Read this blog on my website: www.paulhembree.com

Saturday, February 1, 2020

Life in the AI/ML Music Space

After two years of teaching electronic music and creative coding as a lecturer or visiting assistant professor for small liberal arts colleges in upstate New York, between 2016 and 2018,  I started working full time as an asset developer at Amper Music in May 2018, where I continue to work.

Our primary service at Amper is an artificial intelligence music composer that generates audio based on low-dimensional user input.  Users specify a just a duration, genre and mood, and get back an audio file (or instrumental stem or multi- tracks) of music that closely fits those specifications.  We use a proprietary database of high-quality instrumental samples that are assembled into an audio file on the fly.  Every composition is unique down to each note and rhythm, and there are no pre-recorded loops or musical phrases.

You can use our web-based tool, Amper Score, to compose music, with or without video, or you can use our artificial intelligence via our API, and build your own application.

Of course, the mood elicited by any music is an elastic and contingent phenomena based on listener culture and life experience, but our work focuses on meeting a general listener's genre expectations, assuming enculturation into the Western media landscape.  Furthermore, users are free to explore similar moods to find things that fit their expectations better, or even to use drastically contrasting moods from our database.

Asset development involves supervising the assembly of data that describes each genre-mood pair.  Some of that data takes the form of code as well, so the job involves an enjoyable mixture of programming, composition, analysis and orchestration.  We thrive by exploiting the distinctive features found in these genre-mood pairs.  Our artificial intelligence greatly magnifies the potential of human creativity - we make a relatively small number of decisions that can produce a virtually infinite number of compositions within a genre-mood pair. 

Amper is used within Reuters' productivity suite, we've been part of Adobe Premiere, and we've collaborated on projects with LG, Betty Who, and MasterCard, among others.

Visit our website here: https://www.ampermusic.com/
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