Are Flea and Bootsy out of a job soon? – Sony shows AI Bassist!
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Are Flea and Bootsy out of a job soon? - Sony shows AI Bassist! · Source: Andrey Suslov / Alamy Vektorgrafik
What a dream for your after work jam that would be: a bassist who is on time, who always adapts to what you’re playing, and who can groove and slap. Researchers from Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL) recently presented their version of an AI Bassist in an academic paper. It sounds pretty interesting.
AI bassist could be the perfect musical companion.
We are obviously staying in the subjunctive. Could. The document now published on one of the biggest platforms for scientific papers, arXiv (pronounced: “archive”), just describes the new model of an AI Bassist. There are a few sound examples, but is there no commercial product or upcoming DAW feature so far. But DAW makers, plug-in manufacturers, and probably even pedal companies will be paying close attention.
This AI bassist model developed by researchers at Sony CSL is said to be able to adapt its style and sound to the input. It doesn’t matter whether the AI is fed – an entire mix or a recording of a single instrument, such as a guitar riff or an acappella song.
The technology behind it: Latent diffusion
AI bassist is based on the increasingly popular AI technology called ‘Latent Diffusion’. As the three researchers Marco Pasini, Stefan Lattner, and Maarten Grachten explain in their paper, the input material is analyzed and compressed to its essence. The latent diffuser then produces far better results from the compressed material in much quicker than standard diffuser models.
It is also possible to train the AI bassist with your own sound material. In other words, you can train the AI with a recording of a bass line. If you then let it generate a new bass line to match a song or a single recording, it adopts the style and timbre of the training material. That would make it much more flexible than current models.
If it were commercially available as a plugin, DAW feature, or even hardware, this could offer enormous creative possibilities for producers. Add a funk bass à la Boosty Collins to a self-produced reggae track, or create a slap bass party à la Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers) for a house track – something you could never do yourself! If the commercial product were marketed “fairly,” the bassists whose material was used to train the AI bassist would hopefully also receive financial compensation.
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3 responses to “Are Flea and Bootsy out of a job soon? – Sony shows AI Bassist!”
Ai is for nerds
And people who like gimmicks
AI is booooooring!
Here we go again 🤣🤣
I’m convinced that all of these stories about AI are fabricated by AI trying to convince us that AI is more revolutionary than it actually is.
(People also don’t seem to realize that AI has been available and implemented in our daily lives already. It’s not as new, novel, and “imminent” as people seem to think.)
Especially when there is an “AI musician”, the promotional art always looks like a knock-off Hatsune Miku, like someone prompted an AI software to generate a combination between HM, Bob from the Reboot cartoon (1990’s), and Little Pumpenstein III.
Little Pumpenstein III is the esteemed and revered Duke of Guccitown. He’s the main character of a hip-hop opera that I’m writing based on the life of John Quincy Adams, and I couldn’t come up with great ideas like this without the help of AI. I also wouldn’t know anything about JQA unless the internet told me. I’ve also never read a book in my life, not so much as a Chick Tract.