Rainbowgram

The first AI music thing I've heard that I'd consider adding to a playlist.

I’m used to checking in on ‘AI music’ and feeling like, I wouldn’t actually want to listen to this. The field is in its early days.

I wasn’t sure about “Rainbowgram” at first either (felt too low-res and noisy for my tastes)¹, but then it shifted about 32 seconds in into something I could imagine being played during festival season by artists like Bleep Bloop & Space Jesus.

Huang created “Rainbowgram” using Magenta’s NSynth experiment. He is an experimental musician and YouTuber out of Toronto - here’s his video explainer on “ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MUSIC”:

“A piece of music I made using only these sounds that NSynth generated - the drum ones and the Twitter ones.”

— Andrew Huang on creating “Rainbowgram”

Huang still needed to select and arrange the hundreds of AI-generated music segments he used to create the piece. I appreciate the human element still needed in music compositions like this, the collaboration between human and machine.

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