Left to Right: David Loker, CTO; Mayya Ackerman, CEO; Christopher Cassion, VP of Engineering. Courtesy of WAVE-AI
** An edited version is now published in my Los Altos Town Crier’s “Business Matters” Tech/Marketing Column **
Research has shown that music is heart healthy. It reduces stress, stimulates memories, eases pain, and soothes one’s soul. During this challenging time with COVID19, music has been one of the avenues that’s been effective in helping us cope with stress and anxiety that come with the lock down. For some of us, it’s becoming an essential, therapeutic tool in keeping us calm, activating the happy dopamine in our brains that bring reliefs to stressful moments in our lives.
From Research Project to Commercialization
WaveAI is a startup whose product, ALYSIA, integrates music into our lives and makes it easier for us to create our own music with lyrics, top-line melodies, and vocals, blending with audio background of our choosing, all using artificial and machine intelligence. ALYSIA originally began as a research project which was brought to life by Maya Ackerman, Co-Founder and CEO of WaveAI. Together, with her stellar team of artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers, who are also trained musicians themselves, they hatched ALYSIA in the consumer space.
Maya was first exposed to music through singing and playing piano at a young age. She is an accomplished artificial and machine intelligence expert; she is also an opera singer and a producer. During her Computer Science PhD studies, Maya first began studying voice and tried to create original songs. Because of her own struggles with songwriting, Maya saw the opportunity to create ALYSIA that would help not only herself, but also others who experience similar struggles could benefit from it. ALYSIA was launched 3 years ago. To date, it has generated over 30,000 songs by users mainly in the U.S. and U.K., with more California users than any other state, including users in Mountain View and across Santa Clara county.
A Game Changer in Songwriting
ALYSIA is currently the only platform providing assistance with the creation of vocal music through WaveAI’s one-of-a-kind AI technology, allowing everyone to express themselves through songs complete with lyrics, melodies, and vocals. This is a game changer both technologically and in the self-expression songwriting marketplace. Music is now more readily accessible to everyday people. Music lovers everywhere can express themselves through their own original songs, without needing years of musical and vocal training.
“When a user enters the type of song that he or she likes, the app provides suggested lyrics for users to choose from. The melodies are generated in real time, on demand, not from a database. Only background music is human-made,” said Ackerman. “Other software in the space focuses on creating backing tracks, with no lyrics or vocal components. No other songwriting software enables you to write lyrics with fitting melodies.”
Making Songwriting Simple and Easy
According to Ackerman, ALYSIA started out by catering to novice songwriters with no previous musical experience. The app made it easy for novice users to write lyrics and add the top-line melody to existing audio tracks. By definition, a top-line melody is the main melody of your song that rides above your chord progressions, creating a thru-line that helps connect all the various sections of your song together. The top-line melody is also the vehicle that carries your lyrics. You can either use ALYSIA’s auto voice or record your own voice to go with lyrics in the song. “Existing tools create music sheets without words. Our focus, creating music with words, is much more challenging,” said Ackerman. After users created their songs, they can socially share their songs on YouTube, Facebook or any other social media channel. In the future, ALYSIA hopes to partner with known entities and encourage contest participation to pick the best album of the year, for example.
“Recently, a song created with our technology was named “Song of the Day’’ by the French publication Liberation,” said Ackerman. “With a proven consumer version of ALYSIA, we have now released a Beta version of LyricStudio for professional songwriters. It will be available for free for a limited time.” For more information on ALYSIA and LyricStudio, visit www.wave-ai.net for more information.
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