Automatically "Authent-ifying" your favourite music with AI models
Do you ever really love a band/rapper/artist and then fall in love with their “demo tapes” too? It’s common to love a song and then stumble across a leaked demo tape of its original from years ago - the sound is so authentic, rough around the edges, and raw, and helps you appreciate how far an artist has come.
Take for example this set of YouTube videos for Weezer’s classic “Say it ain’t so”, we can see this progression:
… I even recently discovered the 1992 (!!!!) demo of this song, I couldn’t believe it:
it sounded like something you’d hear in a local club or underground venue by a group a lot less known, without all the hoopla.
It made me wonder, is it possible now, or will there be a form of AI style transfer soon that could allow you “travel back in time” for your favourite band’s songs?
Such a thing would make me really appreciate the music I already listen to so much more and allow me to listen to it from different angles and at different cuts. It would be nice to listen to something with all the good bits left in, rather than something super molded or structured to suit the universal audience’s preferences and listening habits. Perhaps, there could be some commonalities across all artists early on their career with limited recording equipment compared to their polished mainstream versions that the AI model could pick up on, with maybe enough training data on the internet and in archives available to get a draft of such an AI style transfer model going.
Conversely, I would love something similar for listening to the “live versions” of my favourite songs, even if they were not actually performed that way before!
The best things, you want to experience more and more and live in - as if they are a universe of their own. You want to listen to its current version, the earlier draft version, the version with the deleted out-take, and even the version from when the band was still recording from an old windows laptop. The kernel of the great idea is always there and the evolution of the work makes you appreciate the final product and journey of the artist a whole lot more.