How Technology is Rethinking Songs and Musical Instruments

Yesterday Eleven Labs announced a collaboration with Grammy award winning artists like Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel to use their AI tools to compose and perform all-new tracks. Their self-titled Eleven Album is available for streaming now and features snips of more than a dozen new songs from a platform that many are afraid may be contributing to the death of music and musicians. It may be a clever PR stunt, but listening to the songs—they sound anything but AI-generated, which is not surprising considering the actual artists were involved in their creation from the start.

In other music news, Georgia Tech hosted their annual Guthman Musical Instrument competition where creators compete to invent the most compelling new musical instrument. This year's top ten included everything from a 24-string concept built around a repurposed bicycle wheel rim, a magnet-based hovering keyboard, a seven-foot-tall double bass with an Indian classical design and a "Demon Box" that converts invisible electromagnetic waves from everyday electronics into sound. Together, these stories offer a picture of the future of music that sometimes we see depicted in the imagined worlds of science fiction where it's created in new ways, made real with instruments not yet invented and inspired by the talents and work of the music makers who are most willing to be the first to try something new.