Placing AI in the Creative Industries: The Case for Intelligent Music Production

The digital transformation of the recording industry is one of the most well-known in recent times, with the Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) making new methods of music production available to amateurs and professionals in almost any setting beyond the traditional recording studio. However, the uptake of AI in this domain is seemingly impeded by DAW software architectures and a need for designers to better understand production practices and workflows. Our research addresses the latter of these challenges and in this extended abstract we present an overview of an ethnographic study that “gets inside” the work of the recording studio and exposes opportunities for the design of automated production tools. From a summary report of this work, we then aim to motivate or provoke novel conversations and future work in this problem space.