There is no doubt that AI penetrates everything nowadays and music is no exception to that. But this of course can mean so much. AI as a tool offers many new interesting approaches to music creation. This can lead to many results, but in the end we are here for the weird shit. So that’s why you get weird shit.

Martsman provides us with one excellent example to show you how far you can go already. For this release Martsman used Realtime Audio Variational autoEncoder (RAVE). Briefly explained, you feed music to RAVE and it learns from it. The program can then synthesize new audio wave forms out of your input material in quite astonishing sound quality. RAVE functions as a variational autoencoder for “neural audio synthesis”.

So, what Martsman did was feeding his own old releases into the system. And then used this, as he states, as an instrument to write this EP in collaboration with RAVE. The result is very alien, but interesting. It’s definitely futuristic and something new. Maybe you can describe it as completely deconstructed Jungle/Drum and Bass that can be really mesmerizing.

The approach is quite interesting since it questions many musical concepts generations before us grew up with. What this means in the long run is hard to imagine, but it is great to witness these developments first hand.

For those of you who want to dive deeper into the topic, check out these links here.

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2111.05011
Source: github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE