How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Music Making

For songwriters, the subject of artificial intelligence is an especially fraught one: Will technology that learns by watching and listening to us enhance human creativity or replace it? These initiatives, emphasizing the collaborative possibilities inherent in AI, insist that the former is possible -- from using Watson technology to inspire composers to uber-personalizing already existing tunes. THINK OF IT AS... IBM engineer Janani Mukundan calls Watson Beat a "creative assistant": It listens to existing music and scans social media chatter to find trends that could inform new work. RECENT WIN: Alex Da Kid used Watson Beat to write "Not Easy," which peaked at No. 48 on Billboard's Rock Airplay chart in 2016. A tool that can tweak an existing style, then adapt it to a new composition, drawing on the vast melody and harmony database of the Sony laboratory.