New AI Drummer From Sony Could Write Beats For Your Songs

In July, Landr – a start-up from Montreal raised 26 million USD funding for a musical-style-analyzing product in order to create custom-made audio processors sets. At the beginning of 2019, Google and OpenAI introduced creation tools (for online users) which focus on algorithms for music generating.

Inspired by this, Sony carried out its research on a machine learning model to generate conditional kick-drum tracks.

It is already known that Artificial Intelligence could write death metal music and jazz by themselves. Using other songs, they could even generate infinite remixes of those songs.

Sony has now created an Artificial Intelligence which will work with musicians to produce drum beats for various music genres. This feature has become the latest instance of how Artificial Intelligence is tapping into its musical side.

The AI in question is called DrumNet by Sony’s researchers. A paper published on arXiv described that the researchers used 665 rock, electro, and pop songs, each of which featured kick drum, snare drum, and bass tracks to train the AI.

After being trained, DrumNet could create a song with its “musically plausible”  kick drum beat based on other instruments used in the song.

Obviously, what DrumNet produces can’t be compared to that of Keith Moon or Questlove in terms of creativity. However, based on the shared examples from Sony, they do not seem to be too out of place. It proves that this AI tool could be useful for drummers if they need ideas for the next beat. Moreover, if the AI can be trained to write drum beats for the whole drum kit, it might even replace the position of a drummer in bands.