Welcome to the Mint Songs Artist Deep Dive!

In our first ever Artist Deep Dive, Mint Song’s Josh Gordon sits down with technologist and hip-hop artist MJx Music to discuss creating AI produced beats and his upcoming EP, Natural Causes.

The first thing that strikes you as special about MJx is his contagious energy. As a fan - it’s that kind of energy and positivity that drew me in off the bat when I first discovered his music. What’s inspiring though, is that he brings all of that to the table despite the circumstances that he grew up in. MJx shared the tough upbringing that he and his family went through and described how that inspired a lot of the lyrics we hear in his music today.

MJx doesn’t just make music though, he works at Google helping customers leverage the power of cloud of AI technologies. It was there that he got inspired to dive into the world of generative art and learning how to integrate AI into hip-hop. Over the last year, he created a way to produce hip-hop beats through feeding artificial intelligence models MIDI data to learn from. By taking in hundreds of these MIDI music files, the AI was able to learn how to produce unique melodies and samples that MJx used in the creation of his EP. When asked if he see’s AI as the future of music making, he had this to say:

MJx went on to describe how being a minority with a father thats incarcerated has pushed him to deepen his expertise in music and tech. He knows there are others going through a similar situation and this project is about empowering people to use the technology we have at our fingertips to create. You no longer need to be a producer to make music and that's empowering for a lot of people out there.

You can find more info about MJx Music’s Mint Songs drop here.