Say hello to DrumGAN, your new prototype designed to generate AI-drum sounds with ease. Developed by our Music Team at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL – Paris), DrumGAN uses artificial intelligence to make drum sound design faster and more fun than before.

Try it now on TechHub website: https://drumgan.csl.sony.fr/

DrumGAN is powered by Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) technology, which might sound complicated but in fact: it’s a super-smart AI that’s been trained on a huge variety of drum sounds, from punchy kicks to crisp snares and twinkling cymbals. You get instant access to unique, high-quality drum samples that fit any of your music projects.

And here’s the exciting part: DrumGAN has already made its way into the professional music world. It’s been integrated into Backbone, the drum sound design software from Steinberg. If you’re already using Backbone or just getting started,

DrumGAN’s features will make your sound design experience smoother and more inspiring.

Music Credits: “127 tamil dance bass and beat” by Bauchamp, Free Music Archive, CC0 1.0 Universal

If you are curious to experiment what DrumGAN can do, check out the web-based demo app and start experimenting. It’s simple, intuitive, and designed to boost your creativity without any steep learning curves.

All our tools serve as companions in the artistic journey, which comes to having additional producers in the studio. They empower artists to quickly explore various creative directions, expand their creative horizons, and overcome creative roadblocks. DrumGAN provides a user-friendly interface for artists seeking to explore news horizons.

A new AI Prototype

DrumGAN’s algorithms are top-notch, developed by Sony CSL – Paris’s talented team to give you the very best in sound synthesis.

Guiding your creativity – makes it easy to generate original, professional-grade drum samples, so you can spend more time making music and less time tweaking settings.

Behind the scenes, this new prototype has been put through its paces by professional musicians and tested with rigorous metrics to ensure it delivers on quality and variety. It’s a tool designed to keep up with your ideas and elevate your music production.

DrumGAN in use:

In 2020, DrumGAN played an important role in our collaboration with French producer Twenty9. A hip-hop beatmaker accustomed to sifting through numerous drum kits and endless lists of drum samples, Twenty9 harnessed the utility of DrumGAN to create unique drum samples.

Twenty9 is a multidisciplinary musical artist. He developed a career as a composer/beatmaker, which earned him a certain renown as such, thanks to his collaborations with Dinos, SCH, Lacrim and Angèle, among others. In 2020, in collaboration with Sony CSL – Paris, he became the first beatmaker to offer a drum kit designed using artificial intelligence. As a singer/songwriter, he also pursued his artistic identity with the release of his own EP, “thérapie, stéréo”. His rich experience recently brought him the opportunity to co-produce Félix Radu’s musical project, via the GRANDES IDEES label he runs.

Some words from Twenty9:

I met the Sony CSL – Paris team on the recommendation of my publisher Sony Music Publishing, who know me well, and knew that there would be a common interest in this exchange. They were right on target, bringing new exclusive tools and my own touch to their development, and allowing me to create the world’s first drum kit based on artificial intelligence tools.

We made our collaboration accessible through two DrumKits free-to-download here. Feel free to try them out, use them on your next creative piece.

In 2022, Steinberg announced the integration of DrumGAN technology into their drum re-synthesizer Backbone, marking DrumGAN as the world’s first commercially available technology to leverage Neural Audio Synthesis. Thanks to the Sony CSL-Steinberg partnership, DrumGAN is now more user-friendly and accessible to creators worldwide.

Steinberg Backbone links Product page: www.steinberg.net/backbone

Last year in 2023, for the release of the Chainsaw Man anime’s soundtrack, the producer Kensuke Ushio, the Sony CSL – Tokyo Team and Javier Nistal our researcher at Sony CSL – Paris Music Team worked together to develop a special version of our DrumGAN tool, called ChainsawGAN, which generates… unique chainsaw sounds.

Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36hn4IzNmq8

Article: https://cslmusicteam.sony.fr/news/interview-chainsawgan-sonycsl/

So whether you’re a pro producer or just starting to explore the world of drum sound design, our DrumGAN prototype is here to make your creative process simpler, faster, and way more fun. Check it out and try for yourself the difference AI can make.

Creativity remains our main source of excitement, everything we try, research & create is designed to empower artists and enrich their creative process.

We’re excited for what’s next, until then, have fun with our prototypes and stay tuned for more…

(DrumGAN remains a prototype tool, providing a starting point for artists to explore the potential of AI as a companion in the creative process.)

Photo credits: ©Sacha Volkov