Music

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

3 Surprising AI Music Mashups that will make you question your musical tastes

24-hour streaming AI-generated heavy metal on YouTube completely fascinated me – created by the eccentric Dadabots, half of whom I’ve regularly collaborated with on various strange musical projects. Their outputs inspired me to start my own journey of intersecting music with machine learning.

I’ve been composing since I was a kid on whatever platform I could find. Classically trained with a music degree while hungry for as much new music as possible makes for a strange hybrid, a musician and performer trying to understand a technologist’s world.

Amid much struggling and general frustration and many false starts, the stubbornness and late night wrangling paid off. I had my first track and plucked up the courage to share some of my experiments online.

So, here’s one of my first flirtations with Music and Machine Learning on Instagram – the Beatles singing ‘Call Me Maybe’ – because for some reason I thought it needed to exist. And, buoyed by my coding success, I learned how to generate some eye-bending video based on pitch and tempo too.

Each track takes quite a few hours to generate – even 45 seconds or so is a whole evening of attention. The way I’ve been doing it is heavily supervising the code, I need to intervene every few seconds to suggest a new direction for the algorithm in order for it to fit the direction I want it to go in. A lot of the decisions I’m making are not technical – they’re based on my musical knowledge. Then I listen repeatedly to the slowly lengthening audio to see if there’s a recognisable tune being created. Is it sounding like something a human can sing? Plus the ‘upsampling’ process, where some of the noise is removed, can take many hours. A lot of the time I’ll crash out of the virtual machine I’m using because I’m on the free tier. Sometimes I’ll lose everything.

Sounds frustrating, and it’s even more annoying in practice. Yet I find the ultimately infuriating nature of co-composing this way rather addictive. And, wow, when it actually does work, the results are incredibly rewarding.

So, ‘my’ new song made up of thousands of tiny bites of Beatles was compiled. And it is undeniably the Beatles singing ‘Call Me Maybe’ – so much so that a few of my friends thought this could easily be a demo tape or an unheard song if not for the lyrics.

My work received admiration from those familiar with AI music generation – they could tell how much effort was required to create it. And as well as praise, this short tune also generated unsettling feelings for others – which weirdly excited me – to have made something so conversation-worthy – especially in a field as wide as AI and Machine Learning felt like I was onto something, that my musical approach could add value in its own way.

Here’s another one – Queen singing ‘Let It Go’.

So why do I think this might make you question your musical tastes? Well, many of us are quite specific about the music we like. But if a fifty-year-old Beatles recording can be rehashed for a 21st Century Audience, would this track encourage a non-Beatles listener to explore more of this kind of music? Or would a devout 1960s music fan be persuaded to venture outside their comfort decade into the world of sugary pop music? I think it does.

Here’s U2 singing ‘Bat Out Of Hell’.

I’m surprised how much the original artist maintains their presence in each of these examples. And I’m somewhat tickled that the processing and supervision of each track makes this a very labour-intensive activity – not unlike standard music production.

As a new composing method, I am in awe of the sheer amount of work that must have gone into creating this program, and the brilliant minds behind it who conceived and created such a formidable tool for co-creation.

It even seems possible to train the AI on any kind of music as long as the artist has made enough material to be sampled adequately. Which is great news for those of us keen to create cross-cultural artworks – even though there are thousands of artists in the current Jukebox library, the content does appear to skew toward English-speaking music – a useful reminder that bias is built in to every system with humans at one end of it. So one of my next quests will be to see whether I can create my own training set (which might prove taxing on the free tier).

Finally, from a musical perspective, human composers still have quite a few advantages over machines, though generating music with AI is like a whole band writing all its parts at once, which can be very satisfying, if erratic. Sometimes the algorithm is temperamental – and doesn’t work at all. Other times, sublimely beautiful chords and ad-libs come out. No one can know whether the next track is a hit or a miss.

Even controlling the output is gloriously elusive: for example I can’t force a tune to go up or down at any point (though I can choose one of the alternatives that fits roughly where I’d like the tune to go). I don’t have much choice over the rate or meter of the lyrics – though there is some leeway when paginating them in the code. And changing the rate of intervention also affects what’s being generated – in short, the illusion of pulling order from chaos, a pleasing reflection of what composing music means to me.

In quite a few instances the AI has surprised me musically, and that is intriguing enough on its own for me to want to continue creating and co-composing with a machine. With so many possibilities in this field right now, I’m looking forward to exploring more.

Under new management!

…excited to announce that I’m now exclusively represented by JLA Management.

It’s great timing as I’m being asked to present and perform at so many incredible events!

Do please contact Hannah Oldman on +442079072800 for further information.

United Nations Performance May 2019

What’s The Best World Cup England Football Song?

OK, I enjoy the world cup, and understand the off-side rule, but generally prefer playing football to watching it. But when my friend from Great British Chefs posted a query: What’s The Best World Cup England Football Song? World in Motion or Three Lions? – for many days now I’ve been thinking about it. So much so that my response simply does not fit into a social media reply… Mecca, here’s your answer.

“World in Motion” works brilliantly as a standalone pop song, but is it ‘catchy’?  

Harmonically, “World In Motion” is musically complex (apart from the ‘rap’) and there’s a lot going on in terms of chords, percussion and orchestration. It’s interesting, but also demands effort from the listener, meaning cognitively you have to think about where the song is going and pay attention to it. 

Melodically, “World In Motion” is quite gentle – there’s no descending melodies or musical ‘jumps’; it’s tuneful but stays in one place. Yes, the rap segment was distinctive and served to make the song very memorable – but not for musical reasons.  

“World In Motion” is also a little slow for singing along – most people sing football songs while excited, so their heart rate will be higher – faster tempo songs will come to mind more easily in a heightened state like this!

Apart from tempo, both songs have a lot in common – two choruses: ‘Love’s got the World in Motion / Let’s hear it for England’ and ‘Three Lions on a shirt / It’s Coming Home’,  both largely in major (happy) keys, and both are quite sparsely orchestrated. Both songs also do not require particularly good vocal skills.

And so, to catchiness –  have you heard anyone singing “World In Motion” in the street? Personally I haven’t, but “It’s Coming Home” is everywhere.

So what’s happening here? How are they different?

I think the answer lies in melody. Despite great orchestration and production of New Order’s “World in Motion”, the “Three Lions” musical phrases are much more likely to be sung in the wild. They are easier to remember, easier to sing along to and more physically pleasant to sing out loud.

I’ll tell you how this works: The descending tune of the “Three Lions on a shirt” call is followed by an upward response “Jules Rimet still gleaming”.  Wow, super catchy and melodically pleasant –  it’s a classic gospel song call and response: You know where it’s going, there’s a clear musical path that you only need to hear once to sing along, and you’re excited to hear it resolve. A great pop example of this is ‘Twist and Shout’

The second is the clincher “It’s coming home, it’s coming home, it’s coming…” – what an anthem! There’s a built-in melodic jump – you can hear these in a lot of Abba songs (Winner Takes it All, Take a Chance on Me) and many existing football chants. There’s also repetition – this simple phrase is a natural ear-worm, there’s no effort involved in remembering this even after hearing it once.  Listening to this phrase takes low cognitive effort in contrast to “World In Motion”, plus there’s yet another embedded ‘call and response’ too. 

Finally ‘It’s Coming Home’  is a semi-unresolved melody. Getting to the end of the phrase, you want to sing it again. You can see this unresolved effect at work in notable examples like ‘Song 2’ by Blur, ‘My Shorrona’ and ‘Living on a Prayer’. Catchy? Absolutely. And now you know why my considered answer is “Three Lions”, musically the most suited football song for England’s World Cup 2018 journey.

Relaxing Music for Giving Birth

Available now for download on iTunes Amazon and CDBaby

I’ve been away from work and the internet for a while working on a massive project – building a baby! Having always been completely fascinated by music’s power to move us and change our perceptions, I thought there would be lots of music specifically for giving birth  – but nothing came up. Which was ironic, I thought, considering that for conceiving a baby there are any number of musical accompaniments available! So I created music especially for me and anyone else going through the intense experience of labour, birth and early parenthood. 

This album is very special to me – I wanted music that had calmness at its heart to support the incredible and inevitable journey from pregnancy to parent, but I think it’s also a very enjoyable listen if I just want to zone out and remember how to breathe.

Talking of which, this instrumental music complements all kinds of breathing rhythms during stages of labour and birth. I composed it while pregnant and only completed it half an hour before labour!

Originally I wasn’t going to release this music or talk publicly about my experience (it’s so personal!) but below I explain exactly why I chose to do so.

So yes, I had a baby – he is awesome. And for anyone interested in why I wrote such an album, I’ve shared my very personal story about conquering a lifelong phobia of giving birth below the track listing. If you’re not interested that’s fine too –  in any case it’s good to be back, baby! Normal streaming, tweeting and writing about music, inventions, technology and synaesthesia will soon resume.

Relaxing Music for Giving Birth Tracklist

 

 

TRACK 1: Incarnation. Labour, Birth and Calm
Over an hour long and can be repeated seamlessly throughout labour. will play on multiple devices and speakers without sounding out of tune or out of time. It also works as a continuous loop. I didn’t want music to get in the way of my breathing or the physiological process of giving birth – this was actually the hardest part, making sure it was musical and rhythmic while still leaving space for getting into the zone. I had this track on repeat throughout my labour.

Plus – Bonus Tracks for after the big day to give the new family a gentle soundtrack for those first utterly indescribable weeks….

TRACK 2: Serenity. Soundtrack to a Contented Baby

Serene piano sounds soothe and support a calm environment – contains a unique ‘white noise blanket’ – to soften any unexpected sudden sounds from outside that might startle a new baby. It seems to soothe my little one!

TRACK 3: Relaxation: Sleepy Parents, Sleepy Baby

Encouraging even breathing; aims to elongate any rare moments of calmness and sleep – not that you’ll get much sleep over the first months of parenthood! I found this really helped my little one settle. A sleepy soundtrack to chill out with the new arrival. For babies AND parents.

No apologies for massive wall of text below!

HOW THIS ALBUM WAS BORN

(NB don’t worry there are no scary bits. It contains music, a little tech and a deeply personal story behind the album)

Continue reading →

Diving into Periscope – interactive streaming with a musical edge

I’ve recently started playing with an app called Periscope, giving interactive music concerts at my stage piano.

My ‘cast’ (if that’s what it’s called?) includes talks on music theory, breaking down similarities in familiar tunes and of course playing the odd request – like a classical version of Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ – or a mashup between Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ and The Commodores’ ‘Easy Like Sunday Morning’

It’s really fun – and my usecase seems to be a unique enough to get a mention in the Daily Telegraph‘s round up of the technology.

So, what do I get up to when I cast? you can find out on Mondays at 20:30 UK Time! At least, that’s the plan…

Essentially I’m talking about classical music theory using contemporary tunes – why is something catchy? What songs sound similar? What bits make a tune feel good? The session is mixed with live composition and conversation – content creation and audience interaction in real time.

Giving the audience access to the creative process and also a chance to communicate is pretty much exactly opposite to a traditional classical concert, where I’d be on a stage, far away from the listeners.

I believe it’s possible to demystify music without dissecting it, it’s so fun to explain what’s happening while playing some of the most memorable songs on the planet. I think this kind of informal direct broadcast is a great proving ground until I have my own big budget show where I have a huge grand piano and some notable musical guests to riff with.

Until then, viewers who make the effort to interact and contribute positively are going to shape how this cast evolves. How exciting! What works, what doesn’t, what do people want more of? I’m finding out every day. I’d hope to keep the audience interactivity if a big TV company wants to fund the huge grand piano and notable musical guests version.

For those of you reading this on Thursday 9th April 2015, there’s a replay available until 22:30 tonight, but you’ll need to download the app on an Apple device to watch at the moment. They say there’s an Android version coming. And, if you do visit, please ignore my faffing with the cables at the start, it definitely gets better.

At about 1AM this morning, I think I solved the problem of getting a decent audio feed in and listening at the same time, so Monday’s cast should have really rather good sound quality.

Oh and a final note from the technology presenter in me – streaming from mobiles has been available before – apps like Seesmic and Qik did this many years ago. But now data is cheaper, social media makes things more immediate, plus our connections are generally faster. This means the tech is ripe for mass adoption.

A notable alternative Meerkat has some big names endorsing it – Madonna released a video using this platform recently. I’ll let you know if I get a chance to try it out. And I’m sure there are other players in this area. In coming months we’ll get to see whether a single platform gains dominance, or if these apps can co-exist. It’ll inevitably play out over the next few months. Interesting interactive times!

In which I co-write a musical…

Date: Mon 23 March 2015:   Event: My first ever full-length musical !

TICKETS AVAILABLE!

I’m super-excited to call myself a London Theatre Impresario! A date, a venue, a show, tickets on sale!

Scary as I’m currently only about 70% of the way through writing every single note of the upcoming musical adventure that will be held in conjunction with the inimitable Hack Circus in exactly one month’s time.

We’ve written a story to go with some expert talks and some rather spiffing tunes as well even if I say so myself. Leila happens to be a genius librettist in my opinion and I’m hoping my tunes and orchestration will do those fantastic lyrics justice. She and I have hatched a musical monster of a night out… What a nerve-wracking but satisfying experience this is!

TERRIFYING REALITY:

  • I need to finish building the scores and orchestration
  • we need to finalise the order of songs and talks and audience interactive bits
  • I’ll have to learn and sing pretty much all the songs on the night
  • Leila and I have to pre-record some short bits of audio to give on-stage a break
  • I’m trying to build a home-made instrument that may or may not work on the night
  • Eek I need to do all the audio show control while performing (Ableton I’m looking at you)
    and;
  • people are actually buying tickets so it has to be good because we have a paying audience.

ONE NIGHT ONLY

Talking of which, if you’re in London that evening AND want to be the first to see this quite peculiar and creative take on the musical genre. From the HC site:

We will be travelling in a unique sound-powered tunnelling vessel, currently under development. Please bear in mind: we really don’t know what we will find. We need a strong healthy team. It might be worth getting down to the gym now if you can.

Bring a torch. This is very important. We are expecting it to be dark.

We will be guided on our journey by three experts: monster afictionado sci-fi author Chris Farnell, historian and volcano enthusiast Ralph Harrington and shark-mad comics legend Steve White – but who knows who (or what) else we might encounter?

From: Hack Circus

TICKETS STILL AVAILABLE!

OK, I’m intrigued, tell me more:

hackcircus.com/underworlds/ 

(link for mobile users: http://www.hackcircus.com/underworlds )

DID I MENTION TICKETS ARE ON SALE?

Yes!! I’m ready and can’t think of a better way to spend a Monday night!

SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!

(link for mobile users: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hack-circus-underworlds-tickets-15756232315?aff=es2&rank=1 )

^^This link goes to the EventBrite Ticket Page if you’d like to buy a ticket or two.

**For some reason, none of my links work. Head over to hackcircus dot com forward slash underworlds. Oh the humanity…

The Sound of Stars

Music inspired by colour/art

An artist I know called Debbie Davies made a giant light-up interactive star for the Burning Man festival this year. I never got to see it in real life, but the pictures were enough to trigger the most amazing melody in me. I was so utterly happy to hear that she loved the composition. I can’t really explain why I wasn’t surprised.

Debbie, this is your star. I told you it was beautiful!

Photo credit  duncan.co

Music-Powered Spaceship

Last Sunday I took part in a very unconventional story/experiential theatre event run by a friend of mine. I live-composed the music. The event involved taking an audience on a fictional journey into space. Then (whilst in that context) they were given amazing lectures by real rocket scientists (Dr David McKeown), artists (Toby Harris, Sinead McDonald, Jeffrey Roe and more. The talks were diverse but relevant. Imagine hearing what space travel would feel like – as if you and the whole theatre was in fact in a spaceship – travelling through space. Kate Genevieve, a visual artist talked about the messages sent with the Voyager space probe. A man from SETI (Alan Penny) informed us of the best way to survive first contact in a suitably realist approach. There was more, but I’ll get to that nearer the end.

And I? I powered the spaceship with music.

It’s because of Leila Johnston – Hack Circus is her thing. She asked if I would like to create music to simulate ‘hypersleep’ during extended space travel, I went one step further and wrote the following email reply…

I have a great job of being the hyperspace engineer – the piano keyboard is in fact my console muwahaha

Leila responded with;

Oh I love that. Yes! Play us into hyperspace! What a lovely lovely idea.

This really captured my imagination, so much so that I appeared to send the following response:

Yes, the equations are quite complicated to most people. But hyperspace mathematics calculations actually have more in common with Bach fugues than physics, turns out those aren’t musical pieces but formulae all along. A fantastically complicated spatial equation can be surprisingly easy to solve musically which is why the keyboard is my usual preference for transport consoles. Bach was a hyperspace engineer from the future who got stuck in a time travel incident. Before he got transferred back to his timeline he enjoyed annotating his equations in musical form and confusing the natives.

Though the sustain pedal just puts the kettle on

I found this in my ‘sent’ items the next morning, and hurriedly dashed off an apology for sleep-emailing. Clearly I had really taken my role as Hyperspace Engineer to heart.

For some reason this didn’t put her off, and the event was quite literally a blast.

There were cabin crew. There were flashing lights. There was hazard tape. Dr Lewis Dartnell, an astrobiologist, played some amazing sounds from space that triggered my synaesthesia like you wouldn’t believe.

The sound of Saturn’s rings original, courtesy Cassini Radio & Plasma Wave Science team:
“…the sounds produced are exciting! You can listen to the sound of passing through the ring dust by clicking here. sound Listen ” (nb the ‘Listen’ link opens up a video file)

Wow! What magical unearthly sounds! What a weird recording! I had to share how wonderful it felt to absorb these strange vibrations! I attempted to convey my synaesthetic response to the sound of Saturn’s rings – what I hear when I hear them…  and this is the result.

 

For those interested, here’s the mission page. Off topic, I’m joyous to report that the Sun in our solar system plays a giant Major 7th.

Remote Controlling a Digger using Virtual Reality

It really did feel like I was ‘inside the machine’ even though the resolution was low!

I composed the music especially for this feature, there is something very pleasing about a digger in C.

Full story here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-28425844