Randy Travis and his wife Mary spoke with Fox News Digital at the ACMs last week about the AI technology that helped recreate Travis' voice after he suffered a stroke and why they hope people can see the good in its usage. Randy Travis is leaning into artificial intelligence (AI) to continue to produce new music, over a decade after his near-fatal stroke. In 2013, Travis' stroke left him with aphasia – which is the loss of ability to understand or express speech. With the help of AI and country musician James Dupré, Travis was able to produce two new songs since his stroke, "Where That Came From" in 2024 and now his latest single, "Horses in Heaven." He has been on his "More Life Tour" since last spring and recently extended dates through fall 2025.

Nothing beats the experience of powering down the highway in your car with the speakers blaring out your favourite tunes. But often the music doesn't match up to the moments of the drive – whether it's the chorus kicking in when you hit the accelerator or steady beats breaking up the monotony of the motorway. Now, a solution has come from an unlikely source – will.i.am, the entrepreneur and musician best known as the founder of the Black Eyed Peas. He's partnered with German car maker Mercedes Benz on futuristic in-car software called Sound Drive that'turns your car into a musical instrument'. When the driver accelerates, brakes or turns, the software reacts to create new sounds or remix existing tunes, making the driver'the conductor' and the car'the orchestra'.

Professor Ahmed Elgammal recently published an article over at The Conversation about his work as part of the artificial intelligence startup Playform AI. He and his team have used AI to complete Beethoven's Tenth Symphony, and plan to premiere the work in Bonn, Germany on October 9, 2021. It's an intriguing read -- the AI team worked in collaboration with composers and musicologists, using short notes, sketches, and completed works left by Beethoven to unravel his intent and construct an AI that could emulate his work. Ultimately, they ended up with an AI that was able to fool an audience of journalists and music experts alike. "We challenged the audience to determine where Beethoven's phrases ended and where the AI extrapolation began. A few days later, one of these AI-generated scores was played by a string quartet in a news conference. Only those who intimately knew Beethoven's sketches for the 10th Symphony could determine when the AI-generated parts came in."

If you're listening to music right now, chances are you didn't choose what to put on--you outsourced it to an algorithm. Such is the popularity of recommendation systems that we've come to rely on them to serve us what we want without us even having to ask, with music streaming services such as Spotify, Pandora, and Deezer all using personalized systems to suggest playlists or tracks tailored to the user. This story originally appeared on WIRED UK. Generally, these systems are very good. The problem, for some, is that they're perhaps really too good.

When we give a machine values and it solves a calculation for us, that's simply computing. When we give a machine data and it learns from its experiences and then makes recommendations, that's artificial intelligence. So what happens when we give AI one of the most human of art forms: music? Quite a bit, as it turns out. AI uses machine learning models to produce new patterns and correlations based on the data it was trained from.

In his brilliant, provocative 1966 essay, The Prospects of Recording, Glenn Gould proposed elevating – pardon the pun – elevator music from pernicious drone to enriching ear training. In his view, the ubiquitous presence of background sound could subversively train listeners to be sensitive to the building blocks, structural forms and hidden meanings of music, turning the art form into the universal language of the emotions that it was destined to be. In a not-unrelated development, Gould had somewhat recently traded the concert hall for the recording studio, an act echoed by The Beatles' release in 1967 of Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album conceived and produced in a multi-track recording studio and never meant to be played in concert. And while Gould's dream of a transformative elevator music never quite panned out, it is clear that from the 1940s through the '60s -- from Les Paul and Mary Ford's pioneering use of overdubs in How High the Moon, to the birth of rock and roll with Chuck Berry's "Maybellene" in 1955, and on to Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Gould, The Beatles and many more -- a totally new art form, enabled by magnetic tape recording and processing, was born.

It's been almost two years since Pandora launched its on-demand music streaming service. In that time, the company has done a solid job of fixing some of the issues that cropped up at launch and even adding some features the competition hasn't got to yet (like downloading songs to an Apple Watch for offline playback). Today, Pandora's adding another feature that some of its competitors have: Voice Mode. But, as usual, Pandora believes that the amount of information it has on both the music in its catalog as well as its users will set its voice features apart. For starters, Pandora built Voice Mode internally, from the ground up, something Chief Product Officer Chris Phillips says was key in Voice Mode being a more personal music assistant.

"Video games have not only helped the music industry survive, but thrive on entirely new levels," Steve Schnur tells me. As the worldwide executive and president of music at game publisher EA, his team – many of whom have been professional musicians and singer/songwriters – work with some of the biggest music acts in the world, licensing music for video game series like Fifa, Madden NFL, Need for Speed and NHL. Since the 90s, when licensed music became prevalent in games, series such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Grand Theft Auto and Wipeout have become just as well-known for their soundtracks as they are for their gameplay. For millions of people, video games have been a way to discover new favourite bands or dive into other musical genres. And because people discover this music while playing a game they love, they develop a strong emotional attachment to it.

The Bank of England's chief economist, Andy Haldane, has urged his colleagues to examine the musical mood of the nation when contemplating changes to the Bank's interest rate. How could an increase in Taylor Swift downloads or a decline in the popularity of rock and roll be relevant for managing the economy? It all comes down to measuring economic sentiment. This is a way of gauging how people feel about the economy, which behavioural economists use to make predictions about how it will respond to different policies. For example, if people are generally pessimistic about the economy then raising interest rates might encourage them to stop borrowing and spending by so much that it harms the economy.

From its first incarnation in 2000, to its online launch in 2005, up through today, Pandora [Music] set-out to differentiate itself -- a music discovery service hand-built on a scientific and proprietary matching engine. In 2000, 80% of the music industry's revenues came from less than 3% of the releases [2]. Tim Westergren, a musician and composer, saw an untapped market opportunity to bridge this gap -- changing the music industry paradigm and dynamics between artists and consumers. Tim saw an opportunity to match undiscovered artists and their music to listeners who would enjoy their sound. Matching would create value for the artists, listeners and the intermediary facilitating this process.