5 Ways Automation Can Improve Creative Workflow for Musicians
When you mention the word “automation” to a person who works in a creative field, you’re more than likely to get some judgemental (maybe even fearful) looks. The A word is often considered a harbinger of doom, a sure sign that we are on an inevitable path to computers creating art and making human tastemakers obsolete. But if you ask any artist in just about any medium if there was any part of their creative process they wished they could make easier or faster, most of them will have something to say. Because let’s face it, being an artist is hard! It can be frustrating, time consuming and expensive. Maybe it’s time to look to technology to help.
The Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of automation is far simpler than you may think. There’s no mention of trying to cut costs, or trying to teach a computer how to do a human’s job. It’s simply: “The use or introduction of automatic equipment in a manufacturing or other process or facility.” Taking this simplistic definition into account, we can create a new mental picture of the ways automation can benefit a creative process. All we need to do is think about those parts of art creation that are time consuming, the arduous tasks that get in the way of doing what we would REALLY like to be working on.
Here is a list of 5 things that automation is already doing to help speed up music production, as well as some ways that these technologies could be leveraged to make things even more efficient. Once we stop worrying about Skynet taking Taylor Swift’s job away, we can start to focus on the ways that technology can help accomplish small tasks that will free us up to utilize our full musical potential.
1. Pitch/Rhythm Detection:
If you’ve ever owned a digital guitar tuner (or downloaded one on your phone), you already know how valuable digital pitch detection is. If you (like me) don’t have perfect pitch and don’t always have access to a perfectly tuned acoustic instrument as a reference, you likely have to lean on digital technology to make sure you are in tune. Automated pitch detection has gone far enough that some systems can also identify harmonic elements: you can play them a chord or part of a song, and they can tell you the key or even what chords are being played.
Rhythm detection is a bit harder, but in recent years, signal processing has made great advances in being able to accurately detect BPM. All of this means that digital transcription technology is getting better, and that the potential for digital technology to help you to learn how to play new music (or efficiently sample) existing music is easier than ever.
2. Sample Editing:
There is an inherent charm to manually chopping up samples on a piece of physical hardware. This also makes people better producers and musicians by requiring them to pay closer attention to the music and learn to feel the rhythm internally. But any electronic or hip hop producer will tell you that they have spent far too much time trying to chop up samples, oftentimes failing to get the result they envisioned in their head.
Digital sampling not only offers the potential to speed up the act of chopping up samples, but completely redefines what we are able to do with those samples. In Logic Pro X, for example, there is a function called “sample by transient markers”. In simple terms, what this does is chops up a waveform based around peaks in audio into tons of tiny little snippets based on the peaks in the waveform. So rather than training yourself to start and stop samples at the exact points that guitar chord starts and stops, Logic will do it for you. It’s not always perfect, but depending on what kind of sampling you are looking to do, it can potentially save you hours of frustration.
Origin Audio is currently prepping the launch of a product called Midi Replay which we hope will revolutionize sampling of drum recordings. You simply drop in a recording of a drum track, and utilizing machine learning to detect which instrument is which, the audio file will be chopped up into individual smaller samples and then automatically mapped to your midi keyboard.
3. Audio Fingerprinting
If you have owned an iPhone made in 2018 or later (or ever used Shazam before Apple purchased it that year), you are already familiar with audio fingerprinting. It’s a bit hard to look back now on a time before we could hold our phone up to a speaker and immediately find out what song that is and then immediately go on to stream it. Even some of the most staunchly anti-technology musical purists will admit that this is incredibly convenient and helps a) give traction to artists who may not get radio play and b) saves us the pain of having a song stuck in our heads we can’t identify. If you have ever been at a bar, or a grocery store and heard a song that you just HAD to know who performed it, you have technology to thank for helping you find your new favorite band you might have never known the name of otherwise.
4. Digital Notation
Perhaps this is a bit more niche (as knowing how to read music is not important for many of today’s DJs, producers and non-classically trained instrumentalists), but having the capability to do digital notation is a game-changer. Even more powerful than having a screen to digitally write sheet music on is the capability to be able to play the notes on a midi keyboard and have them notated on screen. Not only is this an incredibly powerful tool for making composition a speedier process but it also has educational applications as well. If you have a real time interaction where you can play notes on a keyboard and then visualize on the screen, the instant feedback loop is a massive benefit to people who are visual learners, not to mention anyone who may have auditory or visual impairments and/or learning disabilities.
5. Virtual Companion
Lastly we have an application for automated audio technology that verges on the border of science fiction — although it is very, very quickly becoming a reality. Major corporations like Google and their Magenta project have been working on a machine learning system that can reactively “write” original music based on feedback you give it. For instance, you play the first half of a melodic phrase, and the computer completes it with a satisfactory cadence that fits in the key and style you are playing. Although this technology is not quite seamless yet, there are already other much more simplistic versions of technology that can “jam along with you”, including many plugins that can suggest chords based around single notes. So even people with no knowledge of musical theory can noodle with a simple melody on a keyboard and your computer will suggest how to construct chords around those notes. Even if it doesn’t write your full chord progression for you, it can help push you in the right direction and give you an extra boost of creativity when you feel like your composer juices are running out.
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