Lifeboat Foundation

Google has launched Gemini, a new artificial intelligence system that can seemingly understand and speak intelligently about almost any kind of prompt—pictures, text, speech, music, computer code, and much more.

This type of AI system is known as a multimodal model. It’s a step beyond just being able to handle text or images like previous algorithms. And it provides a strong hint of where AI may be going next: being able to analyze and respond to real-time information from the outside world.

Although Gemini’s capabilities might not be quite as advanced as they seemed in a viral video, which was edited from carefully curated text and still-image prompts, it is clear that AI systems are rapidly advancing. They are heading towards the ability to handle more and more complex inputs and outputs.

Take a cassette and enjoy the experience.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The world’s largest music label has yanked its artists’ music off TikTok Universal Music Group claims TikTok is unwilling to compensate musicians appropriately. (The Guardian) + Taylor Swift fans are kicking off. (Wired $) + Indie record labels don’t like the sound of Apple’s pay plans either. (FT $)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v\u003dON8vxUInQYA\u0026si\u003d7bam3JUgkIjDhzvz

TikTok built its empire off popular music — but now it’s losing access to a ton of it.

In a statement, Universal Music Group said it has chosen to “call time out on TikTok” to pressure the social network for better rules on artificial intelligence, online safety, and artist compensation for its roster, which includes such luminaries as Taylor Swift, Drake, and BTS.

“Today, as an indication of how little TikTok compensates artists and songwriters, despite its massive and growing user base, rapidly rising advertising revenue and increasing reliance on music-based content, TikTok accounts for only about 1 percent of our total revenue,” the statement reads.

“Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures”

Emotions, bodily sensations and movement are integral parts of musical experiences. Yet, it remains unknown i) whether emotional connotations and structural features of music elicit discrete bodily sensations and ii) whether these sensations are culturally consistent. We addressed these questions in a cross-cultural study with Western (European and North American, n = 903) and East Asian (Chinese, n = 1035). We precented participants with silhouettes of human bodies and asked them to indicate the bodily regions whose activity they felt changing while listening to Western and Asian musical pieces with varying emotional and acoustic qualities. The resulting bodily sensation maps (BSMs) varied as a function of the emotional qualities of the songs, particularly in the limb, chest, and head regions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v\u003dsDD_VcxmToE

To learn more, please visit the YouTube Help Center: https://www.youtube.com/help

Shazam now lets you identify music while wearing headphones, the Apple-owned company announced this week. All you need to do is open the app, check for the headphone icon to confirm your headphones are connected and then start identifying music playing around you or within apps like TikTok and YouTube. The new update works with both wired and Bluetooth headphones.

Say you’re watching TikTok with headphones and come across a song you like in a video. You can open up the Shazam app, click to Shazam and then head back to TikTok. After a few seconds, the music will stop for a split second and then you can go back to the Shazam app to see the title and artist of the song.

Or, say you’re wearing headphones in a coffeeshop and want to know what song is playing in the café. You can now Shazam the song without having to remove your headphones.

Summary: Researchers made a significant discovery using an artificial neural network model, suggesting that musical instinct may emerge naturally from the human brain. By analyzing various natural sounds through Google’s AudioSet, the team found that certain neurons in the network selectively responded to music, mimicking the behavior of the auditory cortex in real brains.

This spontaneous generation of music-selective neurons indicates that our ability to process music may be an innate cognitive function, formed as an evolutionary adaptation to better process sounds from nature.