December 12, 2015 editorial: comments

No Humans Need Apply

If you’re a regular reader of this column, you might remember that a little over a year ago, I wrote about a website that offers inexpensive mastering that’s done by a computer algorithm, rather than a human mastering engineer

I was reminded of that this week when I received a press release from a British company called Jukedeck, touting its new website, Jukedeck MAKE. According to the release, the site gives you access to “an artificially-intelligent music composer — a patent-pending system that writes original music, note-by-note, completely on its own.”

As someone who has made money over the years writing music for television and video, I was not thrilled to hear about a computer that composes and produces music for picture. The business has gotten difficult enough due to all the low-cost and free music that’s available online — music made by humans, I might add. If computers start generating quality tracks, the composition business will go from difficult to impossible. 

So I figured I’d better see what this was all about. I went to the Jukedeck MAKE home page and discovered that it lets you create free tracks to audition its abilities. If you sign up for a free account (it also offers paid accounts for corporate users), you can even download a limited number of MP3s of the tracks you create. 

Right now you get the choice of four different styles: Rock, Folk, Electronic and Ambient, and you can also pick a mood (mood options vary according to style) and a duration for each piece of music you create. Then you hit “Create My Track,” and in about a minute or so, your track appears in a little window with a related image attached and a stock-music-style name such as “Faithful Poetry,” or “Enchanting Illusions.” 

While it is impressive that Jukedeck MAKE composes, produces and mixes tracks in about the same amount of time as it would take you to put milk and sugar in your coffee, the music it generated for me was completely lacking in emotion. What's more, the compositional and arrangement choices made by the computer seemed random, and the instrumentation was odd, especially on the folk and rock tracks.

I felt better after hearing those rather lame results, but the concept is still disconcerting. To be fair, I use the Drummer feature in Logic Pro X that creates drum tracks in a similar way, and you could make the argument that Jukedeck MAKE is just a further extension of that kind of technology. But the difference is that I use those Drummer tracks in service of music created by me, a human being, and I edit them after they’ve been generated. But with a setup like Jukedeck MAKE, the human involvement is limited to the programming of the site. There are no people involved in the “creative side” of the music production. And if it’s coming from a computer can you even call it creative?

If you’re curious to check out what this music sounds like, go to the site and create some free tracks. I’d like to hear what you think.