AI generating music is pretty commonplace now. Apps such as Mubert even let you play generative music on your phone. Now, Sony has just developed an AI that adds kick-drum beats to pre-existing songs, and make them more catchy. The AI adds "musically plausible" kick drum beats invariant to tempo and time-shift. The research team used 665 pop, rock, and hip-hop tracks to train the model where rhythm instruments including bass, kick and snare are available as separate 44.1kHz audio tracks.

We already knew AIs could write jazz and death metal tracks on their own, and even create infinite remixes of others' songs. Now, Sony has created an AI that can collaborate with other musicians, producing drum beats for songs in a variety of genres that you can listen to here -- making it the latest example of AI's ability to tap into its musical side. The Sony researchers calls the AI DrumNet, and according to a paper published on the preprint server arXiv, they trained it using 665 pop, rock, and electro songs, each featuring bass, kick drum, and snare drum tracks. After this training, the AI drummer could produce its own "musically plausible" kick drum beat for a song based on the other instruments in the track. The tracks DrumNet produces aren't anywhere near as creative as Keith Moon's or Questlove's, but they don't seem wildly out of place either, based on the examples shared by Sony.