Despite the numerous AI platforms which serve up routes to auto-generate functional music, many artists who have overtly worked with AI have approached the concept via more individual means. Take Holly Herndon, the Berlin-based composer and musicologist who recently created her own intelligent musical accomplice. Dubbed'Spawn', this vocal-sample generator was taught by Herndon and partner Mat Dryhurst to reproduce a bank of vocal-types (including her own) via months of training its complex neural network. Spawn was able to organically add vocals to tracks presented to it. Though, as Herndon told Art in America, the process is still finding its feet: "AI is not that smart, it's very low fidelity, it's not real time, it's very slow and unwieldy. Spawn can take more than 24 hours to process someone's vocal input. On the other hand, it has some unique capabilities that are pretty exciting-slash-scary. The AI can extract the logic of something outside its operator's own logic and re-create it. This is entirely new for computer music."

The influence of Artificial Intelligence on our lives has been increasing. However apparently one area that seems untouched by it is arts, i.e. paintings, images, music, poems, stories etc. One reason for this perception is that arts is considered to be in exclusive domain of human creativity and the Mathematics heavy base of Artificial Intelligence makes it look so distant from it. However advances in Artificial Intelligence are impacting arts too. Within Artificial Intelligence, development of neural networks based on Deep Learning (DL) revolutionized its practical applications. They use multiple layers of non linear mapping and are somewhat similar to the way human brains work.

The big guns are firing in the race to create a credible AI-assisted composing platform. First we had Amazon AWS's DeepComposer, a machine learning-enabled system that combines software and a dedicated MIDI keyboard, and now Sony Computer Science Laboratories has officially launched Flow Machines, an AI-assisted music production project. Sony CSL has apparently been conducting music research since 1996, launching Flow Machines as a research and development project in 2012. It's based on an AI-assisted plugin known as Flow Machines Professional (FM Pro), which: "combines music rules generated by analyzing a variety of music with advanced software technology to help creators to freely create various styles of melodies based on their own concepts". The thinking behind FM Pro is that it combines human creativity with AI-based music.

The use of artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize how people create music but still, robots will not replace humans in the art of making melodies, attendees of a conference about art and music were told on Sunday. "Artificial intelligence will not replace good artists and composers," François Pachet, a scientist, composer and the director of the Spotify Creator Technology Research Lab, told participants of the TechnoArt 2019 conference in Tel Aviv. "AI will change the way people make art, but it won't replace them." Pachet is considered a pioneer of computer music, and specifically its interaction with AI. At Spotify he leads development of AI-based tools for musicians.

Tech Trends is in Austin, Texas to cover the action at the South by Southwest conference. SXSW is a "convergence of the interactive, film and music industries." Over the span of ten days, there are panels, educational sessions, a trade show, special events and more. One particularly unique element of the experience is the intersection of ideas. You can go straight from a concert to a discussion of artificial intelligence.

"And of course there was nothing more repellent than the synthesizer," said Morrissey, front man for the Smiths, in a 1983 interview, reflecting the arguments of the day that raged around whether the new electronic instruments of the 1970s qualified as "proper" music. In 1982, a branch of the U.K.'s Musician's Union even tried to ban the use of synths, on the grounds that they were taking work away from musicians who played stringed instruments. Those kinds of arguments may have a parallel today, in 2019, with the emergence of music created with artificial intelligence. Some of the questions (Is this "real" music? Can it compete with human-made melodies? If so, will it put those humans out of a job?) are eerily similar.

The idea that artificial intelligence can compose music is scary for a lot of people, including me. But music-making AI software has advanced so far in the past few years that it's no longer a frightening novelty; it's a viable tool that can and is being used by producers to help in the creative process. This raises the question: could artificial intelligence one day replace musicians? For the second episode of The Future of Music, I went to LA to visit the offices of AI platform Amper Music and the home of Taryn Southern, a pop artist who is working with Amper and other AI platforms to co-produce her debut album I AM AI. Using AI as a tool to make music or aid musicians has been in practice for quite some time.

Benoît Carré has written songs for some of France's biggest stars: from Johnny Halliday – the French Elvis, who died last year – to chanteuse Françoise Hardy. But this month, the 47-year-old is releasing an album with a collaborator he could never have dreamt of working with. It's called Flow Machines, and it is, arguably, the world's most advanced artificially intelligent music program. Recently, it's often felt like AI is about to take over the music world – that soon, computers will be making our favourite songs. AI has been used to write classical music and Irish folk songs.

Both Google and Sony have projects underway to advance how computers write music. The inherent issue with computers writing music, however, is trying to figure out what the math is for inspiration. Because creativity can't really be quantified, it's difficult to develop an algorithm for it. Douglas Eck of Magenta, an offshoot of a Google Brain artificial intelligence project, says that many of the issues in figuring out how to enable computers to write music are human, rather than machine-based, and revolve around discovering the right questions to ask. Since writing music is not linear, creating a way for machines to write music cannot be linear either.

Some 70 years ago, computer scientist Alan Turing famously set the bar for artificial intelligence: a computer that could convince a human conversation partner that it was a person. On a recent spring afternoon in the Flow Machines laboratory, located on a quiet street in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris, senior researcher Pierre Roy was more concerned with his music-making AI software's ability to create a convincingly catchy song. "So far, from the technical standpoint, no one knows how to do a proper song, to tell a story," he said. "It's a hot topic in AI." Flow Machines, a project of Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris that receives funding from the European Research Council, is developing an AI program that can compose compelling, professional-quality music -- an aim shared by similar ventures such as Jukedeck in the UK and Google's Magenta project. Ever since Turing defined his test, popular culture has fixated on the idea of sentient AI, both benign and catastrophically malign. But AI today has become something of a catch-all term for software that augments human intelligence, usually by mining vast troves of data.