It’s not hard to see the influence of AI on many aspects of music creation and production these days, with everything from basic idea generation to full-blown music tracks with minimal human interaction.
Roland has launched its Melody Flip creative tool which is an AI-assisted melody generator for sparking ideas rather than creating entire pieces of music.
It’s designed to help creators discover new musical ideas and develop them into original works, and combines Roland’s expertise in musical instruments and music production technology with Sony Computer Science Labs’ research insights.
Claiming the initial creative spark to be one of the biggest challenges, Melody Flip offers music patterns called Palettes as a starting point to creativity and inspiration, and it bases this on a user’s favourite songs.
Approximately 250 different Palettes exist, with each serving as a library of musical ideas made from four parts — melody, chords, bass and drums.
Users import song audio to Melody Flip, and the tool then analyses the song’s structure, tempo, key, chord progression, genre, mood and other characteristics, then suggests related melodies and accompaniment patterns that capture the ‘feel’ without directly copying.
Creators can export backing parts as audio and MIDI for the chords, bass and drums, for further editing and integration in a DAW.
It’s interesting that Roland constantly refers to users of the software as “creators” rather than musicians, and it raises the question as to who this is mainly aimed at. Although it doesn’t create complete music tracks on its own, it has a feel of something more targeted at content creators with little musical experience. That said, what it generates does require further processing, so perhaps that aspect makes it aimed at more experienced musicians.
Melody Flip is available via Roland Cloud Manager for macOS and Windows.
