At the Adobe MAX Creative event last week, WIRED reported on several enhancements to audio editing that are likely to be coming soon inside of Adobe products. The capabilities of this “Corrective AI” feature are quite extensive. It can take an audio track and separate it into components to effectively remove or isolate any background noise to adjust them individually. When editing an existing vocal track, an editor can choose from a preset mix of emotions to apply a filter to the vocal track to adjust the level of that emotion in the recording. The tool can also generate background sounds using AI to add to a recording and also isolate licensed sounds like background music and replace it with similar sounding stock music.
Altogether, the enhancements do have some people working in sound engineering worried about the capabilities, while others are welcoming the changes as features that will help them do some of the more mundane tasks within sound editing more quickly and easily. Thinking through the future implications of these tools, the idea that the emotions inside of an audio recording can be so easily manipulated is useful for those creating entertainment but concerning for anyone who cares about preserving the original intent and emotions of a recording without the manipulation.