How AI-generated music is shaking up the industry and why artists are wary
TikTok user, wrote and produced a song called “Heart on my sleeve”. It sounded just like the Canadian rapper Drake and the singer-songwriter The Weeknd. The song went viral, racking up 15 million views on TikTok and hundreds of thousands of views each on Spotify and YouTube. But neither Drake nor The Weeknd had a clue about the song.
They hadn’t sung a single line. Their vocals were generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The machine has moved on from synthesising sounds to generating singing voices. AI is on song everywhere.
Anshuman Sharma and Aditya Kalway, two young producers assisting the music composer duo SalimSulaiman, recreated “Haule haule ho jayega”—the hit song in Shah Rukh Khan’s Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi—in the voice of Mohammed Rafi. “We came across some AI vocal models that could produce the voices of Indian singers like Kishore Kumar, Rafi and Sonu Nigam,” recalls Sharma. In September 2023, Kalway sang “Haule haule” in Rafi’s signature style, put it through a vocal filter and musically arranged it like a 1970s LaxmikantPyarelal romantic ditty. Its Instagram Reel got 2.6 million views and cheers from the music industry, including Vishal Dadlani, Shaan and Sonu Nigam.
In January this year, composer AR Rahman strode into the AI ring. He used AI to generate the voices of Shahul Hameed and Bamba Bakya — two singers with whom he had collaborated but died, prematurely, in their 40s—for the song “Thimiri yezhuda” in the Rajinikanth film Lal Salaam.
AI is the new sound of music. A harbinger of change as
