Artists at Universal Music will be able to use AI for their music

As the importance and influence of artificial intelligence has risen in our society in the last couple of years in a very high speed, the music industry was still very silent until now. Yes, people on YouTube were playing with it and creating funny videos about cartoon characters singing famous songs and yes, also South Korea and Japan has fully AI generated artists and music. But now a big news in regards of AI used in music has reached us. And it has to do with the world’s leading music company, Universal Music.  

Universal Music has signed a deal with Soundlabs, an AI technology company, who create AI tools for music makers. Universal Music described on their website that with this deal that they will create, together with SoundLabs, “official ultra-high fidelity vocal models for artists using their own voice data for training while retaining control over ownership and giving them full artistic approval and control of the output.”

What this essentially means is that all artists signed to Universal Music can train AI to use their own voices. The artists could then use this for new songs, without needing to record their voices to tape. The deal ensures that the artists will retain ownership of the results.

Universal Music says in a press release:

“It empowers artists and producers to explore bleeding-edge vocal transformations, including voice-to-voice, voice-to-instrument, speech-to-singing, language transposition, and a myriad of previously impossible vocal transformations. Together, UMG and SoundLabs are collaborating to allow UMG artists to create custom vocal models that will be available for their exclusive creative use cases, and not available to the general public.”

SoundLabs founder BT said:

“Artificial intelligence, when used ethically and trained consensually, has the Promethean ability to unlock unimaginable new creative insights, diminish friction in the creative process and democratize creativity for artists, fans, and creators of all stripes. […] We are designing tools not to replace human artists, but to amplify human creativity.”