Turning an idea into a song takes more than talent. By handling the full-cycle craft of mixing, engineering, and production, AI helps more people turn raw ideas into real music.
Aryan Kapoor, Founder and Chief Product Officer of AI-enabled DAW Veena, believes the conversation around AI is all wrong. He argues the goal isn't replacing the artist, but liberating them.
Art vs. craft: “I know so many talented singers who’ve never made a single song because they don’t know how to produce,” Kapoor says. “This technology is for them.” He believes AI’s true value lies in unlocking that creative potential. “The future of AI isn’t about replacing artists; it’s about finally getting the ideas out of people’s heads.”
That starts with rethinking what music creation actually involves. “There are two fundamental parts to music: the art and the craft,” Kapoor explains. “The art is the human part, the idea, the emotion. The craft is the technical skill, like music theory, mixing, engineering.” AI, he says, excels at the craft. That’s where it can help most.
Watermarking the wave: A major source of the public’s distrust is the feeling that AI is stealing from artists. “You train a model on five Taylor Swift songs and five Drake songs, but you can’t objectively tell what percentage of the output comes from who,” Kapoor says. The solution is technical, not just legal. “I’ve been reading early-stage research on watermarking data, which embeds a digital signature into the training data itself. Imagine generating an output and being able to say, ‘This is verifiably 80% Drake,’ so he can get his fair cut. Once that’s possible, the industry can finally move forward.”
No T-Pain, no gain: He points out this anxiety is nothing new, drawing a direct parallel to the initial backlash against Auto-Tune. “When Auto-Tune first came in, everyone said it wasn’t real singing,” he explains. “But now, it’s a widely accepted part of the creative process. We have to see if this technology will be accepted in the same way.” For Kapoor, acceptance hinges on transparency and using AI to bolster human creativity, not to feign it.
An iPhone moment: “This is the iPhone launch of our generation,” says Kapoor. “Right now, we’re at the stage where you can play a virtual piano or pretend to drink a beer on your phone. It's a novelty, but what came after that changed the world. I want to see how people build on top of these models to completely disrupt the creative experience.” He even envisions a future where your phone’s camera analyzes the acoustics of your room and automatically adjusts the EQ for perfect playback.