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Artificial intelligence (AI) could make it easier to find your next favorite song.
That’s the mission of a new alliance announced Tuesday between AI company Nvidia and the world’s largest music rights company, Universal Music Group (UMG).
The two giants in the sector announced that they will join forces to develop “responsible AI for musical discovery, creation and interaction”, according to a press release.
The collaboration will leverage UMG’s catalog, with more than three million recorded songs, to extend Music Flamingo, Nvidia’s AI model, a large audio and language model that allows the system to listen, interpret and reason about music.
“We are entering an era where a music catalog can be explored as an intelligent, conversational, contextual and genuinely interactive universe,” Richard Kerris, vice president of media at Nvidia, said in a statement.
Nvidia’s Music Flamingo processes entire tracks up to 15 minutes long with “unprecedented precision, capturing harmony, structure, timbre, lyrics, and cultural context,” according to the company.
With more data to train on, Music Flamingo will be able to help fans discover new songs based on “emotional narrative and cultural resonance,” going beyond traditional search categories like genre or beat. The system will also deepen its own musical knowledge, learning to interpret it more like humans do.
According to the company, this will make it easier for emerging artists to find followers who connect with their sound. Artists will also be able to analyze, describe and share their music in more depth on Music Flamingo.
“By expanding Nvidia’s Music Flamingo with UMG’s unrivaled catalog and creative ecosystem, we will change the way fans discover, understand and interact with music on a global scale,” said Kerris. “And we will do it the right way, responsibly, with safeguards that protect artists’ works, ensure attribution and respect copyright.”
The alliance will also develop new AI-powered music creation tools for artists. To ensure that they are the ones to benefit from these tools, Nvidia and UMG said they will create an incubator specifically for artists.
The companies said the incubator will invite artists, songwriters and producers to help design and test the new AI tools, promising to serve as an “antidote to generic, ‘AI slop’ results.”
This is not the first time that UMG and Nvidia have collaborated, UMG’s Music & Advanced Machine Learning Lab (MAML) has already trained its models using Nvidia’s AI infrastructure.
