Roland Corporation today announced Melody Flip, an artificial intelligence-powered melody-generation application, created in collaboration with Sony Computer Science Laboratories.
Roland says that their view is that AI tools should not replace the musician, but should instead as a partner to ‘amplify’ human intent, taste, and creativity.
Melody Flip puts this philosophy into practice by letting you import an audio file and automatically analyze its musical DNA, including the structure, BPM, key, chord progression, genre, mood, and more. It then pairs the analysis with a library of about 300 ‘creative palettes’ (predefined musical styles and tonal directions) to help you generate new melodic ideas. You can then pick, tweak, chop, or rebuild the new melodic ideas however you want.
Roland says that the result is a new kind of production workflow, where humans and software work side by side to bring music to life.
Powered by Sony CSL’s Expertise in AI-Assisted Music Creation
Melody Flip incorporates technologies derived from Sony CSL’s research in AI-assisted music creation.
For example, Melody Flip extracts musical elements, including structure, BPM, beat positions, key, chord progression, genre, and mood, from the imported audio file and recommends suitable creative palettes based on its characteristics.
This functionality not only supports the generation of new melodic ideas but also helps creators visually understand the song’s structure and key, ultimately improving workflow efficiency.
Seamless Integration with Leading DAWs
Melody Flip will be available for macOS and Windows as a plug-in that will work within standard DAWs. Users can export generated melodies, as well as chord, bass, and drum parts, in both audio and MIDI formats.
Pricing and Availability:
Melody Flip will be available via Roland Cloud Manager in May 2026. Pricing is to be announced.
“letting you import an audio file and automatically analyze its musical DNA, including the structure, BPM, key, chord progression, genre, mood, and more”
Or in other words basically letting you rip off another artists whole style without doing anything more than lift a finger
Seems completely unnecessary to make something like this instead of making a real learning tool instead
Didn’t they say the same thing about sampling in the late 80s/early 90s? Not trying to attack you.
“Roland says that their view is that AI tools should not replace the musician, but should instead as a partner to ‘amplify’ human intent, taste, and creativity.”
Because nothing says “creativity” quite like letting AI create for you.
I have to admit i giggled a bit here yes!
Not sure why all these links to AI products are always listed here when they’re clearly not wanted by the community and always trashed in the comments.
To give people something to talk about, we don’t want to miss this interaction.
I heard there’s only about a 15% chance that AI will wipe out humanity
Long-time readers will remember when some commenters thought we should rename the site to ‘iPadtopia’ or that we “Sold out to Behringer”!
We get it. Change is hard!
But none of the electronic music pioneers achieved what they did by being luddites.
I don’t need a “composing partner.” I already have one: my so-called brain. I won’t write AI off before the ink has even halfway dried, but I’m still waiting to see/hear something from it that makes music “better”. Like any company looking to sell their idea of AI, Roland naturally speaks of it in glowing terms. However, its far too early in the game to call it either Good or Evil. As a skeptic who tripped over some MIDI rumors early on, I vote for Evil to win. It has the larger customer base.
Hi composers have always used assistants. Classical composers for filling in details of scores, and so on. There are some parts of this that I would think AI can assist. Yes there are arguments against, such as it’s reducing useful apprenticeship-like positions that have a role in helping the next generation, and potentially it homogenizes even more than things already are. But it’s also perhaps democratizing. I’ve not much looked in to this particular tool but I would think some composers do already use human assistants like this.
Enabling talentless losers to just rip off anyone else’s ideas is not “democratisation”
I hate to point it out, but talentless losers have been running the music industry for a century and didn’t need any AI to do it.
bit harsh on Andrew Lloyd Webber but ok.
I’ve been a long time follower of this website, but the amount of posts focusing on generative AI have gotten to be too much for me. I understand people need to make money, but the people who follow this site clearly do not use AI and do not want coverage of AI. This is the final reminder that I need to stop checking this site every few days as I have for the last several years.
People who comment don’t speak for all readers. The vocal minority is often emotional, negative, and reactive while the quiet majority perhaps finds interest in this read or simply doesn’t care and moves on.
“I’ve been a long time follower of this website…”
Leden – thanks for commenting for the first time on Synthtopia!
“The amount of posts focusing on generative AI have gotten to be too much for me.”
Some of our readers have always been offended by change, whether it’s the rise of software synthesizers, the emergence of the iPad as a mobile music-making platform, or Behringer making knockoff synths a major category.
Synthesis and electronic music, though, have always been forward-looking, and AI is indisputably part of the future of music production.
Honestly I think a lot of you take this the wrong way. As someone mentioned above, many composers throughout several centuries have used assistance. They have had people, or common scales, or different rules that they use throughout their scores, and have had people notate or transcribe their scores for and with them.
Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman both made amazing scores prior to technology, but do you think they could do what they do without it today? And even still, they don’t do it 100% alone.
The real thing that people are missing about ai, is you shouldn’t use it as a tool to steal or make you lazy. Yes it’s good at both of those things, but it’s better as being a teaching tool. Think of somebody that had no formal training at all, that could open this up and all of a sudden have a world of music, melody, other things that they had never thought of brought in front of them. You can use it as a crutch for a small amount of time, but eventually you’re going to learn the patterns and things that you like, and develop into the musician that you are. It’s no different than having a music teacher, or going out and hiring a producer.
And honestly, I didn’t mean that reply for you a minute for everybody. The reply that I meant to say here, is that not sure if you’ll remember, but that time when synthesizers and midi first came out, the music industry, especially symphonic musicians, absolutely flipped out. Drummers freaked out because of drum machines. Arpeggiators on keyboards were thought to be substitutes for people that didn’t know how to play. Thing is music tech keeps evolving, but trust me, many of us would love to go back and do things with old school midi clocks and a ton of keyboards, a few guitar amps, and a set of Simmons drums, but it happens.
I guess the luxury of it is, we’ve all got opportunities to learn from different methods now, and I can have infinite amount of drum samples, and what feels like an infinite amount of guitar amps on a small hard drive now. And hopefully this technology will teach somebody how to find their groove, rather than just abused technology.
No sir. I dont like it..
Analyzing existing music to write new music is something musicians already do. Trying various compositional techniques to come up with basic ideas for melodies to build on is also standard procedure. It’s tedious and repetitive work that requires no creativity, so I don’t see much of an issue to outsource it to an assistant to free up time for parts of the production process that require human attention and creativity. This seems very different from „generative AI“ as far as I understand it.
Fuck this nonsense.
There should be a company called “F*ck This Nonsense.” Think of the numerous t-shirts they could sell with that logo, in this tumultuous time! Political rallies of any kind would be greatly enhanced if half of the crowd wore one. You could make added-value money by selling a sticker that neatly covers just the “u” for more delicate types.
Then they could really clean up by making banners of it to place over anything political. I can just hear a crowd of 40,000 chanting it all at once…. 🙂
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Admin: Personal attack deleted (name-calling). Keep comments on topic and constructive.
Bill/ Jason Royce – you are also using multiple names when you comment. Each time you use a new identity, your comments are automatically flagged for moderation. This keeps spammers from polluting the comments. Using a consistent identity will avoid this.
I find it very amusing how many so called musicians are so insecure and afraid of AI…
Wake up call everybody… AI is here to stay and not going away. if anything it will expand beyond your wildest imagination.
I’m already seeing instrument plugins created entirely with AI and they are bloody good 🙂
Gross.
Credit to 10 cc – but seemed appropriate re AI.
We’re not in love
So don’t forget it
It’s just a silly phase we’re going through