TikTok Owner's Latest App 'Ripple' Can Turn Your Hums Into Real Music
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has launched a new app called Ripple that allows users to generate an original tune by just humming. The app, which is currently being tested among users in the US, will offer a choice of instruments before users start humming. However, it isn't able to generate vocal parts of a song, and ByteDance won't say if it plans to add this capability down the road.
Ripple can churn out tunes across different genres, but it appears that the app isn't capable of churning out a full-length track and the duration of melody it produces depends on how long you can hum into your phone's mic. At the moment, Ripple is only available in an invite-only format and exclusive to the iOS platform.
Either way, Ripple is shaping up to be an easy way for TikTok Creators to generate original tunes for their videos without having to deal with complex software-based music tools or splurging cash to have an artist do it for them. In addition to recording music, Ripple will also allow users to trim and edit their music clips right on their phones.
A ByteDance spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is planning to add more tools to make the whole process of music generation more efficient for users. The company, which is currently facing calls for a ban in the United States, says it created Ripple to "inspire musical creativity and help musicians, artists, and composers express themselves."
Playing it safe
Ripple is currently not integrated into the main TikTok app, so users must save their tunes locally and then upload them as the background score for their short videos. ByteDance has, thankfully, created a shortcut that lets users directly share their Ripple tunes on TikTok.
Notably, ByteDance says the AI model behind Ripple was trained using music that was properly licensed or owned by the company. "It was not trained on music from the major labels," ByteDance tells SlashGear. However, it's unclear if the company signed any special deal with music labels or artists that goes behind just licensing their music and involves using their work for training an AI model.
The latter is an important distinction because Getty recently sued Stability AI for skirting around the image copyright terms and using them to train models like Stable Diffusion. In the domain of music and social media, Twitter was recently slapped with a $250 million lawsuit by a consortium of music labels for not paying the due licensing fee for music that appears on the platform.
TikTok is the first mainstream social media platform to offer an aI-assisted music generation tool via Ripple. However, it won't be long before Meta gets inspired by it. That company demoed an AI tool called Voicebox a few weeks ago that only needs two seconds of audio sample to generate original audio in multiple languages. Google Assistant also offers a tool that listens to your hums to find the original song.