END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
27 October 2014
Take a deep breath, now exhale. Relax, the world isn’t really ending, but musical composition for film has just taken a massive hit to the solar plexus. Sounding like something from the Jetsons, Xhail (pronounced exhale), is a musical generator tool, launching soon, which promises to change the way music for film, television and gaming is produced.
The software allows users to create original, copyrighted musical pieces from a centralised database of tagged musical stems or instruments. User’s interact with textual cues as the music is being composed. Think of those food generators from sci fi films (the Cat in Red Dwarf asking for fish), a machine that instantly gives you what you tell it to, like magic. Xhail, may not give you food but whatever kind of music you want, it will create it.
You just type in a word, for example ‘fantasy’ and the software (in real time) generates an original musical piece to fit that genre. Adding textual cues, at any stage of the composition, allows users change the way the music sounds, adding instruments, changing genre, timing, or even syncing musical cues to on-screen action.
The software remembers the cue/music that’s been generated and will not regenerate the same cues again…so long as the user has downloaded and paid for its licence.
The platform is the creation of Score Music Interactive (SMI), who offer exclusive global licensing to each project created by users, “each piece of music we licence will never be shared with that client’s competitors or other media.”
Although, it’s not all bad news for film composers and musicians (someone please tell James Horner and Danny Elfman to stop crying).
SMI want to work hand-in-hand with composers and have some pretty nice publishing deals to offer. The company says it has created music cue blueprint templates in all genres, for “composers and musicians to follow and populate.”
When a musician works with Xhail, a blueprint template is delivered to them as a MIDI file. Which sets out two rules for musicians to follow, timing and harmonic mapping of the cue. Musicians can then compose/record their original compositions using whatever instruments they like, returning the finished pieces (without processing or mixing) as individual instrument session wavs. Those individual instrument wavs are tagged then stored in a massive library system in the cloud. Ready for someone using the platform, to type in a cue, which shuffles the wavs and uniquely arranges them for users.
SMI offer musicians a 50/50 split in the publishing and sync licence profits, which is a far more generous than most cloud based music publishers and subscription services. The developers have a team of creatives from the original Xbox and have spent the last two years working on the project, with funding from Enterprise Ireland.
The company has said it is launching the platform in Northern Hemisphere’s Autumn, so any day now.
If you’re interested in composing music for Xhail, or want to learn more about the software, then check: scoremusicinteractive.com
Check out the software in action below.
I suppose it sounds *okay*, but in the end it’s really going to garner extremely generic outcomes as there can only be a certain amount of combinations that are able to be produced with a finite amount of samples in the library for the algorithms to play with, and the differences in the ‘unique’ pieces of music that are produced *may* be large but more likely will be much smaller than a director/producer would hope for.
A colleague was just ruminating saying “Oh dear, this is frightening – because its an easy choice for directors / producers than having to deal with we pesky screen-composers.”
For me I think that the path of least resistance to producing anything in the creative realm is*usually* coupled with receiving terrible reviews for the outcomes… Regardless of that, as a professional film composer myself I wouldn’t want to work with anyone that would think a program like this could replace my creative input and intelligence and come out with a better product. Obviously that’s the artistic side, but fiscally I think screen productions seriously considering the use of a product like this would
probably be falling back to production music rather than firing a composer they would’ve otherwise hired…
Microsoft Songsmith v2014 anyone?
All good points. I wonder how these tunes would be credited? ‘Fantasy’ by Joe Bloggs & Co, arranged by Xhail music algorithm.