Technology

The Stockholm-based audio-entertainment service unveiled its “intention to acquire” the London-headquartered business today, describing Sonantic as “a dynamic AI voice platform that creates compelling, nuanced, and stunningly realistic voices from text.” Since arriving on the scene in 2018, Sonantic has released multiple videos showcasing its AI technology, including clips of “conversations” involving computer-generated voices.

Source: Spotify Buys AI Voice Startup Sonantic –What Does This Mean For Artists?

Facebook parent company Meta announced on Thursday that it will be halting development or production of several anticipated hardware projects, including its augmented reality (AR) glasses, its dual-camera smartwatch, and its Portal smart display device. Meta is citing rising costs of its metaverse-unit Reality Labs, as well as a tightening economy. 

Source: Digital News Daily: Meta Halts Multiple Metaverse-Related Hardware Projects

Text-to-image app DALL-E 2 was released by artificial intelligence lab OpenAI last month, and is able to create multiple realistic images and artwork from a single text prompt. Now researchers believe they may have figured out how the technology works, after discovering that gibberish words produce specific pictures.

Source: AI text-to-image tool may use its own ‘secret language’, experts claim

Advocacy groups bankrolled by big technology companies have poured at least $36.4 million into TV and internet ads opposing antitrust legislation that would bar dominant tech platforms from favoring their own products and services, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. By comparison, groups supporting the antitrust legislation have spent about $193,000, according to a Journal analysis of data collected by AdImpact, an ad-tracking service.

Source: Big Tech Has Spent $36 Million on Ads to Torpedo Antitrust Bill

Entrepreneurs and many established musicians are flocking to the space and creating NFT record labels to capitalize on this proclaimed gold rush of opportunity. With this comes the question — are these NFT labels viable, or just another way that brands and entrepreneurs are trying to cash in on the NFT craze?

Source: Are NFT Record Labels The Future Of Music?

NFTs, which are designed to be one-of-a-kind or unique by nature, may become subject to duplication, with data being transformed (cropped, rotated, stretched) or subject to tiny additions that would make a once valuable collector’s item a poor knockoff. The Sense Protocol enables users to measure the relative rareness of an NFT and to certify its authenticity, thus serving to protect creators and collectors from counterfeits, fraud and scammers.

Source: NFT copymint & duplicate detection technology provides security & assurance for creators

Founded by musician Matthew Chaim out of frustration with the low public output of traditional songwriting camps, Songcamp focuses on grouping artists across genres together to create, release, and monetize songs as NFTs. The collective celebrated its first birthday in March 2022 and has run three camps so far — each involving not only a larger group of contributors, but also increasingly ambitious, Web3-native rails to support their work financially.

Source: Chains & rails: How Songcamp builds community-first music infrastructure – Water & Music

Warner Bros is celebrating the 80th anniversary of Looney by releasing NFTs. The American film and entertainment company Warner Bros has announced that it would be celebrating this event by adding enhancements to the digital tech that it has been using. The latest addition would be Looney Tunes, a digital collectible for users.

Source: Looney Tunes: Warner Bros and NIFTY launch NFT | Cryptopolitan

Spotify’s R&D team has unveiled Basic Pitch, a free, open source tool to convert audio files into MIDI format. Using machine learning to transcribe musical notes, Basic Pitch boasts the ability to convert a recording of almost any instrument — including voice — to a MIDI version. 

Source: Spotify Introduces Open Source Audio-to-MIDI File Converter ‘Basic Pitch’

Dubbed Project Silica, you could oversimplify the technology as something akin to a glass hard drive that’s read like a CD. It’s a 3-by-3-inch platter that can hold 100GB of digital data, or roughly 20,000 songs, pretty much forever.  Located in Norway, it’s part of a cold-storage facility drilled into the very same mountain as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Source: With glass buried under ice, Microsoft plans to preserve music for 10,000 years