AI music composition product, with its complex challenging core of mathematics, music and machine learning, has gained reviewer’s interest these days.  However, there are noticeable issues, which also occur through the product development. 

No music demo or not matching music demo to support

Lately there are more and more AI music composition product related review articles coming out, but it is not rare to notice that quite some articles either (1) do not have any demo music to show the music work delivery or (2) the demo music does not stand strong to support the result/point.  From the reader’s perspective, it could be much more difficult to assess the product based on the review. 

The situation especially (2) can apply to any (debating or not) conversation through the AI music composition product development.  Though generally speaking debating can be seen as a symbol of diversity mindset, a noticeable matter here is the underlying reason — possibly lacking music understanding in terms of musicality.  It could cause the conversation to pause or become difficult, due to the extra effort needed to close the (large) gap of musicality.  This would gradually lead to a bigger hidden cost for product development that was initially overlooked. 

Another similar matter often seen in a conversation is one would purely rely on the abstract or hollow language directly grabbed from the music theory to back the point, with not much attempt to try to explain the point effectively with flexible interpretation.  Sometimes such quoting from the textbook does not connect directly to the point.  Again, possibly lacking music understanding in terms of musicality. 

Designer — Musicality

How much musicality does a designer need for the AI music composition product?  At the first thought, one might consider a designer good with general art or with much music theory in mind might be sufficient, but is it?  We all know what leads to the great composers such as Mozart or Max Martin, and it is not hard to imagine there could possibly be many theorists that are better than them at theories.  Music theory is listed as one element among many other elements within musicality.  What has created those great composers is musicality. 

A simple example, consider listening to the same music piece, people with much more musicality could hear things quite differently from people with less musicality in many terms with one term being melodic math, thus the gap of music understanding.  Another example, consider curating between music pieces for final work delivery, people with much more musicality could more accurately assess and express through the music language as more of the native, while people with less musicality might be more likely to stuck or to experience more difficulty to come up with the remedy strategy and tune up towards better results in terms of aesthetic satisfaction. 

Besides the importance of the difference through listening and curating work experience, there are other design considerations, mostly linked to musicality and can come from sophisticated music training and practicing with instrument playing techniques.  Within this, one noticeable element is bowed string instrument playing.  The string bowing technique adds another whole new dimension towards the music effect and music language interpretation, could even override the whole original theme, but is often overlooked in design. 

From feature engineering to conditional music generation, to evolutionary algorithms for music generation, to (implementing) computational modeling of composition and music theories, it all highly depends on musicality to make a very good musical decision for development.  Take a step back, even each small test from designing the test to implementing the test, to evaluating the test, etc all highly depends on musicality. 

Musicality can be the most important factor influencing the direction of AI music composition product development, affecting many aspects with some mentioned above. 

Discussion of Musicality Definition

Max Martin with Musicality