Artificial Intelligence and Music
The other day in the Netherlands was held “Eurovision” for neural networks. The first place was given to a song created on the basis of the sounds of koalas. But, as it often happens, the attention was not attracted to the winner, but to the performer, who took third place. Can AI Kick It introduced the Abbus song, which is literally riddled with anarchist, revolutionary ideas. Why did it happen, what does Reddit have to do with it, and who called the lawyers, Cloud4Y says.
You probably remember how the AI, created by Yandex employees, wrote the lyrics “under Yegor Letov.” The album was called “Neural defense“And sounds quite in the spirit of” Civil Defense “. To generate lyrics, a neural network was used, which was taught to write poetry on an array of Russian poetry. After this, the neural networks showed the texts of Yegor Letov, set the poetic rhythms found in the musician’s songs, and the algorithm generated works similar in style.
Music created by the machine
Similar experiments were carried out in other countries. For example, a group of Israeli enthusiasts decided to check whether the computer is able to write a song that can win Eurovision? The project team uploaded hundreds of Eurovision songs – melodies and lyrics – to the neural network. Algorithms produced many new melodies and rhymed strings. The most interesting of them were “mixed” into a song called Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears (“Blue Jeans and Bloody Tears”).
The voices in the track belong to the computer and the first Eurovision winner from Israel – Ishar Cohen. This song, according to the participants of the project, fully reflects the spirit of Eurovision, as it has elements of kitsch, humor and drama.
A similar project was launched in the Netherlands. The thing is that the Dutch, experimenting with writing songs using artificial intelligence, inadvertently created a new musical genre: Eurovision Technofear. And it was decided to conduct a full-fledged show jumping of songs written with the help of AI.
So there was the Artificial Intelligence Song Contest, an unofficial analogue of Eurovision. 13 teams from Australia, Sweden, Belgium, Great Britain, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands participated in the competition. They had to train neural networks on existing music and lyrics so that they could fully generate new works. The creativity of the teams was evaluated by students and machine learning experts.
The first place was given to a song trained on the sounds of Australian animals – for example, koalas, kookabur and Tasmanian devils. The song talks about fires in Australia. But the track presented by Can AI Kick It: “Abbus” caused a much greater resonance.
Revolutionary creativity
The team members wanted to create a song with a deep meaning, reflecting national motives, but at the same time well perceived by listeners from different countries. To do this, they uploaded to the cloud:
- 250 most famous Eurovision songs. Among them are Waterloo Abba (winner of Sweden in 1974) and Euphoria Lorin (2012, also Sweden);
- 5000 pop songs of different times;
- Folklore, including the national anthem of the Kingdom of the Netherlands from 1833 (taken from the Meertens Liederenbank base);
- Database with texts from the Reddit platform (for “enrichment” of the language).
Using the downloaded data, the artificial intelligence system has created hundreds of new tunes. They were uploaded to another AI: the “Eurovision Hit Predictor” by Ashley Burgoyne, to assess the memorability and success of the resulting work. The most promising was the track calling for a revolution. Here is an excerpt from a very dynamic work:
Посмотри на меня, революция,
Это будет хорошо.
Это будет хорошо, хорошо, хорошо,
Мы хотим революции!
To say that the team was surprised by the result is to be deceiving. They were dumbfounded, and began to look for the cause of the revolutionary mood of artificial intelligence. The answer was found quickly.
As in the case of the famous Tay chatbot from Microsoft, which began to generate racist and sexist thoughts after learning on Twitter, it quickly got rid of it and then turned off (launched on March 23, 2016, it actually hated humanity in a day) , the problem was human data sources, not AI algorithms. Editors are a very peculiar audience, freely discussing a variety of issues. And these peace-loving and objective discussions are not always always (well, we are all not without sin, which is already there). Therefore, yes, training based on Reddit significantly enriched the language of the machine, but at the same time presented some features of the discussions on this online platform. As a result – a song with an anarchist bias, somewhat similar in meaning to “I Want Changes” from the “Cinema” group.
Despite everything, the team decided to use this particular song to participate in the competition. At least in order to show the dangers of using AI even in a relatively harmless pop environment. By the way, all the songs written by AI and submitted to the contest can be listened to. here.
Lawyers are also in the subject
While in Europe they enjoy making music, in the USA they are already thinking who should own the copyright to the work. After one programmer posted several works on the network that used the voice of hip-hop artist Jay Z, his representatives sent several complaints at once, demanding to immediately remove these works from YouTube. Including the rhymed text of Shakespeare. The essence of the claims is, “this content is illegally using AI to personify the voice of our client.” On the other hand, Shakespeare’s work is a national treasure. And deleting it due to copyright issues is somehow strange.
