Though it's best known for its image and video editing tools, Adobe is no stranger to the world of audio: the Audition audio recording software is a popular choice for those working in post-production.
The company has been progressively integrating artificial intelligence into its family of products for a while - last year it unveiled Firefly, an AI image generator that works within Photoshop, along with a suite of browser-based AI audio editing tools.
This week, Adobe has revealed another venture into artificial intelligence. Project Music GenAI Control is an "early-stage generative AI music generation and editing tool" that generates music using instructions from text prompts and allows for fine-grained, AI-based audio editing.
Much like Google's MusicFX and Meta's MusicGen, GenAI Control responds to instructions based on genre and mood to generate musical clips. Once the audio is generated, the user can change the tune to match a reference melody, alter the structure and tempo, increase and decrease intensity, or extend the clip.
One of the exciting things about these new tools is that they aren’t just about generating audio - they’re taking it to the level of Photoshop by giving creatives the same kind of deep control to shape, tweak, and edit their audio
"One of the exciting things about these new tools is that they aren’t just about generating audio - they’re taking it to the level of Photoshop by giving creatives the same kind of deep control to shape, tweak, and edit their audio", explains Nicholas Bryan, Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research. "It’s a kind of pixel-level control for music".
GenAI Control is demonstrated in the video above. In the video, Bryan generates an orchestral accompaniment for an existing melody line, before transforming the whole clip into a hip-hop style. After that, Bryan generates an R&B clip that follows an ABA structure, before creating an endlessly looping clip with the prompt "groovy rock".
While the music heard in the clip is admittedly a little uninspiring, it's worth remembering that GenAI Control is still in its early stages; we're excited to see what this kind of technology can do once integrated into a finished product.
