Synthetic media describes the use of artificial intelligence to generate and manipulate data, most often to automate the creation of entertainment. One of the inevitable capabilities of artificial general intelligence will be the ability to understand and synthesize reality. As such it should not be to anyone's shock that as we approach the era of general AI our computers become increasingly capable of mimicking creativity and imagination to generate new and altered forms of media. One of the capabilities of artificial intelligence is the ability to generate content for use in music, visual art, CGI, and photo/video manipulation. Generation, smart manipulation, personalized content, and media synthesis are woefully overlooked abilities of machine learning.

Splitting a song into separate vocals and instruments has always been a headache for producers, DJs, and anyone else who wants to play around with isolated audio. There are lots of ways to do it but the process can be time-consuming and the results often imperfect. A new open source AI tool makes this tricky task faster and easier. The software is called Spleeter and was developed by music streaming service Deezer for research purposes. Yesterday the company released it as an open source package, putting the code up on Github for anyone to download and use.