JukeDeck

JukeDeck is a commercial project that uses machine learning to compose musical tracks. The tracks you create with it are available under a royalty-free license. I’m kind of fond of this one I made.

I’m most impressed with the ability of the algorithm to create an ending for its compositions. In my experience, that’s one of the trickiest parts where most generative music composers run into trouble. A lot of algorithms just stop in mid-thought, which sounds very wrong in music. JukeDeck doesn’t always complete the piece perfectly, but it often does a decent job.

Music has innate mathematical structure, and the different genres of music build more elaborate structures out of the basic building blocks. Which makes music one of the most potent generative fields: it’s easy for us to explore the many-layered patterns, and it can worm its way behind our logical analysis and touch our emotions.

It also makes music one of the hardest: we can hear when things sound wrong, and most of us have listened to enough music that even if you can generate a listenable track it’s all too easy for it to be boring or incoherent. To its credit, all the JukeDeck tracks I’ve listened to so far have been pretty varied and coherent.

The biggest downside of JukeDeck is that it’s a bit of a black box: hard for other people to build on top of, or to integrate into other things. What you get is what you get. 

More knobs to tweak would be nice, but ultimately being closed-source makes it less interesting to me, since I can’t tinker with it the way I’d like to. I imagine professional musicians would be better served with something that can output MIDI tracks rather than final arrangements. Still, if you need royalty-free temp tracks, JukeDeck has an infinite selection.