Last year, Google NotebookLM turned the world of podcasts on its head, making way for AI podcast hosts. The other tool that may change how music gets made is Music AI Sandbox, a set of experimental tools that can spark new creative possibilities and help artistes explore unique musical ideas.

For Google’s latest Lab Session, Shankar Mahadevan showed the world the power Music AI Sandbox, developed by Google DeepMind in collaboration with YouTube and guided by insights from music industry professionals like Mahadevan.

“We wanted to see how Sandbox can influence, enhance and inspire a composer like me,” said the musician. “Music starts with a trigger, whether it’s a guitar line or a set of lyrics or a drum beat. One thing leads to the other. I improvise while composing. I could see that even Soundbox, using its intelligence, improvises.”

The Music AI Soundbox team spent 30 hours in Mahadevan’s Mumbai studio, immersing ourselves in his creative process. The result is the song Rubaroo.

Mahadevan used simple text prompts in Music AI Sandbox to create musical samples that incorporated various Indian instruments such as the dholak and tabla. He then looped those samples in his digital audio workstation, riffing on vocal melodies, and we went back to Music AI Sandbox to generate additional instrumental elements. For lyrical inspiration, we turned to a Google Labs experiment, TextFX, using the word “rubaroo” as input to the ‘Simile’ and ‘Scene’ tools, which led to vivid metaphors and descriptions that served as creative fodder for the lyrics.

The value proposition of the ‘create’ feature is that it can let you create sounds that never existed before. The ‘transform’ feature allows you to sing into the system, or input a certain musical instrument and is able to easily transform that into a new piece of audio.

Mathures Paul