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Beats and bots: Rachel Lopez explores music, and music snobbery, by AI

Mar 12, 2022 04:35 PM IST

Artificial intelligence programs can now compose music, generate lyrics for a tune, even perform at virtual gigs. See how humans are training machines to go solo, or to be the bandmate you need.

All these years, when the alarms sounded that robots were coming for our jobs, creative types stayed cool. Sure, machines might be able to count faster, stack better, drive a car. But they couldn’t compose a poem, set it to music, sing.

 (HT Illustration: Jayachandran) PREMIUM
(HT Illustration: Jayachandran)

Now they can. Mic drop.

To be fair, AI programs can’t create music any more than they can paint, choreograph or trade stocks without human intervention. But as humans train machines to study more complicated patterns, words and sounds, the resulting AI-based software is starting to produce startlingly creative results. See what’s out there, and probably already on your playlists.

LyricJam: It’s only words… and now a bot can write them for you. At Canada’s University of Waterloo, researcher Olga Vechtomova, along with graduate students Gaurav Sahu and Dhruv Kumar, developed a system last year that can generate lyrics for live instrumental music. It essentially analyses the genre it hears, matches it to other songs it’s heard in the same style, and offers, in real time, a mix-and-match of phrases based on the mood.

“The purpose of the system is not to write a song for the artist,” Vechtomova stated in a press release. “Instead, we want to help artists realise their own creativity. The system generates poetic lines with new metaphors and expressions, potentially leading the artists in creative directions that they haven’t explored before.”

Try it out on Lyricjam.ai. I hummed a half-remembered hymn in lieu of recording an original tune. The machine suggested moody phrases involving dream, silence, rain and moon. Not the best, but certainly less embarrassing than Baby Shark.

Boomy: Alex Mitchell’s website and app help regular people, even tone-deaf ones, create and edit music of their own. Sign up for free on Boomy.com. Pick a genre (Electronic Dance, Lo Fi, Rap Beats and the like) and filter styles from within each. The AI does all the hard work, composing a song in about 30 seconds.

Users can add vocals, change instrumentation, tempo and arrangement. Submit a saved song to a streaming platform or, say, a video-editing app, and you could earn royalties, though Boomy retains the rights to the music.

Boomy went live in 2018 but found its shining moment in the long, empty hours of the pandemic, when users recorded the majority of Boomy’s 3 million songs. My song, TheGreaterBombay, draws from its Global Groove selection and contains Latin filters. It sounds unmistakably computer-generated, but also feels ominous, sort of like a theme tune for a Narcos spinoff.

OpenAI Jukebox: Humans are rarely original, so why should AI be? Jukebox accepts genre, artist and lyrics as input and generates a new music sample. At best, the songs sound like B-side fillers from Elvis Presley or Katy Perry’s catalogue, voices, guitar fill and all. At worst, they’re like something an underpaid DJ might produce in a hurry. The neural network can also work with a sample or snippet and complete a song. Explore samples on openai.com/blog/jukebox.

Dadabots: On its YouTube channel, this program is described as an “AI death metal band. Emulating musicians dead or alive with neural networks”. The fake band plays real music 24x7. The humans behind the AI are metalheads CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, who studied machine learning at Berklee College of Music. They use material from existing death metal, mathcore and skate punk bands to fuel Dadabots’s AI-generated approximations online.

“While we set out to achieve a realistic recreation of the original data, we were delighted by the aesthetic merit of its imperfections,” they write, in a 2017 paper published on arXiv that breaks down their process. “Solo vocalists become a lush choir of ghostly voices, rock bands become crunchy cubist-jazz, and cross-breeds of multiple recordings become a surrealist chimera of sound.” The band’s website, Dadabots.com, lists nine albums of AI music curated by the two humans.

Authentic Artists: Virtual bands have been part of mainstream music since at least 2001, when Gorillaz — a four-member troupe represented via animations, but with a one-man composer behind it all — released its first album. But the 12 AI-powered virtual musicians of Authentic Artists (they range from a lo-fi-loving cyborg to a high-octane, half-iguana DJ) even compose their own music.

Users of the site offer input on what they want their virtual gigs to be like: an artist, a genre, a film soundtrack or even another gig. The avatars then generate compositions, and adjust tempo, volume and even skip to the next song based on audience feedback, almost like a gamified concert. Three virtual artists (essentially programs), Nayomi, DJ Dragoon and Gnar Heart, also now perform as the “collective” WarpSound. Why? To “co-create real-time live experiences with audiences around the metaverse,” says the company’s website, authentic-artists.ai.

How Bad Is Your Spotify: It happens often enough with humans, so it was only a matter of time before music bots turned into music snobs. While year-end analyses like Spotify Wrapped are usually upbeat, telling you which songs and genres you streamed the most, one bot will judge your music taste all year round.

Log in with your Spotify or Apple Music account. Let the AI draw on its 76,000-odd parameters of what humans objectively consider good and bad music (reviews, store recommendations, etc) to examine your playlists. Then the ribbing begins. Did you really stream Led Zeppelin unironically 79 times this month? You’ve been listening to Tracy Chapman a lot – are you okay?

For the final judgement: A machine-learned multi-hyphen putdown that suits your playlist perfectly. Was my playlist 20th-century-teeny-bopper bad; hot-topic-threw-up-on-you bad; or probably-voted-for-a-fictional-character bad? I’m not telling. Access your own insults on Pudding.cool/2021/10/judge-my-music.

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