When you think of AI, you’re probably put in mind of some soon-to-pass apocalyptic event that wouldn’t be out of place in James Cameron’s head. Or AI toothbrushes. One of the two. Fortunately, we’re still in the ‘making cool stuff’ phase, and now Adobe’s throwing its tech — centred around music production — onto the ever-growing pile of generative AI use tools.
A Doo be Doo be Do bye-yeah
It goes by the unimaginative name of Project Music GenAI Control, announced during the Hot Pod Summit earlier this week. The idea isn’t a new one. It’s essentially a platform that’ll generate audio just by hitting a keyboard in the right order (ie. typing “sad jazz” or something similar). Or you could hand it a reference tune and it’ll do its best to whip up something better.
It’s also got built-in editing tools, so you won’t be exporting the fruits of GenAI Control’s labour to some other software to get mixing. According to Adobe, that means things like fiddling with the intensity, tempo, structure, and repeating patterns — or just asking it to extend whatever track you’ve given it, allowing for endless background music if that’s what you’re after.
“One of the exciting things about these new tools is that they aren’t just about generating audio—they’re taking it to the level of Photoshop by giving creatives the same kind of deep control to shape, tweak, and edit their audio. It’s a kind of pixel-level control for music,” explains Nicholas Bryan, Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research.
If you’re at all concerned about where Adobe’s AI is getting all its training, the company said public domain content was uploaded for the demo. The company hasn’t yet made it clear whether users will be able to upload any track as a reference, or who might be held responsible for infringing on any copyrighted materials. According to TechCrunch, the tool is getting a watermarking feature sometime in the future.
There’s no word yet when the public will have a turn playing with the “early-stage” Project Music GenAI Control, so you’re better off sticking with those tolls under Google or Meta’s umbrella for the time being.
