Ever wanted to collaborate with people living far away but given up on the idea because the process of sending recordings back and forth feels tedious? Ever tried composing music for fun but never possessed the necessary instruments or equipment? Ever wanted an easier way to create music?
Hear ye, hear ye, the time of your waiting and silence has come to an end: meet Jam! (with an exclamation mark, as stated by Simran Bhuria, one of its creators), a web radio station incorporating an artificially intelligent collaborative platform for online music creation. Jam is the product of a 6-member research team called jamrooms, who began this project as part of the Lehigh University Mountaintop Initiative. Lehigh reached out to Ashoka for collaboration and of all the students who applied for the variety of projects offered under the Mountaintop Initiative, Simran Bhuria got selected to join the jamrooms team.
Simran tells us that she was at Lehigh for 10 weeks from 30th May to 5th August with her team, working on the building of their music site. Their purpose was to bring something new to the pre-existing series of music sites, innovating the very concept of such sites by adding the capacity for real time collaboration as well the presence of AI to suggest notes when the composer hits a roadblock during composition. Simran contributed to the AI section. After weeks of work, they had with them the alpha version of Jam! They launched it at the Musikfest at Bethlehem.
Post completion, it was copyrighted, with Simran being one of the people to get creative license for the website. The team continues to work on the site, with some of them focusing on improving the aesthetic structure of the site – with Simran contributing by writing a paper on their work. Her interests lie outside design work, she says, and she feels that she has given her best to the site creation process. She hopes to keep working with deep learning and machine learning in the future.
The opportunity to work with Jam! though, was definitely a unique one that taught her a lot, she says. Simran learnt how to efficiently organize code and gained experience in using Github; she also realized how great it is to work with a well-organized and committed team. Jam! is their success story- and you can go check it out at jam.musicintelligence.co.
Confused about what it can do? Lots! The site offers budding musicians the chance to collaborate with others by opening up publicly accessible music chats and jamming with fellow music-enthusiasts; begin their own compositions online with ease and view others’ composed music. One can remain anonymous, create an account or sign up with your email ID (a secure link will be sent to you every time you wish to login- no more passwords anymore) to engage in this collaborative process.
Composers can open up their own chats and begin composing/collaborating using the editor tool, which offers one the option of creating tunes with a multitude of instruments, with the further option of carefully setting parameters for every note issued (ranging from beat to pitch to on-time of the notes). The coolest option under this is that of the “livebeat”, which allows us the creation of online multi-collaborative tracks by allowing one of the composers to hit on the livebeat button, that causes the thus-far composed track to start playing simultaneously over the speakers of all the composers involved in the track creation. The button can also be used to pause or stop the music simultaneously for everyone. This feature allows for a Google Doc-esque collaboration with regard to music, widening the capacities of long-distance composition. Yet another cool feature is the suggestions button. While composing, if you get stuck, just hit the suggestions button and be treated to the AI platform offering you ideas for notes to add to your music (option only available currently for EDM drum sets). You can also head over to listen to music that’s been or is being made, by clicking the play button on compositions.
What are you waiting for? Are you bored and willing to listen to music? Are you desperately searching for someone to play music with? Are you just thinking of dabbling in composing? Every which way, go on over to jam.musicintelligence.co and check it out! It might be just what you’ve been looking for.
Edited by Vedika Gupta
All images are the courtesy of Viraj Malani