HYBE/Supertone and AI-generated music
Profile on HYBE/Supertone and their genAI music technologies (Screen Play, Shift, Clear)
This post covers what’s known about HYBE, one of the four leading Asian companies in genAI music as of June 2024. Updates will follow as more information becomes known or new product announcements are made.
This post supports Part 3 in our 8-part series on ethics of generative AI for music, announced in this INTRODUCTION post on 6 ‘P's in AI Pods1. Subscribe to be notified when new articles are published (it’s FREE!)
This article is not a substitute for legal advice. It is meant for general information only.
HYBE/Supertone (South Korea)
History & Partnerships
Korean music company HYBE was founded in 2005 as Big Hit Entertainment and is public. They are headquartered in Seoul and have approximately 770 employees. They are the entertainment giant behind world-famous Korean boyband BTS. (ref)
Y-combinator Startup Supertone.ai was founded in 2020 and was also headquartered in Seoul. HYBE acquired Supertone for roughly $32 million in October 2022.
Key Features
Supertone’s focus is voice separation and synthesis AI. Their website describes their “voice separation and synthesis AI technology as able to create “human-like, hyper-realistic and expressive voices.” (based on Google Translate translation, via MusicTech.com (ref)).
Their NUVO app won a CES innovation award in the “Software and Mobile Apps” category in 2022. As of June 2024, they offer:
Text to Speech (“Project Screen Play”)
Real Time Voice Converter (“Supertone Shift”)
Real Time Voice Separator (“Supertone Clear”)
On Dec. 18, 2023, Supertone released a video showing that it had “extended its Voice AI technology to support the iconic rock ballad artist Hyuk-geon Kim (김혁건) alongside his digital twin — a recreated version capturing his prime time before a tragic accident.”
In January 2024, Supertone’s AI image and TTS technologies were used on a SBS news broadcast (Korean, translated).
Training Data, Ownership, Usage Rights, and Pricing
Insights on model training, and ownership & usage right are scarce on Supertone. (At least, they are scarce in English; I don’t read Korean, and I didn’t find any translatable articles that were helpful.)
What’s Next?
Our next posts in the genAI music series will cover 7 major companies outside of Asia, and many more major and minor companies. Stay tuned!
End Notes
See this “AI for Music” page for a complete set of links to all posts and company profile pages in this article series.
![[INTRO] Unfair use? The ethics of generative AI for music](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_140,h_140,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F163f723a-f4fc-4701-84a8-3a81cad85775_4896x3264.jpeg)