The AI Song Contest

A code – be it a chord, melody or rhythm in someone’s head or a disk – can output into puffs of air to create this exquisite, yet ultimately unquantifiable substance we know as music. So how can a machine help us write music for humans?

The gorgeous accidents of the musician’s fingers slipping across their instrument, falling into a new collection of notes – or that warm feeling when a voice breaks between notes of a melody that make the whole tune sweeter – this is the intimate sound of a flawed and beautiful musician, their power, their individuality, their magic – the song inside the tune as Christina Aguilera once said.  

So how can you go from that mystery of music to asking a machine to write a hit song? Well, my team ‘Smorgasborg’, one of 38 entries to this year’s AI Song Contest decided to explore this question.

Voting closes on July 1st – listen to as many entries as you like – and vote up the ones you enjoy the most!

This years’ participants are a fantastic collection of artists, technologists and machine learning enthusiasts, all of whom approached the brief differently – make music – using machines! Now, as a musician learning the elements of coding, I approached the challenge from a musical perspective – choosing to discover “How can we use accessible AI tools to augment the human creative process rather than replace it?”

I’d taught myself AI composing with Style Transfer during my cancer treatment and subsequent shielding here in the UK. It’s surprising how much time there is for learning when utterly stationary, or unable to leave the house, or indeed when it’s impossible to sleep through the night… so why not stay up and run code every few minutes?

My initial results were interesting but not what I would call ‘easy listening’. This time would be different.

Like many musicians, I miss jamming with real people in real time, that physiological response to sound that makes us stand with others in front of massive speakers ‘in flow state’ – that feeling of being somewhere or nowhere – ‘in the zone’.

AI’s potential goes much further than just audio generating audio – which is what I’d been doing – and it just didn’t feel enough like a collaboration. After all, we could have asked the machine to produce random sounds and then selected the best. But instead, we split the song- some elements created by AI, some by the musician- and NO autotune!

Here’s a flowchart showing the relationship between human- and machine-generated content.

My team discussed many issues – even at the level of deciding what popular music is – for example, dominant music theory is based on Western, European tradition. This was partly why we elected to start with AI lyric generation rather than music, as it kept orchestral and melodic options open. We felt AI music would have been more likely to generate western diatonic sounds, as the data sets are currently largely lacking in music outside these descriptors. We wanted to explore some influences outside the popular western sounds.

Here are a few seeding prompts in bold below: For a while I was tempted to go with really simple songs. Then, during a team call, I read through a few that were strangely poetic”.

Example Prompts | Completions from GPT-3 (safe outputs) follow:

“Do people want a catchy tune, a riff that can fly them to the moon? | Or would they rather just see me in my underpants?…” 

“dance dance I wanna | see you move dance dance dance! (Oh!) It’s time to make it right (Oh!) We’re gonna make it…”

“write a love song about 2 machines | falling in luv. 1 hour later. BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM “i just wan 2 say, that’s one of the best songs i’ve ever heard” “I KNOW RIGHT” “i mean, i would probably pay like $1.99 just to get that song on my phone.” “do it, do it now, i’ll wait” BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM “i did it” “KEEP THE CHANGE…” 

After further experimentation, the below completion caught our attention.  

“feel the bass dance all night headphone on smartphone light walking like a zombie in the dark pulsating body nightlife make you move vibrating body sending shiver to the core….”

These words… sounded most like a story, they had evocative phrases like ‘walking like a zombie’” We fed this modified prompt back into the engine and generated our lyrics which remain unchanged  throughout the songwriting process.  

“feel the bass dance all night headphones on smartphone light walking like a zombie in the dark | ‘til the streetlight burns the sunrise behind your back you were here now you’re gone There’s a girl I know who knows what she wants.

I was inspired by the words and created a first draft of the melody, but was getting stuck on ‘Shine like a diamond dust in the universe’. We wanted to use lyrics verbatim to stay faithful to the AI, but were stumped on how to parse this particular musical phrase.So we used OpenAI’s Jukebox trained on Adele to suggest various new melodic lines. 

At first I used a model to output 30 seconds of music at a time – but my first attempts were frustrating – it didn’t create tunes that made theoretical sense! After more false starts, I realised co-composing suited me more, given my mainly musical background. Supervising every 4-6 secs added my own musical preferences to the generative result. 

After 21 attempts (and more crashes!), attempt 22 inspired me to re-scan the lyric lines –

|| Shine like a diamond  ||  Dust in the universe became

|| Shine || Like a diamond dust  ||  In the universe.

Yes! I gleefully thanked the program out loud even though it was 01:30AM, and sang a guide melody and piano accompaniment into Logic Pro X. I felt no need to upsample as I wasn’t planning to output audio and just needed to hear the melodic lines.

Google’s NSynth -one of the settings used with Ableton | Imaginary Soundscapes – with the image used to generate fireworks in the chorus

The bass, piano and pad are all generated via the NSYNTH sound. I was inspired by team mate Leila saying the song was set “In Space” and chose sounds based on this thought – resulting in ethereal and floating pads, with sharp shards of passing comet dust! Continuing the theme, we also used AI-generated audio from Imaginary-soundscape, an online engine designed to add suggested soundscapes to (normally earth) landscapes. We used an image of space from Unsplash and the AI returned audio – fireworks!  You can hear these alongside the chorus.

If you’d like to help us become Top of the Bots – please vote here – no need to register! Team Smorgasborg is excited to be part of the AI Song Contest!

A selection of AI tools used in the creative process: we also used Deep Music Visualizer and Tokkingheads for the music video

GPT-3 – Lyric generation from word prompts and questions  https://beta.openai.com 

Jukebox (OpenAI) – neural networks style transfer for solving musical problems https://jukebox.openai.com 

NSYNTH – machine learning based synthesiser for sound generation  https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nsynth 

Imaginary Soundscape –  AI generated soundscapes from images   https://www.imaginarysoundscape.net

DreamscopeApp – deep dream image generator https://dreamscopeapp.com/deep-dream-generator 

Music Video for Team Smorgasborg, LJ, Dav and Leila.

“I knew the song was finished when Logic gave me the “System Overload” message.”

-very late at night

Getting into Flow states during difficult times – like going through Breast Cancer

Stories of my disappearance are greatly exaggerated.

I’ve just been diagnosed with breast cancer, so now looking forward to playlists such as “Now that’s what I call Chemo!” followed by the hotly anticipated “Last Night a Surgeon Saved my Life” slated for release in the new year. *

I’ll still present and perform occasionally when going through treatment. We’ll play it by ear, depending on how everything progresses and energy levels. Short Notice bookings might work. I’m optimistic that normal service will slowly resume if the results are encouraging.

To those of you unlucky enough to have some experience of the disease (either yourself, or someone you know) I send positivity and love.

BACKSTORY

My mum died of cancer when I was a child – details of her medical treatment were whispered in hushed tones in separate rooms, out of earshot and in secrecy. Yet attempts to conceal her terminal diagnosis were pointless as I knew what was going on. With nobody to ask, I felt powerless.

It’s why this very personal post exists: to try the opposite track. Knowledge (and Music) has always been a great comfort, and my curiosity to learn has helped me overcome so many obstacles, achieve so much and connect with frankly extraordinary people while performing or presenting. I’ve explained as openly and as age appropriately as possible to my toddler. Telling children early on is advised by Macmillan and other cancer charities -such a difficult experience to do but it was taken well and felt like the best decision for him.

FORWARD STORY

I may be dealing with cancer now, but as anyone different has always known, there’s simply so much more to us than how we look, our personal struggles, or what equipment we use to access the world. We are still artists, engineers, writers, thinkers, comics, poets, AI magicians, coders, hackers, lockpickers, DJs, storytellers. We laugh at great jokes, cry at terrible movies on planes (well, OK, I do) and enjoy connecting with others through our love of creativity, unconventional thinking. Best of all we love to collaborate with those who challenge and excite us. We crave pure connections which at their best transcend physical and mental capabilities, creating that elusive and magical experience of flow for audiences and performers to share.

In short, you are welcome to ask cancer questions, which I will answer if I feel up to it…. or, we can talk about stuff I still really love, like music, technology and performing. Any great, fun audio books with happy endings? Wholesome comedy video clips and podcasts? let me know!

Want to lend me some Interesting VR/Immersive kit for a day to try out during or after a chemo treatment in London? I’m down for any entertaining tech distractions during my many medically enhanced hours over the next weeks and months. Some things feel rather unpleasant, so if you think it might be fun to see how creative tech could help make procedures more palatable – that sounds kind of awesome to me too. Interested? Do click here to contact.

Finally, to everyone reading this far, thank you so much for our connection – whether it’s IRL or online  – however brief, however close, through TV, presenting or hacker / music circles, please know that many of you have been responsible for so many of my happiest thoughts. Your impact has been so positive in helping me want to be better – authentic, inspiring, thoughtful, uplifting – and kind. I wish you all the very best.

Love, LJ

P.S *These playlists don’t exist – yet. Want me to make some?

My Three Keyboard Cat Moon T Shirt

The first item of clothing I ever bought on the internet came in the post yesterday…

Three Keyboard Cat Moon T shirt from Threadless

Here’s me in it…

Rock 'n' Roll!

yb

I wore it to work and got comments ranging from “That is Excellent” to
“I can’t believe you buy your clothes off the internet”.

But I don’t care. I want to wear it FOREVER*.  I shall hand wash it.  I might
even buy another one in case I lose this one or get nutella on it.

The only problem with this Tshirt is that while I’m wearing this fabulous
garment,  I can’t look at it at the same time.

Of course, this design is a combination of Amazon’s Three Wolf Moon
T shirt (below)

Three Wolf Moon - top selling shirt

…and Keyboard Cat, the friendly feline that plays people off the stage when
they do something catastrophic:

So, what have we learned from this exercise?  Sometimes the Internet can
surprise us with creativity – this mashing of memes gave us something greater
than the sum of its parts. The Tshirt was scored by 3,791 people, and rated
4.48 out of 5.

Perhaps broad appeal is the new niche.  I’m not worried about following the
crowd on this one.

Sorry about the photoshop rush job,  I was overcome by an uncontrollable
compulsion to upload this picture and couldn’t wait.  The office chairs and
other debris detracted from the WONDER and MAJESTY of said t-shirt.
It had to go.

*Or, at least, for a while.

W00t! new linguistics on the net FTW!

Ok, I’m happy painting my life as a technology-loving geeky social network addict, it’s pretty easy because it’s true. I tweet and send pictures through my mobile on twitter and flickr, I am on facebook, qype, youtube, ping.fm and I’m on other places where I can’t even remember my username – you get the idea, some of you are probably the same as me, or worse. 

You’d think I’d be right up there, jacked in to cyberspace, fully comprehending the internet and not even seeing the code, as it were.  Sadly, I’m nowhere near where I want to be – still far too lost in the ether that is the new net-speak, although I’m clawing back some comprehension every day.

Looking back through my (and others’) twitterstream, the linguistics of the internet is in the process of undergoing yet another evolution. I’m learning a whole new language in order to keep up with my much cooler and hipper online buddies.

The emoticons we’re familiar with since I joined the internet (or before), are everywhere, even my dad texts and emails with 🙂  : – ) and 😉  ; – )  .  Stuff like BRB is pretty easy to interpret and a rough knowledge of phonetics and/or a willingness to tilt your head to one side is enough to make a start on translating the rest.  

It’s all changed now there are so many new codes based on everything from gamer-speak to the economy of letters that Twitter’s 140-character limit has imposed. So what is the last resort of the enquiring mind?  I conclude that one needs to be either “in the know” or risk Urban Dictionary (and possible ridicule for choosing the wrong acronym) to find out the meaning and usage of the latest net-exclusive abbreviations.   

On to the reason for the post – this Wednesday, I’m going to be on the radio talking about the pressure to ‘keep up’ on the internet, not just emoticons and phraseology, but also keeping up with your facebook friends and your twitter chums.  I’d love to read what you think.

Do you feel anxious when you’ve not posted what you’re doing? Do you feel guilty if you haven’t blogged / updated your status for a while?  I’d also love to know whether you use acronyms such as FTW (or even WTF!) on the interwebs, whether you embrace it or can’t bear it, and if you have any good ones you can share with me…  Please feel free to leave your comments, and try to make sure that they are SFW 🙂 kthxbai…

p.s. you can listen live to the show on BBC Radio Scotland at 10.30 GMT on 15th April 2009.

 

Mini Glossary for n00bs

w00t! (with zeros instead of O’s, although this font doesn’t show it as well as the header) gamer-speak with disputed origins, usage: celebratory

FTW = For The Win – usage is normally when you’re about to achieve something e.g. “eating 15 banana frittters FTW”

SFW / NSFW = Safe For Work / Not Safe For Work – usage is normally preceding or following a link where it’s not immediately obvious where it goes – can be used on twitter when posting tiny urls – stops you opening an inappropriate link in front of whoever’s lurking over your monitor.

kthxbai = OK, Thanks, Bye – Lolcats use this language a lot, pop over to http://icanhascheezburger.com/  for detailed exploration. You will waste time, though.

Twitter Article hits BBC Website!

Few things persuade me to get up in the morning, but knowing I needed to finish this article in time to have it submitted to the BBC News Website was successful in pulling the duvet covers off!

 

After last night’s twestival, I arrived back home inappropriately late after spending the majority of the evening filming – it was a fun evening, even though I was working for most of it, and I hope that the very worthy charity: water will have benefited enormously from all the organisers’ hard work.

Twitter Article on the Beeb!

The pictures in this article are by @lateral – you can see more here.

In case you’re wondering, the article is all about how I think Twitter has changed in recent times as more people have joined. Click on the picture, or here: http://tinyurl.com/ljbbctweet to read it.

I’m going back to bed…

Covent Garden Wishing Well

This is what I saw when I went to Covent garden to briefly visit a blogger lunch.

What is THAT????

I nearly bumped into a conspicuous gigantic triangular shaped structure that’s there till January.

Spinvox Wishing Well

 

Spinvox, the people behind the structure, have left this silver wishing well in central London, the idea being that you call and leave a message from your phone, and it gets converted to text and displayed on the inside of the installation.

 – Here’s a shot  a bit closer in – you may be able to see me in it – I’m in the X box…

(Visual Pun! How I wish I did that on purpose!)

Needless to say, there were many others there including my fantastic underground blogger mate, and of course whatleydude who kindly invited me along.

This is what it looks like inside – I stood in here for ages, reading what other people were wishing for.

inside the structure

I particularly like the fact that if one spoke a swear-word into the message, it would be replaced with &* ?*&!£ symbols, so even though the best words went, the sentiment remained. 

Of course, if you were one of those people who looked up rude words in the dictionary at school and laughed (English and other languages – oh, hang on, I still do that now) then you will appreciate the work that must have gone into creating the database to recognise them all.

I loved reading wishes ranging from “I wish for World Peace” to “I wish I had gigantic nostrils”.

If you’re in London, it’s definitely worth a look –  http://www.spinvoxwishingwell.com/

Reality TV follow up mini-blog

http://www.bafta.org/ is currently showing a clip of that reality TV event I attended at BAFTA a few weeks ago – I’m not sure how long it’s up there for, but for people who read my earlier blog about the surreal nature of people like Kelvin Mackenzie and Greg Dyke talking about how reality TV is shaped, I promised to put a follow-up on this blog, so here it is – I must confess it made me see TV very differently. Click the speaker if there is no sound…. and I’ll be back with a proper report on the Spinvox ICA 60th Anniversary report soon!

also see http://www.ljrich.com for more info

New Year, Different Difference?

A slightly belated “Happy New Year” to you, Chinese and/or otherwise. The picture on the left is Twilight on Gerrard St, London, which is the main drag of Central London’s Chinatown area. The place looks magical, with lanterns swaying in the breeze attached to absolutely every possible stationary object. New Year fills us with optimism, that this time, things will be different; we will be different.

On my way to the gym this morning, I remember reading a statistic saying 97 % of all people who make New Years resolutions break them – 8 % of the total actually break those resolutions in the first 10 seconds, and it is with this thought in mind that I’m feeling pretty proud of myself about making my way to the gym on this freezing occasion, a full 1 months and 11 days into the UK’s new year. But this was not a new year’s resolution – I decided to join a gym in September.

Why did I not pressurise myself with a New Year Resolution this year? Because with an NYR, I’ll get 364 chances to fail – guaranteeing that every time I don’t reach my expected goal, it’s time to resign myself to endless telly, feeling dejected about the sheer mountain of unfinished business shouting for attention, and hoping that next year will be different.

So today, I’m going to challenge the popular assumption that an arbitrary day, zero hour, “wipe the slate clean on Day 1” mentality is the only way to get back on the self improvement train, and say instead that any day, at any time, when we make a conscious decision to do something different, that’s when persistence, determination, and that elusive, sparkly feeling that we’re “on our way” is a great and just reward.

Like many people, I’m interested in goal-setting, personal development and self-improvement, and writing down my goals and aims helps me to focus more. (If you’re looking for a goodie, I humbly suggest Getting Things Done, which I overhauled my life with a year or two ago). Last time I did this was in November – not conventionally a month for that sort of thing, unless it’s your birthday, perhaps.

Be Excellent to Each other!

Anyhow, this week I received some interesting emails, including one from the BBC, one from a short film producer, and the continuation of an exciting music project I’m currently sworn to secrecy about. All of these emails represent a move in the right direction – and I have to confess it’s all a little bit scary. I know I’m on TV already, which is a massive achievement, but these projects represent quite a big leap and I wonder why taking that step into the unknown brings up such feelings of vulnerability, even though what I want most in the world is to be knee deep in Music, TV and technology for the rest of my days.

I’m beginning to realise that the big change for me this day, 15th February, is that it’s time to be ready for the next level, which I’ve spent my whole life preparing for, so this year is as good as any. It’s time for all that hard work to be translated into amazing opportunity, and although it’s a petrifying concept, I think I can handle it. So Happy New Day to you, dear reader, and wherever we go, let us go boldly, as a certain Starship Captain or two might say. Live long, and Prosper.

lots of love, LJ x
spoken through SpinVox tweaked by LJ

also see http://www.ljrich.com for more info

Back in Blighty – Back to Work

So I’ve finally returned back to the UK, absolutely tired out, and completely and totally culture shocked by the craziness that is Las Vegas and the ridiculousness that was CES.

I found out that there were 2 million square feet of exhibition space of which I probably only managed to get across a fraction- and even then that was with incredibly hard work and very, very, very comfortable shoes.

For now I’m back in the UK – once I’ve finished unpacking and sorting through my email, I’ll be spending time getting ready to talk about JVC’s MG330 HD camcorder on QVC UK . For the purposes of this blog, and for general curiosity, I’ve found out that a) QVC is the biggest electronics retailer in the world, b) Marco Polo House, where the studio is, was named after real broadcasting Satellites in Space and c) the UK arm reaches 21 million households, which explains why people come and chat to me in really odd places like Milton Keynes British Rail Station.

Actually, it’s great fun when people come and say hello most of the time – although I once got recognised at a certain large 24hour supermarket at 3am buying Imodium – that’s the not-so-glamorous side of life in the public eye – “Hi LJ, how are you? Oh, not too well I see” was the gist of that particular conversation.

On the plus side, when I was flown over to QVC in America, where it’s the 5th most watched channel in the States, I went to the mall the day after the show, and someone came up to me and said “Wow, you’re that videogame girl from England!” – that made my week!

So I’ll be broadcasting live for 24 hours on the 27th January and it will feature JVC’s hard drive camcorder that I took around CES with me to Vegas. So that should be quite fun. It’s still quite surreal chatting away to my phone and I really am enjoying this blogging service, it has to be said. SpinVox might even come over and film me doing this which should be even more fun, although I don’t think it will be very telegenic to have SpinVox film me doing what I’m doing right now which, at the moment, is my laundry 🙂

I can’t believe it’s already halfway through January… I’m in the studio with Graham Wood working on some exciting music projects, and this week I’ll pop over after the initial recording session to do what is known in the trade as “Tweakage” – I’ll also be composing a mini ident (that’s about 3 seconds of music) for a digital device, which is always exciting, as I love to take into account the acoustics of the device, and what it looks like before working out what tune it should have!

spoken through SpinVox tweaked by LJ

also see http://www.ljrich.com for more info