Roland is getting into generative AI music with Melody Flip

Roland 进军生成式 AI 音乐领域，推出 Melody Flip 工具

It’s not quite the “push button; get song” of Suno, but Roland’s new Melody Flip tool marks the company’s foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 “Palettes,” which are essentially themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. You can start from scratch and ask it to generate any combination of melody, chord progression, bassline, or drums. Or you can feed it a reference track and have it build off the melodic ideas from that.

虽然它不像 Suno 那样可以“一键生成歌曲”，但 Roland 新推出的 Melody Flip 工具标志着该公司正式进军生成式 AI 音乐领域。作为一款数字音频工作站（DAW）插件，Melody Flip 提供了约 250 个“调色板”（Palettes），本质上是按流派分类的音乐创意集合。你可以从零开始，要求它生成旋律、和弦进行、低音线条或鼓点的任意组合；也可以输入参考音轨，让它基于其中的旋律创意进行创作。

Unlike Suno or Udio, Melody Flip doesn’t spit out fully polished songs with vocals and full arrangements. Instead, it offers simple musical loops meant to serve as a creative spark for you to build on. There are fairly limited control over the outputs. You can’t feed Melody Flip a text prompt like “acoustic country rock with clean male vocals, literate singer-songwriter, gentle brushed drums, and sparse pedal steel at 98BPM” and get a Jason Isbell ripoff. Instead, you basically just choose a genre, note density, BPM, musical key, and take what you get. Though the genre options are pretty fine-grained, going from standard fare like “80s disco” and “90s R&B” to esoteric things like “Kawaii Future Bass” and “Anime World.”

与 Suno 或 Udio 不同，Melody Flip 不会直接输出带有人声和完整编曲的成品歌曲。相反，它提供的是简单的音乐循环，旨在作为激发你创作灵感的火花。它对输出结果的控制相当有限。你无法像给 AI 写提示词那样输入“98 BPM 的原声乡村摇滚，配以清澈的男声、文学气息浓厚的唱作人风格、轻柔的刷鼓和稀疏的踏板钢吉他”来生成一首 Jason Isbell 风格的仿作。你基本上只能选择流派、音符密度、BPM 和调性，然后接受它生成的结果。尽管其流派选项非常细致，涵盖了从“80年代迪斯科”和“90年代 R&B”等标准风格，到“卡哇伊未来贝斯”（Kawaii Future Bass）和“动漫世界”（Anime World）等小众风格。

The sound selection is further proof that you’re not supposed to use Melody Flip outputs out of the box. The presets available are mostly the sort of general MIDI tones you’d find in ‘90s video games. It seems like the intended use is to export the MIDI data from Melody Flip directly into your DAW to manipulate and pair with other, more powerful synth plugins.

音色选择进一步证明了 Melody Flip 的输出结果并非直接用于成品。其预设音色大多类似于 90 年代电子游戏中常见的通用 MIDI 音色。这似乎意味着它的预期用途是将 Melody Flip 生成的 MIDI 数据直接导出到 DAW 中，以便进行进一步处理，并与其他更强大的合成器插件配合使用。

After years of seeming lost in the woods and alienating customers with its messy Roland Cloud subscription service, the company was back on track recently. The P-6 Creative Sampler, SH-4d, and Gaia 2 synth all addressed major issues with the company’s lineup. And Roland finally listened to customers last year, paying loving tribute to its analog heritage with the TR-1000. But considering the general response from the music community to generative AI, Melody Flip is unlikely to garner it much goodwill.

在经历了多年的迷茫，并因混乱的 Roland Cloud 订阅服务而疏远客户之后，该公司最近终于重回正轨。P-6 Creative Sampler、SH-4d 和 Gaia 2 合成器都解决了该公司产品线中的主要问题。去年，Roland 终于听取了客户的意见，通过 TR-1000 向其模拟设备传统致敬。但考虑到音乐界对生成式 AI 的普遍反应，Melody Flip 恐怕很难为公司赢得多少好感。