A Practical Guide to Generative Music AI for Developers April 2025
Gain fundamental Python and machine learning skills to develop AI music projects and unlock creative career paths in music and technology.
Session 1 Recording
Main Topics: AI Music Case Studies, Course Roadmap
An Introduction to AI Music (50')
Session 1 PDF handout
Open Discussion
Session 2 Recording
Main Topics: Environment Setup
GitHub Repository
Setting up your environment - Cloning the class repository (10')
Hands On
Setting up your environment - Hands On 1.1: Loading, visualizing, playing audio (10')
Setting up your environment - Hands On 1.2: Extracting Audio Features, RMS and ZCR (13')
Setting up your environment - Hands On 1.2: Extracting Audio Features, Spectrograms (13')
Setting up your environment - Hands On 2: Manipulating MIDI Data (20')
Session 3 Recording
Main Topics: Audio vs Symbolic Music, Basics of Generative AI, Data Acquisition and Ethics
Statistical Basics of Generative Modeling in Artificial Intelligence (10')
Variational Autoencoders (16')
Hands On
Hands On 1.1: Lakh MIDI Dataset (12')
Hands On 1.2: Free Music Archive (6')
Hands On 2: Using RAVE
Session 4 Recording
Main Topics: Human-Computer Interaction, Iterative Design, Continuous Deployment
Human-Computer Interaction & User-Centered Design
Open Discussion with Jordan Rudess
Session 5 Recording
Deep Dive into MIDI & Spectrograms
Comparing Musical Representations & Encodec Deep Dive (14')
Understanding RVQ in Encodec (12')
Hands On
Hands On: Encodec (29')
Session 6 Recording
Main Topics: Autoregressive modeling, the Transformer architecture, HuggingFace Hub
The Transformer architecture (15')
Understanding Anticipatory Music Transformers (13')
Hands On
Hands On: Using AMT to generate MIDI data (Part 1) (18')
Hands On: Using AMT to generate MIDI data (Part 2) (17')
Session 7 Recording
Main Topics: MusicGen & Audio Generation with Transformers
Understanding MusicGen (8')
Hands On
Hands On: Using MusicGen to generate audio (38')
Session 8 Recording
Main Topics: Diffusion Models, Latent Diffusion Models
Intro to Diffusion Models Part 1 (11')
Intro to Diffusion Models Part 2 (14')
Conditioning & Classifier-Free Guidance (10')
The UNet Architecture (6')
Inference-Time Optimization: DITTO (6')
Hands On
Hands On: Using Stable Audio Part 1 (15')
Hands On: Using Stable Audio Part 2 (18')
Session 9 Recording
Introduction to TorchScript (18')
8-bit Linear Quantization (9')
ONNX and Graph Optimizations (15')
Main Topics: Landscape of companies in AI and Music, Available Commercial Products
Demo
Session 10 Recording 1
Session 10 Recording 2
Session 10 Recording 3
Main Topics: Setting up a project specification, timeline, and scope
Training Part 1 (8')
Training Part 2 (13')
Training Part 3 (16')
Peer Review & Feedback
Session 11
Lab Session: Guided Coding & Troubleshooting
Milestone Check-Ins
Session 12 Recording
Final Presentations
Next Steps