“Nobody new” is a release from human-AI band G-Zone feat. Rebel Algorithms.

The song is one of fifteen finalists in the 2022 AI Song Contest, selected from an initial collection of 46 entries. The contest page for the song is here.

You are welcome to listen to the song on your platform of choice:

Team

The team is or has been affiliated with the Music Computing and Psychology Lab in the Department of Music at University of York, which is one of the best places in the world to study music in all its diverse forms.

Band members in pseudo-random order:

G-Zone (aka Alex Gonzalez) is a music artist living and working in New York City, and a graduate of Lehigh University, where he majored in English. Like Jemily, G-Zone provided recordings of himself rapping and lyrics from his favourite songs as inputs to our AI algorithms, and wove AI-generated outputs into the final version of “Nobody new”.
Jemily Rime is a PhD student in the lab, working on AI-driven audio production. Like G-Zone, Jemily provided recordings of herself singing and lyrics from her favourite songs as inputs to our AI algorithms, and wove AI-generated outputs into the final version of “Nobody new”.
Mark Hanslip works on AI for music analysis and generation. He trained several text- and audio-based neural networks for this year's task, the outputs of which you can explore in the interface below.
Jack McNeill is an Associate Lecturer in the Department, with an interest in dance and club music scenes. Jack produced “Nobody new”, as well as providing instrumental content that fit well with/responded to particular moments in the lyrics, such as "lightning strikes" (0'19").
Tom Collins put the team together and developed the interface below for exploring and arranging generated audio into textural content for beats/decorating beats (e.g., obvious at 3'27"-3'50", but used throughout). Tom has a new open access book coming out called “Coding music and audio for the web: Empowerment through programming”. Register your interest here!

2021 entry

“Circus” is a release from human-AI band “The elephants and the”. (Yes, the band name is also AI-generated!)

The song was entered in the 2021 AI Song Contest. The contest page for the song is here. It placed 3rd out of 39 entries on the public vote.

You are welcome to listen to the song on your platform of choice:

Texturizer

Here are some examples of loops we came up with for “Nobody new” using the Texturizer interface below. The first one can be heard pretty clearly in the final song at 3'27"-3'50", but both occur earlier in the song too.

The top part of the interface consists of a circle for each audio file generated by our neural network. The network was trained on vocal material provided by Alex and Jem. We trained separately for Alex and Jem, and each generated audio file is on the order of 5 sec in duration. They contain nonsense syllables and words, but are audibly Alex and Jem's voices.
Clicking on a circle brings up an editor for excerpting a sound file, e.g., changing its volume, fade, pan, starting partway through, etc.
The final option allows the excerpt to be paired with a particular MIDI note corresponding to the piano roll in the lower part of the interface. (Playback is toggled with the "p" key.)
Typically, a user begins by adding a 2-measure drum beat MIDI file to the piano-roll interface using the uploader, and then they render the beat by pairing MIDI events with excerpts of the generated vocal sounds. That's how we composed the sound files above.
This approach is inspired by:
1. Hip-hop being a genre of collage;
2. Similar interfaces using regular (non-AI-generated) sounds, such as Citizen DJ and the Infinite Drum Machine.

Drag and drop MIDI files to upload:

Texturizer interface developed by Tom Collins in his capacity for Music Artificial Intelligence Algorithms, Inc.