Generative music: these apps make up custom music

New apps rely on the weather of the day, location or heartbeat to generate custom music tailored to your mood. A combination of artificial intelligence and big data that boosts productivity or helps you fall asleep.

Music platforms like Deezer, Spotify or Apple Music offer multiple playlists to suit your mood, such as “Peaceful Piano” to fall asleep or “Motivation Mix” for a fitness class. But if you’re tired of listening to the same artists over and over again, apps today promise to create custom music based on your personal data.

They rely for this on “generative music” or algorithmic music. Popularized by the British composer Brian Eno, this concept is based on a system of conditional rules to generate sequences of sounds. For example, Belarusian musician Ales Tsurko has unveiled an album named microscale randomly composed from Wikipedia articles.

A melody “in harmony with the heartbeat”

Brian Eno himself is behind several iPhone applications, such as Bloom, Scape or Trope, which create “soundscapes” with a simple fingerprint. New startups have gone a step further by interfering in the juicy territory of well-being. Ended, for example, uses weather, time, location and daily activities to generate music that suits your mood.

If you have a connected watch, the application can even produce a melody in harmony with the heartbeat. Its algorithm relies on thousands of pre-recorded sound loops that are rearranged according to the detected parameters. The startup in Berlin, which has prestigious investors in its capital, says that his music can “multiply the concentration by 6.3” or “divide his level of anxiety by 3.6”.

MusicFit, another application of “adaptive music” created by the startup Musi-co, composes music according to the movements of the body, via the accelerator of the phone. As for Mubert, the number one app for generative music, it produces a stream of music constantly renewed according to a chosen atmosphere (work, meditation, concentration, sleep) or the place (cafe, apartment, boutique).

Generative music soon in stores

An attractive concept but which remains for the moment quite limited. Do not expect to listen to Madonna’s album remix while jogging or a similar Coldplay song for you to fall asleep. The “music” created by these algorithms is more similar to the white noise found on other relaxation or sleep applications and is rather repetitive, although the sound loops theoretically allow the generation of new sounds. music to infinity.

Beyond mobile applications, these startups hope to sell their concept to brands or shops. Various scientific studies have shown, for example, that certain types of music make more generous, encourage more eating out, improve sports performance, reduce violence and even the sensation of pain. To wonder if it is we who will influence the generative music or if it is rather the latter that will manipulate us.