Adobe, makers of popular photo-editing software Photoshop, is making a “Photoshop for music”. The San Jose-based tech giant has announced “Project Music GenAI Control”, an early-stage generative AI music generation and editing tool that will allow creators —or anybody without any professional audio experience— to generate tunes from text and also edit them on the fly.
Project Music GenAI Control is being developed in collaboration with the University of California, San Diego and the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Adobe said in a statement, with Nicholas Bryan, a senior research scientist at Adobe Research calling the capabilities of the project “Photoshop-level.”
“With Project Music GenAI Control, generative AI becomes your co-creator. It helps people craft music for their projects, whether they’re broadcasters, or podcasters, or anyone else who needs audio that’s just the right mood, tone, and length,” Bryan was quoted as saying.
The tool works as you’d expect. You input a text description, say “happy dance”, into a generative AI model, and it will generate music for you. But something like this is not new. Google’s MusicLM and Meta’s open-source AudioCraft already do that. Adobe takes it a notch higher by also integrating “fine grained” editing controls directly into the same workflow so you can, say for instance “adjust the tempo, structure, and repeating patterns of a piece of music; choose when to increase and decrease the audio’s intensity; extend the length of a clip; re-mix a section; or generate a seamlessly repeatable loop” without having to use any other dedicated software.
The most sought after user case could be that creators will no longer have to manually cut music to make their intros, outros, and background audio. AI will create “exactly” the pieces they need end-to-end. Adobe hasn’t revealed the user interface for editing generated audio yet but it says that it will be “simple”. Content in public domain has been used to demo the new project, but more details on how and what type of music can be uploaded as reference material are not known at the time of writing. The same is true about how and when Adobe plans to commercialise it or if the “prototype” will eventually morph into something else entirely.
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