Meta Releases Generative AI Tool for Music and Sound Effects

Meta announced the rollout of AudioCraft on Wednesday, a new tool powered by artificial intelligence (AI) technology that lets users produce music and sound effects. The open-source product allows researchers, AI researchers, and practitioners to access them and train their own models.

Meta Introduces Three Open-Source Audio-Generating AI Models

Facebook owner Meta Platforms launched AudioCraft – an open-source AI model allowing users to create music and sound effects solely through generative AI technology. The new offering consists of three AI models: MusicGen, AudioGen, and EnCodec.

MusicGen lets users create music via text inputs. This model was trained on “20,000 hours of music owned by Meta or licensed specifically for this purpose.” AudioGen allows users to produce sound effects such as footsteps and dog bark, also through written prompts. Finally, the enhanced version of Meta’s EnCodec decoder enables users to produce sounds with fewer artifacts.

The three models are open-source, meaning researchers and AI practitioners can access and use them to train their models to help grow the space of AI-generated audio. Additionally, Meta believes that after adding more features, its MusicGen model could eventually become a new type of instrument, “just like synthesizers when they first appeared.”

Meta Continues to Double Down on AI

With the launch of AudioCraft, Meta becomes the latest tech company to explore the combination of music and AI. Google already developed a similar product, MusicLM, which generated minus sounds based on written text prompts. However, this model is only available to researchers for the time being.

From a broader perspective, AudioCraft is one in a series of AI-based products developed by Mark Zuckerberg’s tech titan, and on Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that the company is also planning to launch different AI chatbots that exhibit personalities of real-world characters such as Abraham Lincoln.

Meta has so far capitalized heavily on the ongoing AI craze triggered following the emergence of ChatGPT. The Facebook owner reported better-than-anticipated earnings and revenue for Q2 2023, primarily fueled by its successful AI-powered ad campaign.

The company’s improving financials and growing ad revenues are also reflected in its stock price, which surged by more than 150% since the start of the year. Meta’s shares were trading at $316.64 at the time of writing.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist