TikTok's tools for adding music to short videos helped turn short-form video into a phenomenon. Now Google is giving some YouTube Shorts creators an AI feature called Dream Track that can generate songs, including lyrics, melody, and accompaniment, in the styles of seven different artists including Charlie Puth, Demi Lovato, Sia, and T-Pain with a tool called Dream Track. To whip up a 30-second clip with Dream Track a creator just has to enter a prompt, such as "a ballad about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic," then select which artist the song should be styled on. The new AI capabilities might help Google lure users from TikTok, where AI tools for adding visual or audio effects are hugely popular. YouTube says it is looking into how artists whose work helped train its music-generating algorithms will receive a cut of future ad revenue generated by videos featuring AI-generated audio.

AudioLM, developed by Google researchers, generates audio that fits the style of the prompt, including complex sounds like piano music, or people speaking, in a way that is almost indistinguishable from the original recording. Crucially, it doesn't require labor-intensive transcription or labeling unlike most other AI-generated audio. Find out more, and listen to the sounds it created, here. I Was There When is an oral history project that's part of our award-winning In Machines We Trust podcast. It features stories of how breakthroughs and watershed moments in artificial intelligence and computing happened, as told by the people who witnessed them.

Officially, Pachet will head up Spotify's new Creator Technology Research Lab in Paris. The lab "will focus on making tools to help artists in their creative process," according to a blog post from Spotify. The blurb doesn't go into any more detail than that, but a rundown of Pachet's previous work invites a few educated guesses. Until recently, Pachet led Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, which he helped found 20 years ago. In that capacity, he worked on a range of music intelligence technologies, including a project called Flow Machines that aims to teach computers how to understand musical style and composition.