How to Preserve Music: Tips and Techniques You Need to Know
By converting analog recordings and printed music into digital formats, we can create high-quality copies less susceptible to deterioration and loss. Moreover, digital archives are more accessible to share and access, making music preservation more inclusive and global.
Efforts to preserve music using AI
Artificial intelligence (AI), in its broadest sense, is intelligence exhibited by machines, particularly computer systems. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to perceive their environment and use learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. Such machines may be called AIs.
Some high-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon, and Netflix); interacting via human speech (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); generative and creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence, and AI art); and superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., chess and Go). However, many AI applications are not perceived as AI: “A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labeled AI anymore.
Efforts to preserve music using AI
Local culture, music, language etc. are being lost due to the pressure of globalization. But it is possible to save the tradition by using modern technology, such a novel initiative is going on in South America.
Nicolas Madore and the FutureX team are researching the impact of algorithms on Latin American music. Explaining the matter, he said, “It is difficult for any AI model to understand the complexity and specific characteristics of a region like Latin America. That is the challenge How do we create tools that represent our region?”
A survey of 16 Latin American countries found that creative people are not yet taking full advantage of AI. According to Nicolas Madore, we use AI primarily for project management, not for creative work
Musicians from all over Latin America work for FutureX. To explore the application of AI in music production, they created a song using various AI tools.
Nicholas said about the initiative, “It took us six to eight months. We have experimented using multiple tools. At first hearing, they could not understand that we are using AI. Mostly musical instruments. Later we trained the AI model with the voices of famous Latin American singers.’
That song has quite an experimental sound. But that effort has given sound researchers some valuable insights.
Nicholas said, ‘That song was actually supposed to be about our voices, women and the amalgamation of different voices. Creating good music was not the main objective at all. Rather, I wanted to know the result of combining all the voices. It is more of an attempt to create a ‘mega voice’.
Together with other musicians and scientists, he is teaching AI audio tools about his country’s musical heritage. If not, he fears that many regional musical styles will be lost.
Nicolas Madore said, ‘In my opinion, it is important to know how to train AI. It is not desirable to create any conflict in our culture by using such models. Rather, it is desirable that technology will deepen our cultural identity and bring local traditional music within the reach of all.
Source: Deutsche Welle.
