Technology Opens Up New Worlds of Music by Dr. Timothy Smith

Photo Source: Unsplash

The evolution of music has depended on artistic creation and technological innovation ever since people shared songs and began making musical instruments, and today another technological innovation looks to again transform musical composition with new methods of composition and new sounds not possible until now. Generative AI has opened the door to novel musical sound production not previously available to even the most technologically advanced composers. In late 2024, the leading chip maker for the AI revolution, Nvidia, unveiled an advance generative AI for music composition and production called Fugatto. Fugatto stands for Foundational Generative Audio Transformer Opus 1, and trained on millions of audio samples, it will compose music from a text prompt, pull out or add instruments to an existing musical composition, or create novel sounds not possible with current instruments, voices, and synthesizers. This radical transformation of musical composition implies that an individual through text prompts without needing to read or write music, know how to play an instrument, or own a musical synthesizer. Simply writing a text prompt with sufficient detail will generate a composition. Additionally, Fugatto can produce sounds such as a saxophone barking like a dog or meowing like a cat. (fugato.github.io)

With any advance in musical technology, critics happy with the current state of music will predict dire consequences to the artform and extend these negative effects to society as a whole. Music has advanced with technological developments over thousands of years with the concomitant fear and criticism as with the introduction of the piano, the saxophone, and the microphone and amplifier. The piano today stands as mainstay for musical composition, personal refinement through musical education, and an instrument of concert halls and living rooms. However, the piano did not enter the musical scene to open arms and eager composers.

When Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the fortepiano in Italy around 1709, the transition from harpsichord to piano was slow, contested, and genuinely disruptive. The harpsichord had dominated Western keyboard music since the Renaissance, and its plucked-string mechanism produced a sound that musicians had composed for across centuries. The plucking mechanism of the harpsichord produces a sound without much dynamic variation. In contrast to the piano which is short pianoforte (hard and soft) uses hammers allowing the musician great variation in dynamic range from a near whisper to thunderous chords. Initially, musicians criticized the piano as too soft and dull compared to the bright sound of the harpsichord, but after this criticism, piano makers worked to refine the instrument. (gtmusicalinstruments.com) Over a half century later, five-year-old Mozart composed a minuet for piano in 1761 and later Beethoven fully embraced the piano for composition, solo works, and concertos.

Later in the 19^th Century, the Belgian born inventor Adolphe Sax in 1846 patented the saxophone, which sits between reed instruments such as the oboe and clarinet and brass such as the trumpet. The music establishment reacted violently to the initial introduction of the saxophone. He faced thirty law suits over the two decades following his patent, and even with the commercial success of his instrument factory, the legal fees left him bankrupt three times. It took many years for the saxophone to find its place in the musical landscape. Before becoming an integral part of the jazz cannon, the Vatican even banned it from churches in 1914 due to its connection to dancing.

The microphone and amplification, although not a new instrument, fundamentally changed the human voice as an instrument. Before the invention of the microphone and amplification, music performance valued the singers with great projection that could compete with an orchestra to reach the back of a theater. With the microphone, singers could explore other types of vocalizations down to a whisper that everyone in the room could hear. Such singing known as crooning popularized by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra created a whole new genre of music. Again, the initial response from the establishment came loud and clear. Famously, in 1932, Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston denounced crooning as "a base art" and "a degenerate form of singing," adding that the songs "profane the name" of love and are "ribald and revolting to true men." (bibliolore.org) Today many of songs from the crooners have become beloved components of the great American songbook.

Although Nvidia has not released Fugatto for general use, it or other generative models that completely transform the access to composing and generating music have arrived. Of course, some will descry the new way some composers work and the strange new sounds possible with generative models, the change has come. Some composers will embrace the new technology such as Beethoven did the piano and the crooners the microphone. Much of the AI technology for music will need technical refinement, but in the hands of musical artists some remarkable and unexpected new landscapes in music will emerge.

Dr. Smith’s career in scientific and information research spans the areas of bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, toxicology, and chemistry. He has published a number of peer-reviewed scientific papers. He has worked over the past seventeen years developing advanced analytics, machine learning, and knowledge management tools to enable research and support high-level decision making. Tim completed his Ph.D. in Toxicology at Cornell University and a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington.

You can buy his book on Amazon in paperback and in kindle format here.