Darius Rucker jokes that when he wakes up, he doesn't want to have a robot standing over him. Darius Rucker is not worried by the emergence of artificial intelligence and its potential threat to songwriters, explaining that he'll continue to write music for himself. However, the singer-songwriter does find the technology to be off-putting in a larger context. "It's scary," Rucker told Fox News Digital at CMA Fest. "I don't want to wake up one day and have a robot standing over me. It's scary, but technology can be that way. "If people were to use it and everything for songwriting… technology is just way in front of me.

The sound of magnetic recording media, such as open-reel and cassette tape recorders, is still sought after by today's sound practitioners due to the imperfections embedded in the physics of the magnetic recording process. This paper proposes a method for digitally emulating this character using neural networks. The signal chain of the proposed system consists of three main components: the hysteretic nonlinearity and filtering jointly produced by the magnetic recording process as well as the record and playback amplifiers, the fluctuating delay originating from the tape transport, and the combined additive noise component from various electromagnetic origins. In our approach, the hysteretic nonlinear block is modeled using a recurrent neural network, while the delay trajectories and the noise component are generated using separate diffusion models, which employ U-net deep convolutional neural networks. According to the conducted objective evaluation, the proposed architecture faithfully captures the character of the magnetic tape recorder. The results of this study can be used to construct virtual replicas of vintage sound recording devices with applications in music production and audio antiquing tasks.