Spotify’s director of its Creator Technology Research Lab (and AI-music guru) François Pachet has been telling a tech conference in Israel some of his thoughts about how “AI will change the way people make art, but it won’t replace them”.
Tools developed by Pachet’s team were recently used by musician Benoit Carré for his Skygge project’s ‘American Folk Songs’ EP – a successor to the pair’s Beatles-themed collaboration ‘Daddy’s Car’ in Pachet’s days at Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory.
In Israel, Pachet talked about a study he co-authored earlier this year, which found that a quarter of all streamed songs are skipped within the first five seconds. “Skipping is not people centered, but it is because of the song, it is the signature of the song,” he said, according to The Times of Israel. Pachet thinks this information will help artists to (in the article’s paraphrasing of his comments) ‘develop compositions that are better-received’. Or in his words: “manipulate their audience in a very precise way… that is going to change a lot of things in future.”
The article also sheds some light on what else Pachet is doing at Spotify: ’Pachet’s work at Spotify has had him mixing genres — such as folk songs with gospel or jazz — to come up with new orchestrations that are very different from the originals. In another twist, his team might blend the rhythm of one song with the harmony of a second to create a “completely brand-new piece” of music,” it claimed.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…