Towards Intelligent Music Production: A Sample-based Approach

Technological advances have always played a central role in shaping the production of popular music. Over the past few years, music generation systems started to attract considerable interest within the academic community, although the proposed prototypes rarely managed to emerge and be adopted by producers in their professional workflows. We argue that a major cause of that is the inherent complexity of integrating those systems into well-established music production pipelines, especially given that most of them are designed with the intent of replacing human creativity rather than assisting it. To this end, we discuss our proposal for a novel approach for Intelligent Music Production based on samples arrangement. Such a tools could offer several potential benefits in enhancing human creativity, as they provide the opportunity to keep human artists in the creative loop as well as to reduce computational costs and hardware requirements, making music production more accessible. As a first step towards this direction, we eventually present MusiComb, a prototype for sample-based music generation. Alongside, we report how this relatively simple system has demonstrated its ability to produce realistic tracks in few seconds while adhering to user-defined constraints.