Monday morning, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures founder and CEO Charlie O’Donnell made two surprising announcements, one revealing he’d invested in an artificially intelligent music composing startup, Amper, the other that he’d spent the weekend listening to Twenty One Pilots.
So we’re just going to stick to Amper in this post. Amper is trying to do for composing music what WordPress templates did for web development or what Bubble is doing to building apps, which is to say, making it easier for non-experts.
With Amper, those who wish to create music need only to input some keywords and toggle some settings to get started, as CEO Drew Silverstein showed in a demonstration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX6fc7bIK4U
“Amper is a companion more than it is any kind of replacement,” O’Donnell wrote in his announcement. “One day, no vocalist or musician in the world will start from a blank sheet of music. The computer will ‘pair program’ with them—riffing back, helping them explore sounds, mixing inspirations, etc.”
We tried to download Amper to see what it’s all about, but although it’s software, it’s only available in beta to a limited number of users. We’re number 4,972 on the waitlist, currently, so we’ll go off what its CEO has to say.
“We believe that the future of music will be created through the collaboration of humans and artificial intelligence,” Silverstein explained in his demonstration above. “It’s almost as if you’re sitting in a studio working with a composer, except that composer is in your computer, and it writes music faster than you can think.”
O’Donnell did not disclose the size of his investment in Amper, but Brooklyn Bridge typically invests no more than $500,000 in its portfolio companies.
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