How Indian music legend Shankar Mahadevan experiments with Music AI Sandbox
For our latest Lab Session, we teamed up with Grammy Award-winning Indian music icon Shankar Mahadevan to explore the exciting fusion of AI and India’s musical traditions. The music of India, a powerhouse of artistic influence widely known for its vibrant Bollywood and booming regional film industries, draws from traditions like Carnatic, Hindustani, folk, dance and devotional genres. This richness provided the perfect canvas for exploration using our Music AI Sandbox.
Music AI Sandbox is a suite of experimental tools developed by Google DeepMind in collaboration with YouTube and guided by insights from music industry professionals such as Shankar. These tools help musicians transform existing music, create new instrumental or vocal parts and explore new directions for their work.
We spent more than 30 hours in Shankar's Mumbai studio, immersing ourselves in his creative process. Together with Shankar’s producer, lyricist and sound engineer, we investigated how Music AI Sandbox could help him create film soundtracks.
Team picture in Shankar’s studio. From the left, standing: sound engineer Ameya Mategaonkar; Shankar; producer Soumil Shringarpure; lyricist Tanishk Nabar. From the left, seated: Googlers Arathi Sethumadhavan and Aaron Wade.
The result of our collaboration was the song "Rubaroo," meaning "face-to-face" in Hindi.
Shankar 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.
TextFX was helpful for inspiration.
“I strongly believe that music happens because of some trigger. It can be a physical trigger, a visual trigger, an audio trigger — it may be anything,” Shankar says. “Sandbox prods you and makes your brain think in a particular direction, whether it be creating a melody or transforming a particular piece that you have in the genre you want to hear.”
This Lab Session with Shankar Mahadevan offers another glimpse into a future where technology complements and amplifies human creativity, enabling artists to push boundaries while staying true to their unique artistic visions. We hope this inspires musicians and film composers worldwide to explore the limitless possibilities at the intersection of music and AI.
If you're interested in experimenting with Music AI Sandbox, sign up for the waitlist here. Visit us at Labs.google to discover more products and tools, connect with us on social media (@labsdotgoogle) or join our Discord community at discord.gg/googlelabs. You can also check out all of our Lab Sessions at labs.google/sessions.
