Apple has acquired a new start-up that uses AI to make music

Apple has recently acquired a new start-up called AI Music that creates soundtracks by using artificial intelligence (AI). According to reports, the purchase of AI Music was completed recently and the start-up’s website has since been taken down. A cached version of the site shows that AI Music and its “Infinite Music Engine” can “change and adapt music for publishers, marketers, fitness pros, and other professions”. AI Music’s tech also claims that it can adapt music “to your heartbeat”. The start-up’s LinkedIn page mentions that its goal is to “give consumers the power to choose the music they want, seamlessly edited to fit their needs, or create dynamic solutions that adapt to fit their audiences”. AI Music’s CEO Siavash Mahdavi had told Music Ally in an interview in 2017 that the company “is shape-changing music to shift the way songs are consumed rather than generating music from scratch”. One of the ways to change music would be to increase the tempo of a song while someone is on the treadmill or out for a run and then slow it down when the pace slows down to a walk. As Gizmodo points out, in more advanced applications, AI could possibly take an existing song, transform it and offer both the versions for the listener to hear. Which might mean that it can take a song from a genre you otherwise do not like and change it to cater to what you do like. “It’s that idea of contextual AI. Maybe you listen to a song and in the morning it might be a little bit more of an acoustic version. Maybe that same song when you play it as you’re about to go to the gym, it’s a deep-house or drum’n’bass version. And in the evening it’s a bit more jazzy. The song can actually shift itself. The entire genre can change, or the key it’s played in,” Mahdavi said. Apple has not released any official comments about acquiring AI Music and it is also not known exactly how much it has paid for the startup. It is also not known yet how Apple plans to use AI Music’s tech within its own services. It can be speculated, at best, that Apple might use AI in Apple Music in some form or the other. Apple might use the tech to create soundtracks for Apple TV+, Apple Fitness+, or background tracks for marketing material as AI Music has said that its tech can be used for “audio advertising that matches listened context”. It remains to be seen which way Apple plans to swing things.