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MillimeterMark In
Aug 1, 2008 12:00 PM
Abaltat Muse makes music composition an easy, sophisticated affair. Simply drop a QuickTime file into the Mac OS X app, and the software composes a track using your selected parameters.
Software Musician
The breakaway popularity of Activison Publishing's Guitar Hero is just one example of how new technologies for music making and appreciation are taking off. One report in a July New York Times article even gave credit to Guitar Hero's combining alternative control gear, alternative music notation, and interactivity for doubling the number of instrumental music makers in the United States in just two years.
Using machines to create music goes back to Léon Theremin's invention of his eponymous electronic device in 1919. The theremin — which later became a cliché of 1950s science-fiction movies — only required players to move their hands in the space around two metal rods, the body's capacitance-controlled electric currents. However, extracting good-sounding results from it remains notoriously difficult to achieve.
As technology improved over the years, the music-generating hardware of an earlier era became software algorithms — first running on mainframe computers, then moving to the PCs of the current era. Dozens of patents going back to the 1980s attest to the interest of applying more powerful algorithms toward generating music by manipulating stored samples on computers.
Now, workaday video editors have the chance to use some remarkable AI-based music-composing software that allows them to move beyond the usual options of original composition, commercial music, music loops, or library music.
Developed by Irish software company Abaltat, Abaltat Muse almost seems impossible for what it does — at least to someone who is not trained in music. You simply drop a QuickTime file into the Mac OS X app (a Windows version is coming), and the software composes a soundtrack using your selected parameters such as tempo and style.
Páraic Ó Curraoin at TG4 — an Irish public-service broadcaster — uses the software to crank out promos. He says the software is flexible because it isn't library music, but it can be manipulated to reach certain musical effects at certain points in a clip. Word has it that you'll hear some of the results in NBC's coverage of the Olympics.
Although there have been some attempts at similar programs over the years, Abaltat Muse adds a distinctive twist: keying music generation to color patterns it discovers in the supplied video. The program searches through your entire QuickTime clip and builds a color map, which it uses interpretively to apply sounds from the large sample library that ships with the program. Keyframes can be added as marker points to trigger the software to change instruments, volume, rhythm, tonality, and other effects.
Muse was introduced in 2007. The company recently added more extensive integration with Apple, Avid, Adobe, and Media 100 editing apps.
The generated music sounds sophisticated; part of that effect comes from the sample player and virtual instruments that Native Instruments and Garritan Orchestral Libraries supply. Finished compositions can be exported as AIFF, WAV, a mixed track, individual tracks, or MIDI.
Musicians shouldn't feel that they're being replaced. An editor can send out the completed file, which a composer can then import to a high-end apps such as Digidesign Pro Tools or Apple Logic Pro to use as a basis for further composition. However, the company may face a quandry in getting high-profile users to fess up to using the app. Who wants to give credit to software, after all, when you can claim the glory for yourself?
