I’m often asked what I think of AI from a sonic branding perspective. It’s a very big subject, and there’s a lot I could say. AI affects a number of elements of sonic branding, but for this blog and the next, I’d like to keep it focused on music. We’ll start with one advantage.

When you’re a musician, sometimes you can get stuck in certain habits or a certain mindset. If you play only one instrument, you’re going to be limited by the nature of that instrument. For example, if you play piano, you can’t bend the notes. Or if you play guitar, there are certain phrasings or voicings that may not naturally present themselves. It’s very hard to reach a new destination if you’re always starting on the same road. So when you find yourself constricted in this way, you start looking for different angles that can spark creativity.

I often think of the 80s when synths were really starting to come into their own. Those new sounds and approaches lead to music that would never have been created with guitars and pianos.

Phil Collins explains how the novelty of the sound propelled the music in In the Air Tonight. Just the first minute of the video will give you the idea.

That’s pretty amazing. Without that sound at that moment, Phil Collins never would have created that song.

In sonic branding, we go through a process where we establish the sonic parameters of the brand. This can include things like instrumentation, tempo, genre, etc. This also includes the brand’s signature melody.

While I don’t think I could ever sell someone something that was made exclusively with AI, there is an opportunity to use the AI to take the sound in directions you may not have considered. And I have tried this. I’m currently working on a variant of a client’s brand theme for on-hold. Here’s the original melody and vocals.

As an experiment, I inputted as many parameters as I could into an AI, and rolled the dice a number of times. Unfortunately, the results were less than ideal. Here’s the one that made me cringe the least.

What happened to my melody, and what the heck happened in the middle?

To be fair, I am a novice with AI, but I do feel there is opportunity to build more specialized AI for brand music, where you could upload the brand sound parameters and receive something that could inspire different directions for production. At this point, AI music really does feel like a gamble. I’m hoping in the coming years we can better bridge that gap between human and machine – between concept and result.

In the next blog, we’ll explore some of the potential disadvantages of AI music as it pertains to brand.