Hans Zimmer Doesn’t Want to Hear About A.I. Music

Hans Zimmer, the legendary composer behind the scores of films like Interstellar, Dune, Dunkirk and The Lion King, has no plans to begin integrating A.I. into his musical process. “I’ve never written a piece of music drunk, and I’ve never written a piece of music on drugs. So I would never write a piece of music using A.I. to help me because I want it to my piece,” said the German music producer yesterday (Oct. 21) during the WSJ Tech Live conference. “Now that doesn’t mean if I used A.I. it wouldn’t be a better piece—but I don’t think it would be.”

Zimmer might not be interested in A.I., but that doesn’t mean he’s avoided the new technology entirely. The Oscar-winning composer conceded that his music has likely been used to help train A.I. models, a practice that has already gotten a number of A.I. startups in trouble with record labels over copyright infringement claims. “I have on purpose not checked,” he said. “It’ll just make me mad.”

The composer has even been subject to a copycat attempt. Last year, the director Gareth Edwards attempted to score his The Creator film with an A.I.-generated soundtrack in the style of Zimmer himself. The resulting music was a “seven out of ten,” Edwards told the MIT Technology Review at the time. “But the reason you go to Hans Zimmer is for ‘ten out of ten,” added the director, who ended up tapping the real-life Zimmer for the score. Zimmer said he never listened to the A.I. product himself, noting that Edwards “was very good at making it disappear before I heard it.”

The sound for A.I. “should be forward-looking.”

Part of Zimmer’s aversion to A.I. is simply “out of hubris,” the composer admitted. Despite his skepticism, he maintains that he is open to A.I.’s possible use as a tool to push innovation forward. The new technology could one day help musicians “figure out how to express emotion or give people an experience,” he said. But simply generating music isn’t enough to make an impact, as evidenced by the hundreds of thousands of tracks added to Spotify (SPOT) everyday, said Zimmer. “I don’t mean to be mean about it, but very little stands out. And the stuff that stands out rises by itself.”

That’s not to say that Zimmer doesn’t have a history of experimenting with technology. An early adopter of digital sampling tech and electronic instruments, he’s even gotten involved in the world of electric vehicles and helped pen a series of different electric sounds to accompany BMW’s EVs as they drive.

When it comes to A.I., however, he believes the technology still has a lot of progress to make. One of Zimmer’s main issues with the current state of A.I.-generated music is that they are created through past examples. “At this very moment, A.I. doesn’t have a sound because the sound it has is the sound of the past,” said Zimmer. “The sound for A.I. shouldn’t be here yet. It should be forward-looking; it should be what we can’t imagine.”