Participants 2022
addlebrane
AI Song Contest 2022 / participantsTEAM / addlebrane
SONG / Heaven Electric
TEAM MEMBERS / Amy
About the TEAM
I’ve been a hobbyist musician since I was a teenager. Over time, however, chronic illness took away my ability to play guitar, and even using a mouse is painful now. I discovered OpenAI Jukebox during a period where I could barely even get out of bed. I’m slowly recovering, and have become a bit obsessed with making original music with Jukebox. I’ve made over 150 songs with it in the past year. I use Jukebox and a few other AI tools to create the podcast AI Music Mixtape, through which I release four new songs every two weeks. My music spans several genres, and sometimes individual songs do as well.
About the SONG
Like a warped vinyl upon which is recorded the song in that one dream you had last night. I heard the title somewhere in the song’s gibberish vocals. When making a Jukebox song, I don’t go in with a strong plan. I give the AI material, the AI transforms the material into weird little bricks, and I build something out of those bricks. I made a few other songs at the same time, and Heaven Electric was the song I picked out of the lot.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
I gave OpenAI Jukebox a “primer,” which is a short audio clip that it tries to continue on its own. I gave it a simple drum loop with no other instrumentation. The AI created some continuations, each 60 seconds long, that added other instruments and vocals. I repeated this several times until I got an output that I liked. You can configure Jukebox to emulate an artist or genre, and provide lyrics that it will try to sing. For this project I kept artist and genre blank, and the outputs I used in the final song had no lyrics.
I picked an output to use as the basis for the rest of the song, and fed a short part of it back into the AI as a new primer. I then manually spliced all the outputs into something with song-like structure, using GarageBand. On top of that, I layered audio loops to enhance the musical progression. I exported the result, and then fed the entire song back into Jukebox.
This time I used a modified version of the software that continuously re-primes the AI with every bar of the song. Basically, it creates a rough clone of the song bar-by-bar with AI-generated audio, until none of the original audio remains. I then lowered the speed of the track slightly to give it a trip-hop vibe, and added a stereo effect via an iZotope plugin.