AI’s Killer App? Making My Band’s Music Sound Even Better

There’s an old joke that the best way to mix rock music is to make everything louder than everything else. Music software using artificial intelligence is surprisingly capable of resolving this seeming paradox — and it’s helping to make the band I play bass in and write and produce songs for sound even better than it otherwise would.

The band is Scotia6301, and our sixth album Static dropped this week2. It was actually finished several weeks ago, but I was waiting for the latest iteration of a particular software package before doing a last polish and sending it to streaming services. That end part of the process is called mastering, a dark art practiced by musical druids with magic ears whose audio sensibilities have been refined by years of listening to tracks. The job of a mastering engineer is to impart a final sheen of professionalism to a track or album, balancing the various elements using techniques such as tweaking the volumes of various frequency bands to hopefully achieve harmonic perfection.