Google's new AI tool can generate music from text descriptions

A new Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool from Google can now generate music in any genre from text prompts, and can even transform a whistled or hummed melody into other instruments.

According to Google Research, the technology called MusicLM is a text-to-music generation system.

It works by analysing the text and deciphering the scale and complexity of the composition.

According to the paper, MusicLM was trained on a dataset of 280,000 hours of music to learn to generate coherent songs from text descriptions and capture nuances like mood, melody and instruments.

Its capabilities extend beyond generating short clips of songs.

Google researchers showed that the system can build on existing melodies, whether hummed, sung, whistled or played on an instrument.

Moreover, as per the research, MusicLM can also take several descriptions written in sequence - for example "time to meditate," "time to wake up," "time to run," and "time to give 100%" - and create a sort of melodic "story" or narrative ranging up to several minutes in length. 

It can also be instructed via a combination of picture and caption, or generate audio that's "played" by a specific type of instrument in a certain game.