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Robots Can Make Music, but Can They Sing?


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Cover art for A.I. Song Contest entry Gulluni x Algomus.

The A.I. Song Contest, which started last year and uses the Eurovision Song Contests format for inspiration, is an international competition exploring the use of artificial intelligence in songwriting.

Credit: AI Song Contest

 For its first 30 seconds, the song "Listen to Your Body Choir" is a lilting pop tune, with a female voice singing over gentle piano. Then, everything starts to fracture, as twitchy beats and samples fuse with bizarre lyrics like "Do the cars come with push-ups?" and a robotic voice intertwines with the human sound.

The transition is intended to evoke the song's co-writer: artificial intelligence.

"Listen to Your Body Choir," which won this year's A.I. Song Contest, was produced by M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D., a California-based team of musicians, scholars and A.I. experts. They instructed machines to "continue" the melody and lyrics of "Daisy Bell," Harry Dacre's tune from 1892 that became, in 1961, the first to be sung using computer speech synthesis. The result in "Listen to Your Body Choir" is a track that sounds both human and machine-made.

From The New York Times
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