To RTFM or not to RTFM? While concerns rise about AI‘s impact on the music industry, some creatives like producer Myler Melodies have found AI tools that can aid musicians without threatening their artistry. Powered by Google’s Gemini AI technology, NotebookLM is one resource that could help you make sense of those confusing gear manuals.
First introduced in July 2023, NotebookLM can wade through documents and PDFs on your behalf. That means, if you upload a complex synth manual, it can process all of the information and understand every feature in under a minute. Then you’re free to ask questions, with NotebookLM serving as an all-knowing teacher.
In a YouTube video, Mylar Melodies shows just how impressive the technology can be. After uploading a 223-page Torso T1 sequencer manual, NotebookLM processes everything within 30 seconds. After processing, he is presented with a summary of what the manual contains, and a prompt to ask any questions.
When Mylar Melodies types in his first question, “How do I set up MIDI channel on the Torso T1?”, NotebookLM provides a response within moments. It provides a simple step-by-step guide, including certain steps in bold to make it even clearer to follow.
Most significantly, the response also provides citations. Each citation can be clicked, and show you exactly where the AI technology has sourced the information from the provided PDF. That means that, even if the step doesn’t quite feel clear enough, you can click and find the information it’s watered down.
Unlike other AI chatbots and tools, NotebookLM is grounded, meaning its knowledge is centred entirely around the notes and sources you provide. Due to the “grounded” nature of NotebookLM, the responses will only seek information from the documents you provide, meaning it wont get confused and trawl through every gear manual available on the internet.
“It’s obviously only as clever as the sources,” MylarMelodies explains. “But you can feed multiple documents into it.”
“If you were researching some classic bits of kit, like a DX7, you could put loads of reference manuals into it,” MylarMelodies says. “[It would then be able to use] multiple sources… it’s like ChatGPT, except, unlike ChatGPT, it is limited in its data source to just the documents.”
It also has an Audio Overview option, which essentially generates a podcast for you to listen to if you’d prefer to listen to the information instead. As he waits, MylarMelodies jokingly falls asleep on his chair – but it only takes five minutes to generate 40 minutes of relatively fluid conversation.
The podcast does sound strange – it ’s likely been trained on hours of co-hosted shows. The pair of hosts welcome the listener like your standard podcast, with a warm “Hey everyone, welcome back for another deep dive.” The AI even pops in a few “ums”, and has the other host making affirmative “right”s, to make it feel more human. It’s a weird back-and-forth exchange that does manage to uncannily conversational.
There’s even the option to basically ‘call in’ to the show. The ‘join’ option allows you to cut into the chatter and ask a question. When MylarMelodies does this, the pair of hosts even respond saying “It’s great you’re asking questions” and “Yeah, we want this to be fun for you, our listener.”
When introducing NotebookLM back in 2023, Google explained that it aimed to help people navigate the information overload of the internet. “We know people are struggling with the rapid growth of information – it’s everywhere and it’s overwhelming,” the post reads.
“As we’ve been talking with students, professors and knowledge workers, one of the biggest challenges is synthesizing facts and ideas from multiple sources,” it continues. “You often have the sources you want, but it’s time-consuming to make the connections. We started to explore what we could build that would help people make connections faster in the midst of all this data, especially using sources they care most about.”
In other AI music news, a US district court has ruled that using copyrighted material without permission to train AI does not constitute “fair use”, marking a crucial moment in the ongoing legal conversation surrounding AI and copyright.
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