DREAM THEATER's JORDAN RUDESS Defends Use Of Artificial Intelligence In Music, Says Name Of Technology Is Misleading

DREAM THEATER keyboardist Jordan Rudess has once again weighed in on a debate about people using artificial intelligence (A.I.) to create music. Asked by Italy's Metal.it if he has any fears about this new technology, Jordan said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "One of the companies that I work with very closely is called Moises. It's a very interesting company. They're mostly known for their work in track separation, and musicians all around the world use it. Because basically the way that it works is that you can upload to their system a stereo audio file or even a video, and then when it's within their system, the system can take it apart. So let's say you upload a DREAM THEATER song, and then when it comes back to you, you can decide: I wanna have the vocals, the piano, the bass, the drums, the lead guitar, the acoustic guitar. You can separate it. It's like having access to all the individual tracks. It's kind of a modern-day musical miracle, really, the way that it works. And there's some different companies that work in track separation, but Moises is pretty much the top of the game. It's incredible. But not only that. So after they kind of put their track separation out into the world, then they started to develop the system even further, to the point where now it does things like — well, first of all, pitch and time are completely flexible. You can have things playing back at different pitches, but maintain the tempo of the music. But it also has gotten really good at showing you the chords exactly on the beat where they fall in the music, and it's getting very accurate as well, which is really great. Plus the idea or the implementation of being able to separate the sections of the music so somebody who's learning a piece can say, 'I just wanna hear the verse,' and loop the verse, maybe the verse into the bridge and connect those two and loop them seamlessly."

He continued: "The reason I bring them up is because I love the technology but also because all the musicians around the world that use this, some of them have this idea that A.I. is a bad thing, but they don't even know that Moises is built on A.I. This is the technology that is the framework for everything that Moises does. I'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news to somebody who's against A.I. but now learning a piece of music using it."

Addressing the original question, Rudess added: "First of all, I believe more and more that artificial intelligence is a very bad name for this technology. There's a lot of other ways to think about it. There's nothing really artificial about it. We should go back in time, really, and change that. It's leading people down the wrong thought process to think about what's actually going on with the tool and how these things are put together."

He continued: "All that said, there's a lot of concern in the music business from people about their rights, how these models have been instructed or loaded in with different songs and styles, and rightly so. People, musicians are concerned. They feel like this is not maybe fair. Maybe their music is being loaded into a computer without their permission. All these kinds of things are really, really important to figure out. This is all legal matters which need to be resolved in a big way. It's gonna take time, and honestly, even though I am aware, sympathetic and also concerned, this is not my specialty, that kind of thing. My specialty is in thinking, okay, well, you have this new technology. How can we use it to make more expressive instruments? How can we use it to have more musical fun? How can we engage more people into the beauty of making music themselves? And how can I use it to just kind of like extend what I do in the musical world and do things that have never been possible before, and also be one of the people who kind of helps to steer it in directions that are most valuable to the future of music and music technology. So that's really important to me. That's one of the reasons I'm really excited about the work that I'm doing with MIT [Center for Art, Science & Technology], because they have some beautiful minds there that are thinking in positive ways about how you can take this technology, the technology that's available to us today, and do amazing, beneficial, cool, important, educational, entertaining things with it."

Rudess is collaborating with the MIT Media Lab's Responsive Environments research group. Rudess's main partners in the enterprise are Media Lab graduate students Lancelot Blanchard, who expolores musical applications of generative A.I. (informed by his own studies in classical piano),and Perry Naseck, an artist and engineer specializing in interactive, kinetic, light- and time-based media. Overseeing the project is Joseph Paradiso, Alexander W. Dreyfoos (1954) professor at the Media Lab, and head of the Responsive Environments group, whose team has a tradition of investigating musical frontiers through novel user interfaces, sensor networks and unconventional data sets.

Rudess is a keyboardist known for his work with the platinum-selling, Grammy-winning progressive metal band DREAM THEATER, which embarks this fall on a 40th-anniversary tour. He is also a solo artist whose latest album, "Permission To Fly", was released on September 6; an educator who shares his skills through detailed online tutorials; and the founder of software company Wizdom Music. His work combines a rigorous classical foundation (he began his piano studies at Juilliard at age 9) with a genius for improvisation and an appetite for experimentation.