About
Oper AI is the first record label showcasing exclusively music made via Artificial Intelligence composition techniques and was founded in February 2023 by Remo De Vico and Jacopo Solari.
The ‘artists’ that OperAI ‘signs’, are AI personas whose biography, profile pictures and artwork is entirely generated by Artificial Intelligence models.
Remo, an established experimental music composer active in theatre, cinema and performance art based in Italy and Jacopo, a physicist (PhD) who works with AI, guitarist and music producer based in Berlin have been close friends from their university time.
Since the beginning of their friendship they have always been brainstorming and dreaming about novel and futuristic projects or extravagant musical acts and were active in the avantgarde and experimental jazz music scene in Rome in the late 2000’s.
The perfect match: Remo, a composer with a passion for technology and Jacopo, a technologist with a passion for music have kept a strong binding throughout the years and kept throwing ideas at each other involving music and science. Most of the time one or the other would say ‘naaaah this is stupid, will not work’ but for OperAI it was different.
In one of their phone calls, soon after ChatGPT showed to the world that AI will likely change the way we live at a fundamental level, OperAI was born. This time they both agreed that ‘a label where the artists are AIs’ was actually an incredibly great idea and they immediately started working on it, tirelessly. An AI developer and a music composer: they were the perfect team!
Setting up a music distributor, opening social media channels, building a website, generating artworks and AI artists personas, starting building an AI music catalogue. They were some pretty intense months the ones that followed.
At OperAI they started pioneering new ways to make music assisted by Artificial Intelligence entities, not with the intent to make AI covers or clone voices of famous artists. On the contrary, with the intent of making AIs their tireless companion and assistant (‘operai’ in Italian means indeed factory workers) and experimenting ways to augment the human composer with such incredible novel tools for music making.
What came up of those efforts to this day is a catalogue of around 100 tracks released by 7 different AI artists personas with genres ranging from ambient to techno and experimental plus a raising interest on the internet and media.
We still don’t know where AI will bring the music maker of the future. But the OperAI team is curious and excited, not scared about it. OperAI aims at being a facilitator for AI-enthusiasts musicians, a meeting space for open minded composers, a creative hub for artist of various disciplines and scientists/AI developers willing to embrace the AI revolution in an effort to push the boundaries of music making.
Not everyone likes the fact that AI is making art nowadays. We understand it and respect it, but we do not feel the same. We got some haters crossing our path on social networks saying things like ‘as if musicians are not struggling enough already to make a living’ or ‘this is such dystopic scenario’ or ‘you are killing music’ but that is normal, radical changes always comes at some cost and generate conflict.
The AI revolution is ongoing and like it or not, it will change the way humans make music - among countless other things.
OperAI is on a quest to shape and imagine/dream the music makers in the future and not replace them by computers. A future where AI might become a launching platform for humans to explore unknown and unreachable sound experiences in ways that we cannot even imagine as of now.
That’s way we feel we have the duty as artists to experiment with AI in music making, and honestly…it’s so much fun!
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All our artists are fictional characters whose biography and media (like profile pictures)
are created via generative AI and chatbots.
The music is mainly made by generative AI, instrument by instrument.
The curators at OperAI claim the freedom
to select the sounds and fix arrangement inconsistencies before releasing a track,