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Co-composing with Jukebox – a video tutorial

johannezz Mar 13

As much as I love AI visuals, it is the OpenAI Jukebox that remains my main attraction. Well, it’s not that simple. What I really love is the synergy of the deeplearn-produced visuals and sounds combined together, uncanny valleys of differing modalities dancing in and out of phase.

I believe Jukebox – or similar technology – has a chance to grow in 2020’s to a phenomenon comparable to what digital synthesizer was in the 1980’s: a tool that can revolutionize music production. But actually, I feel Jukebox is something special, more than “just a tool”. When working with it I almost feel like being with a talented musician who just needs my help to develop some brilliant ideas and motifs into full-length pieces. I also feel that my musical partner is the most open, the most experimental, the most daring of all the musicians I’ve ever known. Much of its oeuvre advances into such far-out territories that I can’t follow, but in addition to that sort of ultra-avant-garde it routinely comes up with enchanting and amazing utilizations of more conventional tonal patterns.

Okay, I’m projecting and transferring my own fantasies to a lump of software, but it comes so naturally to me and makes doing stuff with Jukebox so much more fun. In fact there is a technique that is known in the Jukebox community as “co-composing”, composing together with Jukebox in systematic manner. It’s the way I mostly use to prepare music for the videos, and I’ve modified the “standard” Colab notebooks to streamline fully the process.

My co-composing notebook has also the goal of being as easy to use as possible, especially for the newcomers. The user shouldn’t interact with the code but only fill the forms and push the buttons, and it should be robust in the sense that errors won’t break the production pipeline and work can be resumed automatically at any stage.

So in order to democratize AI-assisted music production and make Jukebox more known in the mainstream, I’ve made a comprehensive tutorial of how to use the notebook. Here is the link to the notebook. and you can watch the video right here.