A stray sound turns into a melody, a word meets another, and like building blocks carefully chosen and placed bit by bit, a song is born through a musician’s mind, sometimes all at once or over months and years. But what happens when a machine can give you a song, any voice and any sound you wish to hear with a prompt? It is what AI music creation platforms promise to grant, and the ripples of those wishes are being felt right here in Bengaluru.
The biggest impact has been felt in music production, notes Joel Sakkari, who, apart from making independent music as Sakre, produces music for other artistes and brands. “It has become common for people to approach me with an AI-generated track for film songs, jingles or ad music and ask me to recreate it – I proofread the chord progressions, create real guitar parts on it, and legitimise that AI composition,” he shares.
In keeping with this trend, Mack Raj, MD of The Bangalore Studio, a film production company which has transitioned into AI-based work using tools like Google’s Flow, Gemini’s Omini, Kling AI and more while developing an in-house LLM (Large Language Model), says that the tech and lower production costs are drawing artistes trying to make it in the industry. “If you were a lyricist or a singer before, you’d have to invest approximately `50,000 to get a song produced and spend lakhs on music videos. With AI, the audio production takes `10,000 while videos cost around `5,000 per minute,” he says, adding that the cuts come from saving on musicians and equipment.
Generating music from scratch with AI is only one part of the story, though, as DJ Ashok Nalwade, the creator of AIRA, an AI powered tool that assesses tracks and weaves them together as a DJ would. He explains, “Most tools are focused on creation, but what we’re trying to do is curate an experience. AIRA understands the context and tempo and decides when to transition from one song to another to maintain the energy. We have also added a biometric feature so that, based on your heart rate from your Apple Watch and the weather, it becomes a beautiful recommendation engine.”
Spoonful of Scepticism
Established musicians like Vasu Dixit, though, are not sold on the idea. Noting how he is able to spot AIgenerated music all the time, especially on restaurant and cafe playlists, he says, “AI-generated images used to be very slick looking, with rough edges and extra limbs – to musicians, AI music sounds like that. It’s still in a very initial stage,” says Dixit. For him, music is as much about the process as the result and the step that makes a song true, “I want to use my senses to express what I feel, experience and see around me. If AI does that for me, it becomes easy. I’m afraid it will lead to not being able to use my skills.”
Like AI-generated texts have problems with ‘hallucinations’ and inconsistencies, AI music has these issues too, as Sakkari, who has experimented with the technology but does not use it in his own work, elaborates. “The tones of instruments are odd, sounding somewhere between real and electronic; the instruments’ tone, the melody and the voice of the singer change drastically in the middle. It gets rhythm mostly right but really overcomplicates harmonies, so you end up spending more credits to fix these issues,” he says, adding that it’s especially frustrating when novices, believing that AI is the expert, refuse to listen to reason. He recalls, “It had made up a chord that could only be played if all the strings were jumbled and the musician had seven fingers, but the client insisted that I recreate it.”
Session musicians, music producers and singers who record demo tracks for pay feel the material impact of this shift the most and Sakkari is one of them, despite being a wellknown artiste in the city’s indie music scene. “Music production has not been replaced, but the amount of money that people are willing to pay has reduced drastically, by almost 50 per cent. I’m having to take on more projects to make the same amount,” he reveals.
One area that has remained mostly untouched by AI is performance. As Nalwade notes, while AI generated tracks feature in club playlists, the highlight is still a live DJ. “DJing is 70 per cent what you play and 30 per cent how you engage with your crowd by feeling their energy, talking to them and getting them hyped up. Maybe someday, AI could do that, but today, it doesn’t take away what DJs bring to the table,” he opines.