Making Music With AI – And Doing So Ethically | Diaa El All, Founder & CEO of Soundful

Diaa El All is the founder and CEO of Soundful, which enables anyone to create brand new music in just a few seconds with AI. And on this episode of CRAFTED., we are literally making music.

We’re also talking about the ethics of using AI to make music. Diaa has been very outspoken about what he sees as the misguided practices of other AI+music companies that train their models by just scraping the web. At Soundful, they’ve taken a different approach: they are painstakingly building their own proprietary data by recording musicians playing one note at a time and then layering the notes to create music that sounds better than if you’d just sampled songs. 

“We've done it. There is a way where technological advancement and working with the rights-holders and protecting them can co-exist together.” 

We discuss:

* Why Diaa stands with the music industry against what he sees as other companies' move fast & break things approach to AI 

* Diaa’s background as a classical musician, DJ, ghost producer, and founder

* How Soundful built its data and how it layers sounds together to make music

* Soundful’s origin story and how it emerged from Diaa’s work with AI and marketing automation

* Why humans are so important when making music 

* Why music theory rules are important to follow – except when they’re not!

* What to expect next… and how incredible AI voice cloning has become

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CRAFTED. is produced by Modern Product Minds, where Dan Blumberg and team advise companies on product, discovery, growth, and experimentation. 

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Key Moments:

[02:01] Ethical AI in Music Creation: How Soundful builds its AI ethically, avoiding training on copyrighted materials and using proprietary data.

[05:00] Diaa’s journey from Cairo to the Royal Academy of London, and his various roles in the music industry before founding Soundful

[07:02] Soundful’s origin story

[10:10] Soundful's music creation process, including the use of music theory rules and proprietary data sets to generate tracks

[12:08] How Soundful manages the non-deterministic nature of AI to ensure unique, high-quality music outputs for users.

[14:36] How Soundful levels people up and why he’s so excited to level up that great singer who is not yet a great producer

[17:00] The hardest part of building Soundful - working with the music industry and winning their acceptance

[21:55] Predictions for the future, including advancements in voice cloning and the potential for democratizing creative opportunities.