Adobe teases ‘Photoshop for audio’

Adobe’s Research lab has teased a new project called Project Music GenAI Control, which it is comparing to their flagship image editing software, Photoshop.

An early-stage generative AI music generation and editing tool, Project Music GenAI Control uses prompts similar to Midjourney and ChatGPT to create or change audio from scratch. What’s different about Project Music GenAI Control when it comes to other generative AI audio platforms like Stability Audio is that it allows users to “fine tune” the output, for their “precise needs”. 

Once the music is generated with prompts like ‘sad jazz’ or ‘powerful rock’, users can further tweak the outputs. Speaking about the project in a blog post (linked below), Adobe Research Team said: “With a simple user interface, users could transform their generated audio based on a reference melody; adjust the tempo, structure, and repeating patterns of a piece of music; choose when to increase and decrease the audio’s intensity; extend the length of a clip; re-mix a section; or generate a seamlessly repeatable loop.”

Expanding on the Project Music GenAI Control, Nicholas Bryan, Senior Research Scientist at Adobe Research and one of the creators of the technologies, said, “One of the exciting things about these new tools is that they aren’t just about generating audio — they’re taking it to the level of Photoshop by giving creatives the same kind of deep control to shape, tweak, and edit their audio. It’s a kind of pixel-level control for music.”

Having that DAW-like level of control over generative AI has been a missing piece since the generative boom kicked off with OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 in April 2022. This isn’t Adobe’s first foray into audio. The software company’s Audition software is a comprehensive audio editing platform aimed largely at post-production. Adobe hinted that this new project will also be aimed at video production. Speaking in the same blog post, Adobe added: “Instead of manually cutting existing music to make intros, outros, and background audio, Project Music GenAI Control could help users to create exactly the pieces they need — solving workflow pain points end-to-end.”

Right now, Project Music GenAI Control is only a research project rather than a product ready to launch, but it hints at a future of generative AI tools for both music and content makers, which could have a significant impact on music-making as a whole moving forward.

Watch the video below for more info and read the Adobe blog on the project.