Whether it’s starring in a dramatic music video or candidly interacting with fans on social media, musical acts know all the usual tactics to stand out from the crowd in today’s digital landscape. Unlike her peers, however, Taryn Southern has found a truly inventive collaborator that the industry hasn’t seen, or rather, heard ever before. Meet Amper — her music producer that is completely artificially intelligent.

From joining the American Idol to cultivating a YouTube channel with almost half a million subscribers, Taryn is certainly no stranger to the entertainment business. With the Recording Industry Association of America reporting a 12% growth in revenues last year backed largely by streaming music, she knows that it’s imperative for musicians to constantly step out of their comfort zone in this ever-expanding industry. Taryn shared her musical journey with The Wrap, saying, “When I was on YouTube, I felt owned by an algorithm… so I threw in the towel and started exploring other avenues of interest.”

This is why she wasn’t afraid to step into the world of artificial intelligence (AI) after reading about how it was being used in novel ways. And on her quest to reach uncharted musical territory, Taryn partnered with the AI platform Amper Music to release her album, I AM AI in 2018 — the first of its kind to be fully produced with AI. The first single she released from the album, Break Free, tells the story of a woman who desires to escape from her biological limitations. Meanwhile, the follow-up single Life Support had an immersive 360° music video, which breathed more life into this virtually unexplored part of the digital landscape.

AI has found fertile ground to grow in areas like finance, healthcare, and governance. The variety of AI courses that are currently being featured on Udemy are a testament to the increasing demand for skilled professionals that have mastered the subject. These courses cover everything from AI’s use in business processes to game development, as the applications of the technology are vast and continually changing. This is why it’s not surprising that artists like Taryn have made a home for it in the creative industries, too. These seemingly rigid fields of data science and machine learning have a wide variety of applications, if you know how to master them and where to look. Machine learning models can be designed and adapted to create new things out of old materials — all at the blink of an eye. One fascinating example we explored previously here on the site is Google Brain, whose developers are also building an AI system that can write literary fiction by training it to read romance novels and other related texts.

Albeit a similar technology, Amper is a much more user-friendly system. By using pre-recorded samples to create new sounds, artists like Taryn are given brand new tracks to work with and create music around it. From there, they can add their thoughtful tweaks and touches, as the open-source AI software gives them various creative options, such as adjusting the tempo, changing the key, and even placing in different instruments.

With their first collaboration already under their belt, more AI-composed music can be expected to reach the radio waves, as AI researcher Maya Ackerman is using the technology to produce her original songs, too. Based on her experience, Taryn believes the sky is the limit when it comes to AI’s future in music, sharing, “I imagine in 20 years, ‘coding’ songs will be commonplace.”