The AI Song Contest 06 Apr 2020
- Vincent Koops (NL), Senior Data Scientist at RTL and composer;
- Anna Huang (US), leading AI researcher in music generation;
- Ed Newton-Rex (UK), composer and a Director in the AI lab at ByteDance (TikTok).
- Purely AI-generated music doesn't work that well yet, but AI-human collaborations are really interesting. A few entrants did try to create purely AI-generated music, but this didn't tend to go well - AI isn't yet up to writing music totally on its own. It needs human input - which I think is a good thing.
- Using AI can enable more people to get into music. The competition encouraged some people who had no musical experience to enter a song contest. Some teams had never made music before, but using AI helped them do this.
- AI can be used as a tool for musical inspiration. One of the key things that has emerged from seeing the entries is that lots of people found that the AI surprised them in the music-writing process, creating things they weren't expecting but which they ended up liking and using.
- What this contest shows is that AI in music isn’t a genre - it’s a tool. This isn’t a competition in which all the music is of a certain style - on the contrary, it’s incredibly diverse, with elements ranging from pop to classical to death metal. Thinking of AI music as a genre would be like thinking of music made in Pro Tools as a genre. When AI is just one element of the creative process, you can expect humans’ creativity to result in a huge spectrum of final material. This is why, as well as asking for teams to submit their songs, we’re asking them to provide write-ups of the process.
- The final weeks of the time the teams had to write the song were generally spent under lockdown, which meant that these teams - some of which included 5-10 people - had to work together remotely.
- One team submitted a song that combines Death Metal and Bach, with lyrics that merge English and German.
- Another team made a synthesiser out of the sounds of various Australian wildlife as a response to the recent bushfires there.
- One team used AI to evaluate several generated songs, as opposed to just using AI to generate music, which is an interesting approach.
- Most teams included some human decisions in the songwriting process, but one team even tried to remove these, by rolling a dice at points when they needed to make a decision.
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THE HEADLINES
Spotify talks growth, bundle royalties and short-video plans (see Digital)
BPI CEO calls on music industry and government to unite around 5 key priorities to support human artistry and sustainably promote British music (see News)
Hipgnosis Song Management fires back at Songs Fund board (see Business)
Blackstone bid for Hipgnosis receives backing from board (see Business)
Taylor Swift’s new album breaks Spotify records (see News)
Independence - what’s up with that BPI press release about 2023 music consumption? (see Comment)
Creator Remuneration Working Group meet for the first time (see News)
Concord's takeover of Hipgnosis (see Analysis)
Concord set to acquire Hipgnosis Songs Fund (see Business)
Is the music industry gaslighting artists? (see Comment)
BPI’s new Yearbook highlights an independent sector growing for a sixth consecutive year (see Reports)
Can’t cross the moat? Walk around it. (see Comment)
The conversation around Fandom needs to change (see Opinion)
Viagogo: Carrying on ticketing, despite the controversy (see News)
Taylor Swift songs return to TikTok (see Digital)
Spotify plans new remixing tools for the TikTok generation (see Digital)
Is Spotify plotting a largescale push into short-form video? (see Digital)