Plenty has been said about the perceived threat of AI to musicians, but the potential benefits are often ignored. Enter Seeds by Lemonaide, a new platform that can generates chords and melodies as MIDI data via what it calls “ethical AI”.
Rather than create a track for you, Seeds is designed to help producers at the composing stage. Select a key or mood and it will use its big ol’ brain to create a combination of chords and a melody, just chords or just a melody. It then immediately spits out multiple musical ideas, which are displayed in and can be edited via the built-in piano roll. Once you’ve got something you’re happy with, just drag it into your DAW and do with it what you will.
Rather than outputting semi-random MIDI data, Lemonaide says that Seeds uses generative AI. The company’s ‘ethical’ claim stems from the fact that its algorithm was trained on producers’ data with their permission, not “randomly scraped from the web”.
Whether this is evidence that AI will be “the most fantastic co-writer you will ever have” - a view shared by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus recently - is open to debate, but Lemonaide is at pains to point out that it wants to help producers rather than replace them, and has no plans to create software that outputs full songs.
Lemonaide is working in partnership with BeatStars, the beat buying and selling marketplace, and Seeds is currently only available to BeatStars customers who’ve signed up to the Marketplace or Professional tier. It will be available on its own in a few weeks.
