A new report puts human composers and generative AI head to head when it comes to making commercial music.

Regardless of the industry, expressing brand identity is vital through all facets, both visually and sonically, hence the use of catchy commercial songs and company jingles. 

Generative AI is used as a co-pilot for conceptualising these songs. However, with the tool’s growing popularity, will artificial intelligence wipe out human creativity when it comes to writing these musical pieces?

Music branding company Stephen Arnold Music (SAM) and sonic branding and marketing testing business SoundOut conducted a series of tests to answer this question. 

The first test looked at the emotional accuracy of AI generated music. SAM and SoundOut delivered music briefs based on a variety of emotions to gen AI platform, Stable Audio. 20% of the time, the AI created appropriate music. 

Given the not so promising percentage, SAM’s president of creative marketing, Chad Cook, says: “ When developing commercial-ready music for leading brands, there are additional considerations for evoking the proper emotion at the proper time. Performance, emotional timing, production quality, mixing and mastering are all elements in which the human touch makes a distinct impact.” 

Test #2 put a human song writer against an AI one, seeing if either could compose or improve tracks based on a desired emotional feel. Humans were better at composing or improving AI tracks, while AI worsened human ones. 

Despite this, SoundOut CEO David Courtier Dutton highlights: “The AI does not need to understand emotions, just how to invoke them in humans. This study demonstrates that AI can also compose music to move us emotionally, it now just needs a little more technical empathy to be able to do this with sufficient precision for commercial use.”