There is a musical group YACHT in the USA. It is possible that you have not even heard of it, although they have been playing since 2002 and have already recorded many compositions. In general, this team of musicians has always approached their work in a rather creative way. For example, they once sold an album without a cover. But it could still be obtained … by fax at the nearest post office. However, YACHT would hardly have got on the pages of our publication for such a thing. But the band's recently released album, Chain Tripping, is drawing attention to itself. After all, artificial intelligence was the co-author of the musicians here.
Why should AI write songs?
YACHT has long been interested in how high technology can help musicians improve their creativity. Lead singer Claire Evans even gave a talk at Google I / O on this topic. It took three years to create and record the new album, Chain Tripping YACHT.
In fairness, it should be noted that artificial intelligence and neural networks have already been used to generate music and even text, but all this did not go beyond research projects designed to demonstrate the capabilities of AI. The YACHT group decided to do it a little differently. The team decided not to use AI as a co-author in order to cause a stir and declare: "Look, this song was written to us by a machine!" And for the fact that, according to the musicians, their goal was to create music that they themselves would never have done, but which would sound in their style.
Claire Evans, vocalist of YACHT. it came to her mind to record an album with the participation of AI.
How to teach a car to write songs?
Promotional video:
At the very beginning of their work, the musicians tried to establish contact with the authors of almost all existing solutions based on AI. But none of the projects satisfied the musicians for a number of reasons. Therefore, they decided to take all the known developments and create something of their own on the basis of this. To train neural networks, as you know, you first need to "feed" them information, on the basis of which they will work in the future. It was decided to use the discography of the team, which had to be completely re-recorded in MIDI format to simplify the work. There were only 82 songs in the group's discography at that time. And this, unfortunately, is too little to fully teach the neural network to create something new based on the existing one.
However, this amount was quite enough for the AI to "learn to play musical instruments." Moreover, he mastered several variants of instruments and "gave out" melodies made in the style of a musical group. Thus, according to the musicians, they didn’t have a “magic button”, upon pressing which they would receive a finished song. Artificial intelligence only amplified their melodies and rhythms with additional sound. Well, you can evaluate the result of the work by listening to one of the tracks from the new album (and at the same time appreciating the music video, made in a very peculiar style, like the music itself) in the video available below.
Vladimir Kuznetsov