Is there a need for a boundary between the AI and the creativity of the musician?
In my opinion, that boundary arises naturally and changes as users engage with musical technology. It’s important to remember that AI is ‘artificial’, and I’m very confident that the creativity of musicians will continue to push the bounds as they can make use of a technology for their creative goals. Certainly our goal at LANDR is to support and enable our users incredible creativity, by leveraging AI to enable users to retain their sense of flow, and not get bogged down in trawling sample collections searching for that one sound which will be the keystone that realises their musical goal.
Do you think that AI sample recommendation could take away from the digger mentality of traditional sampling techniques?
We’ve tried to consider the goals of sample-based musicians, and add Selector’s recommendation in addition to text searching. I like to think of Selector’s recommendations as waves of possibilities, that you can surf from one to another, picking up on one recommendation from the list of recommended samples, and using that as another query, and seeing where that can go, jumping from a set of recommendations to the next. So that serendipity, from browsing or digging, is still there, but hopefully is a little more under the users control, based on their selections.
What problems does AI sample recommendation solve for musicians?
One goal is to reduce the time to find a sound that you have in your mind’s ear, allowing you to converge on your idea. The other, as I mentioned above, is to give musicians a way to explore our sample library in a way that is driven by sound itself, in preference to the typical modalities of vision or text. The other problem is that of addressing the scale of possibilities, as sample libraries increase, having a sense of what is actually available to musicians to use can be limited if exploration is limited to the names of packs, genres, moods or other descriptions. It also allows musicians to play directly with the idea of musical similarity, and to reflect on how similar or different they want a sound to be, compared to something they already have listened to.