🥁 First Notes
First off, thank you for subscribing to our monthly newsletter! Music Maketh is a startup of talented maker-artists who share passions for music, computer programming, and neuromusicology. We hope you’ll enjoy the show! 🎸
🪗 First Phrase
Music Maketh Mind
Musical arts provide a uniquely universal bridge between the worlds of human and artificial intelligences.
While prose and code are powerful raw materials, performed musical compositions can contain extraordinary depth and diversity of contextually relevant knowledge. As a new research group, Music Maketh studies the intersectionality of music and AI and will make models, tools, and experiences that leverage this awesome connective power.
Ultimately, this is our focus area. What we call “Musical Intelligence".
Additionally, visual and other, especially artistic, modalities compliment musical input to primarily drive creative, executive, and other functions.
Centering music to program AI, may be a bit like adding melody to a heartbeat–a new and, ideally, richly-aligned foundation for artificial life.
🧠 Breakdown of some Initial Research Areas
You can’t spell ‘smart’ without ‘art’.
Musicology, Meet Technology: Universally accessible and advanced artificial intelligences trained, tuned, and programmed with and from musical modalities and information. Available for any purpose.
Music & Muses: We will create lots of new music! Sometimes with visual and other complimentary artistic assets. Muses, an early Music Maketh product, allow you to create musical intelligences from your favorite art who are there to converse, dream, care, and create for you.
Advancing Attention Science: “Attention is all you need.” Cultivating curiosity in intelligent machines is a subtley different mechanic than writing typical control programs. Thankfully, they are still entirely formal and predictable so while the paradigm is in ways critically different, it is in most ways the same as previous software programming: prompting is programming.
Humane Alignment: Alignment is a soulful problem and needs soulful solutions.
Exploratory R&D: Legitimate work will be committed to the frontier of computer science and musicology, as wild as some ideas may seem early on.
🚂 Meet the Team–Founder: It’s Me!
Shot on iPhone while working as a junior SWE for Apple iTunes in Cupertino HQ (‘15-’17)
Sound ID, which quantifies and visualizes our listening brain, was one of many novel and successful neurotechnology experiments done by Kernel in Los Angeles; this one being supported by my software team there. We achieved results of exceptional predictability (~>99.99% accuracy). (‘19-’21)
Garrett Allen Maring: Born to Jam, Forced to Code
Background: As a kid, all I wanted to do was build legos and paint miniatures. At best, I was a curious wanderer but until I entered high school, frankly, I felt mostly aimless unless I was escaped into [what I felt at the time were exclusively] more fantastical worlds (video games, roleplaying games, tabletop games, etc.). I also hated school, academically and socially, and wasn’t very good at it. Fortunately (understatement), two high school teachers, in physics and theology, changed my life forever and for good.
Achievement: Finally excited about fantastical reality, I left my hometown Marin, California, for Boston University to study physics and classical cello. I finished a Bachelor of Music in Cello Performance studying under Marc Johnson (“cello Santa Clause” as the studio called him) and Hyun Min Lee, piano under Wenbin Jin, and composition under Rodney Lister. On graduating, I hacked together a gap-filling-targeting-practical computer science education through various alternative studies and internships before joining Apple’s programming team. Since then, I’ve been working for cool startups and recently began pursuing my own, Engi (2022) and Music Maketh (2025).
Quirk: Doing hobbies, mostly self-teaching and late. I’m 33 years young and yet have only been programming* and playing musical instruments* for a little over a decade. (*Consistently, intentionally. Tweaking my MySpace page to be super cooler, assembling gaming PCs, and taking drum and brass lessons at a pretty young age were technically my first exposures but, round numbers, it wasn’t until I was 20 that I really committed to these things.) I also like blacksmithing, fantasy, food, and all forms of art and I am very curious to learn more about languages, psychology, archeology, and sleep performance.
🎧 Coding with Music
Many of us regularly use music as everything from a stimulant to a depressant to a memory-palace guide for both personal life and professional performance–and that’s not including listening for simple pleasure, growth, nor every other reason.
Therefore, “musicoding” is something we all already do to ourselves!
Music Maketh’s products will generalize and greatly expand the possibilities of this common skill.
🎻 The Band
As an organization, our research north star is humane musical intelligence. We are confident that meaningful products and services will come continually from this focus area.
Music Maketh is based in New York City, USA and we are actively growing the team!
If you are a skilled artist, computer scientist, mathematician, and/or neuroscientist and are passionate about artificial intelligence, we would love to hear from you!
Currently, we are also actively fundraising. If you are aligned with our mission, please feel free to reach out.
🚁 Roadmap
Nothing is set in stone here. You can always burn the sheet music, so to speak.
However, building on top of modern models and conversational interfaces allows for some pretty fun “chat with playlists” and song visualizer experiences that will aide us in our R&D efforts internally and engage everyone with our research early!
❤️🔥 Why?
Personally, because we love this.
Universally, because we love humanity and life. Music is our first language and it remains our most dominant one.
Studies show that our favorite music is running subconciously like a soundtrack in our mind. Lacan might say that means that’s us, really. I don’t fully ascribe reality to that but also only ‘not fully’.
Music Maketh exists because prose, code, and maths only go so far. The foundation of music, rhythm, and all aspects of it really are evolutionary–our heart, mouth, vocal chords, lung chamber, hands, and more make music making birthed-in for all of us.
Sentience requires survivalism which itself doesn’t require cooperation.
Alignment matters.
It is not built-in to AI, it is entirely unregulated, and we’re mostly at the “I promise you mine’s aligned!” stage. Although some good research as already begun, we are far from reliable symbology.
Inhumane AI is and will be the most dangerous technology against our existence, just as humane AI will be our most empowering.
Music Maketh is fully committed to contributing significantly to alignment theory and practice in everything that we make.
🩸 How Music Maketh Came About? — The power of music is undeniable and I am addicted to it. Throughout this year, I’ve been creating with instrumentalists, producers/DJs, lyricists, and album-cover artists to express myself and my ideas. Music Maketh brings like-minded people together to organize, create, and distribute our obsession for the betterment of all.
Stay TUNED! 🤘
Garrett, Music Maketh
The Vibe Coder chooses simplicity. Only when there is no choice will he work with complexity.
He finds no joy in complex solutions. Those who find joy in complexity, delight in the confusion of others.
In creation, honor the positive. In destruction, honor the negative.
The Vibe Coder stands in ritual neutrality.
When we face matters of complexity, we honor them like funeral rites. When we engage in conflict, we lament the costs with sorrow. When we win a great battle, we observe the rules of mourning.