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09/06/2018
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AI-music app Amadeus Code opens up to all with Spotify feature

Amadeus Code is the startup that pitches itself as an “AI songwriting assistant”, with an iPhone app that helps people to “create an entire sketch of a song in minutes” so they can beat writer’s block or just get some fresh ideas. It’s been available as an early-access beta for a few months, but now it’s opening up to all, complete with a new feature that taps Spotify, called ’Harmony Library’.

“This is how Harmony Library works: users can search Spotify’s library from within the AC app and use the chord progressions from their favourite songs, and Amadeus Code will compose new melodies on top of them. This means you can tap inspiration from your favourite songs without copying them, tweaking them to create something intriguing and new,” explained the company, adding that Amadeus Code’s tech as it stands “uses data from popular songs over the past few centuries to craft melodies based on your preference of era, familiarity, drama, note length, and range”.

There are some fascinating legal issues around all this: not just about using chord progressions from copyrighted songs on Spotify, but also in the fact that the tech has been trained on ‘popular songs over the past few centuries’. The question of what kind of licences are needed to train an AI on a catalogue of music is something that’s come up regularly during AI panels at music conferences recently.