What happens when you mix modern AI with a piece of vintage technology and the musical stylings of a very amateur guitarist? You might be surprised.
That’s the subject of this week’s GeekWire Podcast. My fun holiday project, revisiting a favorite gadget from my youth, illustrated some bigger themes about the AI tools that have emerged in the past two years, and the role they can play in life and work.
Listen below, and continue reading for the backstory.
Reflecting on the past year — and especially everything we’ve seen, heard and experienced in the realm of artificial intelligence — I keep coming back to something that Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, said in May.
“You really want to focus on things that have made the transition from impossible to merely difficult,” Scott said at the company’s Build developer conference.
He was talking to engineers and technologists about the tools and solutions they dream up and build, but the message also resonated with me as an everyday user who likes to come up with new ways to apply what all those smart people create, to change and hopefully improve my own work and life.
Over the past year, this has ranged from simple stuff like using AI to figure out the year of a vintage concert poster, or creating fun nametags for my extended family, to bigger things at work, like dramatically improving the process of organizing and retrieving information with tools like Otter.ai and Google’s Notebook LM.
AI is literally helping me sleep better at night, thanks to a Groundlight AI system on my back porch that keeps raccoons out of our house by accurately identifying them and turning on flashing lights and a radio to scare them away.
I’ve also dabbled in other forms of AI, including music. One of our most popular and fun GeekWire Podcast episodes of the past year was our attempt to use AI to create a jingle for our “My AI” segment on the show.
All this was in the back of my mind when my brother brought a blast from the past to our family Christmas gathering: “Dr. Rhythm,” aka the Boss DR-110, circa 1983.
It’s an electronic drum synthesizer, about the size of an old video cassette, with buttons, knobs and a 2.5-inch by 1.5-inch black-and-white screen. You place dots on a grid to program beats. It also plays preprogrammed rhythms.
My brother let me bring the Dr. Rhythm home to Seattle with me. I’ve been having fun this week playing my guitar along with some of its classic rhythms.
As a piece of technology, it’s so rudimentary by today’s standards. Smartphone apps can do this and much more. But hearing those familiar beats took me back to that era. It made me remember how exciting it was to make music with this gadget — not unlike my feeling today when I experience AI doing something amazing.
You can probably guess where I’m headed. If there’s anything that qualifies as previously impossible, it would be transforming the sound of me plunking around on the guitar into a worthwhile tune.
So after recording myself playing guitar with one of Dr. Rhythm’s preset beats (Rhythm 5 on Bank D, for any fellow Dr. Rhythm aficionados), I went back and found a simple 35-second clip with some basic strumming. I uploaded that to Udio.
Listeners who caught our past episode will remember this as one of the AI music services being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America on claims of copyright infringement. So it felt ironic, upon uploading the clip of my collab with Dr. Rhythm, to check a box attesting that I had the right to use and distribute the file.
At any rate, from there, I was able to use AI to extend and accompany the song, using a feature that Udio introduced in June. You can hear the AI join Dr. Rhythm and me in the clip below.
What do you think of the AI? Email todd@geekwire.com.
Personally, I’m amazed by the technology. My teenage self, goofing around with Dr. Rhythm at my brother’s college apartment, would have been blown away.
From a musical perspective, it’s not exactly a Grammy-winning performance. But it’s certainly better than anything I could do on my own, especially in the couple of minutes that it took the AI to produce it. It’s passable, and maybe even pretty good as a piece of low-key background music.
And since it’s riffing on music I made, it doesn’t create the same guilt that would come from simply entering a prompt and having the AI mimic a popular genre.
This speaks to one of my own takeaways from using AI at work over the past year: AI is best when it’s part of the creative process, not simply generating the end product. At a basic level, it’s about using an AI tool to summarize or retrieve a piece of information, or improve a headline or sentence.
For me, at least for now, it’s not about AI doing all of the work. It’s about AI as an assistant, collaborator and co-creator, ultimately helping me to do my best.
That’s what I’ve learned over the past year, and it’s one of the reasons I tend to be more optimistic about the previously impossible things those developers and engineers are working on now.
Just wait until Dr. Rhythm meets a quantum computer.
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https://ift.tt/jDlf0eP January 04, 2025 at 04:53PM GeekWire
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