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In April last year, ghostwriter977, a TikTok user, wrote and produced a song called “Heart on my sleeve”. It sounded just like the Canadian rapper Drake and the singer-songwriter The Weeknd. The song went viral, racking up 15 million views on TikTok and hundreds of thousands of views each on Spotify and YouTube. But neither Drake nor The Weeknd had a clue about the song.They hadn’t sung a single line. Their vocals were generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The machine has moved on from synthesising sounds to generating singing voices. AI is on song everywhere.Anshuman Sharma and Aditya Kalway, two young producers assisting the music composer duo SalimSulaiman, recreated “Haule haule ho jayega”—the hit song in Shah Rukh Khan’s Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi—in the voice of Mohammed Rafi. “We came across some AI vocal models that could produce the voices of Indian singers like Kishore Kumar, Rafi and Sonu Nigam,” recalls Sharma. In September 2023, Kalway sang “Haule haule” in Rafi’s signature style, put it through a vocal filter and musically arranged it like a 1970s LaxmikantPyarelal romantic ditty. Its Instagram Reel got 2.6 million views and cheers from the music industry, including Vishal Dadlani, Shaan and Sonu Nigam.In January this year, composer AR Rahman strode into the AI ring. He used AI to generate the voices of Shahul Hameed and Bamba Bakya — two singers with whom he had collaborated but died, prematurely, in their 40s—for the song “Thimiri yezhuda” in the Rajinikanth film Lal Salaam. 109465176 109465180AI is the new sound of music. A harbinger of change as well as confusion, it is shaking up the industry. While the technology’s potential is immense, artists are admittedly wary of their voices being cloned with the click of a few tools.“2023 is when the AI-hype phase in music really took off,” says Valerio Velardo, a consultant in music and AI based in Andalusia, Spain. He founded Melodrive, an AI system that composes music in real time, in 2016, followed by the Sound of AI, one of the largest online AI music ecosystems. “We shifted from a symbolic generation to an audio-based generation,” he adds, referring to the shift from the use of symbols to create music—which a synthesiser or sampler does —to the use of audio files to train AI models to generate music. “This was a leap,” he says.Indeed. It has come a long way from 1957, when the American composer and chemist Lejaren Hiller and the mathematician Leonard Isaacson programmed the Illiac computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana– Champaign to compose a string quartet. The Illiac Suite is widely regarded as the first score to be composed by a computer.The use of artificial intelligence in music exploded with the entry of tech giants and powerful AI-first firms. One of the pioneers was OpenAI’s Jukebox. Released in 2020, it generated raw audio that approximated the inputs you gave like a certain musician or a particular genre.Google came up with MusicLM, which generates hi-fi music from text prompts, in May 2023. Meta followed with AudioCraft in August. Soon, Stability AI, which created the popular text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, swept the music industry with its Stable Audio. A text prompt like “a low-key romantic ballad in a Scandinavian setting, with harmonies across three octaves in the style of Charlie Puth” would generate exactly that, in a voice and style uncannily similar to the American singersongwriter. “This is the equivalent of Midjourney or Dall-E, but for music,” says Velardo.In addition to Big Tech models, there is a proliferation of free, easy-to-access AI tools for music, especially voice-cloning applications. Sharma and Kalway were playing around with such tools when they decided to bring alive the sound of Rafi. 109465182 109465185 109465189WHO OWNS MY VOICE?The easy replication of famous voices with the use of AI has raised a significant question—who holds the copyright to a voice? Its particular timbre and texture? That is sending ripples across the music industry, leading to legal tangles and conversations about copyright.When Universal Music Group, the world’s leading music company, got into a licensing dispute with shortform video company TikTok Inc earlier this year, AI-generated music was a big part of the quarrel. Universal said TikTok was “flooded with AIgenerated recordings”. It pulled down ghostwriter977’s “Heart on my sleeve”. Before that, Universal had sued AI company Anthropic for distributing copyrighted lyrics with its AI model Claude 2.Singers, too, are raising their voices against the use of AI. Earlier this month, 200 artists, including Stevie Wonder, Robbie Williams, Billie Eilish and Katy Perry, wrote an open letter, asking AI developers, tech companies, platforms and digital music services to stop the usage of AI in music which, they said, “diminishes the rights of human artists”.The ripples have reached India too. In January, SP Kalyan Charan, son of the legendary singer, S P Balasubrahmanyam, sued the producers and music director of a Telugu film called Keedaa Cola for the “unauthorised” use of his late father’s voice with the help of AI. The filmmakers have denied this. Singer-musician Shankar Mahadevan is cautious. “Use of technology is always a fine balance between possibilities and restrictions. AI in music is an amazing advancement in technology,” says Mahadevan, who is part of the Grammy-winning fusion band Shakti. “But it should be used to enhance a basic composition and not create or replicate human creations. Otherwise, it could be like copying someone’s tune. Is that ethical?” he asks.The surge of AI has many ramifications. It could, for one, eat into the chances of a new singer. Today, new artists, looking for a break, render scratch versions of a song before the final version is sung by an established artist. It is these scratches that bring new artists to the notice of music directors. With vocal cloning, all that a music label needs to do is choose from a list of vocally filtered renditions of established singers to decide whose voice will suit the song. The trial-and-error of scratch versions, often the first step to fame for a new musician, could get completely bypassed.“I think AI is a good tool in the hands of somebody who understands the organic creative process and the electronic creative process,” said tabla maestro Zakir Hussain and founder of Shakti in a recent interview to ET, adding, “In the hands of someone who is totally uninformed, I don’t know what it will become.”AI can bring tremendous opportunities to the world of music. A recent report by EY said, in terms of revenue growth and cost benefits, generative AI would have an impact worth `45,000 crore in the media and entertainment business in India over the next few years. “It could mean a 30-40% enhancement of music industry’s revenues,” says Ashish Pherwani, media and entertainment leader, EY India.“Now, we can keep alive yesteryear’s artists in the minds of their fans for longer. The cost of recreating a fan base vanishes because the fan of Hemant Kumar or Rafi will listen to the songs you create. It’s a dream-come-true from a business point of view,” he adds.LEGAL VOIDThere is a yawning gap, though. There is currently no law that protects artists, their voices, vocal styles and compositions from being recreated by AI-generated tools, says Velardo. “It’s a legislative void,” he says. He points to two problems: “One is straightforward: I’m recreating Taylor Swift’s voice. That’s a breach of copyright. There’s another that is more subtle, which is training full generative music systems. AI companies train their models on material they don’t own and they don’t have permission from copyright holders to do the training.”The absence of laws is a problem that Charan’s lawyer Kavitha Deenadayalan is facing in the lawsuit against the makers of Keedaa Cola. “There is a narrow difference between using AI-generated music for the sake of entertainment or for paying tributes to a late singer, and using it for commercial purposes.When it is commercialised, somebody has to get licence and consent and also pay the artist the remuneration that is mutually agreed upon,” she says. “In the absence of a law, there is an ethical need to reach out to artists or their family for permission. That’s what Rahman did for ‘Thimiri yezhuda,’” she adds. Gautam KM, partner at Krishnamurthy & Co and an expert in AI law, says, “When you are generating music in someone’s voice through a platform, where was the platform trained? Was it, in this instance, trained on the deceased singer SPB’s existing songs? If that is the case, has the platform owner taken necessary rights from his estate or heirs to train the platform with SPB’s voice? If you are giving lyrics to a platform and asking it to create a sound recording in the voice of SPB, you could very well be infringing upon the personality rights or the moral rights of the original singer,” he adds.Legal guardrails are coming up. The state of Tennessee in the US has enacted a new law called the Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security (Elvis) Act of 2024, which seeks to impose liability on AI and tech companies for unauthorised use of a person’s voice or likeness. The law will come into effect on July 1.Meanwhile, artists are putting up their own guardrails against AI. Canadian singer Grimes has created an AI software called Elf.Tech, which allows users to clone her voice but they will have to share 50% of royalties with her. “The moment you commercialise a song with Grimes’ AI voice, you are going to do a revenue split,” says Velardo. She has also tied up with New York-based music distribution company TuneCore to distribute the songs. In a recent interview on The Music Podcast, singer Arijit Singh spoke about copyrighting his voice. Mahadevan echoes that view. “Every artist has to copyright his or her voice. I certainly would,” he says.

Whenever the price of milk and rice go up, buy gold.” Thomas John Muthoot doles out this sagely advice which, on the face of it, has conflict of interest written all over it. For starters, Muthoot’s Rs 3,500 crore company, Muthoot Fincorp, which offers loan against gold, profits from fluctuations in the price of the yellow metal. But Muthoot says he is only quoting a Madurai-based homemaker who, in turn, lives by her grandmother’s wisdom.The grandmother seems to be setting the trend these days. As two wars ravage the world and standard financial instruments appear risky, gold prices have set new records, and it has become the asset to bank on. Gold is retailing at Rs 7,500 per gram for 24 carats and is shaking up home and market equations around the world.India is the second largest consumer of the yellow metal after China. It is estimated that Indian households are sitting on 27,000 tons of gold. The figure does not include the Reserve Bank of India’s gold reserves of over 800 tons. This means, the rising prices of the metal make ordinary Indians richer, as middle-class citizens residing both in rural and urban areas own a substantial chunk of the yellow metal, mainly in the form of jewellery.BUY INDIA, BUYMuthoot says higher gold prices have been encouraging more people to see gold loan as an option, something that was considered a taboo until recently. “As gold prices rise, the value of the collateral increases, allowing customers to avail larger loan amounts against the same quantity of gold. This has helped increase disbursements and assets under management (AUM),” he says.109464599India mines less than 1% of the gold consumed in the country. Recycling makes up around 14-15%. The rest of the gold—roughly 85% or 780 tons in FY23—is imported, burning a big hole in the country’s foreign exchange reserves.A portion of the gold bars imported, however, gets exported after being processed in India. In the first 10 months of FY24 (April- January), for which data is available, India exported gold valued at $11.3 billion as against its import of $40.4 billion. Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), South Africa, Peru and Australia are the top five suppliers of gold to India.Historically, rising gold prices have prompted consumers to encash their holdings. “However, this has not been the case now, reflecting higher confidence among consumers,” says Sachin Jain, regional CEO (India), World Gold Council. He says Indian households have created a strong cultural bond with economic wisdom by linking gold with auspicious festivals. “Higher prices of gold encourage investments in gold-linked digital and other products,” he adds.Will gold enthusiasts continue to invest as prices soar? According to Rajiv Popley, director of Mumbai-based jeweller Popley Group, Indians are undeterred by the rising price and they tend to buy gold at any time. “Indian consumers always have gold at home and yet they are happy to buy more,” he says.GOLD FOR VENTURE CAPITALNon-banking financial companies (NBFCs) have recently seen a surge in startup entrepreneurs approaching them for gold loans. Ticket sizes of such loans have also been increasing. Interestingly, the average age of gold borrowers is declining. Umesh Mohanan, executive director and CEO of Indel Money, an NBFC, cites an example of a young IT professional from Bengaluru who quit her job and took a gold loan of Rs 500,000 before raising bigger funds. “We handheld her in the first mile,” says Mohanan. “Since no underwriting is required for a gold loan, she could immediately start her business. Once her business grew, she could access a bank loan.”However, there isn’t a clear trend yet on the younger generation stepping up to invest in gold. “Changing demographics and the possibility that millennials will move away from gold as other luxury items demand their attention cannot be ignored,” says a World Gold Council report titled “India’s Gold Market: Refor m and Growth”, which was published in December last year. The report highlights some positive scenarios as well. “Gold jewellery demand will likely benefit from strong economic growth and growing urbanisation as incomes rise and the middle class grows. As more people are lifted out of poverty, gold jewellery demand will benefit,” it says.According to the commerce ministry’s data, India’s import of gold jewellery rose to $1.1 billion in FY23, a rise of 80% y-o-y, before jumping to $2.5 billion in the first 10 months of FY24. Finished jewellery imports, however, form only a tiny component of overall gold imports, as about 95% of India’s imports of the yellow metal are in the form of unwrought gold bars.THE STORY SO FARThough India liberalised the gold market in the 1990s, some restrictive measures were imposed on im- ports in the early 2010s. This U-turn was a result of excessive gold im- ports—900 tons in 2010—which was one of the reasons for the widening of current account deficit. Between January and August 2013, GoI raised the import duty on bullion, from 2% to 10%, according to the World Gold Council’s December 2023 report. The then government also introduced what is often called the 80:20 rule, under which 20% of all gold imported had to be mandatorily exported as jewellery. This was rolled back in November 2014. The duty on gold was raised to 12.5% in 2019, but Budget 2021 reduced the duties on gold bars to 10.75%. In this decade-long highduty regime, smuggling of gold into India is believed to have increased manifold. In its recent negotiations on free trade agreements with gold-supplying nations, New Delhi has been cautious while granting gold-related concessions. While the UAE was handed duty concessions in 2022, the same was not extended to Australia and Switzerland. Trade negotiations with Peru, another major gold supplier, are currently at an advanced stage.Gold as an investment is a new concept, though. There’s a historical reason for it. Between 1950 and 1970, gold prices were hovering in the Rs 100-200 bracket (price per tola or 11.6 gram) before gradually moving up. Even at the turn of the millennium, it was affordable, staying under Rs 5,000. The price moved faster during the last two decades. “If gold price keeps increasing at this pace, it will be more an investment commodity than a consumer item,” says Surendra Mehta, national secretary, India Bullion and Jewellers Association, attributing the recent hike to massive buying by Chinese consumers as well as central banks around the world.Despite being a non-yielding asset, gold often serves as a hedge against inflation and offers stability during stock market dips, making it an integral part of the financial portfolio of most smart investors. Rumki Majumdar, chief economist of Deloitte India, unpacks the relationship between inflation and gold as a strategic investment alternative.“Given that the US economy is expected to be strong and the labour market remains tight, inflation in the US may remain higher for longer than expected.With rising expectations that inflation is likely to remain high, the real interest rates become less appealing for investment. Therefore, gold, which although offers no return, becomes more attractive than other alter native investments,” she says.Colin Shah, MD of Kama Jewellery and former president of Gem & Jewellery Export Promotion Council (GJEPC), does not foresee any softening of demand either in India or in China even if gold prices remain firm. “Gold buying in India could soften only in the next two-three months, basically the summer period with no festivals. And if some good news arrives by the end of this quarter, for instance, a resolution of the Russia-Ukraine or the Israel-Hamas conflict, the price of gold may correct from July onwards.” When asked about the scenario if the conflict escalates, he says, “If there is no resolution to these geopolitical crises, gold prices will continue to stay high even in the JulySeptember quarter.”Gold, then, has arrived as the gold standard of investment, its price fluctuations offering an opportunity rather than threat. It is up to the investor to deploy it effectively to extract maximum benefits.

Making a strong comeback to international arena after leading a prolonged protest against former WFI chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, celebrated Indian wrestler Vinesh Phogat locked Paris Olympics quota in women's 50kg category with a strong show at the Asian Olympic Qualifier, here Saturday.Also punching their tickets to the Paris Olympics were Anshu Malik (57kg) and U23 world champion Reetika (76kg), who also reached the final of the tournament with solid performances.India now have secured four quota places for the Paris Games as Antim Panghal had earned a quota in the 53kg category with her bronze medal winning show at the World Championships last year.It will be interesting to see if WFI lets the quota winners represent India or hold a final selection trial to pick the national wrestling team.In the Tokyo Games, India had fielded a strong seven-wrestler team that had four women -- Seema Bisla (50kg), Vinesh (53kg), Anshu (57kg) and Sonam Malik (62kg).No male wrestler has yet earned a quota. The last chance to win the Paris Games quota will be at the World Qualifiers in Turkey from May 9.The 29-year-old Vinesh has now secured her third straight Olympic quota, having featured in Rio Games (2016) and in Tokyo (2020) earlier.Vinesh dished out a strong performance, demolishing her opponents one by one.After losing several months of training due to the prolonged protest against Brij Bhushan and the ongoing legal battle, it was a challenge for Vinesh to secure a quota and she did that, making full use of an easy draw.As is her wont, Vinesh looked for that one opportunity to subdue Miran Cheon in her opening bout and grabbed it after measuring her Korean rival for about 30 seconds.Once she grabbed Cheon and pushed her down for a take down, the bout ended in a jiffy, in one minute and 39 seconds.It was difficult to wriggle out of Vinesh's strong hold. The Indian employed gut wrench move thrice and mixed that with one 'expose' to finish the bout.The next bout lasted a mere 67 seconds. Cambodia's Smanang Dit was an easy prey. Vinesh pinned her in no time to move to the women's 50kg semifinal.The celebrated Indian faced some resistance from 19-year-old Kazakh wrestler Laura Ganikyzy in the semifinals but she used all her experience to foil the attacks employed by her younger rival.Twice Laura went for left-leg attacks but Vinesh scored on counter and led 4-0 by the end of the first period. This was the first time Vinesh was pushed to the second period in this tournament.Once Vinesh got hold of Laura, she had no problem in employing consecutive gut wrench moves to finish the bout.Vinesh was competing in the 50kg category after winning the selection trials.The finalists at this competition are being awarded quota places for the 2024 Summer Olympics.The 2021 World Championship silver medallist Anshu had no problem while putting it across Kyrgyzstan's Kalmira Bilimbekova in the quarterfinal, winning by technical superiority.Anshu, who also featured in Tokyo Games, continued her impressive show, winning the semifinal against Uzbekistan's Laylokhov Soboirova by technical superiority. It was a pacy bout dictated by the Indian.The U23 world champion Reetika did not have to break much sweat in outclassing Eunju Hwang. She won the first round by technical superiority as the Korean had no answer to Reetika's class and got a similar win under her belt against Mongolia's Davaanasan Enkh Amar.In the final group bout against China's Juang Wang, Reetika raced to an 8-0 lead but the Chinese fought back and logged six straight points.She effected another move at the dying moments but much to the relief of the Indian camp, that point was not awarded because it came at the end of the stipulated time.In her semifinal, Reetikja recorded a comfortable 7-0 win against Chinese Taipei's Hui Tsz Chang.Mansi Ahlawat (62kg) also made it to last-four as she needed to win just one bout.Up against Kazakhstan's Irina Kuznetsova, she emerged a 6-4 winner but was outgunned by North Korea's Hyon Gyong Mun, who was excellent in her defence, not giving any opportunity to attack to the Indian.The only Indian wrestler who could not reach semifinals was Nisha Dahiya (68kg).

A huge blast at a military base in Iraq early on Saturday killed a member of an Iraqi security force that includes Iran-backed groups. The force commander said it was an attack while the army said it was investigating and there were no warplanes in the sky at the time. Two security sources had said earlier that an airstrike caused the blast, which killed a member of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) and wounded eight others at Kalso military base about 50 km (30 miles) south of Baghdad. In a statement, the PMF said its chief of staff Abdul Aziz al-Mohammedawi had visited the location and "reviewed the details of the investigative committees present in the place that was attacked". The Iraqi military said a technical committee was looking into the cause of an explosion and fire at the base, which it said happened at 1 a.m. on Saturday (2200 GMT Friday). "The air defence command report confirmed, through technical efforts and radar detection, that there was no drone or fighter jet in the air space of Babil before and during the explosion," the military said in a statement. The incident in Iraq's Babil province occurred with tensions running even higher than usual across the Middle East, following what sources said was an Israeli attack in the Iranian city of Isfahan on Friday. Tehran has played it down and indicated it had no plans for retaliation. That incident came six days after Iran fired a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel in response to a presumed Israeli airstrike that destroyed part of Iran's embassy in Damascus, killing seven Iranian Revolutionary Guards officers on April 1. The PMF includes Iran-backed groups which, operating under the banner of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, have attacked U.S. troops in the region and targeted Israel since the eruption of the Gaza war, declaring support for the Palestinians. Their attacks on U.S. forces in Syria and Iraq stopped in early February after a drone strike killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan, prompting heavy U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. But they claimed responsibility for an attack on the Israeli city of Eilat on April 1. The U.S. military's Central Command, in a post on X early on Saturday, denied what it said were reports that the United States had carried out airstrikes in Iraq. "The United States has not conducted air strikes in Iraq today," it said. The PMF started out as a grouping of armed factions, many close to Iran, that was later recognized as a formal security force by Iraqi authorities.