Model Musician

A NEW AI LANGUAGE MODEL that understands music like a trained musician is one beat closer to reaching your devices.

Music Flamingo, developed by UMD and NVIDIA researchers, anchors a recently announced partnership between NVIDIA and Universal Music Group that could revolutionize music discovery and creation.

Streaming services’ current recommendation algorithms rely on user behavior rather than musical analysis; cue up Taylor Swift and it will recommend Sabrina Carpenter next because listeners who like the first tend to like the second. But Music Flamingo goes deeper, analyzing stylistic, compositional, even emotional content to fulfill user preferences.

The system was trained on more than 4 million songs and tested on real musicians, who preferred it to existing AI models. “When Music Flamingo came out and started beating everything else, the whole music industry got really interested,” says Ramani Duraiswami, a professor in UMD’s Department of Computer Science and a system co-creator along with doctoral student Sreyan Gosh.

Beyond finding music, the system could help create, promote and safeguard it for artists, Ghosh says, leveraging AI speed and power without quashing human inspiration: “Anything that we build should be loved by the music creator family.”