Striking all the right notes

Have you ever tried to find a song to put on a video you made? And when you found the perfect track, you realised you couldn’t use it because of copyright infringement? This week, Meet the Changemakers invited Max Cearly, the Business Development Manager of Jukedeck – the website that uses advanced machine learning to create unique pieces of music that anyone can use – to speak to us.

Jukedeck is the brainchild of Ed Rex, a Cambridge graduate with a Double-starred First in Music who founded company 5 years ago at the ripe old age of 21 (and who also enjoyed a brief stint as a backing singer for Dizzee Rascal). Juckdeck’s core mission is to make music more accessible to everyone. Users can select from a range of music genres from folk to drum and base, a mood such as sci-fi or uplifting, the track length and even when the music climaxes. In seconds Jukedeck will then create a completely original music track. Each song costs roughly $20 and already, over 15,000 YouTube videos feature a Jukedeck composition.

Max’s talk highlighted the importance of audio brand identity and showcased the speedy evolution of Jukedeck, from the basic computer mono tones of 2014, to the complex harmonies it can produce today. And in just a few years the company has received significant industry recognition, winning TechCrunch Disrupt London 2015 and taking home a prestigious Cannes Innovation Lion for their artificially intelligent music composer.

Max then elaborated about the next steps - the prototype that enables a deeper layer of configuration and features, altering the music on an advert depending on the audience type, and the ability to automatically adapt music to scene changes in a video. But perhaps most exciting of all is the prospect of a music Turing Test that will challenge the public to guess whether a piece of music has been composed by a human or a computer. But whatever the outcome, at its current trajectory Jukedeck looks set to go platinum.