Created: August 20, 2023
Updated: August 20, 2023
Updated for version: N/A
Composing to Infinity... And Beyond
As you probably found out already, Cydrea Music can compose complete songs from scratch. A lot of them. So many, that it appears to have an infinite capability.
In fact, it does. In theory at least. In practice, its capacity was limited in order to have some classification of the types of music catalogs it can produce. While Cydrea Music could simply create an infinite number of seemingly disconnected songs, we decided that the application's composition capability would be presented and organized as a real-world music catalog. Therefore, you will find bands, artists, albums, music genres, and songs.
For instance, the Cydrea Music Catalog, the standard catalog included in the application, includes one quadrillion artists! So big, it would simulate, not only a catalog of all Earth musicians, but an entire universe of musicians!
Technology One: Procedural Generation
How can this catalog be so big? Is it repeating itself over and over again? No. To achieve this, the first major technology comes into play: Procedural Generation.
Procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness. It can be used to automatically create large amounts of content in a library. A big advantage of procedural generation is the ability to have smaller file sizes, while having a large amount of content, and randomness for completely unpredictable results.
Part of the catalog and its songs use procedural generation in order to be deterministic and structured.
But that is not enough. After all, procedural generation is essentially about randomness... and randomness does not sound good to humans.
Technology Two: A.I.
So, to have minimally acceptable songs, we need some intelligence. And intelligence needs rules and reasoning...
Meet the second technology to enter the ring: You guessed it, Artificial Intelligence! Well, it was written in the title anyway :).
Now, Artificial Intelligence is a very broad term, and today it is used everywhere, if at least the computer program acts like a person making choices and doing the work. It's not about true, human-like reasoning and creativity. That doesn't exist (yet).
But doing human-like choices is something completely achievable today, and Cydrea Music is using a set of A.I. tools to build songs that try to sound as close as possible to the target genre of music.
Cydrea Music's A.I. is not like a LLM (Large Language Model). It does not rely on a bunch of pre-processed human work built into a statistical engine. Instead, it relies on three intelligent workers: a styler, and two generators: a rhythm generator and a melody generator. The styler sets directions for genre, mood, tempo, instruments and other details. The rhythm and melody generators add some creativity and combine their results to reach a fragment of music that follows the guidance of the styler. Anyway, the styler and generators still have to be trained.
Wrapping It All Up
The A.I. styler fills the gaps needed by the procedural generator, and together they reach a complete result, either a single song or a complete album.
Currently, in the early versions of Cydrea Music, the styler and generators are still very unprecise, meaning that the resulting songs are not really accurate regarding their target music genres.
As the application grows more precise, better sounding songs will be obtained from scratch... but remember: Cydrea Music still gives you the right set of tools to quickly adapt any generated song to your taste.