How an AI-assisted album is asking big questions about music’s uncertain future
thefader.compatten, the London-based producer and artist born Damien Roach, has used generative AI in his practice for years, but in late 2022 he came across something new.
Riffusion is a website that uses Stable Diffusion, a neural network model that traditionally generates images from text prompts by trawling the internet for source material.
Riffusion cleverly hijacks this by harnessing text prompts to create a spectrogram, a visual representation of a sound. Users type in whatever they like (“Puff Daddy polka,” perhaps?
Or maybe “Interstellar soundtrack baile funk 2023?”) and save the resulting clip to their computer. After stumbling across the tool, patten spent a sleepless 36 hours generating a vast library of sounds with Riffusion, the raw material that he would spend the next several weeks pouring over and assembling into his new album Mirage FM.
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