Google AI creates challenge for indie musicians with samples

Google Assistant, similar to Apple’s Siri, is an always accessible assistant ready to answer all your questions, and fulfill your needs. This software recently has gotten new updates, which now allows Google Assistant to also be able to recognize music samples.

Producers have been able flip cut and change samples so much in the past that the original audio was unrecognizable. Now though, your Google Assistant can uncover samples that are even less than a second long.

This technology could become a problem for smaller artists or producers who use samples, making the what once was unrecognizable now quickly revealed by the AI. This brings in the issue of royalties, and owner’s rights when artists want to use material from already existing music.

Student film major and rising musician Autumn Bryant shared her thoughts on the matter/ talked about how this could impact artists in the future.

BRYANT:”I think that so much of the magic of using samples was the fact that a lot of times listeners couldn’t recognize that it was a sample or what the song was from.. Producers would cut or stretch or tone down different songs to sample them, and a lot of times it would just go unnoticed.”

Bryant claims that the science of sample digging is an intimate process and is not something that can be easily accredited to via Ai.

BRYANT :”I feel like now in 2023, lets say someone made a song and it was a sample… I feel like the internet would go crazy, like oh this isn’t even original.. Versus just listening to the sample itself and taking it in and appreciating it and then potentially figuring out that it was manipulated.”

Bryant also expressed an interest for the future of music as well.

BRYANT: “It definitely changes the fun for the artists, I dont think its gonna make the people appreciate the music less, hopefully not, but I do think itll definitely change that kind of experience for the musician. I’m going to be interested to see how artists or different record labels use the Ai in terms of sampling, I’m not too savvy when it comes to AI and the sampling verse right now, so I think it will be interesting to see how it affects the music industry.”

This AI is new on the block and already shaking the music industry. Music is constantly evolving and with this new technology we should be expecting even more changes to come in the near future!

For Annenberg Media, I’m Haylee Clophus.