British firm Synthesia isn’t a ‘music/tech’ startup specifically, but we think it should be of keen interest to the music industry nonetheless. It’s been developing “video synthesis technology” which creates “photorealistic video synthesis of humans”. For example, it recently powered an ad campaign that saw Malaria survivors speaking through David Beckham, and before that a demo video showing a newsreader speaking in three different languages.
There are some worries around the potential use of this technology for ‘deepfake’ videos (i.e. videos that appear to show a celebrity saying words that they never did in real life), but Synthesia’s argument is that there are plenty more positive uses: “Dramatically reducing production costs, removing the language barrier and enabling entirely new creative possibilities will allow great culture to emerge without the conventional constraints of budget, time and skill,” in its words.
Music Ally thinks there are uses for music: imagine an artist making their tour announcement in a range of languages, or fully-localised fan Q&As, or even just inventive music videos. Anyway, Synthesia has just raised a $3.1m funding round, so we think there’s potential for music partnerships as it continues to build out its tech.
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