The news: Seattle-based Soundry AI, a platform that uses generative artificial intelligence to help musicians create samples for songs, is part of the latest cohort at the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
The tech: Soundry AI has created a text-to-sound generator, allowing users to experiment and fine-tune drum beats, bass lines and more through various text prompts.
“There’s hundreds of thousands of samples online you could purchase. What we’re able to do is allow someone to communicate the emotion or the feeling that they have and turn that into samples,” said Soundry co-founder Diandre Ruiz, the startup’s chief product officer and a musician with the EDM band Bandlez.
Watch Ruiz put together a sample in the video below:
The founders: Along with Ruiz, Soundry AI is led by CEO Mark Buckler and CTO Justin Parus. Buckler has previous experience at Amazon where he spent 3 1/2 years as an applied scientist working on the Scout autonomous delivery robot, among other things. Parus spent 5 1/2 years at Microsoft as a software engineer.
Competitors: Ruiz said Soundry competes in the space with such companies as Suno AI, which is used for song generation. Companies offering music sample libraries have also proliferated, such as Splice and Output, but Soundry argues such libraries can come with copyright concerns or a lack of authenticity.
Partnerships: Soundry partners with artists and licenses their songs and samples to help train its AI. Its new “infinite sample packs” are collections of samples that make up genres such as “Hip-Hop Crate” or “Tokyo Dubstep Drums.”
In the demo video below, Buckler said the goal is to have making music be “as simple as playing with LEGOs … we’re going to take some blocks, we’re going to smoosh ’em together.” Alongside Soundry, he uses a music production software tool called Ableton.
Funding: In addition to Y Combinator, Soundry is close to completing a seed round of financing.
How they make money: Soundry’s subscription model is $10 a month and offers access to all sample packs. Every week they release different packs, different styles and different partnerships to give members access to the continuing evolution of the technology.
Customers: Soundry is focused on audio prosumers, high-level hobbyists and professional musicians who can use the tool to fill out tracks. “We’ve even had some foley guys tell us that they put footstep [prompts] in there for their indie games or things like that,” Ruiz said.
AI vs human artists: “You don’t have anything unless you have a human experience,” Ruiz said. “I think the more tools that we give people to really communicate their experiences, the more content we can get out there and the more people that can tell their story. And that’s where the power of AI really is, not necessarily in the music itself.”
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