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Marc Rebillet champions AI-assisted music at Google I/O: ‘The machine is good’

As part of the Google I/O 2024 pre-show, musical guest Marc Rebillet showcased Google’s MusicFX AI generation tool, incorporating it into his signature “Loop Daddy” style.

Musician Marc Rebillet took the stage at the Shoreline Amphitheatre ahead of the Google I/O 2024 keynote. He made quite the entrance, climbing out of an oversized coffee cup on stage (fumbling a bit on the way out) in a boldly colored Google I/O-themed robe (a centerpiece of his typical stage presence).

Rebillet is known for making music on the fly, looping and layering samples to improvise truly wild songs. Rather than building from traditionally created musical samples, he booted up Google’s MusicFX to create AI-generated instruments to serve as a starting point. To kick things off, he showed a live-generated example of a viola backed by an “808 hip hop beat.”

Later, given the opportunity to choose three instruments from a set of six, the audience (thankfully) rejected bagpipes and opted for a combination of a djembe drum, a Persian tar, and a flamenco guitar. One by one, Rebillet asked MusicFX for a track based on each of the three instruments then patched that into his sampler. Along the way, he talked through the highlights of MusicFX, extolling that “no one wrote this – Google wrote this.”

The performance comes on the heels of backlash to a recent Apple ad depicting the “crushing” of various instruments and artistic tools into an iPad Pro. By contrast, Rebillet’s I/O pre-show seemingly pushed back on the idea of AI tools harming artistic creation. “The machine is good,” he said while incorporating the AI-generated samples into his typical artistic workflow.

MusicFX is freely available as part of Google’s AI Test Kitchen suite. Rebillet also partnered with Google DeepMind and YouTube to create another demo track of AI-generated music, seen below.

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Avatar for Kyle Bradshaw Kyle Bradshaw

Kyle is an author and researcher for 9to5Google, with special interests in Made by Google products, Fuchsia, and uncovering new features.

Got a tip or want to chat? Twitter or Email. Kyle@9to5mac.com

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