Music and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Happy New Year – Music and AI
Abilene, TX data center hosta eight football field sized buildings full of powerful servers collecting, storing, analyzing data 24 hours a day.
Time magazine selected the Architects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the 2025 Person of the Year. The issue had column after column about the leaders of AI, investments in AI, and the scary new world of AI. They listed some disturbing statistics like Meta, Google, Oracle, and Amazon had 2025 capital expenditures of $427 Billion spending on AI. It’s an incredible amount of private capital investment in anything.
What does this have to do with my weekly column devoted to Key West music you say? My earlier career as a software developer knows only the programs created in ones and zeros that need exhaustive labor and debugging to accomplish tasks and need constant maintenance and upgrades to remain operational.
Making music and song has been the domicile of humans for thousands of years.
Today, we have Large Language Models (LLM), the basis of chatbots. The most famous one is ChatGPT released by Open AI. There are dozens of others like the one founded by a group of MIT grads called Cursor which has become one of the fastest growing startups.
A very quick AI 101 tutoring includes the list of LLM Model Builders such as Open AI (ChatGPT), Meta (think Facebook), Anthropic (a chatbot named Claude), and Elon Musk’s xAI (Grok). These are supported by the huge data centers including those built by Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Amazon. Finally, the chip builders that power everything AI include NVIDIA, AMD, TSMC and ASML.
All the big tech companies are building Artificial Inelligence models, and chatbots.
Now back to how this relates to music. A few months ago, I started a weekly radio show on Island 106.9 (shameless plug Wednesdays at 7pm) presenting all local music written and performed by Key West musicians. The owner of the station and I had a conversation about technology one day and he’s a big ChatGPT user. He demonstrated how ChatGPT could write a new song in less than a minute. We typed in a few parameters, Key West, sunsets, water, and one other criteria that I can’t remember. ChatGPT generated song lyrics in less than a minute. Melody is a bit different and not as ready for prime time. However, it took less than a minute to provide a significant set of lyrics. I was impressed.
Move over musicians and songwriters, here comes AI. Please excuse my skepticism but can anything artificial master the art of creativity of Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin, John Lennon, or any of our many famous human songwriters. The simple answer to that question is not yet.
The huge AI models are digesting new information every day. Picture one thousand acres of land near former cow town Abilene, Texas with eight huge football field sized buildings filled with computers and software from those above-mentioned organizations, all processing billions of chats and queries designed like social media to promote engagements. This is no longer the in the realm of science fiction – this is reality today. There are over 800 data centers located in the US alone.
Key West musician (Jersey Slim) kept all his many Blues songs in a notebook with him on stage.
I recently ran a ChatGPT request for Key West music. The reply was two pages of halting but fairly accurate description of “a very distinct laid-back island sound shaped by the Caribbean, the Gulf, and a long tradition of storytelling.”
The description of Key West music was probably based on the millions of posts on Facebook and Google queries describing music in our town. I found quotes from some of my own writings in The Soul of Key West. I estimate it was filled with about 65-70% accurate information. It even offered to help “write or analyze a Key West–style song”.
My curiosity got the best of me, and I asked ChatGPT to write a Key West style song. I’m sure all my computer literate Key West musician friends have already tried this. In less than a minute, it resulted in a proposed melody. It wasn’t a Grammy nominee but it was a simple and somewhat cool song. ChatGPT even asked to go deeper into the “sound or style” of the Key West melody. It listed four Jimmy Buffett songs as proposed examples for changes.
ChatGPT has learned from Jimmy Buffett. It offered further refinements and changes, a different tempo, add a bridge, re-write for a lower or higher vocal range, and much more. I am not promoting the use of AI for making music but just reporting what is currently happening to music. What happens when AI models learn from all our songwriters. Songwriter James Slater, just debuted a very cool song at his December Key West concert titled, “All The Cool Bands”. The music business is tough enough.
I have interviewed 200 of our Key West musicians and some have told me it has taken them months to write a new song. ChatGPT isn’t there yet but my background in software and technology tells me that something serious is happening to music. I’m still not convinced that five years from now the Green Parrot or Sloppy Joe’s will be hosting a ChatGPT Songfest.
Hard to imagine a bunch of software creating this.
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