She is neither 100% human nor 100% artificial. "She is a hybrid," defines the all-powerful American producer Timbaland. The driving force behind great hip-hop and R&B stars like Aaliyah and Missy Elliott, and the creator of undeniable hits for Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake, has a new protege. Her name is TaTa Takumi, and in reality, she does not exist, although she is more real than it may seem. The Asian singer with vibrant pink hair and an arrogant attitude was born in his imagination, modeled from her songs, and eventually took shape in a music video last October.
Glitch x Pulse landed like an earthquake in a music industry that sees artificial intelligence as an inevitable but undesirable competition. Its chords were born from the collaboration of man and machine. To put it simply, from Timbaland's tinkering with the music generation tool Suno, which impressed the producer so much that it led him to open his own entertainment company focused on artificial intelligence under the name Stage Zero. "I call it redesigned artistic development," he describes in an interview with The New York Times.
Suno generates songs from written or spoken instructions, but it also constructs or enhances tracks from audio. "It's about verbalizing music, taking what you have in your head and simply, saying it," explains the producer, who has even hummed ideas to the software for it to work its magic. The lyrics are indeed written by human composers, and a real actress portrays the singer in the music video.
Her voice, however, is partially artificial, and her story and image stem from a long chain of creativity that did culminate in the machine. The AI video generation tool Veo 3 helped create the visuals, but Timbaland's goal was to never completely lose touch with reality.
A few days ago, TaTa Takumi released her second single, Rack It Up, generated with the same technology, a kind of new music genre that Timbaland himself has dubbed AI-Pop, which comes as a shock to a music industry fiercely defending the humanity of processes in an increasingly technology-driven environment.
Suno itself has been the target of a lawsuit filed by major record labels for copyright infringement, as its software has been trained on countless real songs. Last month, it reached an agreement with Warner Music Group, and both companies announced a partnership.
Last summer, a band emerged in the music scene that went viral more for its how than its what. The two albums by The Velvet Sundown, which appeared almost simultaneously on the internet, sounded like 70s psychedelic rock, with a touch of The National and a title, Dust in the Wind, reminiscent of the classic by Kansas. However, neither the singer, Gabe Farrow, nor his musicians Lennie West, Milo Rains, and Orion Del Mar had ever existed before those releases.
The platform Deezer, which has technology that tracks the use of AI, warned that in their albums there are "some songs that may have been created using artificial intelligence". A study by the French Ircam Amplify, a subsidiary of the prestigious Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, found that 10 out of the 13 songs on Dust and Silence were made 100% with that technology, likely using the Suno 4.5 program. It seems that music has ceased to be the exclusive domain of human creativity.