Meta releases AI-based music generator
The Facebook Group's music generator is hardly the best, but you can try it out for yourself.
Meta, the company behind Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, has released MusicGen. The AI-based music generator is open source and you can try it out directly in your web browser https://huggingface.co/spaces/facebook/MusicGen. It works in a similar way to the image generators Dall-E, Midjourney or StableDiffusion: you enter a text describing what you want and the AI generates something. Optionally, you can upload an audio file for the software to use as a guide.
The MusicGen demo generates 12 seconds of music and often takes over two minutes for this short snippet. The results are mixed. I took a few random samples:
"a jingle for a tech podcast" [[video:230742]]
"background music for a video review" [[video:230743]]
"a cheerful melody played with old school synthesisers" [[video:230744]]
In the article from techcrunch.com you can find more examples, one of them with audio as a default. There are also direct comparisons with MusicLM, the AI-based music generator from Google.
Cover image: David Lee, generated with StableDiffusion
My interest in IT and writing landed me in tech journalism early on (2000). I want to know how we can use technology without being used. Outside of the office, I’m a keen musician who makes up for lacking talent with excessive enthusiasm.