or business with less than 10 employees 78p. These tracks can be used for free if they credit Jukedeck, while larger businesses pay around £17.20 per track or sign up to a monthly subscription model.
Over 500,000 tracks have been created in 169 countries so far and Jukedeck created tracks featured in YouTube videos have been viewed over 30 million times. Google, Coca-Cola and the Natural History Museum have all used music created using Jukedeck in their online adverts. Liz Yepsen – Developer Platforms Program Manager at Google said: “The music was perfect for our video and very fun to create.”
The company has origins at Cambridge University and the team is formed of composers, producers, engineers, academics and machine learning experts who have a passion for music and technology. It is training deep neural networks to understand how to compose and adapt music in order to give people the tools to personalise the music they need.
Jukedeck has already won several awards including TechCrunch Disrupt Winners 2015, Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity Award Winners 2016 and LE WEB Start-up Competition Winners.
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You can find out more information by visiting their website:
Jaime is the Head of Sales at Amper Music and comes from a predominantly sales background. Her desire to work with artists/bands led her to work at The Orchard from 2006-2012, first as a Director, then Senior Director, before becoming Vice President.
After a couple of years as Global Head of Major Labels Relations first at Nokia and then at Microsoft Jaime joined Amper.
Jaime’s role at the company is building a marketing/sales strategy and meeting companies to demo Amper, explaining what the product does, its future capabilities and then in turn signing up new clients.
Drew is the CEO and Co-founder of Amper Music. He graduated from Vanderbilt University's Blair School of Music, where he studied Music Composition and Italian, and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
He was an award-winning composer, producer, and songwriter for film, television, and video games in Los Angeles at Sonic Fuel Studios before turning his attention to creating artificial intelligence software for music production at Amper.
Drew’s vision and reason for helping create Amper is to broaden accessibility to music and provide everyone with the tools to create music. The aim is that no matter what the person's background or financial situation they should have the opportunity to access and create their own music.
Pete is a former DJ most prominent in the 1980s. He is best known for being the conceptualist and founder of the Big Chill Festival, which he ran from 1994-2011 and also founded the record label Cooking Vinyl.
Over the past 18 months Pete has been working on setting up and running Campfire Convention, a brand new social network which also hosts a variety of events and meetings with a strong sense of community and togetherness being at the heart of the project.
Sebastian has over 10 years of experience working in the music industry, representing record labels and artists. He has worked with many famous artists/bands including Justin Bieber, Zara Larsson, the Rolling Stones, Green Day and Icona Pop.
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In February 2017 he founded Yours In Distress, a record label for music created by artificial intelligence based in Stockholm, Sweden. He views the project as being an R&D department for the music industry where he and his colleagues can experiment with ideas using A.I.
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He is also the Co-founder and Creative Director of Vast & Awesome, a digital agency for the music industry.
Taishi is the COO of Amadeus Code, an artificial intelligence powered song writing assistant. The app is due for public roll out in February 2018.
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Based in Tokyo Japan, he is also the Co-founder of QRATES, an on-demand vinyl crowdfunding platform and was responsible for launching the first Music Hack Day in Asia in 2014. Taishi has also produced music for chart topping Japanese and Korean artists and became the first Red Bull Soundclash champion in Japan.
